The third volume of Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind was never written. As Arendt's editor, Mary McCarthy, observed, "After her death, a sheet of paper was found in her typewriter, blank except for the heading 'Judging' and two epigraphs. Some time between the Saturday of fi nishing 'Willing' [the second volume of the aforementioned work] and the Thursday of her death, she must have sat down to confront the fi nal section." Fond of quoting McCarthy, commentators have turned the missing volume on judging into an enigma of spectral proportions. What would Arendt have written had she lived long enough to fi nish her tripartite work? How would the volume on judging have fi t with the rest of her oeuvre? What kinds of problems would that volume have addressed and perhaps solved? Although we cannot know what Arendt would have written, we might refl ect on the role that judging plays in her extant political theory and, more important for this book, what role it might play in contemporary democratic and feminist political theory. In her strikingly original view, the capacity to judge should be expected from each and every citizen. Although Arendt turned to Homeric impartiality, to Aristotelian phronesis, and to Kantian enlarged thinking, it is not Homer or Aristotle or for that matter Immanuel Kant to whom we can attribute her novel account of judgment. Rather, it is Hannah Arendt herself who fi rst discovers judgment as a political capacity of ordinary democratic citizens, not elites with special knowledge or abilities. This discovery is at least equal to

This essay examines the significantly different approaches of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt to the problem of judgment in democratic theory and practice.

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Linda Zerilli explores what the historian of science Ruth Leys has decried as the “nonintentionalism” of affect theory and its implications for critical feminist practices of judgment. To insist, as Leys does, on intentionalism as concept possession, argues Zerilli, does not adequately account for the fascination with nonconceptualism. Such fascination must be understood in relation to a wholly intellectualist view of conceptual rationality, according to which knowing how to do something involves a highly abstract and disembodied form of rule-following. Far from unique to affect theory, this view is shared by certain phenomenological philosophers and postfoundational feminist theorists, who have been eager to recover the idea of human practice as a form of nonrational and nonconceptual embodied coping. Zerilli draws on ordinary language philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, Stanley Cavell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein to uncover the misunderstandings that animate the turn to nonconceptualism as the only alternative to intellectualism.

This article has been peer-reviewed through the double-blind process of Le foucaldien, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.