Liberation and Contradiction

The question of liberation has faded. This is true not only within academic discourse but more broadly as well. In place of the profound opposition between liberation and domination, we now encounter dichotomies such as democracy/populism, globalization/nationalism, elite/people, freedom/security, which fragment and limit our understanding of society. In contrast, I aim to once again bring the emphatic question of liberation to the center of social philosophy. Modern societies confront us imminently with the necessity of liberation, as life in (late) capitalism is marked by constant contradiction. Since G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx, we know that capitalist societies generate numerous social, institutional, and logical contradictions: capitalist societies are inherently contradictory. I intend to argue that processes of liberation are closely linked to a new, liberating perspective on how we engage with societal and logical contradictions, and thus with our very practices of thought. Only when we recognize these contradictions as constitutive that is, as identity-forming elements of capitalist societies can we articulate a radical critique of (late) capitalism. Only then do we avoid merely countering it with an external ideal or with that which it destroys, and instead reveal its own contradictions and destructiveness, turning them against it through immanent critique. The attempt to overcome domination therefore requires a theory of liberation grounded in a speculative understanding of social contradictions. The speculative here does not refer to everyday meanings of guessing or supposing but rather emphasizes unity in division, identity in non-identity, the positive within the negative. Put differently, the fact that capitalist societies are constituted precisely through and because of their internal contradictions can only be thought of speculatively. Thus, we must understand liberation theory simultaneously as a theory of the erosion of domination: liberation encompasses both the (subjective) emancipation of the oppressed and the (objective) decline of domination. In this way, the emergence of freedom and the decline of domination are recognized as moments of the same dialectical process of liberation.