The Autonomous Animal: Self-Governance and the Modern Subject

Conclusion: Freedom and Self-Governance

167 It is always an opening, at once in the sense of an unclosed system, of the opening left to the other’s freedom, but also in the sense of an overture, advance, or invitation, made to someone else. . . . It must remain something one cannot anticipate. —Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews Within modern political thought, autonomy has played an important role in resisting various forms of power. The idea that individuals possess a capacity to reason for themselves and thus govern themselves challenged multiple forms of hierarchy and domination. The project of modern democratization is heavily invested in a vision of the subject that defines autonomy as the characteristic that enables popular sovereignty . Thus the modern political project of liberation is built on the foundation of the sovereign subject of autonomy, able to will the law and thus preserve personal freedom and social order: “The freedom offered and defended by liberal rhetoric is a freedom that is entwined with these images of a subject whose integrity is an impossible perfection , a subject who can be calculated and predicted into the future at the same time as he or she has a clarity of thought and will that directs these very promises and predictions” (Bell 1996, 82). However, the promise that the autonomous subject offered universal human Conclusion freedom and self-governance Conclusion 168 168 emancipation has often seemed empty. Liberal proponents of the idea of autonomy argue that the failure is not in the ideal itself but lies with minor quibbles in defining precisely what constitutes autonomy or in differences over how best to defend it. Antifoundationalist critics of modernity have argued that the problem with autonomy is not an incomplete realization of the idea but in the ideal itself. The antifoundationalist critique has suggested that in ontological terms the subject is always already the product of particular conditions beyond their absolute control (Hindess 1996, 75). In normative terms, the requirement of autonomy for full recognition as a political subject leads to the exclusion of particular forms of life deemed to be inadequately autonomous. The critique of autonomy as it is conventionally understood in liberal theory is not necessarily a wholesale rejection of the political or ethical value of autonomy as a powerful political discourse. Derrida, reflecting on the ways in which subjectivity is always already the product of contextual forces, argues “this heteronomy, which is undoubtedly rebellious against the decisionist conception of sovereignty or of the exception, does not contradict; it opens autonomy on to itself; it is a figure of its heartbeat” (1997, 69). The goal of this project has been to consider the political ideal of autonomy as self-governance, avoiding the general approach of, to borrow from Bell, “recognize, rally, and reconstruct” or, for that matter, recognize, rally, and reject (1996, 83). Instead, the purpose has been to approach the idea of autonomy not as an abstract or transcendental concept that underpins or justifies a political system but as a site of political contestation whereby the boundaries of political community are drawn by determining who or what is capable of self-governance and thereby authorizing “a whole series of exclusions, disciplinary practices, and restrictive moral and rational norms” (Newman 2003, 14). Framing the discussion is a central tension within the literature, defining autonomy, on the one hand, as the capacity to self-govern or make a law whereby subjects voluntarily limit themselves and, on the other, defining autonomy as human freedom, the capacity to act in the world and on one’s self. Considering the actual effects of the ideal of autonomy, how it authorizes particular subjects and not others, opens up the concept to broader political contestation. The question is not whether particular practices are autonomy-promoting 169 Conclusion 169 or autonomy-denying but whether particular uses of the idea of autonomy cultivate self-detachment and therefore promote political change (Foucault 1996, 303) or whether they reinforce existing power relationships. My underlying goal is similar to Honig’s description of Arendt’s politics: the strategy, then, is to unmask identities that aspire to contestation, to deauthorize and redescribe them as performative productions by identifying spaces that escape or resist administration, regulation, and expression. These are spaces of politics, potentially spaces of performative freedom” (Honig 1993, 226). The examples examined in the book—adolescent sexuality, the drug war, animal rights, and endurance athletes—provide snapshots...