Guest lecture by Marina Vishmidt (by webinar). Marina Vishmidt is guest professor at the research area Critical and Cultural Theory at Södertörn University in the autumn of 2020.

This talk will act as the opening of a line of inquiry into whether it may be possible, and plausible, to displace the concept of autonomy as it functions in philosophical aesthetics and art criticism, and in political philosophy, with the concept of ‘obstinacy’, as developed in Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s recent English-language translation and edit of their monumental work History and Obstinacy.

Autonomy as a form of law-making (self-law) and the modes of the human and universality that it predicated has consistently been queried ever since Kant formulated it as the bedrock of the project of rational critique and aesthetic sensibility alike.

To take one example, scholars such as Bernasconi, Lloyd and Ferreira da Silva have recently done extensive work to outline the inextricability of such a 'self-owning' subject from notions of race. Another is the path often pursued by historical materialists such as Sohn-Rethel that seeks to show autonomy and other classical Enlightenment concepts are anything but independent of its socio-economic contexts of origin.

However, the critical legacy of autonomy – and the heterogeneous politics of critique itself – could perhaps occupy us by other means, if the concept is revised with a view towards relationality and collectivity as intrinsic to any self-legislation, rather than the atomised liberal subject. It might mean leaving behind legislation entirely as a principle of governance, of the self or others, as the basis of the distinction – and connections – between these.

Here we arrive at ‘obstinacy’, the resistance of labour to being labour, to being subsumed, to being made productive, to being killed - but exceeding resistance as we normally encounter it in theories of power because it is neither ‘primary’, as in Foucault, nor reactive, but behaves as a sort of anthropological minimum that inscribes ‘self-will’ (not self-law) as the inert or negative force that undermines all projects of domination. Going from ‘autonomy’ to ‘obstinacy’ will create additional difficulties, without a doubt, but it should be tried.