How do we become political subjects? Put another way, how do we become actors who have the power to instigate political change? These are questions that have long vexed political theorists, particularly feminist and critical race scholars who think about how to achieve real political transformation. According to postmodern scholars, subjects are defined only through their relationship to institutions and social norms. But if we are only political people insofar as we are subjects of existing power relations, there is little hope of political transformation. To instigate change, we need to draw on collective power, but appealing to a particular type of subject, whether "working class," "black," or "women," will always be exclusionary. This issue is a particular problem for feminist scholars, who are frequently criticized for assuming that they can make broad claims for all women, while failing to acknowledge their own exclusive and powerful position (mostly white, Western, and bourgeois). Recent work in political and feminist thought has suggested that we can get around these paradoxes by wishing away the idea of political subjects entirely or else thinking of political identities as constantly shifting. In this book, Claudia Leeb argues that these are both failed ideas. She instead suggests a novel idea of a subject "in outline". As such, we are coherent political subjects, but we are always open, or in outline. It is this openness that both underscores the exclusionary character of political subjectivity and allows us to counter it. Leeb also argues that power structures that create political subjects are never all-powerful. While she rejects the idea of political autonomy, she shows that there is always a moment in which subjects can contest the power relations that define them. Over the course of the book Leeb grounds this concept of the subject in outline in work by Adorno, Lacan, and Marx - the very theorists who are often seen as denying the agency of the subject. Specifically, she takes a critical look at the way that Judith Butler treats the political subjectivity of women and the ways in which Marx and Adorno treat the liberation of working class women.

Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, this book illustrates the relevance and applicability of a political discussion of guilt and democracy. It appropriates psychoanalytic theory to analyse court documents of Austrian Nazi perpetrators as well as recent public controversies surrounding Austria's involvement in the Nazi atrocities and ponders how the former agents of Hitlerite crimes and contemporary Austrians have dealt with their guilt. Exposing the defensive mechanisms that have been used to evade facing involvement in Nazi atrocities, Leeb considers the possibilities of breaking the cycle of negative consequences that result from the inability to deal with guilt. Leeb shows us that only by guilt can individuals and nations take responsibility for their past crimes, show solidarity with the victims of crimes, and prevent the emergence of new crimes.

A philosophical investigation of dealing with guilt and its impact on democracy, in the case of Austrian NazisDrawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, this book illustrates the relevance and applicability of a political discussion of guilt and democracy. It appropriates psychoanalytic theory to analyse court documents of Austrian Nazi perpetrators as well as recent public controversies surrounding Austria's involvement in the Nazi atrocities and ponders how the former agents of Hitlerite crimes and contemporary Austrians have dealt with their guilt. Exposing the defensive mechanisms that have been used to evade facing involvement in Nazi atrocities, Leeb considers the possibilities of breaking the cycle of negative consequences that result from the inability to deal with guilt. Leeb shows us that only by guilt can individuals and nations take responsibility for their past crimes, show solidarity with the victims of crimes, and prevent the emergence of new crimes.

The Democratic Arts of Mourning reflects on the variety of ways in which mourning affects political and social life. In recent decades, political theorists have increasingly examined and explored the themes of loss, grief, and mourning. With an introduction that contextualizes the turn to mourning in previous scholarship on the politics of tragedy, this book includes twelve chapters that clarify the intertwinement between politics and mourning. The chapters are organized into five thematic sections that each shed light on how democratic societies relate to loss, grief, suffering, and death. Collectively, the chapters explore the concept of mourning and its relationship to civic rituals, memorials, taboos, social movements, and popular music. Chapters examine how social groups defend their members against experiences of grief or mourning, or how poetic expressions—such as ancient Greek tragedy—can address the catastrophes of human life. Other chapters explore the politics of symbols and bodies, and how they can become fraught objects that stand in for a society’s undigested—unmourned—losses and absences. The book concludes with an interview with Bonnie Honig, whose own work on mourning has been deeply influential in contemporary political theory.

In this original book, Claudia Leeb uses a poststructuralist perspective to chart explicit and tacit assumptions about the working class in general and the working-class woman specifically in the classical texts of prominent political philosophers and social critics including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Weber and Bourdieu. The author argues that philosophical discourses that construct such categories as the Other function as disciplinary practices that aim at keeping working-class women either out of or at the margins of academic institutions. She analyzes interviews with women from a range of national origins in New York City's elite academic institutions, who identified their backgrounds as working class. Her analysis foregrounds the potential of these women to resist class and gender discipline. "Working-Class Women in Elite Academia makes a significant contribution to political-theory literature on injustice that challenges and reconfigures the meanings of woman and working class. It is of particular interest to political philosophers, critical theorists, and women's and gender studies scholars.