The University of Chicago Political Freedom Between
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO POLITICAL FREEDOM BETWEEN ARENDT AND FOUCAULT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY JOHN U. NEF COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL THOUGHT BY DAWN HERRERA HELPHAND CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments iii Abstract v Chapter One: Liberal Conceptions of Political Freedom: Property, Sovereignty, State 1 Chapter Two: Freedom Between Arendt and Foucault: Problematics and Possibilities 48 Chapter Three: Freedom as Practice 118 Chapter Four: The Free Subject in Play 153 Chapter Five: State, Race, Violence 202 Chapter Six: Freedom as Event 248 ii I owe an immense debt of gratitude to the teachers, mentors and friends who have guided me in the completion of this project. I would like to thank my Chair, Nathan Tarcov, for his trust in my capacity, his steadying hand when I myself doubted it, and for the care he has taken with my work; Patchen Markell, whose subtle insight and breadth of knowledge, have been matched only by his profound generosity; and Bernard Harcourt, who from the beginning has directed me straight to the heart of the matter and encouraged me to embrace my vision as my own. Thank you all for challenging and supporting me. I am truly fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with you: your friendship and advice are an inestimable gift. Thank you to the Committee on Social Thought, for providing my colleagues and I with that rarest, most precious scholarly resource: space to think. For helping me find my footing there I am deeply indebted to the late Paul Friedrich, a great soul and a dear friend. Special thanks are due to Anne Gamboa, for all these years of help and good humor—it made a world of difference to me. Thanks also to all of my wonderful teachers at Chicago, and especially to Linda Zerilli, Lauren Berlant and Arnold Davidson, whose rigorous, generative seminars shaped this work, and to John McCormick, whose acuity in advising my master’s thesis enabled it. This project first germinated at Brown University. I am forever grateful to Lewis Gordon and Linda Martín Alcoff, who handed me the seeds, and to Suzanne Oboler, who put a spade in my hand and told me where to look for water. I am grateful to the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the Mellon Fellows Program: the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship gave me the confidence and motivation to pursue a graduate degree, and the Dissertation Completion Fellowship gave me the means to iii complete it. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities—a crucial bridge on a long road. A number of friends and colleagues have contributed substantially to my thinking. In particular I would like to thank Carly Lane, David Gutherz, Hadji Bakara, Stephen Haswell Todd, Tejas Parasher and Daniel Schultz for their insights and recommendations. Thanks are due to the Social Thought Dissertation Workgroup, and the University of Chicago’s Political Theory Workshop, Contemporary European Philosophy Workshop, Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop, and Social Thought Colloquium, as well as the Johns Hopkins University Humanities Center Graduate Conference, which all assisted in my working through of this material. Further thanks to Bernard for hosting informal but highly productive working dinners, and to the cohort of students who made them such a delight. These meetings not only pushed my writing forward, but showed me collegiality in its highest form, and I am honored to have taken part. Finally, thank you to my family. To my first and best teacher, my mother, Socorro Herrera, thank you for giving us everything and more, for clearing the path, for showing me what is possible and for the incredible strength of your love. To Kevin Herrera, thank you for keeping me honest and making me laugh, always. And to Jesse Davila and Isamari Davila, thank you for sharing with me your brightness and promise. Thank you, Selah and Cyrus—for your patience and for my joy. To Ben, my first interlocutor and happiest companion, my refuge, support and inspiration—I owe you everything, and dedicate this work to you. iv ABSTRACT In the academy and in popular discourse, freedom is the prevailing political ideal of our age. Due to this normative and rhetorical primacy, we must continually work to understand what we mean when we say "freedom," and what implications it has for our individual and collective lives. My dissertation argues that our predominant understanding of freedom, largely derived from liberal political philosophy, is at odds with the form of life that democracy requires. I read Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault to develop their critiques of this conception of freedom and its relevant normative framework, and place into dialogue the conceptions of political freedom legible in their work. In doing so, I contribute to the conceptual elaboration of a freedom that is experienced as political engagement. Chapter 1 of my dissertation surveys the liberal philosophical tradition to identify a concept of liberal political freedom. Counterposing traditional binaries (positive and negative liberty, natural rights and constructivism, libertarianism and welfarism), I find that most liberal theories of freedom share three features: political freedom is a property of the subject; the subject of freedom is sovereign; and freedom is a state of being, guaranteed by the state. These assumptions constitute an implicit normative paradigm, and provide a foil against which we can better view the conceptions of freedom legible in the work of Arendt and Foucault. In chapter 2, I reconstruct freedom as Arendt and Foucault understood it—as something one does—and elaborate their critiques of the ideal of sovereignty and of the state as freedom’s guarantor by threat of violence. I consider how these theorists have been read in contemporary critical and political theory, and problems that typify their reception. In contrast to the liberal v paradigm of “property, sovereignty, state” I posit that Foucault and Arendt share a conception of freedom as a practice; of the subject of freedom in play; and of freedom as an event. Chapters 3 through 5 elaborate this paradigm and respond to key debates in the secondary literature. In chapter 3 I argue that a practice must include both active and reflective components. Refuting readings that characterize Foucault as “ethical” and Arendt “political” in their approaches to institutions and collectivities, I find that both of their understandings of freedom require concerted ethical and political engagement, and consider the relation between the two. Chapter 4 responds to the polemics surrounding both authors’ refusal to posit an essentialized (sovereign) subject and the crisis of normativity engendered by that refusal. A recognizable figure of the free subject is important for our political imaginary: I posit play as an alternative paradigm of free subjectivity, legible in the work of Foucault and Arendt. I reconstruct the concept of play through philosophy and the social sciences, arguing that it uniquely exemplifies an activity with immanent (rather than transcendentally given) norms. I then describe how in Arendt and Foucault’s accounts of freedom the free individual is always “in play.” This figure presents a compelling challenge to the sovereign subject of freedom, critiqued by both authors as an impossible and antidemocratic ideal. Chapters 5 and 6 challenge the dual role of “state” in liberal theory. In chapter 5, I examine the complex relationship between state, violence, and race in the authors’ historical critiques and political engagements. For both authors, race-thinking represents a historical scandal of domination, which they analyze with respect to Nazi (national socialist) totalitarianism. In light vi of their genealogical analyses, race appears as an indelible scandal for the State conceived as the protective agent of individual freedom. The possibilities of freedom in their respective understandings, and its relation to political institutions, must be thought with respect to this complex problematic. Finally, contesting the idea of freedom as a state of being, I engage contemporary continental philosophical theories of the event to examine, in abstract terms, the difference it might make to think of freedom as an event. Locating the stakes of the argument in the authors’ critiques of the bureaucratic administration of life, I consider how shift to understanding political freedom as an event in time might recast our ideal conception of political institutions. Methodologically, my research is best described as critical normative theory. While my primary authors are often considered standard bearers of Continental philosophy, my approach is largely analytic: I work by closely examining the meaning of concepts and considering how they are brought to bear on human actions. In doing so, I draw on diverse bodies of scholarly literature: For example, my work on play in chapter 4 elaborates the concept through a juxtaposition of Kantian aesthetic theory, ordinary language philosophy, psychology, sociology and cultural anthropology. Throughout the dissertation, I am strongly committed to advancing conversations across disciplinary lines and moving beyond departmental silos to grapple with fundamental questions. We are living through a strange and challenging political moment, as the threats to our life in common grow increasingly present, increasingly clear. Now more than ever, we must carefully vii consider what animates, to borrow a term from Montesquieu, the spirit of our laws. Foucauldian and Arendtian critique suggest that the problems of contemporary democracy are rooted deeply in our form of life, and have inspired me to look closely at our foremost political value, freedom. Thinking freedom another way opens new horizons for rethinking what “rule of the people” as a lived reality might require. viii CHAPTER ONE LIBERAL CONCEPTIONS OF POLITICAL FREEDOM: PROPERTY, SOVEREIGNTY, STATE This chapter opens a critical evaluation of how political freedom is understood in liberal theories of politics.