Article Problematising the Political Theory of Identity Politics: Towards an Agonistic Freedom

Abstract: Despite the successes of identity politics as the main thorn in the side of liberalism, this article suggests they share the same political morality in which the subject grounds politics. This kinship results from a common view of freedom, namely, as something exercised by the subject either a priori or a posteriori to social interaction. With John Rawls, for instance, it is presumed that power relations are distinct from the subject, whence a self-mediated freedom that aims at autonomy, while for Charles Taylor power relations can be resolved in favour of consensus and kept at bay from the community, which enables freedom through recognition. Similarly, even when these opposing notions of freedom are reconciled in textual autonomy, an ontology in which power is the antithesis of freedom persists. The article then highlights the aporia of these approaches: instead of discerning the constitutive relation between power and the subject’s freedom, accounts of autonomy, recognition and textual autonomy focus on the foundational relation between the subject’s identity and politics. Subsequent to arguing that politics concerns the self-constitution of identity precisely because of the way in which freedom is the effect of power, a Foucauldian exit of agonistic freedom is proposed. Because it is the consequence of power, it implies a subject of contingent becoming, which in turn requires a permanent critique in respect of the supposedly necessary truths of one’s being that are encapsulated in identity