| This thesis represents an attempt to develop a feminist green political theory rooted in the early Frankfurt School critical theory of Theodor Adorno. While it focuses most directly on the ecocentrism/anthropocentrism debate in ecological thought, the thesis is also intended, however, to be a significant contribution to the critical theory/postmodernism debate in political theory and the standpoint epistemology/postmodernism debate in feminist theory.; In relation to the first debate, I argue that Adorno's nonidentitarian dialectics allows for the formulation of a powerful critique of ecocentric deep and postmodern ecologies as well as of anthropocentric social and socialist ecologies while, at the same time, it resonates with and facilitates a more adequate elaboration of the critical ecofeminism which is being outlined by Val Plumwood. Not only does negative dialectics validate critiques ecocentrics and anthropocentrics direct at each other but it also reveals the anthropocentrism underlying the Ecosophy T of Naess, Eckersley, Fox, and Devall/Sessions, the premodern tendencies in the postmodern environmentalism of Oelschlaeger and Kuehls, the authoritarian residues in Bookchin's libertarian municipalism, and the bourgeois elements in the ecosocialism of Benton Grundmann.; As regards the second debate, I demonstrate that, like postmodernism, negative dialectics challenges the organic holism underlying deep ecology's Locke liberalism and the naturalistic teleology implicit in social ecology's neo-Aristotelianism and ecosocialism's Hegelian-Marxism. However, negative dialectics proceeds further to show that many of the same tendencies are still at work in postmodernism itself. Postmodernism is exposed as a new stage of bourgeois identity thinking linked to the Kantian sublime and thus as a continuation of, rather than a break with, the Western Platonic tradition.; Finally, in the context of the third debate, I argue that negative dialectics not only rejects the standpoint epistemology, essentialism, and false universalism associated with Donovan's cultural ecofeminism and Merchant's socialist ecofeminism but also reveals that the postmodern "cyborg politics" of Haraway (but not of Piercy) is implicated in many of the problems for which postmodern feminists take Rousseau to task. In addition, negative dialectics highlights the significance for feminists of the dialectical nature of Enlightenment as implicit in Machiavelli's call to "conquer Fortuna" while feminism, in turn, leads to the call for a move beyond Adorno. |
