Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Jeanique Tucker
Jeanique Tucker is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. She studies the politics of violence, incarceration, race, ethnicity and statelessness. In 2017 she completed a MA in Political Science at the University of Victoria, where she was the 2016-2017 QEII Scholar. Her thesis, “Moralizing Violence”, focused on institutional violence trained on black and brown bodies. She considered the kinds of structures facilitating, even encouraging, human suffering. Her PhD research builds on this by: (i) focusing on the structures and processes capable of relieving some of this suffering; and (ii) asking what responsible citizenship looks like during moments of crisis. She completed her BA in Political Science and Africana Studies at Vassar College in New York. Her undergraduate thesis, “The Chains that Bind Us” was an examination of the American prison industrial complex.
Imagining Freedom as Solidarity: In Conversation with Shari’ati, Mbembe and Sartre
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Karl Marx argued that freedom was the telos of the human species and that history was tied to its protection. It is no surprise, then, that this concept has been interrogated at length within political theory. From Ali Shari’ati to Achille Mbembe, there is no consensus on how freedom should be defined and how it might be secured. For example, Hegel and Heidegger, as well as much of “Western” philosophical thinking, tell us that the death-event is final ground on which the meaning of freedom rests. For both, death is the fundamental horizon that constitutes the structure of life- and therefore freedom. We see the influence of these arguments in much of Mbembe’s work, especially as it relates to his concept of necropolitics and the ways he interrogates the insidiousness of white supremacy’s control of non-white and “non-Western” bodies.
Shari’ati presents us with an alternative, grounded more in positive rather than negative freedom. This is not because he failed to engage with “Western” thinkers; rather he maintained a distinct and dialogical ontology. For Shari’ati, “freedom, equality and spirituality” not atheistic rationalism, possessive individualism or even death-event represented the means through which freedom could be secured. In this paper, I will compare how the concept of freedom is used throughout Shari’ati and Mbembe’s work, while putting them in conversation with Jean Paul Sartre. This paper is primarily concerned with answering these questions: What is freedom? What is the antithesis of freedom? How might freedom be secured? And what are the conditions that either limit or inspire the responses these thinkers offer? I would argue that freedom as solidarity- purposeful, chosen and deep-rooted- is incredibly empowering and transformative. Shari’ati treatment of freedom is the closest to offering such an imaginary. I nonetheless pursue the utility of Mbembe’s “freedom as ascetic practice” and Sartre’s “existential humanism”. My intention is not to reject one frame or another, but instead, I mean to have a conversation about how we might rescue ourselves in a world keen to divest us of our agency however that road to freedom is built.
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