Interview by Sophie Lewis Hannes Charen

What follows is a interview with an agitator, revolutionary, philosopher, sometime playwright, feminist, mother, legal, and ethical thinker, Drucilla Cornell. Fighting for bread and roses, going beyond the well-weathered opposition between “formal equality” and “difference” in feminism, she has proposed the radical significance of imaginary domains to the never-ending process of becoming a person.

Cornell has decisively contributed to opening up new revolutionary paradigms in the field of constitutionalism and is the author of myriad texts, notably Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (1992); Philosophy of the Limit (1993); The Imaginary Domain (1995); At the Heart of Freedom (1998) and Beyond Accommodation (1999).

She has been a life-long organizer (union and non-union) who co-founded “Take Back the Future,” a leftist direct action group led by women, after 9/11. For five years Cornell was also a Professor at Cardozo Law School where Jacques Derrida is known to have made his philosophical turn towards ethical thought. More recently she began the Ubuntu Project in South Africa (a political initiative inspired by that concept’s freight of radical communalism and dignity) and became, herself, the subject of a collected volume, namely Imagining Law: On Drucilla Cornell . There, Heberle and Playor note how “traditional demands” such as rights, dignity and equality “become radicalized in her hands.”

Cornell teaches at Rutgers and anywhere else she lights up a room — pressing attention to such questions as “Are women persons?” (potentially) and “Should a Marxist believe in rights?” (yes).