Feminist Freedom, Violent Resistance, and Responsibility

• In Event: Feminism, Resistance, Violence

Abstract

This paper explores the relevance of violent resistance in articulation of feminist freedom. To address the question of violent resistance, I turn to Simone de Beauvoir’s reflections on three historical moments: the French Résistance, Jewish rebellion during the Holocaust, and the role of women in the armed fight against French colonialism in Algeria. In exploring Beauvoir’s response to these instances of resistance, I bring her into a conversation with Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon on agency, responsibility, complicity, and finally, freedom. I ask how these moments of violent resistance may be relevant to feminist struggles to end oppression and sexualized violence. Following the reconstructed debate, I distinguish political freedom from liberation as its condition of possibility that may be violent. Articulating a concept of feminist freedom, I ask if this performative freedom can be detached from transforming the conditions of oppression and other forms of structural violence. Can this transformation take place, in other words, without the precondition of (violent) liberation? The answer is that freedom and liberation are not clear-cut phases. Following Fanon, we can understand how freedom is gained in the act of liberation, the action itself transforms the conditions and changes the reality. At the same time freedom remains non-sovereign. Both Beauvoir and Arendt take plurality, which implies intersubjectivity and interdependency, seriously. The consequences of any action remain unknown, precarious, vulnerable, and from a feminist perspective, situated. Non-sovereign freedom transcends the instrumental categories of means and ends. Here perhaps is an answer to the questions of violent resistance. When violence is relegated to the realm of instrumentality, the answer cannot be a normative prescription but a responsible response that requires analysis of the specific circumstances and embedded conditions, while taking into account that the results remain open.

Author

• Tal Correm, New York University