Diane Enns

The purpose of this project is to explore the rethinking of freedom and politics in contemporary French thought from existentialism to deconstruction, in relation to several of the most prominent post-war revolutionary struggles and the liberation discourses they inspired. My questions arise out of the disjunction between a desire for liberation from the effects of oppression, often expressed as a teleological project of self-determination, and a philosophical wariness of the assumptions such a desire fails to contest: primarily, the sovereignty of the subject and its attempt to transcend power relations. I argue that this wariness is not disabling for emancipatory politics but is the condition of possibility for a renewed thinking of politics and freedom. ;My point of departure is Jean-Paul Sartre's elaboration of freedom as absolute choice and the antagonistic relationship between the self and the other that results as each struggles to assert his own autonomy. These existential tenets appear in the texts of the revolutionary movements that marked Sartre's time---against colonialism, apartheid and patriarchy---in their focus on the primacy of the subject for a notion of freedom as self-determination and recognition. Michel Foucault is shown to challenge this notion with his attention to the paradox of liberation: power relations cannot be escaped, yet they never appear without resistance. Liberation is thus never wholly achieved. ;This does not deny the desire for freedom, however. Jacques Derrida's work affirms emancipatory desire, yet remains vigilant against the dreams and dogmas bound to political solutions that replicate the abuses of power they contest. The work of liberation must remain cognizant of the singularity of each event and the impossibility of knowing the outcome of decisions. Wary of the metaphysical presuppositions of an ideal freedom, Derrida nevertheless posits an ambiguous freedom in this gap between decision and act that is the condition of possibility for political practice. What this might mean for liberation struggles is exemplified by the Zapatistas, whose revolutionary practice is continually reinvented, signaling not the coming of a utopian freedom beyond politics and power, but the coming of an unforeseeable future.

Speaking of Freedom analyzes the development of ideas about freedom and politics in contemporary French thought from existentialism to deconstruction, in relation to several of the most prominent twentieth century liberation struggles. It describes the paradox of freedom—that freedom "kills itself" in both thought and practice: in the attempt to theorize the indeterminate, and in the revolution or emancipatory discourse that dies as it hurries towards its utopian conclusion, rejecting one system only to be enslaved by another. Both the philosophical wariness of the concept of liberation that one finds in Foucault and Derrida, and the desire for freedom from oppression expressed by anti-colonialists and feminists, are shown to be necessary for political practice. The book thus provides a cogent analysis of some of the most difficult concepts of contemporary continental philosophy, along with a profound sense of engagement with liberation struggles