Freedom After the Critique of Foundations International Political Theory series Series Editor: Gary Browning, Professor of Politics, Department of International Relations, Politics and Sociology, Oxford Brookes University, UK. The Palgrave International Political Theory Series provides students and scholars with cutting-edge scholarship that explores the ways in which we theorize the international. Political theory has by tradition implicitly accepted the bounds of the state, and this series of intellectually rigorous and innovative monographs and edited volumes takes the discipline forward, reflecting both the burgeoning of IR as a discipline and the concurrent internationalization of traditional political theory issues and concepts. Offering a wide-ranging examination of how international politics is to be interpreted, the titles in the series thus bridge the IR-political theory divide. The aim of the series is to explore international issues in analytic, historical and radi cal ways that complement and extend common forms of conceiving international relations such as realism, liberalism and constructivism. Titles in the series include: Keith Breen and Shane O'Neill (editors) AFTER THE NATION Critical Reflections on Nationalism and Postnationalism Gary Browning GLOBAL THEORY FROM KANT TO HARDT AND NEGRI Alexandros Kioupkiolis FREEDOM AFTER THE CRITIQUE OF FOUNDATIONS Marx, Liberalism, Castoriadis and Agonistic Autonomy Michaela Neacsu HANS J. MORGENTHAU'S THEORY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment Raia Prokhovnik and Gabriella Slomp (editors) INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL THEORY AFTER HOBBES Analysis, Interpretation and Orientation Howard Williams KANT AND THE END OF WAR A Critique of Just War Theory Huw Lloyd Williams ON RAWLS, DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBAL JUSTICE The Freedom of Peoples International Political Theory series Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0-230-20538-3 hardback; 978-0-230-20539-0 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England, UK Freedom After the Critique of Foundations Marx, Liberalism, Castoriadis and Agonistic Autonomy Alexandros Kioupkiolis Lecturer, School of Political Science, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Palgrave macmillan © Alexandros Kioupkiolis 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-27912-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-32686-0 ISBN 978-1-137-02962-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137029621 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Marx on a Tightrope: The Essence of Freedom and the Movement of Becoming 11 2 Kantian Transcendence and Beyond 44 3 Knowledge and Practice in Trouble: A Reasonable Way Out of Ontological Traps 63 4 Liberal Detours and Their Mishaps: Negative Liberty, Isaiah Berlin and John Stuart Mill 83 5 Agonic Subjectivity and the Stirrings of the New 106 6 The Social, the Imaginary and the Real 123 7 Freedom, Agonism and Creative Praxis 149 8 Post-Critical Liberalism and Agonistic Freedom 179 9 Post-Foundational Reason and Sustainable Affirmation 198 Conclusion: Past Agonies and Present Openings of Freedom 226 Notes 240 Bibliography 248 Index 265 v Acknowledgements It is almost impossible to acknowledge my various debts to the numerous people who have played a substantial role in the conception and realization of this book project. My interest in politics and freedom dates back to my early childhood, in the heavily politicized context of the Greek Metapolitefsi, the years after the fall of the colonels' regime and the restoration of democracy in Greece, when there was a shared sense that politics matters a lot, and democracy and freedom were the object of strong collective investment. A turning point in the intellectual trajectory that gave rise to the present book came in a hot summer in my late teens, when I first read Castoriadis's The Imaginary Institution of Society, which would have a formative impact on my under standing of freedom. Ideas, questions and concerns which arose in me at that time would undergo a protracted process of elaboration throughout my graduate studies in political theory, at the Universities of Essex and Oxford, before taking shape in the final book project three years ago. To some extent, the story of this book is the story of my life so far and of the fragment of contemporary Greek history it contains. So, I will limit my expression of gratitude only to those who were directly involved with the publication of the book. Many thanks are due to Amber Stone-Galilee, Commissioning Editor for Politics at Palgrave Macmillan, who has supported this publication from the outset, and to Liz Holwell, former Assistant Editor at Palgrave Macmillan, who has offered technical guidance and has been very kind and obliging up to the last months of its preparation. Elaine Towns of Keith Povey Editorial Services copy-edited the book and she and Keith helped a great deal to make my English more readable than usual. I am particularly grateful also to Zenos Frudakis, a Greek-American sculptor, who was pleased to offer pictures of his sculpture Freedom for the cover of the book. Chapter 8 has been published previously in Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 147-68, May 2008. Chapter 9 contains revised parts of the articles 'The Agonistic Turn of Critical Reason' (forthcoming in the European Journal of Social Theory) and 'Ontology, Ethics, Knowledge and Radical Democracy', published in Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 691-708, July 2011. Palgrave Macmillan and Sage Publishers have kindly granted permission to reproduce them here. ALEXANDROS KIOUPKIOLIS vi Introduction The first decade of the twenty-first century signalled the collapse of the neoliberal utopia that rose to global prominence in the 1990s. The values of freedom and democracy remain as powerful and resonant as ever, yet their distance from the tangible realities of most people across the world grows ever larger and more painful. Massive death, misery and oppression afflict poor and developing countries, but they are also festering in many prosperous, liberal-democratic states. Here, moreover, vast majorities have become even more disaffected with representative governance and more disillusioned about the prospects of realizing freedom in the present condi tions. It is not only that consumer choice, enjoyment and self-invention are thought to be hollow modes of living, poor sources of meaning and constricted forms of liberty, controlled as they are by alien interests and predetermined laws - the dominant interests and impersonal logics of the market; it is also that they have become materially untenable for large seg ments of the population. Enhancing the freedom of all in the current situation calls for a thor ough rethinking of freedom and a parallel reconfiguration of its practices. Established capitalist-democratic regimes of liberty have plunged into a deep-rooted crisis. On different grounds and in different respects, historical alternatives - Soviet socialism, social democracy, leftist and anarchist aberrations - have been equally condemned because of their failure to create enduring societies with equal freedom. Drawing on the lessons of the present and the past, illuminated by historical insights and achievements, the emancipation of the many needs to make a fresh start in perplexing circumstances of extensive social fragmentation and intense diversification, amid disagreement, fear, cynicism, insecurity about the future and uncer tainty as to the real possibilities it might hold in store. This state of affairs is echoed vibrantly in the state of social and political thought in recent decades, whereby the idea of a universal human essence and of universal truths as such have attracted extended and multivalent criticism (Foucault, 1980, 1982; Rorty, 1989; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; 1 2 Freedom After the Critique of Foundations Mouffe, 1993; Tully, 1999; Newman, 2007). Hermeneutical philosophy, social constructionism, post-structuralism and multi-culturalism are a few of the currents that have contested with renewed vigour the notion of objective knowledge and the presence of fixed structures of thought and action that define, as a reality or an ideal, all human beings. Contingency, uncertainty, contestability, radical pluralism, dispersion, strife among divergent perspectives, and struggles without final redemption are the key landmarks of the conceptual landscape in which contemporary thought engages with questions of truth, value, being and subjectivity, realigning political categories such as freedom, equality and justice. Needless to say, these historical and conceptual shifts are not celebrated across the board. They have come under heavy liberal-democratic fire on the charges that they lapse into a self-defeating relativism and threaten treasured Enlightenment ideals (Habermas, 1990c; Norris, 1997; Barry, 2001; Lukes, 2003). Among others, the cardinal value of freedom is apparently jeopard ized in a variety of ways. Presumably, its worth cannot be securely established if values are cultural oddities and lack objective foundations. Emancipation cannot be advanced on the scale of humanity, as socialism and liberalism aspired to do, if it is not possible to lay down certain universal conditions of freedom. Moreover, anti-essentialists have taken issue with a picture of the human subject that endows individuals with universal reason and considers them sovereign and independent of society in their constitution. Rather, the rules of reason are conventional and local currencies. Subjectivity is suffused with social content and is prey to the unconscious and the irrational. Such convictions can throw into doubt the very idea of individual freedom. These objections have recently been duplicated in radical discourses with emancipatory intents. Slavoj Zizek, to name a prominent figure in this camp, has argued insistently that the loosening of stable general norms, the expansion of variety, change and erratic self-creation reflect the very logic of late digital capitalism, which is flexible, constantly self-revolutionizing, and in favour of self-organization and anti-hierarchical networks of production. This new organizational modality of capitalism has proved to be more efficient, productive and lucrative. The lack of a fixed identity is mobilized by the hegemonic ideology to 'sustain the endless process of consumerist "self-re-creation"' (2009: 65; see also Zizek, 2004: 183-5, 213). He cites Deleuze and Guattari's riposte that, in capitalism, the self-altering creativity of the multitude remains caught up within the confines of a set framework, the laws of the market and the pursuit of capitalist profit. But he retorts that these constraining conditions are also enabling conditions for the revolutionary, nomadic productivity of late capitalism, which is bound to vanish if it is subtracted from the reign of capital (Zizek, 2010: 264). What we need today in order to confront and to burst through the bonds of an erratic, constantly self-reinventing capital is in effect a 'stable ethical position' (Zizek, 2004: 213). Introduction 3 This is also the main tenet of Alain Badiou (2006: 14-17, 43, 531-3; 2011: 17-21), who labels the doxa of the dominant state of affairs 'demo cratic materialism'. This materialized global ideology advocates sceptical relativism and postulates that there are only finite bodies and contingent individual preferences or opinions, in a fragmented and diverse world which demands pragmatism, anti-dogmatic flexibility and modesty. However, a perpetual agitation and innovation on its surface conceal the lack of deep and significant change in core domains of human thought and agency, such as art, science and politics. To break through this 'atonal' world, we should embrace a materialist dialectic which posits that, on top of bodies and diverse languages, there are also eternal truths. Real emancipation involves participation in the exception of a universal truth, and, more precisely, incorporation in a collective subject which incarnates this truth in history. Whatever grains of truth such arguments may carry, the questioning of essentialism carries a forceful liberating potential. This has been highlighted eloquently by a number of anti-essentialist thinkers in the recent past, such as Michel Foucault and Cornelius Castoriadis, who have traced out various strains and thralls in modern templates of freedom, and have sought to adumbrate constructive alternatives. This is still argued today by radical the orists, such as John Holloway, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who insist, in contrast to Zizek and Badiou, that '[Capital] does have a rigidity ... capital is a set of rules that channel the flow of our activity' (Holloway, 2010: 147); 'Our self-fulfilment as human doers implies creative change. Self determina tion, even in an emancipated society, could not be static' (Holloway, 2010: 209); and '[L]iberation aims at the freedom of self-determination and self transformation, the freedom to determine what you can become. Politics fixed on identity immobilizes the production of subjectivity; liberation instead requires engaging and taking control of the production of subjectivity, keep ing it moving forward' (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 331-2). The final sentence sums up the gist of the argument in this book. Its sustained development will seek to furnish a cogent reply to the various critics of freedom as liberation from static limits, drawing out the virtues and the potencies of a vision of autonomy that pivots around contingency, multiplicity, openness, social construction, reasonable scepticism, creative agency and contest. There is in fact a burgeoning literature on freedom with a similar focus and grid of analysis (Kateb, 1992; Laclau, 1996; Tully, 1999; Unger, 2001; Honig and Mapel, 2002; Flathman, 2003; Hirschmann, 2003). But still missing is a systematic statement of the debilitating effects radiating from received notions that inscribe a settled substance in the agent of freedom; of the reasons why traditional alternatives do not make good these defects; and of the ways in which the critique of essential closures in freedom can dissolve the perceived blockages of modern thought on this subject. Moreover, present work in this field slips into an unwarranted conflation of the layers of epistemology, ontology and ethics in the critique of universalist