(1) The critical redetermination of the structure of social participation or membership will take place through a reflection upon its genesis. The process of becoming a part or a member of a social practice, namely, the process of socialization-as-subjectivation, is examined from a genealogical perspective and critically set against a teleological conception of education or Bildung. Becoming a competent participant of a social practice is genealogically understood as a process of transforming an antecedent ("natural") endowment, one that is not, however, completely re- or trans-formed simply in and through this process (which would be the case according to a teleological concept of Bildung). Rather, this antecedent element is preserved and survives in its difference from the logic of social or cultural capacities. Thus, from a genealogical point of view, social participation or membership is also in itself structurally fractured: the singular self is never fully a social member, the "individual" not wholly "subject," the "human being" is not the same as the "person." The linkage between the (a-social) individual and the (social) subject contains a moment of irreducible contingency or foreignness.
(2) Taking as our point of departure the genealogical problematization of the social, the concepts of "normativity" and "freedom" in their relation must be newly conceptualized. As a first, abstract approximation, one can say that normativity and freedom can only be determined through one another, while at the same time, in facing one another, are also different and independent: that is, normativity and freedom stand in a (negative) dialectical relation. Normative orientations are not simply realized in having been generated as freely posited, but rather, they retain-for the sake of their normative force-an irreducible moment of foreignness or independence. On the other hand, a free self-relation does not arise in the generation (or formation) of normative orientations alone. Rather, in order warrant the name "freedom" in an emphatic sense, a free self-relation maintains an irreducible moment of distance and play over and against all normative orientations. The hypothesis is that only thus can the transformations and innovations of normative orders be explained: freedom is not simply absorbed in self-obligation, but rather, always and again exceeds it.
Sub-projects:
The project outlined above will be carried out in a series of closely related interlocking sub-projects.
Project 1 - The Subject of Rights (Christoph Menke)
The relation of tension between normativity and freedom underlies the fundamental form through which the government of modern society takes place: the form of so-called "subjective rights." On the one hand, the form of subjective rights is defined by the fact that it addresses the bearers of rights as subjects of arbitrary will (Willkürsubjekte): rights themselves place the very questions of whether and how rights are claimed within the sphere of the arbitrary choice of individuals. On the other hand, rights are the result of autonomous self-determination that is exercised in political self-government. Therefore, between the content and the ground of rights is a governing tension that corresponds to the tension within the concept of freedom itself, namely, a tension between freedom from normativity and freedom as the ground of normativity. This project aims at an investigation of the form of subjective rights in light of this tension within the concept of freedom. It will be examined in two steps:
The first step provides a more precise structural description of the form of subjective rights. Here, the hypothesis is that to grasp this form is to understand the basic change that this form introduces into the relation between right and person. To this end, legal-historical and -sociological inquiries offer crucial insights: subjective rights aim at the power, the capacity of the person-they are "empowering." In this first step, we will examine more precisely how this legal empowerment leads to the constitution of new types of social formations, and thereby at the same time, constitutes a new form of political government. In particular, this will allow us to work out the new determination of the relations between the individual and society that is expressed by the form of subjective rights. The thesis of this project is that this relation is determined through an irreducible difference.
The second step assumes that the socio-structural determination of subjective rights itself has a normative content. What is required here, first of all, is a general determination of the connection between normativity, freedom and social participation. The basic assumption is that the free execution of social participation is the ground of normativity. From here, the determination of the relations between the individual and society must also be understood through the form of subjective rights. Thus, the claim is that the ground of subjective rights can only lie in a concept of normative freedom as the execution of social participation, a process that essentially involves freedom from normativity, freedom from social participation. In order to understand this adequately, reflection upon the relation between spirit (Geist) and nature will be required-a relation that answers to the name "human" in the normative discourse of modernity.
Project 2 - Paradoxes of Autonomy (Thomas Khurana)
It is distinctive about the concept of autonomy that in it freedom and normativity are entangled in special ways. In the concept of self-legislation legitimate normative order is linked to the fact that in it we are subject only to our own laws. On the other hand freedom is thought such that it consists in a special form of normative certainty (and not in bare uncertainty). The aim of the concept of autonomy consequently is twofold: a normative concept of freedom and a free conception of normativity.
In the concept of autonomy, then, freedom and normativity stand in an internal relation. At the same time, however, between both persists an irreducible tension, which turns "autonomy" into a category as dynamic as it is precarious. The irreducible tension between freedom and normativity manifests especially in the so-called "paradox of autonomy," which on various occasion has been diagnosed with regard to Kant's determination of autonomy. In the conception of self-legislation, a moment or an act seems to become necessary in which the subject gives itself the law, without being determined in this very act by a prior law or ground. At the same time, however, such a lawless moment cannot in itself be thought as autonomous in the sense that it lacks the aspect of being bound by a law. Thus in the paradox of autonomy freedom (in the positing of the law) and normativity (being bound by the law) come apart in problematic ways.
The project asks after possible forms of the deployment of this paradox, in which the tension of freedom and normativity can be internally released, without the sides of these relations falling apart. Such a deployment of the paradox demands a multiplex new determination of autonomy: an interrogation of the legal imagery of normativity and its reformulation in terms of practices and capabilities; a questioning of the image of a singular subject, which is at the same time subordinated to and the author of norms, and its reformulation in terms of a social constellation of reciprocal determination; and an attention to the complex temporal dimensions of the development of normative orders and to the process of formation, in which being-bound and active re-articulation reciprocally condition each other. These forms of the reevaluation of autonomy in concepts of practice, sociality, and formation are confronted with the task of elaborating the paradox of autonomy without lopsidedly dissolving the tensions that are concentrated in this paradox: the tensions of limitation and capability, individual and general freedom, freedom in the social and freedom from the social.
Project 3 - After Sovereignty: Toward a Reconceptualization of Political Freedom (Francesca Raimondi)
The hypothesis of this project is that the recurring formulations of the concept of the political-formulations that began already in the first half of the twentieth century and that have only intensified in current debates-can be properly understood only if they are read as attempts to recover a concept of political freedom, that is, a freedom that comes to be expressed in political practice. Such a concept of political freedom stands in critical relation to certain presuppositions of liberal understandings of freedom (which in most cases have no genuine political connotations), as well as to models of sovereign self-determination as elaborated in theories of democracy. What the at times emphatic recourse to the concept of the political signals, is a moment within political or legal processes that cannot be institutionalized, a moment that resists institutionalization. Although the possibility of instituting new practices, rights or even political orders is founded on such a moment, this moment also retains a certain alterity with respect to such instituting processes and consequently cannot be fully absorbed into the transparent process of collective self-determination. This non-institutable moment should be conceived as a mark of political freedom (or one of its central aspects) insofar as the impulse towards change and transformation is located within it, and because it bears a specific reference to the foundations of social practice. It is only on the basis of such impulses that we can characterize political practice as something more than the mere administration of political affairs.
This project attempts to develop the contours of such genuine understandings of political freedom, particularly in their difference from theories of individual self-actualization as well as collective self-determination. To this end, various conceptualizations of political freedom will be discussed (Schmitt, Arendt, Lefort, Rancière) with an eye toward drawing out what is problematic in each, for example, Schmitt's conceptualization of the non-institutable moment as sovereign power, or Arendt's explanation of political freedom as freedom in its proper sense. The normative implications of such a concept of political freedom are also of particular interest, namely, the thought that the legitimacy of normative orders is bound to the possibility of transformation or reinstitution, and thereby, tied to a moment of indeterminacy.
Project 4 - Dimensions of Aesthetic Freedom (Juliane Rebentisch)
The modern idea that the formation of normative orders can only be considered as legitimate if it is grounded in freedom has been specified since Hegel: The freedom to generate normative orders, or autonomy, must be conceived as always already mediated through social practice. According to the influential tradition of Hegelian thought that theorizes this formation as a part of "ethical life" (Sittlichkeit), this mediation by social practice is total: freedom exists only in and through participation in a social practice. Against this conceptualization, this project assumes that an important aspect of freedom is marginalized if not entirely denied by this line of thinking, namely the freedom we have in opposition to social practice, its normative orders, and their corresponding identity expectations. In working through this connection of problems, this project will turn to the classic scene of this controversy that stages the confrontation between theories of "ethical life" and its notoriously hated foe-namely, romantic irony. According to the Hegelian line of thinking, the tradition of romantic irony and its accompanying understanding of "aesthetic" freedom are considered as the epitome of a radicalized notion of freedom as a form of arbitrary will (Willkür); by putting merely natural individuality (which includes inclination, desire, and drive) in the place of social personality, the romantic tradition precisely misses and fails to realize freedom itself. In challenging the Hegelian judgment of romantic irony and its underlying assumption, namely, that freedom must be one-sidedly identified with the capacity toward rational self-determination, this project aims to show that the romantic integration of involuntary, irrational, and anarchic impulses into the concept of freedom instead suggests a notion of freedom akin to what Adorno called the "dialectic of freedom." At the heart of this concept of dialectic is an active antagonism, a relation of tension that takes place between the subjective capacity toward self-determination and the impulse that opposes it-a pre-subjective force. A further thesis of this project is that this dialectic is the condition of possibility for any transformation of our second nature (that is, of history in general), and therefore, an important moment of freedom. In addressing the questions that arise in connection with the dialectic of freedom, this project will draw from the fields of anthropology, ethics, moral philosophy, political philosophy, and cultural and social theory.
Project 5 - Acts of Freedom: Kant and the Problem of the Reality of Autonomy (Dirk Setton)
At the center of Kant's theory of autonomy stands the idea of a pure self-relation of the will, a will that is itself law and that determines itself only in conformity with itself. According to Kant, this full sense of autonomy for a human will is indeed a practical necessity (freedom and law are reciprocally conditioning), although properly speaking, impossible to realize (the law is not immediate and never a complete ground of determination of the will). With this in mind, the aim of this project is to read Kant's practical philosophy in view of the problem of the reality of autonomy anew. In order to develop a theory of the freedom of the will, we will be guided by the following premise: that the paradoxical modality of the necessary impossibility of autonomous self-relation is to be conceived as an insight into the inherently problematic reality of human freedom. In other words, the thesis is that a reformulation of the so-called "paradox" of autonomy-that a free will should be the author of a law from which its freedom first arises-can express a truth concerning the freedom of the will. In developing this perspective, this project will re-construct Kant's theory of freedom, taking the text, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, as its point of departure. Here, Kant presents the reality of autonomy in the sense of a "revolution" of the will, and indeed, as the result of an im-possible, groundless, and radical "act of freedom." The consequences of this idea for Kant's practical philosophy as a whole will be developed through a reading of his classical texts, and the stakes of this interpretation will be further explored through references to Hegel, Sartre, and psychoanalytic theory.
