Roberts examines the liminal and transitional space of slave escape in order to develop a theory of freedom as marronage, which contends that freedom is fundamentally located within this space—that it is a form of perpetual flight. He engages a stunning variety of writers, including Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Rastafari, among others, to develop a compelling lens through which to interpret the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and politics that still confront us today. The result is a sophisticated, interdisciplinary work that unsettles the ways we think about freedom by always casting it in the light of its critical opposite.
Roberts examines the liminal and transitional space of slave escape in order to develop a theory of freedom as marronage, which contends that freedom is fundamentally located within this space—that it is a form of perpetual flight. He engages a stunning variety of writers, including Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Rastafari, among others, to develop a compelling lens through which to interpret the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and politics that still confront us today. The result is a sophisticated, interdisciplinary work that unsettles the ways we think about freedom by always casting it in the light of its critical opposite.
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Roberts examines the liminal and transitional space of slave escape in order to develop a theory of freedom as marronage, which contends that freedom is fundamentally located within this space—that it is a form of perpetual flight. He engages a stunning variety of writers, including Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Rastafari, among others, to develop a compelling lens through which to interpret the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and politics that still confront us today. The result is a sophisticated, interdisciplinary work that unsettles the ways we think about freedom by always casting it in the light of its critical opposite.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226201184 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 02/11/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 270 |
| File size: | 814 KB |
About the Author
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Freedom as Marronage
By Neil Roberts
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-20118-4
CHAPTER 1
The Disavowal of Slave Agency
In other words, the social question could not very well be solved by revolution in America for the simple reason that at the moment no such solution was required—if we leave out of account, as we must here, the predicament of Negro slavery and the altogether different problem it posed.
—Hannah Arendt, "Revolution and Freedom: A Lecture"
This opposition between slavery or servitude on the one hand and freedom on the other is probably the single most characteristic feature of the long rhetoric of liberty to which the experience of the Roman republic gave rise.
—Philip Pettit, Republicanism
There are many people today and some of them radicals and revolutionaries who sneer at the fact that this [Greek] democracy was based on slavery. So it was, though we have found that those who are prone to attack Greek Democracy on behalf of slavery are not so much interested in defending the slaves as they are in attacking democracy.
—C. L. R. James, Every Cook Can Govern
Introduction
A glaring problem exists that receives little attention in the voluminous appraisals of freedom: the lack of attention paid to slavery and slave agency. Hanna Pitkin asks whether freedom and liberty are conceptual twins, observing how these terms might denote distinct notions with their own original roots and implications. Implicit in this inquiry are the ways in which thinkers posit probing questions without exploring crucial aspects required for comprehensive explanation.
Although philosophers and political theorists persist in thinking about the association between freedom and liberty, they often perpetuate the unfortunate act of disavowing a much more fundamental relationship between freedom and slavery. If the relationship between freedom and liberty is one of twins or siblings, then the connection between freedom and slavery is one of a child to a parent. Slavery serves as the foundational notion that gives rise to freedom.
Slavery should not be understood as a mere metaphor. Slavery denotes a state of unfreedom and zone of nonbeing conceptually and phenomenologically antithetical to freedom, and any theory of freedom failing to take this association seriously remains inadequate. The use of slavery as metaphor is ubiquitous in Western thought, ancient and modern. The literatures of Greek and Roman antiquity, discourses on sin of Pauline and Augustinian Christianity, documents of medieval jurists, treatises of Enlightenment philosophes, battle cries of revolutionary America, the French national anthem, and the rhetoric of contemporary libertarians are suffused with it. The metaphor of slavery is a trope in the Western imagination that overextends itself, the metaphorical eclipsing the experiences of the real. The analytical juxtaposition of slavery ancient and modern, though, is not a formula for conflating the historical circumstances of eras, for whereas ethnicity, gender, and class are primary identifiers of enslaved peoples of the ancient West, race is foremost among other intersections for modern slaves. Nonetheless, peering deeper into ancient and modern slave societies, thinkers, and revolutions discloses experiences of flight that excavate common submerged discursive knowledges.
In the modern period scholars espousing genres of republicanism and reading the ancient into the modern devise influential ideas of freedom beyond the parameters of liberalism and neoliberalism. To a differing extent, however, cadres of republicans disavow slavery and the actions of the enslaved, obscuring the importance of a slave's capacity for revolutionary action. Through their disavowals, they obscure the constituent elements of freedom.
Disavowal does not mean silence, as a silence denotes a complete failure to mention the relevant subject. In everyday language, the verb to avow is to acknowledge. Regarding the opposite of avow, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb disavow as meaning "to refuse to avow, own, or acknowledge; to disclaim knowledge of, responsibility for, or approbation; to repudiate; to deny." Disavowal, then, in its everyday usage, denotes the "action of disavowing or refusing to acknowledge; repudiation, denial." Sigmund Freud usually describes disavowal (Verleugnung) with respect to castration anxiety and fetishism. To a lesser degree, Freud associates disavowal with death. Children, for example, acknowledge the lack of a penis in females while at the same time repudiating the belief that they in fact imagined a female possessing the male sexual organ. The resulting neurotic castration fear leads to the creation of a fetish that is disavowed internally in the children's minds.
Freudian psychoanalysis expands the understanding of disavowal by relating it to specific traumatic experiences and pointing out that acts of disavowal exist alongside recognition and acknowledgment of the traumatic event. While trauma plays a large part in disavowal, Freud does not differentiate between its internal and external consequences. The example of disavowal regarding the castration fear illustrates internal trauma; events such as the Haitian Revolution and revolutionary antislavery illustrate external trauma; and acts of race and racism illustrate forms of both. Repetitions and reversals produce external transgenerational trauma at the individual and collective levels.
Disavowal centrally requires what I take to be a simultaneous double movement: an acknowledgment and a denial. By simultaneously acknowledging and denying an event, one does not silence its existence. Rather, one strategically locates an event and then rejects its relevance, knowing full well that it occurred. The double movement produces negative traumatic effects more damaging than silence. Locating and establishing the implications of the disavowal of slave agency is the goal of what follows.
The chapter begins with an analysis of two republican notions of freedom: the first, freedom in the founding of non-sovereign human action; and the second, the concept of freedom as non-domination. I outline the claims of each while highlighting the locus of their respective disavowals of slavery and slave agency. The second republican ideal does not hide the importance of slavery to freedom in the Roman tradition it seeks to revive. It makes a point of addressing slavery explicitly in a manner that the first notion fails to articulate. Strict, doctrinaire adherents of these two systems nevertheless disavow the experiences, thoughts, and agency of slaves, and this act unites them. After explaining the adverse effects of disavowal, I turn in the next section to the meaning of slave agency and underscore Toni Morrison's adage that "modern life begins with slavery." By identifying the actions of slaves and spheres of fugitivity, we discern the importance of lived experience, the intersections between race and slavery that inform modern sensibilities, and overlapping ancient and modern discourses on flight derived from experience.
Founding Non-Sovereign Action
Justice, power, order, and rights are essential features of our existence in the world. On their own, they are not first principles of what it means to be human. The relation of humans to politics complicates this appraisal. Hannah Arendt observes that the "raison d'être of politics is freedom, and without it, political life would be meaningless." In "What Is Freedom?" and The Promise of Politics, she reiterates this statement. Arendt conceives of freedom as the central category shaping the human condition, and constant attempts to formulate a compelling notion of freedom pervade her oeuvre. Arendt's ruminations on freedom navigate an inherited "hostility between philosophy and politics" that "has been the curse of Western statecraft as well as of the Western tradition of philosophy ever since men of action and the men of thought parted company—that is, ever since Socrates' death." Understanding the hostile abyss between politics and philosophy brings to the fore the contested gulfs between praxis and poiesis, acting and making, beginning and ending, thought and contemplation, and natality and death.
Arendt shares several of Immanuel Kant's positions on judgment and spontaneity. Even more fundamental is Arendt's agreement with Kant on conceptualizing freedom as independent of slavery. For Arendt, "Kant saved freedom from this twofold assault upon it by distinguishing between 'pure' or theoretical reason and a 'practical reason' whose center is free will." Kant's critical philosophy locates freedom a priori in the noumenal realm of intelligible things-in-themselves, a sphere separate from the phenomenal world of the senses. In the Kantian framework, one does not come to realize or feel freedom through casting judgment on the experience of slavery, since a universal idea of freedom is thought to exist throughout time and space regardless of our everyday lived activities.
In Arendt's estimation, despite his originality, Kant falls prey to the limitations of a Western philosophical tradition unable to integrate concepts and phenomena into comprehension of how humans living in an interactive "web of relationships" may best live free. Actions and experiences matter more to Arendt than a priori intuitions. Philosophy mistakenly banishes freedom from the domain of politics, turning its optic narrowly inward toward the will.
We must come to terms with the meaning of freedom externally by recognizing the actuality of human plurality, "the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." A return to the ancient Greek polis is the basis for Arendt's neo-Athenian republicanism and proposed solutions to the dilemmas facing us. By neo-Athenian, I mean a conception of republicanism that bridges concerns about the life and economy of the ancient city-state with modern forms of governance and statecraft. Neo-Athenian thought introduces elements of ancient Athens applicable to republicanism and freedom in the modern world.
The agonal spirit of the polis is the passionate human drive for self-assertion against others. Becoming a part of the polis means participating in public modes of governance. This has a range of scales. Size matters less than the capacity for agents to cultivate a free existence. For Arendt it "was the polis, the space of men's free deeds and living words, which could endow life with splendour." To speak of freedom in modernity, unencumbered by the limitations of Western philosophy, requires delving into the phenomenon of revolution.
In On Revolution (1963), Arendt reflects on two of the eighteenth century's formative events: the American Revolution and the French Revolution. While the American Revolution represents the realm of freedom and the political, the French Revolution is Arendt's definitive example of the apolitical site of necessity and unfreedom. Arendt claims the French Revolution's negative totalizing effects overshadow the lost treasure of the American revolutionary tradition. A symptom of this loss is "the very fact that these two elements, the concern with stability and the spirit of the new, have become opposites in political thought—the one being identified as conservatism and the other claimed as the monopoly of progressive liberalism." Reclaiming the lost tradition established by American revolutionaries and the Founding Fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson, is paramount to achieving freedom in dark times.
When looking to the physiognomy of the twentieth century, Arendt identifies the rise of the atomic bomb and notes the staggering omnipresence of wars and revolutions. Unlike the phenomenology of war, revolution emerges only with the advent of the modern age. Revolution occupies a key role in thinking about freedom since the "aim of revolution was, and always has been, freedom." Nonetheless, in the twentieth century, "nothing indeed has seemed to be more safely buried than the concept of freedom." Arendt's exhumation starts with an etymological observation.
The term revolution first related to the natural sciences, and it was nonpolitical. Revolution had an astronomical association with the revolving motion of the stars. It carried the backward-looking connotation of restoration, the exact opposite of the word's current usages. In the seventeenth century, revolution took on a political designation, remaining wed to the notion of restoration as a return to a preestablished point. The subsequent onset of the American Revolution also operated to a significant degree under the rubric of revolution as restoration.
With the storming of the Bastille, French revolutionaries forever changed the political language of revolution, shifting its meaning from a backward-looking to a forward-looking concept. Revolution in its modern form now denoted a beginning, the birth of a novus ordo saeclorum. The people irresistibly sought nothing less than the entire abolition of absolutist feudalism and the asymmetrical relationships among peasants, lords, legislators, and monarchs that feudalism established. The idea of irresistibility took a sad, violent turn in Arendt's view, as the unalterable movement in search of radical change collapsed into the violent Jacobin Terror of historical necessity. Arendt remarks, "It was the French and not the American Revolution that set the world on fire, and it was consequently from the course of the French Revolution, and not from the course of events in America or from the acts of the Founding Fathers, that our present use of the word 'revolution' received its connotations and overtones everywhere, the United States not excluded."
Modern revolutions confront the problem of beginning directly. Beginning is natality, dually referring to "the fact that human beings appear in the world by virtue of birth" and "the capacity of beginning anew, that is, of acting." Arendt develops an unorthodox conception of the experience of beginning, which has in its theorization a desire to dismantle hierarchical systems of rule while holding onto the ideals of naissance and action. Experience here is significant. In her German translation of On Revolution, Arendt underscores this through the repeated invocation of the word Erfahrung for "experience"—understood in a processual manner as the experience of "movement" and a "journey"—instead of Erlebnis, an immediate experience. The problem of beginning something new in the domain of politics resides in the existence of nonpolitical and antipolitical factors that disrupt the formation of a new order of things. The foundation of freedom, non-sovereignty, and the social question are phenomena that either obviate or exacerbate the problem's challenges.
Anchoring Arendt's republicanism is differentiation between liberation and the foundation of freedom (constitutio libertatis). The lack of acknowledging the distinction is another facet of loss in late modernity that we are to recover. Liberation describes the negative moment of necessity "whose fruits are absence of restraint and possession of 'the power of locomotion.'" It is a condition that precedes the institution of freedom. To attain liberation means be released from one's chains. Violence characterizes the moment of liberation, an unavoidable phenomenon in many instances of flight.
Violence, nevertheless, must not dictate the course of revolutionary projects, for in Arendt's estimation violence's subsumption of speech and situatedness outside the political sphere produces a clear outcome: the implosion of freedom. Whereas power is the human ability to act in concert, violence is the instrumental, illegitimate, antipolitical quality that destroys power. Under this rationale, a "rebellion," as a violent uprising, describes the final result of the liberation process rather than the nomenclature of "revolution." The French Revolution is a misnomer in these terms, because it ends in the liberatory violence of the enraged, failing to arrive at the next constituting phase.
Freedom moves beyond the stage of necessity through its central act: foundation. Arendt imagines foundation as spontaneously constituting a lasting rubric for a republic unsusceptible to the necessities of violence, political closure, and time. Freedom demands the constitution of a republic, and it is not to be mistaken for either free enterprise or civil rights. In this sense, notwithstanding an inverse appraisal of will and constituent power, Arendt echoes Carl Schmitt's dictum that constitutionalism and foundation are more than the sum total of constitutional laws. To enact constitutionalism, agents must be participators in governance. Otherwise, their actions become meaningless. Unlike liberation's focus on tearing down, freedom involves positivity and the creativity that natality instills. Resolving concurrent tensions between liberation and the foundation of freedom is a dilemma that Arendt believes is unsolvable. Hers is also a premature judgment.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Freedom as Marronage by Neil Roberts. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsPart I: On Slavery, Agency, and Freedom
Introduction
One / The Disavowal of Slave Agency
Part II: Slave Theorists of Freedom
Two / Comparative Freedom and the Flight from Slavery
Three / Sovereign Marronage and Its Others
Four / Sociogenic Marronage in a Slave Revolution
Part III: Freedom as Marronage In Late Modernity
Five / Marronage between Past and Future
Afterword: Why Marronage Still Matters
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
“In Freedom as Marronage, Roberts insists that a new theory of freedom emerges from the Haitian Revolution, but each instance of formulating this new thought seems to demonstrate, instead, a more rigorousapplication of the tenets of freedom and fraternity in the French Revolution. Where there is a difference is through dynamics of creolization, of African, European, and indigenous American conceptions of legitimating practices in the struggle for freedom. That the Black slaves chose, for example, the Native American name for the island as the one for their republic is a case in point. Roberts responds to and builds on these criticisms through theoretical reflection on the concept of marronage, whose etymology points to the sea, to what it means to be lost at sea from one perspective, stuck on an island in another. It refers to the consciousness of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, whose hopes to return to Africa (home) were challenged by the sea in every direction. Roberts shows how, in such modern isolation on the one hand and the constant, brutal realities of slavery on the other, the enslaved’s conceptions of freedom were affected; would, for example, being marooned, being ‘stranded,’ lead to a form of stoic resignation as the formulation of freedom or more active forms of resistance, what the revolutionary psychiatrist, political theorist, and philosopher Frantz Fanon refers to as becoming ‘actional’? Roberts works through Hannah Arendt, Phillip Petit, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Frederick Douglass in a debate over such topics as the impact of racialized slavery on conceptions of freedom to problems with the dialectics of recognition as the basis of securing freedom and dignity for the self. Particularly powerful is Roberts’s discussion of Coleridge’s impact on Douglass’s thought. Roberts reveals, in Coleridge, a profound existential commitment against bondage and an understanding of freedom that transcends mere liberty. This book, then, is an exemplar of the creolization of theory, of theory from the global south reaching beyond the institutional location of its author in northern provinces, to articulate freedom and the quest for human dignity beyond the confines of Euromodernity to the heart and soul of a human world in need of learning much from its always present dark side. It’s a splendid addition to the bourgeoning movement of creative political thought from Afro-modernity and beyond. A must read for those interested in knowing, proverbially, otherwise.”
“Freedom as Marronage is an exciting, well-conceived, and passionately argued work of political theory and Africana thought. Roberts’s distinctive understanding of freedom is especially welcome in the context of political theory and philosophy, where slavery still appears largely (if at all) as either a metaphor or a signpost of moral and political progress. As he shows, thinking through the legacies of enslavement and the flight from it is essential to understanding freedom in a postcolonial, post-apartheid, post-civil rights moment.”
“Freedom as Marronage is not only an illuminating exegesis on the self-activity of enslaved people to create free space for living but an utterly brilliant meditation on the fundamental meaning of freedom in the modern world. Political theorists, historians, philosophers, and cultural critics take heed: Roberts is a thinker to be reckoned with.”
“Could there be a topic in Western political theory as thoroughly analyzed—indeed as exhausted—as freedom? But it all depends on whose liberties have been framing your conceptual investigation. Taking up the perspective of the ‘dread history’ of Afro-modernity—a history of slavery, revolt, and marronage—Roberts opens up for us an exciting new conceptual terrain unexplored by the hegemonic Euro-narrative. In the process, he makes irrefutably clear the extent to which modern Western political theory has been constructed on the silencing of the voices of resistance of the West’s subordinated racial Others.”