Louden Family Lecture Series

The Antinomies of Self-Emancipation

 In this talk, Professor Paris will canvas what he takes to be the essential elements of self-emancipation as a social practice. Self-emancipation, he will claim, not only contests the dominant vision of politics as a top-down affair between leaders and followers; self-emancipation affords us a novel set of norms for diagnosing forms of domination in capitalist society as well as principles for the transformation of social life. However, the critical stumbling block for the social practice of self-emancipation consists in the fact that agents confront both the objective limits of the present and regressive forms of subjectivity inherited from the past. Either the world is not ready for the transformative practices of self-emancipation or we are not yet the agents who can emancipate ourselves. Drawing from the ideas of figures such W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs as well as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, he will outline what he takes to be the specifically temporal antinomy at the heart of self-emancipation and defend the role of utopia in its resolution. 

William Paris is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is also an Associate Editor for the journal Critical Philosophy of Race. He is one of the co-hosts of What’s Left of Philosophy? His research centers on History of African American philosophy, critical theory, Marxism, critical philosophy of race, 20th century continental philosophy, and political philosophy. He has published on Frantz Fanon and Gender, Sylvia Wynter’s phenomenology of imagination, and C.L.R. James and Hannah Arendt. His current focus concerns the conceptual relationships between social theory, utopia, and the normative foundations of self-emancipation. He is also the author of the forthcoming Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (Oxford University Press). Professor Paris’s personal website: williammparis.com