Fugitive freedom and radical care: Towards a standpoint theory of normativity

Abstract

Epistemic standpoint theories have elaborated the effects of social situatedness on epistemic competence: Dominant groups are regularly subject to epistemic blockages that limit the possibility of cognition and knowledge production. Oppressed groups, on the other hand, have access to perceptions and insights that dominant groups lack. This diagnosis can be generalized: Not only our epistemic, but also our normative relation to the world is socially situated, that is, our values, virtues, moral sentiments are shaped by relations of domination. In this article, my goal is to sketch the general outlines of a standpoint theory of normativity. I do so by engaging with two lines of tradition. First, I review conceptions of fugitive freedom in the Black Radical Tradition, before I recapitulate the feminist debate around the concept of care work. The counter-hegemonic norms theorized in these traditions can be brought into dialogue because they are both based on similar presuppositions, namely, political struggle provoked by social contradictions.

“We must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.” (Césaire 1972, 2-3)

Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is a particularly succinct version of the critique of the moral depravation that results from the exercise of domination. Countless other versions of such criticism can be found in the history of social struggles: The feminist movement has shown that the exercise of sexism and misogyny leads to the formation of toxic character traits in men; the labour movement has denounced the coldness, ruthlessness and heartlessness of capitalists; black liberation movements have exposed the ignorant brutality of white complicity with systems of racist dehumanization. What is addressed by these critiques is not the trivial fact that the exercise of domination is itself morally reprehensible. Rather, many critical theorists and radical activists have argued that dominant groups, due to their position in a relation of domination, also tend to form problematic attitudes, affect structures, ideas and conceptions beyond a singular action, which solidify and take on a life of their own. Césaire famously used the metaphor of the boomerang to describe this dynamic: The exercise of domination comes back to hit the dominant group as well.

Epistemic standpoint theories ¹ have illuminated similar dynamics with respect to epistemic competence: Dominant groups – if only because of the justificatory narratives and ideologies they must employ to maintain their positions of power – are regularly subject to epistemic blockages that limit the possibility of cognition and knowledge production. (A research group composed largely of men who do not take women’s contributions to discussions seriously misses out on potentially valuable research findings produced by women.) Oppressed groups, on the other hand, due to their specific experiences can form counter-communities that help them unlock an access to perceptions, insights and memories that socially privileged groups lack. (The #MeToo movement shocked many men, while feminists were well aware about the extent of sexism in our societies – feminist women, as well as queer, gender nonconforming and non-binary people had a better understanding of the true nature of our society than men). This analysis can be generalized: Not only our epistemic, but also our normative relation to the world is socially situated, that is, our values, orientations to action, attentions, virtues and moral sentiments are shaped by whether and where we find ourselves in relations of domination. As Césaire and many others have emphatically shown, the exercise of violence has a formative effect on both the perpetrators and the tolerators of violence; it corrupts their normative beliefs as well as their affect structures. Charles Mills has therefore added a normative dimension to epistemic standpoint theories: ‘White ignorance’, that is, the structural epistemic blockage that result from the need to form worldviews that sustain forms of white supremacy, also implies ‘moral ignorance’: ‘moral non-knowings, incorrect judgments about the rights and wrongs of moral situations’ (Mills 2017, 58). In hindsight, one often wonders, for example, how the founding fathers of the US failed to see that it is a contradiction to assume on the one hand the ‘self-evident truth’ that all men are born equal while at the same time holding fast to the institution of slavery, or that the French revolutionaries determined all humans to be ‘free and equal in rights’ from birth but excluded women from those rights. This failure to see can be understood, with Mills, as the result of the solidification of an interpretive and imaginative framework that is ingrained through everyday practices and that individuals cannot effectively challenge (ibid., 61 f.). In this regard, the effect of this normative blockage is not limited to those who directly engage in normatively wrong actions, but also those who witness, tolerate or benefit from them (as Césaire says, those who accept colonialism in France are also compromised by it, not just those who torture in the colonies themselves). ²

Mills’ analysis of group-specific normative blockages has a certain implication that he does not elaborate on, namely, that, consequently, other groups are dispensed from these blockages and are thus able to develop other forms of normativity; ones that are less distorted by investments in domination. Moreover, if one takes seriously the character of domination as a relation, it becomes apparent that oppressed people cannot simply be seen as ‘uninvolved’ with respect to these blockages. It is not as if exercising domination leads to impairment or distortion, while suffering servitude leads to some form of neutrality or impartiality. Domination and servitude are, it can be said with Hegel, ‘two opposed shapes of consciousness’ (Hegel 2020, 112): Both shapes must be understood in their opposition. Read in the sense of a standpoint theory of normativity, Mills’s thesis of normative blockage must then be that oppressed groups in particular have a normative potential that dominant groups do not have; that is, that there is something in the objective social conditions that potentially enables them to form better normative orientations.

To assume forms of group-specific normative blockades on the one and, accordingly, normative potentials on the other side implies that the practical self- and world relations of dominant and oppressed groups are in conflict with each other. Their normative standpoints are antagonistic – what appears to be just, virtuous or useful from the perspective of one appears to be unjust, depraved or cold-hearted from the other. As with epistemic standpoints, normative standpoints can also be compared and evaluated: Oppressed or marginalized groups are economically, socially or politically disadvantaged, but they are potentially normatively superior, that is, they are potentially better (in the sense of ethical goodness) than dominant groups. ³

‘Potentially’, because the thesis of normative advantage of oppressed groups is not meant to say that social situatedness or group membership completely determines all moral attitudes and behaviours, nor that dominant groups could not also act normatively right or oppressed groups normatively wrong. Like epistemic advantage, normative advantage is only a potential, the exhaustion of which depends on numerous other factors that also interact with each other in complicated ways. For example, people who are themselves oppressed may blame other marginalized groups for their suffering instead of social relations of domination, and may themselves turn to bigoted ideologies; or they may find themselves in situations of isolation and loneliness, so that no sense of solidarity or shared interests can develop at all; or they may be numbed, for example, by culture-industrial and mass-media influence. On the other hand, there have been many examples of people who work their way out of dominant subject positions and become ‘allies’ of oppressed groups (socialist factory owners, feminist men or anti-racist whites) – oppressed groups are not automatically ‘good’, dominant groups are not automatically ‘bad’ (or ‘evil’). In addition, the struggle against relations of domination can itself produce normatively problematic attitudes and stances – even hatred of oppression, as we know from Bertolt Brecht, ‘distorts the features’. The thesis I will argue below sees the central practice of exploring normative potentials in political struggle: It is through the transformation of subjectively experienced contradictions into political resistance that oppressed groups can develop superior forms of normativity (along the same lines, see Celikates 2020; Medina 2013; Medina 2023; Pineda 2021). ⁴

In this article, my goal is to sketch the general outlines of a normative standpoint theory on the basis of two heterogeneous lines of tradition. In doing so, I am interested in three aspects in particular: First, what are the objective, that is, passive, conditions that enable the normative standpoint of oppressed or marginalized groups; second, to what extent are normative goods conceived differently when they are developed from a subordinate rather than a dominant perspective; and third, what are the political consequences of this revision? First, I review conceptions of freedom in the Black Radical Tradition as developed by Angela Davis, Barnor Hesse and Neil Roberts, among others. These theorists start from the premise that an adequate understanding of freedom must be developed from the concrete liberation practices of those subjected to the most extreme forms of unfreedom, namely, the enslaved. The careful reconstruction of these practices allows an alternative conception to emerge that contests the hegemonic understanding of freedom shaped by dominant groups, and that also manifests itself in political institutions other than those of bourgeois democracy (1.). I then recapitulate the feminist debate around the concept of care, both in Marxist feminist approaches as well as in feminist care ethics. Combining these two accounts, we arrive again at a normative standpoint theory: Due to their specific socialization and daily experience, women form different and potentially better ethical self- and world relations than men (2.). The counter-hegemonic norms and values theorized in these lines of tradition, fugitive freedom and radical care, can be brought into dialogue with each other because they are both based on similar objective presuppositions, namely, political movements provoked by social contradictions. In the concluding section, I name some of the far-reaching philosophical and political implications of normative standpoint theories (3.). – The entire argument will admittedly remain on a schematic level. In this article, I won’t be able to offer an empirical analysis of the social conditions that actually allow oppressed groups to unfold their normative privilege in reality. My goal is thus only to demonstrate how a standpoint theory of normativity is conceptually possible.

Fugitive freedom

In the fall of 1969, barely a year before she would become first a fugitive and then a prisoner, Angela Davis gave a seminar at UCLA on liberation, the first two lectures of which were transcribed by a solidarity committee and published in a pamphlet (Davis 1971, see also Roberts 2015, 55-57). Davis here develops the first outlines of a standpoint theory of normativity. The concept of freedom, Davis argues, occupies a central role in the history of Western Philosophy. From antiquity to the present, however, the loftiest treatises and declarations of freedom proved compatible with the persistence of the most blatant forms of unfreedom. Rather than the ideals of freedom of relatively privileged philosophers and statesmen, therefore, one should centre the conceptions of freedom developed by those for whom the question of freedom arises with the greatest urgency. From the perspective of the enslaved, the nature of freedom presents itself not only differently but better than from the perspective of dominant groups whose concept of freedom itself remains compromised by slavery. In Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies, Davis finds not only a detailed narrative of the practical conditions of liberation, but already a philosophical reflection on the nature of freedom itself.

Following Hegel’s schema of domination and servitude, Davis uses Douglass’s account of slavery to display that the consciousness of the slave has more truth than that of the masters. In doing so, she presupposes Hegel’s argument from reciprocal recognition as a condition of freedom – under asymmetrical conditions, freedom does not come about for either the slave or the master. This ‘truth’ of the slave’s consciousness is first one of knowledge: The master believes himself to be free, but because his alleged freedom depends on the unfreedom of others, he is not in fact free and is thus subject to an epistemic blockage. ⁵ At the same time, this advantage of the slave is not limited to epistemic privilege, but includes privilege in terms of normative ideas and practices; not only does the master consider himself free even though he is unfree, he also fundamentally misunderstands what freedom is in the first place, when he deems freedom compatible with servitude. The exercise of domination leads to an ideology, that is, a false consciousness, in those who exercise it, as well as to a transformation of their ‘second nature’, that is, their attitudes, dispositions and habits. From the point of view of the slaves, on the other hand, these self-perceptions and practices of the masters appear as errors: They thus arrive at a ‘more profound’ and ‘more enlightened’ (Davis 1971, 1) conception of freedom. Here we see that the dialectical inversion Davis demonstrated with Hegel and Douglass using the truth of knowledge – social domination leads to an epistemic disadvantage – also encompasses the entire practical relation of self and world. Davis points this out through the behaviour of the brutal ‘slave breaker’ Covey, whose essential task for the institution of slavery is the complete dehumanization of the slave. Covey is described by Douglass as a vulgar coward who shies away from any direct confrontation; he hides, sneaks, crawls and creeps in order to ambush and monitor or punish the slaves. His posture, Davis argues, is indicative of the inversion wrought by the relation of domination: ‘Who is the non-human here?’ (Davis 1971, 7, in Douglass 1994a, 265).

Given the comprehensive social privilege of the masters and degradation of the slaves, how can this inversion practically occur? What are its objective conditions? The slaves, after all, were subjected to a fundamental system of deprivation and degradation, so that both their possibilities for knowledge production and philosophical reflection, as well as morally correct behaviour, were severely limited from the outset – not to mention epistemic or normative advantage. The crucial factor enabling the truth of the servant’s consciousness for Hegel was that of work: While the master merely enjoys, the servant experiences her own independence by forming an object and postponing her own desire to consume it. However, there is no mention of such an experience of work in Douglass’s narrative of liberation; he does not speak of having attained an awareness of his freedom through, say, the working of cotton or tobacco. Rather, for Douglass, the precondition of awakening a consciousness of freedom is the specific experience of objective contradictions. Central to this is the contradiction between the external practices of dehumanization and his simultaneous experience of himself as a human being. The genesis of his self-consciousness involves various factors, some subtle, some overt; these include, first, learning to read and write, studying the message of the Bible, hearing rumours of abolitionist activity, open physical confrontation with the slave breaker Covey, and, finally, physical removal from the site of slavery through escape. Douglass thus experiences contradictions between his human capacities and the simultaneous denial of equal liberties, between the biblical message of mercy and the cruelty of the whip, between his own subjugation and the possibility of resistance, which he witnesses in the resistance of other enslaved people. The experience of contradiction finally drives Douglass to an overt act of rebellion when he resists Covey’s whip and enters into open combat, where his physical strength proves superior: ‘I found my strong fingers firmly attached to the throat of the tyrant, as heedless of consequences, at that very moment, as if we stood as equals before the law’. (Douglass 1994b, 588; in Davis 1971, 8) A passive objective condition has turned into an active subjective activity (contradiction into resistance). Thus, not through the processing of the thing, but through the resumption of the ‘struggle for life and death’ that for Hegel was already completed, the servant’s consciousness comes ‘to an intuition of self-sufficient being as its own self’ (Hegel 2020, 115). With this experience of physical superiority, the hitherto only inward, spiritual freedom actualizes itself outwardly, thus moving to resolve the objective contradiction subjectively experienced by the slave but not by the master.

The two poles of the relation of domination and servitude consequently also form different concepts and ideas of freedom. Davis understands this antagonism as an opposition between a dynamic and a static conception of freedom: The slave is aware that freedom is something that must be historically fought for, while the master thinks he is ‘by nature’ in possession of an inalienable freedom (Davis 1972, 1). Barnor Hesse (2014) and Neil Roberts (2015) have elaborated on how this notion of fugitive freedom can be specified and sharpened in comparison with hegemonic notions of freedom. Both challenge Isaiah Berlin’s well-known distinction between negative and positive notions of freedom, which figure the philosophical discourse of modernity as the antithesis of a conception of freedom as freedom from external constraints and a conception of freedom as freedom to participate in collective practices of self-government. What these different concepts have in common (with each other and with their meta-reflection in Berlin) is that they do not give an account of their origins in a system of European racialized colonial rule and that they are based on quotidian, routine foundational exclusions that prevent other intellectual historical traditions with their concepts from coming into view at all (Hesse 2014, 290). The subject conceptions and models of democracy associated with them also historically served to bolster the assertion of superiority of European institutions and to declare non-European forms of political community-building regressive or even ahistorical. Thus, a first conceptual feature of the dynamic notion of freedom, developed out of the experience of slavery, is that it itself performs a gesture of escape. Fugitive freedom is contestatory: It exposes, illuminates and critiques the foundational exclusions and violent justifications of dominant conceptions of freedom (Hesse 2014, 307).

Theorists in the Black Radical Tradition have formulated countless objections and criticisms, often Marxist-inspired, to liberal, negative conceptions of freedom. One fundamental objection is that the notion of freedom as freedom from interference dethematizes the material and intersubjective conditions of individual freedom. Davis has already alluded to these intersubjective conditions when she says that a freedom that conceives of the other as a limitation, not a condition, of one’s own freedom leads to an ideological indifference to the freedom of others, which thus leaves relations of domination intact. The material point can be shown with W.E.B. Du Bois in relation to emancipation from slavery: If emancipation is only a formal release from the shackles of slavery and does not include the social conditions for economic self-reliance and political autonomy, new forms of servitude form underhand; the promise of the Reconstruction era was therefore not only freedom from external restriction but also ‘40 acres and a mule’, that is, at least basic conditions for securing one’s subsistence (Du Bois 1999). A second characteristic of fugitive freedom is therefore its materiality, that is, its embeddedness in transindividual conditions of success.

Fugitive freedom, however, also differs from positive notions of freedom. First, in that it is attentive to the compatibility of forms of collective self-government with exclusion and dehumanization – both the Athenian ancient and the French modern democracy were based on forms of slavery. This is often accompanied by a division that claims political agency only for citizens, not for those excluded from citizenship – which contradicts the very basic premise of developing freedom from the perspective of the oppressed (Hesse 2014, 306; Roberts 2015, 14). In addition, many positive conceptions of freedom tend to define freedom as a fixed state of which one is either a part or not. This reduces escape into a means employed to achieve the state of freedom. Roberts, in contrast, insists that fugitivity itself must be understood as the crucial practice of freedom: Freedom consists in the interstitial movement of liberation itself (Roberts 2015, 15). Accordingly, a third feature of fugitive freedom is its irreducibly transitory character; it remains in a movement of self-transgression and is never satisfied in a fixed state.

A concept of freedom developed from the concrete experiences of enslaved people can thus be contrasted to relevant liberal or republican concepts of freedom in that fugitive freedom has a contestatory, material and a transitory content. (These three features are not necessarily exhaustive, but they are necessary – they arise from the experience of bondage itself. From the perspective of the oppressed, liberation cannot be accomplished other than by challenging dominant norms, engaging social and material conditions, and passing through an interstitial transitional movement.) Neither Hesse, nor Roberts address Hegel’s conception of freedom in their discussion of dominant concepts of freedom. Following Angela Davis’s schematic reading, one might argue that an understanding of freedom conceived from the perspective of the servant’s consciousness is already prefigured in Hegel’s account of domination and servitude. Identifying the truth of self-consciousness as the servant’s consciousness, after all, owes itself precisely to the experience of independence made possible for the servant through her own practice. However, that the implications of a standpoint theory of normativity are not yet fully settled even with Hegel becomes clear when one looks more closely at the institutional implications that the respective conceptions of freedom give themselves.

Due to his static concept of freedom, the master fails to see the dependency relationship of his freedom on the freedom of others: He does not see that his liberation depends on the liberation of others. Frederick Douglass, on the other hand, faces this relationship from the very beginning: It is not enough for him to escape slavery individually; he is truly free only when the institution of slavery is abolished for all. This implies not only formal emancipation but also a fundamental transformation of the background economic and political conditions of the society that made slavery possible (Davis 1971, 2). But how can the project of abolition democracy be stabilized and institutionalized? In particular, how can the transitory content of freedom, as it is revealed in the perspective of the concrete liberation practice of the enslaved, remain institutionally operative in the concrete practice of self-government? To this end, Neil Roberts has reminded us of the political form of marronage, that is, the political communities formed by fugitive slaves during and after their escape. Marronage in this context is not limited to geographic distancing, but encompasses the cultivation of specific languages, bodily practices, affect structures and ways of thinking that are distinct from the enslavement society. Roberts distinguishes between two forms of marronage: ‘sovereign marronage’ as advanced in the abolition of slavery in Haiti through the vision of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and ‘sociogenic marronage’ as practiced in the anti-state entities in the mountains or forests, which has also remained alive in Haiti as an enduring revolutionary desire. Sovereign marronage understands flight as the substitution of one sovereign for another – it imitates the dominant idea of freedom and thus not only develops dictatorial forms itself, but also tends to surrender the specific normative contents that arise from the transitory practice of flight (Roberts 2015, 103). Sociogenic marronage, on the other hand, remains committed to the transitory moment of freedom even in its (non-sovereign) political actualization (ibid., 116 f.). It employs a range of (de-)subjectification techniques by which community members position themselves in a constant dynamic way against recuperation into sovereignty, including the invention of new forms of name and address, spiritual practices, vital civil societies, active democratization efforts, as well as plural narratives of history, non-originalist aspirations for the future and an understanding of one’s culture as unfinished and inventive. ⁶

In a review of Roberts’s book, Charles Mills has cautioned not to overburden the historical practice of marronage as a signifier of freedom in general or even of the human experience as such (Mills 2015). But if read as part of a standpoint theory of normativity, it becomes clear how it is possible that a historically very specific and thus minority practice can have universal significance. The counter-communities of oppressed and marginalized groups, exemplified by the maroon communities, are able to form better political formations out of their liberation practices than the dominant groups whose institutions – the bourgeois state – correspond to the false concept of freedom developed out of a domination interest. They can be better because they correspond better to the better ideals developed from the oppressed point of view. If this is true, then liberation can never simply be about of gaining access to the dominant institutions, of being included or integrated into them, but of abolishing them (in an authentically abolitionist sense), that is, of pushing them back while building new institutions in their place. ⁷ At the same time, marronage does not have to become a new master signifier or model for all trajectories of liberation, but proves its full potential precisely by forming an alliance (or: engaging in a translation with) other manifestations of counter-normativity.

Radical care

In the last section, I reconstructed one particular oppressed normative standpoint according to the three components: its objective conditions (the experience of contradictions), its normative content (its contestatory, material and transitory character), and its political implication (sociogenic marronage). In this section, I proceed in a parallel fashion with regard to a different instance of counter-normativity, namely, that of ‘care’. With the erosion of social securities and the global expansion of a politics of organized abandonment (Gilmore 2011), care has become a central reference point for a heterogeneous variety of social struggles. These include, among others, women strikes resisting the unpaid reproductive labour of feminized subjects in households, campaigns for reproductive justice centred around the rejection of forced care labour through involuntary pregnancies, the movements for climate justice and saving planetary livelihoods, disability justice initiatives, campaigns centred on health care opposing the economic and political neglect of caring for vulnerable lives, Black Lives Matter movements and abolitionist initiatives rebelling against the disposability of racialized populations and building attentive communities beyond state violence. In all of these cases, the use of the concept of care is marked by a central tension. On the one hand, care describes an objective relationship of domination: As the distribution of care tasks runs along gendered and racialized differences, some groups are forced to perform care activities, while others only benefit from them. Caring, on the other hand, is also a normative value (a virtue, a practice and an ideal): Only by releasing and intensifying care to establish and restore the foundations of life can collective well-being be ensured. This tension can be grasped by a standpoint theory of normativity: Normative orientations are socially situated; they are formed within social formations that are permeated by relations of domination. Within and because of these relations of domination, it is then precisely the excluded or oppressed groups that potentially develop better – ethically, morally and politically more appropriate – forms of normativity, while dominant groups develop specific forms of normative blockages.

The analysis of feminist Marxists around the international ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign formed in the 1970s offers a good starting point for the reconstruction of the objective social conditions of care work. Based on the personal experience of women’s work under Fordist capitalism, the central premise of the interventions of authors such as Mariarosa dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici and others is that the reproduction of the labour power of the (mostly male) wage worker is essential for the functioning of capitalist exploitation. In order for the worker to go to the factory, someone must have educated him, washed his laundry and cooked his food – activities that are predominantly performed by women. ⁸ The central justification strategy of this service is the naturalization and romanticization of reproductive activities: The affective preconditions of care work are attributed to an individual competence or preference of women, with love playing an important role. This is what Federici’s famous denouncement is aimed at: ‘They say it’s love. We say it’s unwaged work’. (Federici 2012, 15) ⁹

This slogan shows that, like with the concept of fugitive freedom, it is the experience of a contradiction that can lead to the development of a liberatory normative orientation: Reproductive work is essential for the reproduction of a society, but unlike other (often much less essential or even destructive) activities, it is not paid. Another way of describing this contradiction would be to point at the conflicting expectations of action that many women face once the essential significance of care work is revealed: On the one hand, affective bonds and concern towards the clients (be it a child, a husband or an elder) can lead to feelings of responsibility that bind care workers to the demands posed by concrete others, on the other hand, experience of the value of one’s work, expressed and fostered by feminist movements, can lead to political and economic emancipation aspirations. Subjective enactment of these objective contradictions constitutes a particular normative standpoint in the sense of a normative standpoint theory.

For the reconstruction of the specific normative content of that standpoint, it is helpful to move beyond the Marxist feminist paradigm and to consult feminist care ethics as established since the 1980s in the tradition of Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different Voice (1982). In her canonical study, Gilligan formulated a critique of the moral development theory of her former teacher Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg had developed a stage model that describes moral development as an ever-improving approximation to abstract principles of justice, with the highest stage (which, however, only exceptional individuals reach) being a moral conception guided by Kant’s categorical imperative. Kohlberg further proclaims a moral deficiency in women, whose development allows for a lower generalization capacity and thus a less well-developed understanding of justice. In contrast, Gilligan’s own survey, which focuses on the moral attitudes of girls and women, reveals other normative attitudes: Instead of abstract principles of justice, women tend to pay attention to relationality, concrete needs and responsibility for others when solving moral dilemmas.

While Gilligan initially only refers to a gender difference without explicitly evaluating them, philosophers in the tradition of care ethics have further profiled the concept of care and presented it as a superior alternative to an androcentric conceptions of justice. Theorists such as Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, Eva Feder Kittay and others explicitly consider care obligations to be the primary ethical relationship, as originally expressed, for example, in the caring relationship with (young) children, but also more generally in the emotional and material nurturing of social worlds. ¹⁰ Without the responsible care for a – at least at initially exuberantly – needy life, no human society and therefore no normativity at all is possible. Moral theories that conceive of humans as rational and independent individuals and aim for impartial, disengaged and universally applicable rules fail to recognize emotionality and dependency as human traits and subordinate the responsibilities that emerge from them, which are often asymmetrical and context-specific (Kittay 1999). Understood in this way, then, care ethics results in an inversion of social and normative privilege similar to Hegel’s schema of domination and servitude – the orientation toward care values, while philosophically and socially marginalized, is actually normatively superior to the dominant male justice-centeredness.

Care ethics is thus, like the notion of fugitive freedom, contestatory with respect to dominant norms, and in that it focuses on the material, intersubjective and social conditions of normativity. In addition, it shares with fugitive freedom also a third component, namely, its focus on the transitory, non-static condition of normativity. Partly, transition is inherent to the very nature of care work itself. The telos of caring for children, for example, is a development toward their autonomy and independence, for which the child must also acquire a sense of its own preferences and interests (the same applies, for example, to love relationships and friendships). It is therefore precisely among the competencies of caregivers to be able to relinquish claims to control, to endure conflict and to accommodate distancing movements. In addition, transition forms the background condition for care ethics to emerge as ethics (and not simply the naturalized execution of life’s demands) in the first place. As Gilligan already noted, the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s raised in many women an awareness of the legitimacy of their own ‘egoistic’ needs and desires. Many women, however, did respond to this freedom not by completely severing care relations, but by negotiating their emancipatory freedom with the demands posed by concrete ties – with the result of changing the character of justice altogether (Gilligan 1982, 149). Political struggle is thus the constitutive condition, not the means of implementation, of the normative standpoint of care. This transitory element also indicates how care ethics move beyond Hegel’s grounding of the servant’s normative superiority in her experience of work; care work is liberatory precisely not as work but as struggle.

The radical or militant power of the care standpoint can finally be explicated even further if its political implications are spelled out. The interplay of contestation, sociality and transition positions the care perspective in open confrontation with established political and economic institutions (read: bourgeois capitalist society). ¹¹ In addition to challenging the bourgeois separation of spheres that relegate care activities to the realm of the private, conclusions can also be drawn from such politics of care about the institutional design of a politics and an economy that corresponds to the normative perspective of caregivers. As with the idea of fugitive freedom, the politics of care raises the question of how, in particular, the transitory moment of the repressed normative standpoint can be made permanent and stabilized. Federici has suggested that the experiences of care workers should be linked to the demand for ‘reproductive commons’. If it is no longer only women and racialized subjects who are to be responsible for the reproduction of human well-being, then these tasks must be organized by all together in a cooperative way. But if, at the same time, the normative character of caring activities only derives from political struggle, then the militant aspect cannot be satisfied by the fulfilment of the demand. Therefore, for Federici, the task of guaranteeing a care infrastructure should never be assigned to the state: ‘If the reproduction of our daily life must guarantee our “buen vivir,” and reproduce not our labour power but our “struggling power,” then we cannot imagine that in an alternative to the atomization of reproductive activities that we experience, we should consign our reproduction into the hands of the state’. (Federici 2019, 721). This confirms that the specific conceptions of norms that emerge from the experiences of oppressed and marginalized groups also have a particular political component: Oppressed groups do not only develop particular normative orientations, but also particular ideas about what institutional form they might take. ¹²

Conclusion

The perpetuation of regimes of exploitation, oppression, marginalization and necropolitical violence on a planetary scale has massive effects on those groups that benefit from these regimes. These effects take the form of epistemic ignorance: Members of dominant groups are not attentive to certain truths. They also concern affect structure and empathy: Those who dominate others or idly witness such domination are bound to develop forms of callousness, indifference, coldness or even passionate contempt, as expressed in bigoted ideologies such as racism and sexism. Finally, the effects corrupt the normative ideas and conceptions that a dominant group develops – its ethics, morality and politics will tend to provide justificatory narratives for existing domination. Western Philosophy has been such a discourse of legitimation for domination for millennia – and remains so in its largest parts to this day.

At first glance, it seems that another effect of this domination is that those dominated by it are even deprived of the capacity to articulate their own counter-normativity. Some of the aspects that prevent the emergence of a liberatory consciousness are, for example, a lack of access to education and knowledge resources, ideological obfuscations, a lack of a collective perspective due to increasing individualization and isolation, internalization of their own devaluation by oppressed, or divisions and competitions amongst different marginalized groups. The critical theory of the older Frankfurt School has tried to grasp this apparent lack of alternatives to universal moral depravation with the concept of totality: The normative conflicts of society tend to no longer take on the character of overt antagonisms. In his early essay ‘Moral Consciousness and Class Domination’, Axel Honneth attempts to tie the normative liberation perspective back more strongly to conflicting social groups. However, he still claims that oppressed groups are incapable of articulating elaborate value judgements and normative conceptions, but at best spontaneous indignations, intuitive inklings of justice and silent forms of disapproval: ‘A coherent value system is not normally an institutionally regulated part of the occupational roles available to members of oppressed social classes. Their occupational roles activity challenges them seldom or not at all to develop even the most provisional overview of the structures involved in the life and the interests of society as a whole’. (Honneth 2007, 85) Therefore, he no longer ascribes to these groups, as was still the case with Marx, the power to explode the existing society by universalizing their own standpoint, but only the role of drawing attention to ‘yet unrealized potentialities of social progress’ (ibid., 95).

The consultation of two important liberation struggles, rubricated here under the concepts of fugitive freedom and radical care, however, has shown that the oppressed are not only quite capable of developing difficile and coherent forms of normativity, but that these can even be superior to dominant conceptions of normativity. This superiority does not result simply from the fact that oppressed groups are dispensed from the normative blockages of dominant groups, nor are they automatically predisposed to the unfolding of their normative privilege by virtue of their position in the structure of domination. Their experiences under conditions of servitude provide them with a situated potential, but they can only exploit it through specific practices, namely, practices of solidarity and ultimately of political liberation. The reconstruction of the normative ideals and orientations of action of the two movements has brought to light three essential common features: Counter-normativities are firstly contestatory, that is, they challenge the validity of established or hegemonic norms; secondly material, that is, they concern themselves with the relational scope and the social conditions of normative validity; and thirdly transitory, that is, they conceive of norms as dynamic and self-transgressing. These characteristics give rise to particular political implications, which in both cases are expressed as a preservation of a distance from state institutions. As a political expression of a preservation of the specific normative content of the movement of fugitivity from systems of enslavement, the idea of sociogenic marronage has been proposed (with Neil Roberts): a plural, incomplete community not aiming at restoration of myths of origin. An analogous idea was presented for the liberation of care work in the idea of the reproductive commons (with Silvia Federici): a never merely ‘social’ but always already ‘political’ need-based cooperation for the reproduction of human and non-human well-being.

These two traditions are obviously not exclusive, there are many other counter-communities who have produced rich discourses on alternative normativities. However, even thinking just these two together, it quickly becomes clear what dazzling utopias could be generated from alliances of heterogeneous liberation movements. For Hegel, the struggle between master and servant came to a successful end with the achievement of bourgeois society as a system of universal recognition. If we start thinking liberation consistently from the perspective of those who continue to be dominated or marginalized by this society, however, a completely different idea of liberation appears: that of a community free of domination, in which the satisfaction of needs is not dependent on any origin or title.

It follows from a standpoint theory of normativity that liberation cannot be thought of as the completion or expansion of dominant normativity. History is not a ‘process of enrichment’ in which more and more normative contributions expand an existing discourse. It is rather a conglomerate of antagonistic struggles. Any attempt to integrate excluded groups into existing institutions rather than changing them fundamentally necessarily leads to a reproduction of domination, since these institutions are not neutral but have themselves been shaped according to the needs and interests of dominant groups (Gordon 2021, 44). Those who remain within the dominant interpretive framework will not only fail to shake off the normative blockages resulting from the exercise of domination, but will also squander the normative potential resulting from the standpoint of the oppressed – the potential of fugitive freedom and radical care.