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...potential of feminist contributions in relation to ethics and politics. The aim is not to reenact, or even to reactivate, the well-worn arguments around universalism and the ethic of care. (1) It aims instead to reclaim the political in feminist discourse, to identify its conditions of possibility, and to consider its location in relation to the hegemonic order that clearly defines the present. Faced with totality, a totality that I argue is based on a hegemonic neoliberal order and a matrix of war, feminism's options appear to be twofold. On the one hand, there is clearly the option of complicity, a form of co-optation into the discourses of the powerful. On the other, there is the option of dissention and contestation. The feminism of co-optation is not intentionally supportive of totality, but rather lacks a discourse based on a radical critique of the present. However, and far more significantly, there is another feminist voice, located in a plethora of spaces and associations, essentially and necessarily transnational, that contests and through contestation enables the emergence of woman as speaking subject, possessing an ever-shifting agency that in itself is circumscribed by time and space, culture and society, the local and the global. This is an engaged feminism, one that refuses co-optation, or uniform definitions of what it is to be a liberated self.
The first part of the article identifies the totalizing discourse of the present and its implications for feminism. The aim of this first section is to clearly identify the present and its constitution in intelligibility. This first section asks simply: What are the conditions of the present and how is feminism and feminist discourse being reconstituted as it is subject to the imperatives of power that define the present social and political order? The second and third sections analyze and elaborate upon the options facing feminist ethics and politics. These options are related to the ontological commitments within feminist discourses, relating in particular to how feminism responds to totality or hegemony. The aim throughout, I repeat, is to reclaim the political in feminism.
On Totality
The present appears to represent a break from history, a temporal location that somehow encompasses the uncertainties and vulnerabilities associated with late-modern social and political life. There is a sense in which the transformation has taken place and in so doing has firmly established itself in lived experience. The transformation is, however, incomplete, and it is this incompleteness that disturbs, generating in its wake a sense of a world that is unknown and unknowable, a constitutive unease that locates the subject in a temporal in-between, the in-between of past and present. Transformations must hence imply a present dissociated from the past, where the former represents vulnerability and uncertainty, while the latter is the domain of consistency, of bounded selfhood and community. The past, nostalgically recalled, is then imagined as that location that must be retrieved even as the past so remembered is devoid of historical content, shorn of its complexities and uncertainties.
Awareness of transformation must hence raise questions relating not simply to a break from a constructed past, but also of continuities that render the past intelligible, or at least subject to understanding, so that the subjectivities of the present may in some way ask that which is question-worthy. The lived experiences of past generations come to form the memory traces of the present, constitutive of life in the present. The enactment of naming the present in any particular way is not therefore an essentializing act, a striving for exactitude in conceptual formation. Rather, it is a reflection of a distinct and particular articulation of the present, emergent from a particular and distinct reading of history, a particular subjectivity.
There is much in the present condition that centers on a conception of the past that naturalizes and reifies. As Michel Foucault's analytic of power has shown, (2) the establishment of a hegemonic discourse requires a uniform rendition of past and present, where, in a sense the past comes to serve the present, is brought into the service of the present. Political discourses based on categories such as homogeneous community, the right to sovereignty, family, the literal reading of religious doctrine, appear to seek legitimacy through renditions of the past where the subject is uniform and content within the confines of family and community. History is rendered a technology, deployed in the practices of exclusion that identify exclusively those agencies that may possess legitimacy in renditions of past and present. Such historical technologies are not only aimed at the glorification of the past, but also at the reversal of particular social and political turning points of the past. Relations of power come to be formative of the historical process and the discursive practices that surround it. For Foucault, analyses of such relations must move beyond the dichotomy between structure and event, for "the important thing is to avoid trying to do for the event what was previously done with the concept of structure" since events differ in their "capacity to produce effects." (3)
A critical ontology of the present asks first and foremost the Foucaultian question--namely, "How in the present does power operate?" Now, in the present, the conditions of totality are variously described in terms of empire, as in Hardt and Negri, the information age, as in Manuel Castells, (4) and late-modern risk society, as in Giddens (5) and Beck. (6) These authors describe the transformations of the present in terms of networks and flows, transnational relations, structured through the dynamics of information capitalism, the consequences of which are often beyond the control of local communities and state authorities. The dialectics of late-modern social life come to be defined in terms of globalized and rampant neoliberalism, on the one hand, and the reassertion of locality on the other. This relationship becomes crucial, in that it begins to inform us of the dynamics of exclusionary practices that differently impact upon the lived experiences of the many as against the few, as well as the constraints that originate in distant abstract systems but that have implications in the everyday and the routine.
Social theorists of the present provide us with characterizations of the dynamics of transformation emergent in late-modernity. It is, however, important to point to the structures of domination that permeate these transformations, for it is relations of power that ultimately reveal the congealment of hegemonic institutionalized practices that determine the legitimate, the acceptable, and the remits of politics. Understanding domination, therefore, calls for the identification of conditions that delimit how these conditions are named, just as it requires the unraveling of hegemonic practices that control entry into the space of the political.
The totality of the present may hence be named as the hegemony of neoliberal information capitalism. For the social theorists mentioned above, the workings of this order are global in scope, touching communities across the signifying divides of culture and state. The social patterns emergent from this order intersect the local and the global, render proximate distant events, and compress time and space distantiations so that the "ontological securities" (7) traditionally associated with local environments and local relationships are radically transformed. If we therefore enquire phenomenologically into the condition of the present we find that the experience of late-modernity and, as I will show below,...
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