Abstract

This paper sets out to examine the limits of Sen’s paradigm of Development as Freedom by an interrogation of its critical silences on the structure of violence animating the progress of modern power. I argue that despite Sen’s radical shift to an ontology of capabilities for evaluating states of (human) well-being, and his move away from a utilitarian ethics for social choice, his approach is fundamentally compromised by its complicity with an ideal of freedom, rooted in Kantian moral philosophy, that is measured by a transcendent figure of sovereign agency. Given this imbrication, Sen’s valorization of freedom depends on an uncanny silence concerning the foundational violence grounding this figure of “modern freedom” which is deployed, I argue, in order to sustain an obscure yet pernicious “hauntology” of abject blackness. This omission acts to dislocate the past from the structuring of violence in the present, and is reinforced by Sen’s myopic presentism on the violence emanating from a dialectic of becoming through this same ideal figure of freedom. However, to the extent that there is a continued presence of such a hauntology, which reflects the global shadows of a fetish of transparency, that is, a contingently racialized modern philosophy and politics of place in the processes and projects for development, then Sen’s efforts to sustain an authentic relation to the present will suffer from a radical disability. Sen’s ambitious project for global social justice and the advance of human development thus founders not only because of the normative fuzziness of values for sustaining choice, or because of the implicit privileging of an ethics of freedom over an ethics of care. Rather, more fundamentally, the fault lines of his projects rest with an obscure yet pernicious dependence on a freedom sustained through hauntologies of abject blackness in a violent politics of “mapping the present” in a modern world.

pdf

Share