The Female Voice: Reinstituting Life*

This article argues for a renewed understanding of the project of anthropology and the anthropological tone in philosophy, not through the super concepts of the knowing subject but through an acknowledgement of the vulnerability of life and the constant work of reinhabitation and reinstitution that it requires. My claim is that the blind spot in classical theories of society is the cunning exclusion of the work done by women in reinstituting life through a contempt for the ordinary and the quotidian repetitions within which women find and nourish improvisations, newness, and expression. The constitution of the subject as the male subject and a sexualisation of language itself mark the texture of abstract theorising in the social sciences. Against this vision of theory, I offer the work of women writers in the vernacular, with Krishna Sobti as the exemplar who shows a method and theory through the female voice honed in the streets and born in the domestic that can address the violence seeded in everyday life. The constant work of repair women do by treating life not as an object that is external to the subject but as that within which the subject evolves, not so much in the moment of dramatic conversion of self but through a transfiguration that can only be shown by an attention to detail.