Abstract
Via a critical reading of Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, this essay argues the traditions of “history from below”, subaltern studies, and postcolonial feminist studies have issued in a series of conceptual difficulties around the idea of emancipation. Mahmood rightly criticizes the tendency of these traditions to conflate agency and resistance. Her own effort to decouple agency and desire from emancipatory politics, however, undercuts theory’s capacity to diagnose domination and ties theory too closely to the self-understandings of its subjects. Distinguishing appropriately between agency and freedom and between desire and interests can revivify the idea of emancipation. A universal interest in freedom from domination can be defended on this basis without discounting the self-understandings and actual desires of people. This argument points the way to a division of labour between emancipatory political theory, which analyses public institutions in the name of the universal interest in freedom, and emancipatory politics, which begins from people’s actual desires in order to build support for institutional change.
Notes
1 I will use “emancipation” and “liberation” interchangeably throughout to refer to the project of eliminating systematic domination or oppression; freedom is its goal.
2 Recent attempts to reassert freedom as the goal of the Left have drawn inspiration from the neo-republican political theory of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, among others (Lovett and Pettit Citation2009; Pettit Citation1997; Skinner Citation1998). Scholars have traced the historical continuity between republican opposition to domination and the rise of the nineteenth-century Left (Claeys Citation1989; Gourevitch Citation2015; Leopold Citation2007; Roberts Citation2017). Simultaneously, the contemporary political concerns of the Left are being rearticulated in terms of freedom from domination (Einspahr Citation2010; Gourevitch Citation2016; Halldenius Citation2010; Shapiro Citation2016; Watkins Citation2015).
3 There are major disagreements between (a) empiricists like Thompson, for whom one must only attend carefully to the right sources, (b) structuralists like Guha, for whom only a rigorous protocol of reading the absences in the official records will do and (c) poststructuralists like Spivak, for whom the subaltern's voice is eternally deferred in any system of signs. These become meaningful differences, however, only after the choice is made to pursue popular or subaltern cultures of resistance.
4 Having a reason to want something is not the same as wanting it, and does not preclude having other reasons for not wanting the same thing. Thus, having an interest in being free from domination may conflict with and be outweighed by other interests. We will explore some of these intricacies further on.
5 Chatterjee’s critique of Chibber’s interpretation is worth considering, though (Warren Citation2017, chap. 1).
6 Something Chatterjee affirms (Warren Citation2017, 43).
7 Foucault himself, when questioned, averred that liberation from domination is “the political or historical condition for a practice of freedom”, what he called ethics or the care of the self (Citation1997, 283).