To explore how a non-individuated understanding of freedom may be useful for a politics of abolition or decolonization, I turn to work on spirituality, and more specifically to the idea of a “calling” or vocation. Unlike 20th century understandings of the “vocational” as a kind of debased (non-liberal) training, or a relic of presecular formations, the paper draws on work on religious or spiritual calling, as well as poststructuralist theory, to consider how freedom might adhere in responding to a call, in taking up a demand issuing from outside of the liberal subject. Whether understood as coming from a specific entity (a divinity or ancestors no longer “living”), or from a less locatable source (Butler, 2004), calling situates our actions as free not because they issue from “inside” a bounded self but because they knowingly continue–and care for–modes of living that prexist us and envelope us. Where a liberal framework would see bondage and thrall to past traditions, this paper amplifies a specific modality of freedom as radically social and shared, affective, and trans-individual (even trans-generational). What we are summoned to think here is the experience of feeling called, an affective attunement to what lies outside of, precedes, and ultimately envelopes any sense of bounded selfhood. One might designate this as the affective call of freedom.
The paper begins with critiques of the liberal, “post-Enlightenment subject” (Da Silva, 2007) as the presumptive bearer of “freedom” in the post-1492 world. Drawing especially on Saidiya Hartman’s analysis of “burdened individualism” (1997) and Fred Moten’s provocations toward thinking of a “non-self” (2018), as well as theories of nonconscious, pre-individual affect (Massumi, 2002), the paper considers what “freedom” might mean when thought otherwise than through something locatable within a bounded, individual, liberal subject.
In a global framework informed by the work of Sylvia Wynter (1996; 2003), the paper considers how coloniality has worked by “overrepresenting” various modes of being human with a single dominant genre: Man. Man, the post-Enlightenment subject, is a preeminently rational entity, where cogitation precedes and informs acting in the world. When action encounters limits not posited by this rationality, such limits are called unfreedom. This could be through harsh materialities (e.g., the so-called “struggle against nature”) or legal and economic structures. As even such vaunted liberal thinkers as John Locke and the German Romanticists underscored, “freedom” for this subject is the freedom to self-posit limits. This presupposes that the source of all things that matter is rational cognition and any limit arising from outside rationality itself is to be decried.
And yet, the freedoms of the post-Enlightenment subject are often relationally produced precisely through the enslavement, criminalization, and disqualification of non-Man ways of being (Dillon, 2018). As Toni Morrison put it in Playing in the Dark, “The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery” 1992). The purportedly free post-Enlightenment subject cannot exist without the unfreedoms of its Others, those Judith Butler (1993) calls Man’s “constitutive outsides.”
As theorists of transindividual affect (Brennan, 2004; Massumi 2002) have insisted, this self is far less isolated and bounded than the liberal tradition imagines. If any subject is already responding to affect before it is consciously aware of being affected, then conscious cognition is late to the scene of (human and more-than-human) relationality. This, in turn, short circuits traditional understandings of “freedom,” spurring us toward situating freedom elsewhere than within the rational self.
Returning to work in Black Studies, we can note how post-1492 racisms often operated by marking non-white subjects as insufficiently rational and hence incapable of setting the proper limits to their own actions, thus undeserving of legal “freedom.” In such a context, resistance to racialized regimes of bodily, economic, and legal subjection was often characterized as irrational, as proof of a kind of “primitive” mentality that rendered improper subjects less-than-human. Colonial modes of education sought to violently instill proper rationality in these subjects so that they might learn to act in ways appropriate to the free subject. The properly free subject, in other words, could never desire anything but what is posited as good by Man. Intersecting with secularizing state projects, such violence also overcodes many spiritual or religious traditions as threats to freedom. Colonial secularism masks itself as “more free” than religious formations (An 2024).
By re-imagining the subject, we can imagine freedom as response to a call that does not require dialectical violence to produce the self’s own freedom through subjecting others. This otherwise subject could take many forms, including what Moten (2018) calls the “non-self” or even that of a pre-Enlightenment Pauline tradition of fractured and shifting self that Melissa Sanchez sees continuing into “secular” love poetry. Reimagining freedom as non-individual is a starting point for imagining alternative ways of addressing the rise of religiously-inflected authoritarianism in our moment, summoning us to develop capacities for being alongside one another that don’t use a pretext of individual “religious freedom” to subject others to various forms of violence.
Bibliography
An Yountae. 2024. The Coloniality of the Secular. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Unthinking Gender. New York: Routledge.
Da Silva, Denise. 2007. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press.
Dillon, Stephen. 2018. Fugitive Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables of the Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark. New York: Vintage.
Moten, Fred. 2018. Stolen Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sanchez, Melissa. 2019. Queer Faith. New York: NYU Press.
Wynter, Sylvia. 1995. “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5–57. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337.
This paper explores a non-individual conception of freedom through a reimagination of the subject. Analyzing the liberal, post-Enlightenment self, and critiques of that self from affect theory and Black studies, the paper questions the idea that freedom can be understood in individual terms as the expression of rationality acting on/in the world. By underscoring how affect produces responses antecedent to conscious cognition, and historizing the “rational” self in colonial projects, the paper wonders how “calling” may situate a self within a more-than-human social world. Exploring the feeling of being called, and the ethics of responding, the paper rethinks freedom in collective terms. Rejecting individualist freedom predicated on violence toward others, as well as colonial forms of secularism and “religious freedom,” the paper imagines freedom as profoundly shared: not issuing from a subject but coming to it from elsewhere and animating it with ethical charge.