Social Death/Life, Fanon’s Phenomenology, and Prison Riots: Three Questions for Neil Roberts’ Freedom as Marronage

• Published in: Theory & event 2017, Vol.20 (1), p.201-206
• Main Author: Dilts, Andrew
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dialectics; Fanon, Frantz (1925-1961); Phenomenology; Psychologists; Psychology; Questions; Reading; Rebellions; Slavery; Sovereignty
• ISSN: 2572-6633; 1092-311X

Neil Roberts' central thesis in Freedom as Marronage-that freedom as flight from slavery, freedom as marronage, powerfully illuminates the experience of freedom itself-ought to be uncontroversial. As he demonstrates throughout this work, this claim is both correct (as an intervention into how we ought to theorize freedom and as an empirical framework useful for understanding the Haitian Revolution) and important (in that it can and should alter how theorists consider the concept and practices of freedom). And I am convinced by Roberts' account that marronage, as the "flight from the negative, subhuman realm of necessity, bondage, and unfreedom toward the sphere of positive activity and human freedom," is a real thing in the world.1 I am further convinced that this account is a useful and powerful way to theorize freedom, agency, and the practices of domination, oppression, and marginalization that structure experience in specific historical and contemporary moments. Specifically, as both a theoretical and an empirical account of freedom, marronage directs our attention toward the experience of freedom and the way in which that experience is anything but static or settled. Rather, freedom is mobile-predicated on and experienced through motion and movement. This realization ultimately underscores the negative side of the dialectic of liberation, moving with (and not simply against) more "positive" conceptions of freedom that continue to pervade political theory. Quite simply: the experience of active refusals, resistances, and rejections are spaces of freedom.My overall endorsement of Roberts' work does not, of course, mean that I necessarily agree with Roberts on every page. As one of our mutual teachers once told me: one should never argue with someone you don't respect.2 And it is out such respect that I will pick several arguments with him, framed as questions. The force behind these questions is less that I think Roberts is wrong in his analysis, but rather that I want to know how to productively build on his work, to bend, extend, and adapt freedom as marronage to additional ends. If Roberts makes good on his promise, that freedom as marronage "presents a useful heuristic device to scholars interested in understanding both normative ideals of freedom and the origin of those ideals," then a crucial test ought to be if, as a sympathetic fellow traveler, I can better understand the ideals and origins of our shared lexicon of freedom and slavery.