This panel, conceived in the wake of the death of Drucilla Cornell(1950-2022), considers various aspects of her writing and work with a focus on what they enable us to think and do. Pre-eminently a feminist philosopher with an emphasis on law, Cornell’s work was multi-faceted, drawing on traditions of feminism, historical materialism, deconstruction, and German Idealism to push our thinking and action on matters of rights, ethics, law-making and law-resisting. Her thinking worked with high concepts, for which she had a gift at formulations that would become influential (“philosophy of the limit,” “ethical feminism,” “imaginary domain,” and the like), usually with a view to illuminating the most concrete of social and political problems (abortion, incarceration, apartheid) and suggesting ways of acting responsibly in and against the face of the law. In what would be the last phase of her life, in South Africa, her work crystallized in several late books and projects on law in that country and the ethos of uBuntu, one index of the relatively global reach of her work, some of which already had the status of “travelling theory.”
Judith Butler, “Aspirational Meditations”
Abstract: This paper addresses the aspirational quality of the “we” in Drucilla Cornell’s work, and how this quality extends to her philosophical writing, as if breathing the air of potentiality. The analysis will probe how this strain of her work is related theoretically to her idea of the imaginary as well as the task of philosophical writing.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
“Early Cornell and the Practice of Living”
Abstract:
Drucilla Cornell became an internationally acclaimed activist scholar before her untimely death. I knew her from the time she was a young law instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and interacted with her intellectually and in friendship in those days of forbidding gender inequality in academic work. As she became increasingly familiar with Derrida’s thinking, our interaction became more vibrant, until her more open entry into South African Ubuntu brought us into the intense friendship of the final period. In my short talk, I will attempt a summary, intellectual and personal, oriented toward visions of a just world.
Abstract:
“Reason to Hope”
This paper traces the arc of Drucilla Cornell’s itinerary, intellectual and political, with a focus on her optimism about the power of dialogue from an early Hegelian belief in Reason to the more pragmatic-political hope characterizing her later work. Thrown out of Stanford for protesting the Vietnam War, by the age of 20 she was organizing sweatshop workers for the United Auto Workers. Union organizing led her to law school and a career as a law professor. A defining encounter with Hegel at the age of 15 launched her intellectual trajectory, which would be followed by various schools of post-Hegelian thought (Frankfurt School, Derridean deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis), feminisms practical and theoretical, Rawlsian liberalism, and, in her final work, African and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. Far from a shallow ecumenicism, her work represents a sustained engagement with each tradition of thought, aimed at coaxing its essence from its native vocabulary in the faith that productive dialogue is possible between radically different, and even opposed, intellectual traditions.