Conference presented at the University of California – Berkeley, at February 2017.
DERRIDA, Jacques; Rogue: two essays of reason, Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 152
Idem, p. 11
TOCQUEVILLE, Alexis; Democracy in America, p. 74
BENVENISTE, Emile; Vocabulaire de termes indo-européens, volume I, p. 90
LOCKE, John; Second treatise of government, par.
MACPHERSON, C.R.; The theory of possessive individualism, Oxford University Press, p. 142
BUTLER, Judith e ATHANASIOU, Athena; Dispossession: the performative in the political, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, p. 3
ADORNO, Theodor; Negative dialektik, p. 133
To be the owner of my own person:
toward a concept of freedom as heteronomy without servitude
Vladimir Safatle
University of São Paulo
What must be thought here, then, is this inconceivable and unknowable thing, a freedom that would no longer be the power of a subject, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without servitude, in short, something like a passive decision. We would thus have to rethink the philosophemes of the decision, of that foundational couple activity and passivity, as well as potentiality and actuality.
I would like to accept the challenge proposed by Jacques Derrida in Rogue: two essays on reason for thinking what appears to us as inconceivable and unknowable, namely, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without servitude. It seems to me necessary to discuss the reason for proposing such a change in our hegemonic conception of freedom, exposing its political and moral impact. In particular, we must explore the practical potential that opens up when we reconfigure one of the normative foundations of our way of life.
Let us note how such a challenge is imposed on Derrida. At the beginning of his book, which is a political reflection about the democracy and its contemporary impasses, Derrida starts from a precise strategy: if we want to understand what is at stake in the possibilities inherent to democracy, we must try to understand what kind of krátos, of force, of domain, it implies. There is an exercise of force that is proper to democracy. But which kind of force is this one, and especially what this force is able to produce, which is its own grammar?
These questions are not just related to the field of political philosophy, as it might seem. We are not just talking about forms of government when we ask about the kind of force that is presupposed by the "force of people" proper to democracy. In fact, we are talking about ways of constitute agents socially recognized as subjects. Every subject is endowed with an agency, this agency presupposes, in turn, some form of force, a specific dynamics of decision and exercise whose configuration must be the object of analysis. Democracy implies, in its normative horizon, a certain form of agent and agency, but what kind of agent we are here dealing with? What is the subject of democracy and, above all, which are its naturalized metaphysical presuppositions?
These issues gain importance in a historical context, such as ours, in which skepticism about democracy grows up. I would say that, in his own way, Derrida's text, written more than ten years ago, is a possible elaboration on such skepticism. For we should ask ourselves if all forms of skepticism about democracy are the same. Are all forms of such skepticism regressions tied to fear, frustration, and resentment toward social transformations and economic impasses inherent in the development of what we often call democratic societies? Or some forms of skepticism about democracy are self-criticisms that aim to liberate democracy from metaphysical presuppositions that would be the true source of its present limits, presuppositions mainly perpetuated in its liberal tradition? Should we say that fight for democracy today is possible only on the condition that we are able to criticize its metaphysical presuppositions? This seems to me major consequences that follow from Derrida's strategy.
The answer to such questions lies in the understanding that the strength of the demos in democracy has so far been inseparable from an ipse. We're dealing here with a krátos that is the manifestation of an ipse, of a force to realize the condition of being itself. We could even suggest as a definition: democracy seeks to appear as the social space of manifestation of the force of being myself. The rationality of democracy is based on the belief that subjects share a fundamental desire: the desire to empower themselves with the force to be themselves. What is, in fact, only the beginning of the problem, not its solution.
We can here remember such important Derrida's statement: "By ipseity I thus wish to suggest some "I can," or at the very least the power that gives itself its own law, its force of law, its self-representation, the sovereign and reappropriating gathering of self in the simultaneity of an assemblage or assembly, being together, or 'living together', as we say". Ipseity, being itself, appears here in a quite significant declination. It appears inseparable from the capacity to give to oneself its own law, to represent oneself and to be in assembly on condition that one stands in one own domain. This presupposes a fundamental identity between law and case, between representation and the represented, between being together and being in my own domain. Such identity originates from a non-thematized overlap between a metaphysical foundation and a political exercise.
Let us try to better understand this point. To insist that democracy is a social space grounded on the force of being myself means among other things that, however a democratic society may be an antagonistic society, a society characterized by the recognition of the productivity of social conflicts, we normally believe that such multiplicity of perspectives can be incorporate into a demos, into a people, even if this incorporation expels part of the population from the condition of people. This multiplicity can be incorporated into a demos because the unfolding of multiplicity is the expression of a force that never leaves itself. In democracy, people is the name of this movement to actualize what never leaves itself, to put in assembly what retains its own determination. In this sense, social conflicts appear as modes of unfolding a convergent force proper to societies that act immanently, as if such societies were at the same time cause and effect, origin and production. Let us remember, for example, Tocqueville speaking of America as a democratic society par excellence, since it would be a society that: "acts by itself and for itself. There are no authorities except within itself; One can hardly meet anybody who would dare to conceive, much less to suggest, seeking power elsewhere". Tocqueville's statement is interesting for defining democracy as an emergent political body characterized by a certain immanent potential univocity, even if such univocity actualize itself through a multiplicity of voices.
Then we have what we can call the first metaphysical presupposition of democracy: democratic sovereignty is the expression of the ipseity proper to what can be the cause of itself, proper to what acts by itself and for itself. This sovereignty rests on a more fundamental principle of sovereignty, namely, the sovereignty presupposed by the very notion of -self. This is a central point, namely, there is always an exercise of sovereignty in affirming oneself. We know that self-affirmation is not just a constatative statement, but it is a performative production that requires some recognized authority and strength. And strength is necessary because self-affirmation is also a capacity for exclusion. It is only possible for me to be my own cause if there is nothing to remove me from the legislation of myself, nothing that places me outside the jurisdiction of myself, of my own domain. The exercise of such selfhood is a sovereignty because, as Derrida will remember, it will be inseparable from the constitution of forms of immunity, of self-immunity (and since Hobbes we see how sovereignty and immunity are bounded). For I would say that the power that is an ipse would not be able to affirm itself without being immunized mainly against what is involuntary, unconscious, not subject to laws, contingent and that, therefore, can only appear as a potential attempt on freedom. These figures of the involuntary, of the unconscious, of the contingent are not only alterities. They are the potentiality of another nomos, expressions of another order. An order that is not configured in the form of will, of conscience, of necessity. Therefore, they are the manifestation of a heteronomy that calls into question what we mean by agency, by activity. They break the force that appears as "mine."
Thus, this democratic force that will also be a struggle for immunity, a decision to immunize, is based on the defense that, those who acts, acts to unfold its own domain. It is no accident that ipse, as Benveniste has showed, is associated with a series related to power, possession, property, the authority of the master. In fact, Benveniste seeks to explain why: "various languages designate 'the master' by a term meaning 'himself'" following for it the deployments of *potis from Sanskrit. This allows him to show how identity and mastery will always be related. What is ipse is available in the condition of integral possibility of use, because it is an expression of my ability to dispose of myself.
It may seem that we have here some form of anachronism, for it is not difficult to see how that ipseity seems to be constituted from a notion of autonomy which, after all, is modern. This notion is linked to the capacity to give to oneself its own law, thus constituting a field of self-legislation and self-government which has, in turn, the force of self-determination. Modern autonomy realizes the idea that my determination will be an expression of freedom just when it is the result of a self-legislation. This is one of the major regulative ideas of our forms of life. What explains the reason that, even when we normally engage ourselves in the critique of the dynamics of social alienation, our criticism is normally made in the name of the rise of a potential self-legislation, of an autonomy to come.
However, we can reverse this analysis and ask whether the modern notion of autonomy has not been built on deeper and more original metaphysical presuppositions. Let us ask what the notion of self-legislation necessarily presupposes. What in modern autonomy perpetuates a mode of being whose roots lead us to the "prehistory of modern subjectivity"? For we can use the Derrida's position on freedom without autonomy to remember that there is no point in criticizing the legal paradigm implied in the very notion of "self-legislation" if, after all, our criticism is guided by even greater presuppositions internal to the very notion of autonomy. It is no use, for example, to remember that self-legislation entails a legal notions of jurisdiction based on concepts of universality and unconditionality, concepts that require the internalization of disciplinary dispositive able to conform the self to the form of the subject of rights, if I can not move out of what such a jurisdiction presupposes.
In this sense, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that self-legislation and self-government are necessarily based on a much more decisive and pregnant principle, namely the notion of self-belonging. For this reason, our critique of the model of freedom as self-legislation will be ineffective if it is made from the conservation of a principle that is the very foundation of modern autonomy, namely, self-belonging.
We know a multitude of distinct philosophical strategies that will define freedom as a form of self-belonging (such as, for example, the Stoics and their notion of oikeiôsis, the Cynics and their notion of autarkeia, Spinoza and his clearly juridical notion of sui iuris, Kant and his concepts of mündigkeit and selbst-bestimmung, among many others). We could use a reading strategy that will explore the obvious strong distinctions between such conceptions and even show how they will produce different life forms. But we could also insist that within this difference, within this dispersion there is still a common principle that defines a certain limitation, which makes such a field of differences turn around a common and seemingly insurmountable difficulty. A insurmountable difficulty at least for us, that read such philosophical experiences through the threshold of historical possibilities inherent in contemporary capitalist societies. For the fundamental question here will be: which are the contemporary social forms that shape and define the possibilities of realizing demands of self-belonging? For our time, what does it mean to read and try to recover diverse forms of self-belonging as a model of realization of freedom?
If we accept that freedom can not be understood only as an exercise of individual expression, but that it is in fact a mode of social relation, then it will be important to ask about the practical conditions for actualizing certain philosophical concepts linked to the normative structure of the notion of freedom. This gives to the philosophical activity a strategic character. There are historical situations in which is impossible to make certain concepts explicit, at least if we want to preserve the potential for emancipation that they were once able to express. There are certain things that we can no longer speak of if we want to accomplish them. I believe that such a presupposition holds for the multiple and diverse forms of freedom as self-belonging.
Autonomy and self-belonging
Let us then return for a moment to what we might call the "hegemonic conception of autonomy." Today, we would accept without major problems that one of the fundamental characteristics of subjects recognized as endowed with moral autonomy is exactly self-belonging. To be the legislator of myself, to be the enunciator of the law that expresses my freedom, it is necessary that this law be mine. If it were, for example, the law of an Other that I internalized, a law that was imposed on me through coercion, it would be an expression of my servitude, not of my freedom. But it is not just a matter of remembering that the law must be mine, that in a way I must see myself as its author. When the law is exercised, its exercise implies the constitution of a space in which I can't lose myself, a space in which I belong to no one but myself. Hence, Kant, for example, insisted that the causality present in autonomous action is a causality through freedom (Kausalität durch Freiheit). This freedom is another way of saying that there is a kind of sameness implied in the exercise of autonomy. Freedom as autonomy is not only to assert itself beyond the causality of nature and the mechanistic dispositions that would apparently subject everything that is object, everything that is thing. Freedom as autonomy is to be in possession of oneself, in possession of my acts, of my reasons for acting.
Normally, we associate autonomy with a fundamental capacity for self-reflection. We say then that an autonomous subject is someone capable of taking himself as an object of reflection and inspection. But let us remember that through the act of taking myself as the object of my own reflection I exercise my self-possession. For through self-reflection I objectify what in me is still affected by external causality, I take distance from what causes me outside my own domain and I state the primacy of a decision enunciated in a space that establishes a relation without distance to myself. Within this space without distance, I experience what "self" means, beyond its pure psychological reality.
At this point, I would like to introduce the central argument of this conference, namely: this notion of autonomy has as a major presupposition not only the relations of self-belonging, not only the self-identity, but the natural right of self-ownership. It is not only as endowed with self-belonging, but as the owner of him/herself that the autonomous subject acts and affirms his freedom. For in present historical conditions it is not possible to insist on a form of belonging that is not expressed under the regimes of property. Within our capitalist societies, all forms of belonging and possession were colonized by a general form expressed in property relations. It would not be possible for a reflection of political philosophy to ignore this situation. It would not be possible to ignore that there is something like a metaphysical force of capitalism, that is, a way proper to capitalism to conform the general possibilities of existence and of relation upon the regimes of property and commodification.
Actually, the definition of freedom as a kind of self-ownership is one of the historical origins of the modern notion of autonomy. I'm sure that you know this classical statement of John Locke in his Second Treatise on the Government, from 1689:
Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.
That is, the individual possession of what appeared previously as a common good (the earth and all inferior creatures) is based on the fact that labor is both an expression of self and a form of possession. Labor appears here as the production of what is proper to me, of what is the specular confirmation of my own determinations. Like the bourgeois who has inside his home objects that tell his personal deeds, his small idiosyncrasies, exotic travels and memories, the consciousness that works seems to want to transform nature into a great home decorated by objects that are the expression of its own history. For property is, above all, an affect: the affect of the security of things that are fully submitted to my dominion. This overlap between expression and possession can occur because the form of self-determination, the field of our ipse, is already the expression of a relation of property. I'm a subject because I have a property of my own person.
Such property of my own person had appeared, decades before Locke, explicitly in seventeenth-century English liberalism and its political struggles. Among many possible examples, let us recall the way in which Richard Overton initiates in 1646 his pamphlet An arrow against all tyrants and tyrany, a major moment of the levellers battle, a movement considered as the first emergence of democratic radicalism:
To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any. For every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety, else could he not be himself; and of this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Mine and thine cannot be, except this be. No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's. I may be but an individual, enjoy my self and my self-propriety and may right myself no more than my self, or presume any further; if I do, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man's right — to which I have no right. For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural, innate freedom and propriety — as it were writ in the table of every man's heart.
These statements are exemplary. At the dawn of the modern concept of democracy, Overton proclaims freedom as a self-ownership from which I cannot be private, from which no power can alienate me. Hence the notion of self-ownership as a natural right. This natural right must ground the institutionality of social life, guaranteeing a space in which social action is thought as struggles for recognition of my status as owner. As Machpherson had stated: "not only has the individual a property in his own person and capacities, a property in the sense of a right to enjoy and use them and to exclude others from them; what is more, it is this property, this exclusion of others, that makes a man human".
This way of understanding the experience of freedom is necessarily grounded in a kind of paradox. For property relations are usually relations between persons and things, that is, they are exactly the opposite of what we mean by relations capable of producing the affirmation of the condition of subjects. Relations of property presuppose this fundamental distinction between what is submitted to a right of use (things) and what is not submitted (person). Because of this, they are dissymmetric and based on submission; the owner has right of use over his property. What is property is in relation of existential dependence on its owner. For this reason, the causality of a property is necessarily external to it. It is at the will of its owner. However, by being within the domain of its owner, the property has a peculiar identity to its owner. Because it is property, what happens to it, immediately occurs also to the owner.
No one better than Hegel in his dialectic of the master and slave demonstrated the existence of a continuing reversibility in the apparently dissymmetrical relationship between property and owner. Hegel will remember that the use of property necessarily implies transformation of the owner her/himself, dependence of the owner on the property (slave), dependence in relation to the mode of existence of the property. As the enjoyment of the owner depends on the property and its mode of existence, it is impossible that this mode of existence does not necessarily pass in the subject.
Hegel may recall this reversibility because, at least in his Phenomenology of Spirit, property relations appear not only as relations of use but as relations of desire. I don't just use properties, I desire what reduces itself to the condition of property. This is the basis of the process of alienation inherent in every notion of self-ownership. My desire submits to the form of property, my being is determined within a field of properties. I determine myself from what conforms itself to the condition of property. In this way, to desire as a master is to define the slave as the mode of existence of my desire, is to link my expression to what is integrally available, to what is defined in a one-dimensional form, to what can not escape from my possession, but that only confirms my mastery, my narrative about myself
The thesis that I would like to defend here is that such a notion of self-ownership is not only an ideological construction that sublimates the conditions of material reproduction proper to the rising free-market capitalist society. I initially sought Derrida's considerations in order to insist that the thesis of freedom as self-ownership is a possible realization of a metaphysical presupposition rooted in our most original notions of ipseity and self-belonging. However, from the moment that the notion of freedom as self-ownership emerges, all other forms of self-belonging are rendered impossible. For it has in itself the strength of the processes of material reproduction of life and of its extensive colonization of the possibilities immanent to social experience.
In this point I would like to return to Derrida's initial position in order to defend simply that it is no longer possible to think of freedom as autonomy, leaving us with the greater task of understanding what can be a freedom as a heteronomy without servitude. But I would also insist that this metaphysical horizon makes democracy, or at least made it to this day, the affirmation of the primacy of property relations, of the constitution of social agency as an expression of self-ownership. In short, democracy has so far been the affirmation of self-ownership. It has so far been the defense of the person's integrity as the integrity of the owner.
Even the moments when liberal democracy was criticized from the viewpoint of the defense of common goods, criticism was usually made in the name of another form of property, in the name of another form of possession, namely collective property. Rare were the moments in which criticism was made in the name of the possibility of circulation of what is improper, of what is not configured as property. That is, criticism moved within the same paradigm. What could not be different since even the critical horizon of democracy always remained dependent on the normative force of the concept of autonomy, even if it were an autonomy based on the notion of collective intentionality.
A definition of freedom as heteronomy without servitude
Let us try, then, to describe, at least in general terms, what we might understand by a heteronomy without servitude. There are several ways of introducing this question linked to the historically growing awareness of a fundamental moral and political potential present in the defense of an agency caused by what isn't proper to myself. This consciousness has several matrices, not always completely convergent one with other. Nevertheless, to describe such matrices would compel me not to a new conference, but to a series of conferences.
Therefore, I would like to begin by suggesting an operational definition of what is a heteronomy with servitude. Relations of heteronomy are experienced as servitude when they express the submission of my will to the will of an Other. In this condition, and only in this condition, heteronomy is a form of alienation, since it is only in this condition that the exercise of force is thought as the realization of domination. But there are situations (affective relations, social relations) in which my actions are caused by what isn't proper to myself, by what isn't an immanent expression of my potentialities, but isn't either the will of an Other. This implies the capacity to relate to that which, in the Other, dispossesses also the Other, refusing the general form of the will. Lets insist in this point: there are situations where I'm relating to what dispossesses not only myself but also the Other. I let myself be affected by something that moves me as a heteronomous force and at the same time is profoundly devoid of place in the Other, something that forsakens me and the Other, that dispossesses both. Thus a relationship is formed which cannot be described as servitude, but which is paradoxically a form of freedom, a freedom from the will of the Other.
It may sounds strange to speak of freedom in this context. But let us begin by asking: everything that causes my actions involuntarily, everything that breaks the jurisdiction of the laws I once seemed to give to myself, is in fact an attempt on my freedom? Would there not be a conception of freedom for which I am free when I am able to open myself to what I do not completely control, to what does not submit to the law I gave to myself? This other conception will not say that freedom is autonomy. Freedom is to know that there is always a profound heteronomy that affects me, that is why my actions are never completely mine. Thinking like this would make us more apt to hear what passes through us without ever acquiring the form of ourselves. This is my way to understand what is at stake in an important statement of Judith Butler, for whom:
we are dispossessed of ourselves by virtue of some kind of contact with another, by virtue of being moved and even surprised or disconcerted by that encounter with alterity. The experience itself is not simply episodic, but can and does reveal one basis of relationality – we do not simply move ourselves, but are ourselves moved by what is outside us, by others, but also by whatever "outside" resides in us.
That is, to enter into relationship is not only to confirm itself in its supposed properties, but dispossess myself for opening to something that affects me from the Other, even if such a "thing" isn't the will of the Other. Therefore, a relationality proper to the human condition cannot be understood as a guarantee of cooperation. We know that dispossession can also appear as the expression of a vulnerability produced by social and economical insecurity, the production of a social non-being. But there is also another form of dispossession, closer to a phenomenological manifestation of negativity, capable of breaking the substantiation of a "possessive individualism". This dispossession shows us the productivity of situations of heteronomy without servitude.
For this reason, I believe we must say that in an effective democracy, a democracy yet to come, agents will be in continuous dispossession of themselves for being able to implicate themselves with processes and affects that deconstructs the person's system of determination and its properties. Effective democracy couldn't be the affirmation of self-ownership. Instead, democracy would be the emergence of political subjects deprived of relation of property, even of self-ownership. Such dispossession of properties is the condition to incorporate processes that continually withdraw individuals from their supposed identities, processes able to create a field of generic implication. There is a social plasticity within effective democracy that we do not yet know. For this would require political affects different from those that guide us today.
You might ask yourselves where such affects would come from, affects capable of supporting a democracy without ipse. I had planned to end this lecture by showing how such a conception of freedom as heteronomy without servitude was born, in fact, in aesthetics. This freedom was initially an aesthetic idea and such aesthetic experience continues to resonate as an open potentiality to social life. There are affects that take us out of identity presupposed by ipse and are certain aesthetic experiences that remind us of such possibility.
The roots of such experience must be sought in the transformation of the concept of aesthetic expression upon romanticism. A transformation that come from the romantic criticism on liberal individualism and its modes of egological determination. Some philosophers, like Charles Taylor, understand the advent of such an expression as a defense of a concept of freedom linked to authenticity, as opposed to the notion of freedom as autonomy. I would like to have shown that this notion of authenticity does not live up to the force of decentering, indeterminacy, and depersonalization that the aesthetic expression will put into operation upon the romanticism. This is a theme you can find in Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory. Adorno insists on aesthetic expression as openness to the "non-subjective in the subject", to the "impersonal" able to provoke a shuttering of the self. He firmly believes that a concept of expression that goes from Beethoven's late style to Schoenberg's emancipation of dissonance is the social form of a emerging non-identical subject. Such experience of non-identity isn't just a aesthetic one, but have strong political consequences. What cannot be different for someone that sad: "identity is the original form of ideology".
However, and to my great misfortune, I realized that this would require twice as time as I had. Therefore, here is an indication of development and the expectation that we may meet again to develop such problems.
