What is Freedom beyond the Post-Enlightenment Subject?

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.