Download Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose

‘Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose’ *
Or Clawing at the Edges of the Social
Thora Margareta Bertilsson, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
Peter Fallesen, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen & Rockwool
Foundation Research Unit, Denmark.
*(song by Janis Joplin, text by Kris Kristofferson)
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‘Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose’
Or Clawing at the Edges of the Social
In his book on Freedom (1988), Zygmunt Bauman notes that the concept of freedom is „like the
air we breed‟: as long as it is there, we just take it for granted; when it is gone, we suffocate. In
the same vein, he reproaches sociologists for avoiding to discuss the issue of freedom; instead
the discipline is prone to hide behind economic, political, and social forms of unfreedom in
modern society. Although an essential component in all critical theory zooming in on
unfreedom(s) in contemporary liberal society, the analytical conceptualization of what freedom
is all about is, here we agree with Bauman, indeed thorny: is freedom an attribute of social or
individual life; what are the components of the social as well as that of the individual; how is the
social and the political related; is freedom related to the will of the individual; how is the will of
the individual related to collective life – to that of the Sovereign; is the nation-state a
precondition or a barrier for conceiving of freedom rights; what is the relation between the
citizen and the individual; what is the relation between the individual and h/er body? The
questions to be raised can easily multiply into a labyrinth easy to access, but exceedingly
difficult to exit (Ryan 1979) Nevertheless, we are convinced that it is an urgent task for the
renewal of critical theory adapted to post-liberal societies to dwell on the issue of freedom. In a
cynical post-liberal world, the song-text of Janis Joplin is perhaps more relevant than ever:
„Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose‟?
What we will do in the following is to relate and contrast two vital positions on how to approach
the non/freedom of modern individuals in an effort to carve out a more robust standpoint for
critical social theory; both in more general terms, but also in relation to more specific issues
haunting the modern (welfare) state. We will in turn discuss the theories on freedom of Isaiah
Berlin and Giorgio Agamben: the views of these two thinkers are chosen for the reason that they
represent – or are thought to represent – very different views on the issue of freedom, and with
widely divergent consequences for our conception of social and political theory. While Berlin
has been hailed as a liberal thinker par excellence, Agamben makes problematic the
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identification of freedom with modern citizenry; when there is nothing more left to loose, then
freedom takes rescue in „bare life‟ – the body itself becomes a last bastion of the exercise of
(negative) freedom: as an act of power! However, it is our argument that a simultaneous reading
of Berlin and Agamben‟s rather abstract notions of freedom can provide a strong approach to a
sociologically viable conceptualization of freedom within a critical theoretical framework.
Isaiah Berlin – on negative and positive freedom
Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) is known as a liberal thinker par excellence and a stout defender of
individual freedom. Commonly, such a position is difficult to defend from a sociological point of
view on the ground that social life and its demands on cooperation are left out of the
consideration. Our aim here is to revive and discuss Berlin‟s two conception of freedom in lieu
of the paramount problems of current post-liberal societies: the problems to deal with and
accommodate refugees and immigrants. Reviving Berlin‟s standpoint on the issue(s) of freedom
may also help to unwrap his legacy from its sanctioned liberalist bastion and make it available to
critical theory more widely. It is our argument, that Berlin‟s two concepts of freedom should be
viewed as the two outer points on a continuum line, wherein between we locate what we might
name different forms of empirical freedom.
Most well-known among Berlin‟s texts is undoubtedly his inaugural lecture on Two Concepts of
Liberty, on negative and positive freedom (1958/1979). Negative freedom, Berlin defines as
follows: „I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes
with my activity‟ (169). This concept of freedom is often referred to as non-interference and is as
such relating to a human being freed from outside inter-ference: „What is the area within which
the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do
or be, without interference by other persons‟ (121). Negative freedom stands in a starch contrast
to what Berlin calls positive freedom: freedom given to us through our membership in various
collectives. Foremost among positive freedom-rights are those that the (welfare) state provides to
its members such as freedom to enter schools, treatment in hospital, parent privileges, pensions
rights, etc. Another formulation in distinguishing among the two concepts of freedom is:
negative freedom is freedom from, while positive freedom is freedom to.
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A sociologist can profitably look at the two forms of freedom as the difference between ascribed
versus achieved: in the first case, the individual is – qua individual - assigned a sacred quality,
while in the latter case, the individual achieves a set of (freedom) rights because of membership
in socio-political communities. As a corollary, negative freedom is by definition vague and
diffuse assuming many different concrete expressions dependent on context, while positive
freedom is more specific; positive freedom (rights) are most often guaranteed by law. 1 When
formulated in more specific terms, also negative freedom can assume a law-like character: The
right of persons, or group of persons, not to be the subjects of torture is declared as
„fundamental‟ in international law, and in most domestic laws as well. However, a de jure
declaration is not necessarily a de facto declaration. Nevertheless, a breach with torture law, as in
the case of the American military‟s behaviour in the Abu Ghraib prison in the aftermath of the
second Gulf war, has, if the will of the Legislator is pursued, consequences for the perpetrators.
However, when reading Isaiah Berlin‟s essay „Two concept of liberty‟, a rather subtle point is
made that especially a first time reader might tend to overlook. The point is surprisingly simple.
The two notions of freedom that Berlin introduces, the positive and the negative, are just two
ways of theorizing freedom – the notion of freedom could be looked at in many other ways than
the two presented by Berlin, but nonetheless these are the ones he has chosen. But why these
two, one might ask? Because it is between these two theoretical poles that Berlin locates what we
could call the empirical human being. While we agree with Berlin that modern human existence
is suspended between the freedom from and the freedom to, we also believe that Berlin perhaps
overlooks a rather important aspect – the body in which these notions of positive and negative
freedom is inscribed. Such an overlooking of the body is especially regrettable in the light of his
insistence on the „empirical human being‟ as the locus of freedom; he is arrogantly critical of
identifying individuals as solely abstract social categories (i.e. as the citizen). During their lifespan, empirical human beings assume a multitude of social roles such as mothers, fathers, sons,
daughters, employees, etc., but the only common denominator remains the body itself. However,
this does not deter Berlin from arguing that negative freedom holds an intrinsic value.
1
With reference to the legendary Swedish sociologist, Johan Asplund, it seems suggestive to link the two concepts
of freedom to that which Johan Asplund calls „social responsivity‟ and „abstract sociality‟ (1987).
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Well aware of many absurd (social) implications of formulating freedom as non-interference, we
shall nevertheless proceed with Berlin‟s own insistence of its intrinsic value.2 Non-interference,
Berlin continues, does not necessarily entail a picture of man as a Robinson Crusoe, isolated
from other human being. It refers rather to a social relation where we may conceive of
intervention in the lives of other persons along a continuum: from the point where the coercive
intervention of others in the life of an individual is almost complete as in the case of parents
intervening in the activities of their children for the reason that it is in the best interest of the
child to be governed. Also prisoners are to a great extent under surveillance from the outside,
although they may have a little free space left to their own discretion in their respective cells.
Michel Foucault‟s famous picture of Panopticon reveals the control mechanisms in operation as
the power of surveillance, as does his concern with „bio-politics‟; how modern societies install
both bodily and mental control into their members (1977). Indeed, it can be asked, as we will do
subsequently, if not Foucault‟s popular treatises reformulate and revive the relation between the
two kinds of freedom that Berlin chose to label respectively negative and positive. Foucaultdisciples as for instance Giorgio Agamben calls attention to the productive span of situating the
issue of freedom between a positive and a negative pole, that we attend to in the discussion that
follows.
The other extreme point along a social continuum is when two or more people interact in full
recognition of one another‟s right to a „free space‟. Erving Goffman provides us with rich
illustrations of how such mutual recognitions proceed without interference: when walking along
a street, individual walkers occupy the same circumscribed space but when seemingly ignoring
one another, they have to take care of one another‟s presence in order not to cause discomfort to
one another. A lot of „recognition-work‟ is demanded in order to uphold the freedom rights of
one another in such seemingly a-social situations (1963).3 Goffman‟s many observations as to
forms of silent „rule-following‟ profoundly qualifies Jean Paul Sartre‟s dichotomy between
social and non-social action: there is, in Sartre‟s view, a qualitative difference between a mute
2
As noted by both friends and foes of Berlin (Ringen 2008; Taylor 1979), it is especially his concept of negative
freedom that has caused concerns and quarrels.
3
A point elegantly demonstrated by novelist China Miéville in his The City & The City (2009) which portrays daily
life in two distinct urban environments sharing the same physical, but not social, space. From early childhood the
inhabitants of the two cities learn to unsee their counterparts in „the other city,‟ thereby living physical next door,
but never socially acknowledging each other.
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queue waiting for a bus (1976) and that of a debating Oxford society.4 In the first instance, social
life is merely incidental and physical (we happen to be at the same place at the same time), while
in the latter instance, social life is „psychical‟: people take account of one another, and control
their conduct, in „taking turns‟ as to who has the right to speak. Goffman‟s brilliance in
observing rule-following also in the squatters of the non-social profoundly widens our
consideration of an infinite social continuum in constant operation: how „sacred‟ individual
territories arise and are upheld as a matter of routine and habit. From such a sociological point of
view, this is our suggestion, it seems meaningful to view even routine social interaction as
generated by a whole number of various spatial and temporal freedom recognitions: turn-taking
in speech is clearly a case in point where we refrain from interfering until occasions arise;
avoiding stepping into the bodies of other people is another illustration of how we routinely seek
to respect the freedom of others while at the same time we expect the same recognition from
others. To unduly intervene in the time-space matrix of another person is what Goffman calls
degradation work; in special circumstances such work amounts to „ceremonies‟ undertaken by
collectives (Goffman 1961; Garfinkel 1956). Mobbing seems a case in point. On the more
formal-juridical level, the treatment of refugees and immigrants in today‟s advanced liberal
societies can best be illustrated as the state‟s official degradation ceremonies of expelled
individuals: in order not to adjust to normal routines of social action in the countries to which
they have escaped, refugees, including children, are not allowed to socialize outside their strictly
assigned (asylum) camp territories. In the language of Berlin and Goffman, expelled individuals
are stripped of their access to humanity; they are reduced to „bare life‟ and become the „homo
sacer‟ of modern liberalism (Agamben 1998; Fallesen 2008).
But how come then that freedom, which should – according to the name – be the most central
value within a liberal democracy so easily can be curtailed within the very same? It is valuable to
take note of a cleavage within the liberal tradition itself, or to what some have referred to as the
tragic vs. the progressive version of liberalism.5 Berlin‟s quarrels with some of his fellow
liberalists in the classical tradition, notably with J.S. Mill relates to the worth of freedom as non4
This dichotomy is also the one pursued by Max Weber in his classic definition of social action (1978:4).
Alex Callinicos (1999:67-68) labels the tragic version of liberalism „agonistic‟, a position he also says was that of
J. S. Mill in referring to a discussion pursued by Berlin‟s primary biographer, John Gray. I admit that a more
complex elaboration as to immanent value-conflicts is called for, but we can for reason of space not enter into such a
discussion here.
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interference as non-reducible to any other also necessary social values: freedom cannot (and
must not) be justified in terms of the social consequences that it may generate: it is a „sui generis‟
(Berlin 1979:174). Mill‟s view on freedom is, in Berlin‟s words, prone to link its worth to other
worthy human pursuits such as truth, happiness, a free market, democracy, efficiency, genius,
originality. To Berlin such associations risk depriving the issue of freedom of its intrinsic value:
democracy can curtail freedom while dictatorship under some conditions can allow for its growth
– at least for some. Originality and genius can certainly flourish also in societies that we would
not think of as free: Tsarist Russia is an example while such qualities can meet sharp resistance
in more free societies such as our own (178).6 Linkages between freedom and other worthwhile
human values clearly occur, but they should be looked upon as felicitous historical
circumstances, rather than as a consequence of there being „social laws‟.7
Concomitant to this polemic within the liberal tradition that history itself is to be seen as the
march of freedom and democracy, as if there would be an Aristotelian telos hidden in nature,
resides Berlin‟s observation that the value of (negative) freedom is more of an exception than a
rule in the history of mankind; and that its negative formulation, in contrary to the positive
version, probably will never become a popular banner of social mobilization. Its appeal among
wide population strata, whether liberalists or socialists, is likely to be quite restricted for the
reason that as an inner motivation and force, freedom is deeply individual.8 When called upon by
the masses, freedom is often mixed with other equally worthwhile social values as opposition
against oppression, injustice or tyranny.
Indeed, Berlin‟s radicalization of freedom as a non-negotiable human value, often in tragic
conflict with other worthwhile human pursuits, has affinities with the position of many radical
social theorists such as Adorno, Arendt, Foucault, and more recent Agamben, primarily known
for their critique of modern liberalism. Such claims may at first sight appear conspicuous as we
have become so accustomed to associate his legacy with crude liberalism. In his critique of the
6
In this regard, an affinity is apparent between Berlin‟s formulation of negative freedom with that of Alexis de
Toqueville‟s criticism of modern democracy in its eager to merge freedom and equality as actually curtailing the
value of freedom (Toqueville 2000).
7
Berlin‟s conception of freedom in his political philosophy should also be seen as a conjugate to his philosophy of
social science and his polemics against „social laws‟ of whatever kind.
8
Max Weber‟s view on science and politics expresses similar (tragic) views; however important science and politics
are in shaping collective life, the individual always stands alone with regard to the central question of „the meaning
of life‟(1946:143).
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„legislator‟ view of freedom represented primarily with Rousseau and Hegel, we will attempt to
show where in fact the radicalism of Berlin may reside.
Berlin‟s critique of freedom as residing in the „positive rights‟ bestowed upon the individual by
virtue of h/er membership in a collective such as the nation-state should really be seen as
stemming from his critique of a predominant and might-oriented view of modern Sovereignty: as
encapsulating the inner wills of all rational individuals inhabiting a bounded territory, and hence
invested with the power to bespeak their true interests. Such a notion borrows from J.J. Rousseau
the idea that the „rational freedom‟ of individuals reside in the social contract in which they have
succeeded in abolishing their „empirical self‟ (with passions and interests) for the sake of their
„rational self‟. As opposed to our dispersed empirical selves, a union among men is only possible
by means of strong social identification of belonging. This view is but a secular version of the
religiously derived „homo duplex‟: that our real selves reside not in the here and now of earthly
societies, but in God‟s kingdom. 9
In its secularized form, „homo duplex‟ enables us to conceive of such sociologically predominant
ideas as that of the tension between the subject and the object, I and me, which then can be
resolved by means of Hegelian reflection, a higher form of self, that allows for peaceful rational
union. Such formulations also allow for the social self to take command of the empirical self (the
body). The legislator view of Sovereignty is thus not limited to collective life of the ruler, but
also to our inner intimate life where the Legislator demands that we are in rational command of
our bodily passions and interests. A prolongation of this view for social and political life is that
the Sovereignty is bestowed with (omnipotent) power to rule in „the best interest‟ of the ruled.10
As positive freedom(s) are given to us by virtue of our belonging in Sovereignty, by the same
token these freedom(s) can be taken away: the prisoner looses a great deal of freedom rights, a
toll that in accordance with positive law is in his own interest; in its extreme Hegelian version,
the prisoner wants his own unfreedom.
Berlin clearly accepts that in any „well-ordered‟ societies (to use a phrase from a more recent
liberal thinker, John Rawls), positive rights need be balanced with negative rights, a minimum
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The church father Augustine raised the following conundrum: „Can slaves be free?‟, a problem that could be
solved by separating the body from the soul. The more enslaved the body, the wider is the horizon of freedom in the
Kingdom of God (Arendt 1977:158).
10
A point also found in Kant‟s What is Enlightenment (1784/2009).
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space of freedom where individuals are free to move outside the interference of others. How the
balance is to be achieved is up to any historical society with its traditions and mores to find a
solution to: there can be no „principled‟ law equally valid for all societies in time and space. This
is yet another implication of Berlin‟s denial that there be „social laws‟ of the same robustness as
that of nature‟s laws.11 The real value of Berlin‟s criticism of the Legislator-view of the social
and the individual lies, we will suggest, is his insistence to revitalize our „empirical selves‟ as
individuals occupying territories with more or less fluent boundaries. His liberal plea to guard a
little space of freedom to individual (to act without interference) that our époque of civilisation
has achieved (who knows for how long?) from being abolished once more, now within liberal
society itself, can in fact be seen as a plea to safeguard a fragile humanity from destroying its
central ethos. To invest in too strong an Administrator view, disguised as Legislator, in order to
bar the entrance of unwanted others, Liberal Society produces in its midst, and with large accept
of its citizenry, the „bare life‟ of its own outcasts. Positive rights can easily be plucked like the
feathers from a bird; negative rights are more fragile as their loss risks dehumanizing both the
victim and the perpetrator.
Clawing at the Edge of the Social
As we observed already in the opening paragraphs, Berlin chose to conceptualize the issue of
freedom from two mutually exclusive positions; that of the negative vs. the positive endpoint.
Our critical remark with regard to Berlin‟s conceptual opposites is about his negligence of the
excluded third – that of the naked human body which is both the bearer of (positive) rights and
which - as human being – is assigned a sacred quality. We will conclude our essay on freedom
by addressing the territorial and bodily spaces as also constituting the very boundaries of the
social.
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose thinking takes its origin from Michel
Foucault‟s work on biopolitics and the history of sexuality as well as Carl Schmitt‟s ideas of the
position of the sovereign, argues that prior to the modern notions of positive and negative
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Berlin is opposed to the view of a unitary science where the social and the human sciences would follow in the
steps of the natural sciences and search for the „laws‟ under which one could subjugate historical events for the
reason that such a view denies the possibility of human freedom (1979b).
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freedom, and thereby also the modern form of democracy (we use here democracy in the widest
form of the word) could be introduced, a more important aspect had to be created: the idea of the
human body as something unique in a juridico-political sense of the word. This was done in
England in 1679 with the instigation of the habeas corpus, which from then on commanded that
the body of an accused individual must be presented in front of the court, and that s/he in person
can demand that the validity of the accusation should be tried before a court of law (Agamben
1998:123). Thereby the body was placed as the „ground zero‟ of political and juridical rights, and
the form of these rights (be they positive or negative) must be derived there after. 110 years later
this point was substantiated by the French declaration of the rights of man and citizen wherein
the positions of man and citizen seems to be indistinguishable from each other – the rights of the
citizen could not be distinguished from the human body in which they were inscribed (127). This
is also what Foucault argued as being the birth of the problem of the population – a move from a
territorial state definition, where the only true sovereign body was that of the ruler, to a nation
state. Here the sovereignty of the state was inscribed into the bodies of the subjects of the state,
thereby making them both citizens and biopolitical subject extraordinaire, bearer of both positive
and negative rights/freedom, and giving them the possibility of creating life, identity, and form
of existence within a given society (Foucault 2008:75ff). But as every coin has two sides, every
position must also have an opposition. When the citizen was created as a theoretical figure its
excluded opposite was created in its shadow: the refugee (Agamben 1998:126ff; Nyers 2006:
28ff).
It is important to understand that neither the citizen nor the refugee can be looked directly upon
as empirical categories. Instead we must first understand the citizen as a position. The notion of
the citizen is based on a narrative combining blood and soil. „Because I am born on this specific
piece of land, my body are inscribed with these rights and freedoms.‟ This is the narrative that is
the ontological foundation of the modern nation state – the body state (Agamben 1998:129). One
might argue, a bit vulgar, that the citizen, and thereby the nation, is identified by the passport.
This also sheds some light upon the position of the refugee: s/he is the individual belonging to no
piece of land, holding no passport. When we then bear in mind the argument, that we are unable
to distinguish between human and citizen within the frame of the nation state, a rather strange
figure appears: The refugee becomes in Hannah Arendts words: „a man who is nothing but a man
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(Arendt 2000: 41)‟, but since the logic of the modern nation state specifically argues that man
and citizen are indistinct from each other, what appears in front of our theoretical gaze is a
biological entity without rights and freedom, and unable to declare him- or herself to be a man.
Agamben has named this individual homo sacer: the subject that cannot be sacrificed but can be
killed without penalty – the individual whose only political value is its status as having only
biological life. A form of being located at the limit of subjectivity, whose political existence is
defined solely by the absolute unpolitical – the body. As the biological nature of the body is the
only element of being that an individual in no way can change or act upon (with the exception of
suicide or self mutilation, as we will touch upon later), the position of the refugee is founded on
the threshold of becoming a biopolitical object, thereby losing its position as a „human being‟
(Agamben 1998: 183).
Now that we have defined the two limits of being in the context of the modern nation state – the
citizen and its shadowy counterpart, the refugee – we now move our gaze towards the empirical
subject. If we return to the notion of the empirical Man, suspended somewhere between positive
and negative freedom, how does this new biopolitical dimension then contribute to this dual
notion of freedom? To fully understand this, we must first touch upon the opposite sides of these
two forms of freedom. If negative freedom is defined as the degree that others not are allowed to
interfere with my existence, and positive freedom is defined as my possibility for participating in
different congregations, then the opposite of the first form must be action that I “cannot not due”
(necessity), and the opposite of the latter must be actions that I cannot due (impossibility).
Therefore the possibility of (social) action for a given subject must be bounded by: a) its
existence as a biological entity; b) what it by law, social norms, etc. is bound to do; and c) what
it by lack of capital, be that cultural, social, or economical – as well as norms and law – is
prevented from doing. This creates a space of potentiality of action emanating from the body,
and constrained by impossibility (the lack/loss of positive rights) and necessity (the lack/loss of
negative rights) (Agamben 1999: 134f; Fallesen 2008).
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Impossibility
Loss of positive
rights
Space for potential being
Context
(Symbolic systems)
Body
Necessity
Subjectification
Desubjectification
Loss of negative
rights
When the right to free participation in society is constrained, and/or when certain actions are
forced upon the subject, its possibilities of social action lessens. Say that, as an empirical case,
someone is conscripted into the military, thereby forced to behave in specific ways at the specific
times, forced to dress and speak in a certain way, etc. This subject will experience a loss of
possible strategies of creating self/selves compared to existence prior to conscription. In effect
this would be a form of desubjectification, since certain forms of being would now be restricted,
but there would still be ways of keeping and creating an identity other than that of „the soldier‟ –
there would be room for certain forms of resistance against the symbolic systems (in this case
army regulations) that are forcing a specific type of being upon you, since the system is not
absolutely totalitarian. And the subject would be able to „articulate‟ these actions within the
social space, thereby constantly pushing and clawing at the edges of what is allowed by simply
acting out other „identities.‟ Articulations that would, if applied in a way constantly questioning
the validity of the symbolic systems, de facto be criticizing the symbolic systems, by resisting
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the form(s) of being forced upon him or her, and thereby opening up a new possibility – the
possibility of changing aspects of the symbolic systems, and thereby changing the social space.
But what happens in the case where no free participation is allowed and all allowed participation
is forced? Then the space for social action converges at a single point: the body. When the only
political value of existence is the body, then the only political act left possible is an act against
the body. Self destruction becomes a radical act of subjectification in which the subject questions
the validity of the assumption that nothing except its pulse is of value to the symbolic systems.
And it is here we return to figure of the refugee, the homo sacer. When the only political capacity
in the eyes of society is the ability to be killed, the only way of confronting this political axiom is
to claw at the only edge of the social left – the skin. Thereby asserting that there is something
above biological life, and that that something is not solemnly defined by whether or not one was
born on a specific piece of land, but instead showing that the narrative of the nation state is
nothing more than a story told about the significance of some lines drawn upon a piece of paper
called a map, and in no way sat in stone, though treated as such in modern liberal democracies.
And it is perhaps here that we find criticism in its most radical from – as a practice of freedom
clawing at the edges of the very social, showing that there perhaps is nothing left to loose, but all
to be gained, by fighting back from the basis of the body.
Negative rights, (dis)embodied selves, and the problem of the social
Our exploration in linking two very different thinkers on the problem of freedom in modern
advanced liberal societies, Isaiah Berlin and Georgio Agamben, was spurred by a presupposition
that it might help in widening our view on the relation between freedom, empirical selves (our
bodies) and the social. Berlin‟s firm standpoint on the value of negative rights has largely
excluded him from the circles of critical theory while in turn he has been hailed as a hero by
radical liberalists. Agamben‟s views on freedom are on the other hand derived from Michel
Foucault as well as Carl Schmitt, and can, by that very same token, be more easily received by
radical social theory. What we have been attempting in this essay is to „embody‟ Berlin‟s
empirical selves in suggesting that the body is the very last territory that an individual is in
possession of when s/he is dispossessed by the social territory; in the case of the refugee, the
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social is identical with the nation-state issuing positive rights, but can, dependent on contexts,
assume many different shades. In the case of Goffman‟s Asylum, the social is gradually being
plucked from those who are inside, and what remains are the deformed bodies of those who have
nothing left to lose. In Agamben‟s view, radicalizing that of Arendt, the refugee becomes the
homo sacer of modern liberal society and can in that respect reveal its duplex moral order:
positive freedom is by definition limited to those who carry a passport. The cutting problem of
the refugee as a social type, however, arises with regard to h/er negative freedom: to possess a
space to act without interference! Clearly, international human rights declarations can in various
degree set limits for the exercise of national Sovereignty; but lacking the power of real sanctions
vis-à-vis those of the nation-state, such sanctions can merely be moral ones. In the light of the
monumental – if not legal – power (and so much more the administrative) of the liberal
democratic nation-state backed by the majority of its people, the shaming of moral power is
indeed week. Freedom can only be possessed by the insiders; outsiders are destined to „claw at
the edge of the social‟. When the nation-state also is in the possession of the ability to define the
boundaries of the social as drawn by its own territorial space, then those who are clinging to the
fence, or did not even succeed, will fall outside the strictly social: they have no rights and we
who are inside have no obligations either.
When exterior territorial space is denied, or severely restricted (as in the camp), a venerable and
from Christianity derived view on freedom holds that when the body is in chains, then the soul
has a chance to ascend to a higher – mental – form of freedom. But such inner freedom, however
enchanted, is not at all what Berlin means by negative freedom. Such freedom is indeed
„corporeal‟: it presupposes a territorial space, however restricted. The only such space left to the
refugee, as in our case above, is the body. Bodily infliction of whatever kind signifies a token of
life – a last and desperate move to uphold a sense of worth in the face of others, including
oneself. 12
12
2009 Nobel Prize Laureate, Herta Müller, reveals the same desperate move of freedom among the prisoners in an
Ukrainian post-war camp in playing and kicking with words. (Atemschaukel (Everything I Possess I Carry With
Me).Such playing with words rescues a sense of freedom while keeping hunger way, at least for a while.
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A critic would perhaps object at this point in our linking of Berlin and Agamben via the figure of
the refugee, and claim that what Agamben‟s refugee is doing is but a desperate exercise of power
and resistance rather that of negative freedom in Berlin‟s sense. However, as noted by Arendt
more explicit while more implicit by Berlin, to exercise one‟s freedom also requires „the power
to act‟; there can be no (empirical) freedom without there also being action in the form of
embodied movements. But „the power to act‟ as a freedom postulate does not entail the
„legislator‟s view on freedom‟. Berlin‟s severe criticism of this very dominant view of freedom
(power as control) in modern nation-states does in fact reveal the congeniality between his views
and those of Hannah Arendt (and by implication Foucault). When freedom is linked to the
Legislator, or the Sovereign, then it is also understood as control, preferably of others but also of
ourselves. This is the contract view of Rousseau for if the individual is unable to control h/er
passions and interests, then s/he is but a slave. Freedom in this sense is only possible as control;
control of our inner selves and those of other‟s selves. Berlin‟s criticism of positive freedom
derives precisely from its urgency to control others (and ourselves „in the best interests‟). Such
control is also „rational‟: it is controlled by our cognate rather than sensate selves. From such a
point of view, this is Berlin‟s observation, the „homo duplex‟ of modern man is furnished by an
inner and an outer selves where a hierarchy reigns: our inner (controlled) selves are viewed as in
some sense higher and/or more real selves, while our empirical, embodied selves, are viewed as
more vulgar and less social! True sociality can in this sense only be achieved via a union of our
inner cognate selves; the social, by implication, becomes rational and spiritual. The social in this
enchanted form is, as also Durkheim taught, but a replacement of God: his law is ubiquitous, and
we are denigrated to his faithful and disciplined followers. This is also the mode of reasoning
that the secular nation-states draw upon when conferring their people(s) with rights and
obligations.
But as noted not the least by Agamben, the body/state confronts its own contradiction when
faced with its stateless others; by definition, these others become mere bodies as the „homo
sacer‟ of modern liberal societies. For them: the only freedom left to loose is their own naked
bodies.
16
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