Presidential Address: Freedom and the Ethics of Vigilance in a Time of Endangerment

A year after my call last November  to the AAR community to explore conditions of freedom and unfreedom in new ways, we are confronted with a deepening climate of erosion and erasure. From military dictatorships to university administrations that mow down departments and programs, an atmosphere of repercussion, inhumanity, and inscrutability prevails. The fragility and fickleness of these arrangements of life press us to keep asking what each of us can do, and to keep searching for possibilities. I turn to poets and storytellers, activists and political visionaries, who have discerned a practice of vigilance more sovereign and sustaining than the brute vigilantism of the state and other oppressive structures. What does it mean to be alert not only to threat but also to possibility—to be vigilant for justice, vigilant for the smallest acts of dignity, vigilant for freedom in the ordinary and the everyday? What kind of agency and orientation does an ethics of vigilance reveal, what hope does it trace, what does it offer us and what does it demand of us?