Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kenneth Surin is Professor and Chair of the Program in Literature at Duke University. He is the author of Christ, Ethics, and Tragedy; The Turnings of Darkness and Light: Essays in Philosophical and Systematic Theology; and Theology and the Problem of Evil.

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""Freedom Not Yet" is a stunning, mature, and major work. It provides a unique combination of strong empirical research and significant theoretical sophistication. Kenneth Surin is after a workable model for revolution within the broad frame of the Marxist tradition, and he provides significant engagements with approaches including identity, subjectivity (Derrida), event (Badiou), nomadology (Deleuze and Guattari), and transcendence (Radical Orthodoxy), cutting through each with a sure hand. This book will be at the center of discussions for a long time to come."--Roland Boer, author of "Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes"

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FREEDOM NOT YET

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................ixIntroduction...................................................................................................11. The Complementary Deaths of the Thinking Subject and of the Citizen Subject................................212. Producing a Marxist Concept of Liberation..................................................................343. Postpolitical Politics and Global Capitalism...............................................................654. The Exacerbation of Uneven Development: Analysis of the Current Regime of Accumulation.....................945. The Possibility of a New State I: Delinking................................................................1256. Models of Liberation I: The Politics of Identity...........................................................1417. Models of Liberation II: The Politics of the Place of the Subject..........................................1658. Models of Liberation III: The Politics of the Event........................................................1979. Models of Liberation IV: The Religious Transcendent........................................................22610. Models of Liberation V: Nomad Politics.....................................................................24111. The Possibility of a New State II: Heterotopia.............................................................26512. Prospects for the New Political Subject and Liberation.....................................................285Conclusion.....................................................................................................295Notes..........................................................................................................299Bibliography...................................................................................................371Index..........................................................................................................407

Chapter One

The concept of the subject is one of philosophy's preeminent topoi, and like all philosophical concepts it operates in a field of thought defined by one or more internal variables. These internal variables are conjoined in diverse relationships with such external variables as historical epochs and political and economic processes and events, as well as functions which allow the concept and its associated variables to produce a more or less specific range of truth-effects. The trajectory taken by the concept of the subject in the history of philosophy affords considerable insight into how this concept is produced, and as a result this philosophic-historical trajectory merits examination by anyone interested in this concept's creation.

The Classical Citizen Subject

There is a conventional wisdom in the history of philosophy regarding the more or less intrinsic connection between the metaphysical-epistemological project that seeks an absolute ground for thought or reason (What is it that enables reason to serve its legislative functions?) and the philosophico-political project of finding a ground in reason for the modus operandi of a moral and political subject (On what basis is reason able to legislate for the good life or right action?). According to the lineaments of what is by now a thoroughly well-seasoned narrative, the essential congruence between the rational subject of thought and the complementary subject of morality and politics was first posited by Plato and Aristotle. This unity between the two kinds of subject then found its suitably differentiated way into the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Hegel (and a host of their successors). The core of this narrative is expressed by the somewhat Kantian proposition, characteristic of the Enlightenment in general, that reason provides the vital and indispensable criterion by which all judgments concerning belief, morality, politics, and art are to be appraised, so that reason is the faculty that regulates the thinking being's activity. This activity is in turn the essential means for reason's deployment in any legitimate thinking about the world, that is, for the thinking being's capacity to describe and explain the world in ways that accord fundamentally with reason's precepts. And this precisely because reason is the irreducibly prior and enabling condition of any use of this capacity on the part of the subject. Reason, in other words, constitutes the thinking being, and the activity of this being in turn enables reason to unfold dynamically (to provide a somewhat Hegelian gloss on this initially Kantian proposition). In the topography of this unfolding of reason, both rational thought and politics and ethics are deemed to find their dovetailing foundation.

The philosophical tradition provides another way of delineating this connection between the rational subject of thought and the moral-political subject, one that also derives its focal point from Kant. Using the distinction between a subjectum (i.e., the thing that serves as the bearer of something, be it consciousness or some other property of the self) and a subjectus (i.e., the thing that is subjected to something else), the tradition has included among its repertoire of concepts a figure of thought taken from medieval philosophy that hinges on the relation between the subjectum and the subjectus. Etienne Balibar, in his fascinating essay "Citizen Subject," uses this distinction to urge that we not identify Descartes's thinking thing (res cogitans) with the transcendental subject of thought that very quickly became an ineliminable feature of Enlightenment epistemology. Nothing could be further from the truth, says Balibar, because the human being is for Descartes the unity of a soul and a body, and this unity, which marks the essence of the human being, cannot be represented in terms of the subjectum (presumably because the subjectum, qua intellectual simple nature, can exist logically without requiring the presupposition of a unity between soul and body). As the unity of a soul and a body, the human individual is not a mere intellectual simple nature, a subjectum, but is, rather, a subject in another, quite different sense. In this very different sense, the human individual is a subject transitively related to an other, a "something else," and for Descartes this "something else" is precisely the divine sovereignty. In other words, for Descartes the human individual is really a subjectus and never the subjectum of modern epistemology, the latter in any case owing its discovery to Locke and not to Descartes. For Balibar, therefore, it is important to remember that Descartes, who is palpably a late scholastic philosopher, was profoundly engaged with a range of issues that had been central for his precursors in the medieval period, in particular the question of the relation of lesser beings to the supreme divine being. This was a question which both Descartes and the medieval philosophers broached, albeit in different ways, under the rubric of the divine sovereignty.

The Cartesian subject is thus a subjectus, one who submits, and this in at least two ways significant for both Descartes and medieval political theology:...