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Unsustainable: The End of the Emancipatory Subject? – Remarks on Blühdorn’s Unhaltbarkeit

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Florian Maiwald

In his latest and highly recommendable book Unhaltbarkeit (engl.: Unsustainability), sociologist Ingolfur Blühdorn puts forward the provocative thesis that the ever-worsening ecological crisis, with which the world is confronted today, cannot simply be kept in check by an emancipatory subject that views this crisis as an expression of the freedom-restricting parameters of global capitalism. Rather, according to Blühdorn’s provocative thesis, part of the crises prevalent today (above all the ecological crisis) is itself attributable to the very idea of an emancipatory (autonomous) subject.

Blühdorn develops this idea against the backdrop of the assumption that today’s Western societies are marked by a double form of unsustainability (Unhaltbarkeit): On the one hand, there is the most obvious form of unsustainability—the ever-increasing exploitation of ecological resources and the escalating climate crisis, along with the interdependent social and economic consequences.

While this form of unsustainability may be obvious – and rightly so, as it represents a near consensus in progressive circles – Blühdorn undoubtedly strikes a nerve among many progressives with the second form of unsustainability he identifies: according to Blühdorn, today’s ecological and social upheavals are not solely due to the contradictions of the capitalist system itself, but also to what Blühdorn calls the “eco-emancipatory project” (öko-emanzipatorisches Projekt).

In this way, Blühdorn attacks nothing less than the very notion of an emancipatory subject itself.

It is not particularly problematic that Blühdorn’s argument can only be outlined in broad strokes here – for the present discussion, what is most relevant is what Blühdorn refers to as the dialectic of emancipation.

According to Blühdorn, the emancipatory subject is characterized by a constitutive form of internal tension, which one might also express in Freudian terms as discontent.

Already in the autonomous subject as characterized by Kant, the emancipatory claim becomes evident: to position oneself critically in relation to existing structures of domination by means of the authority of one’s own law-giving reason.

Due to a perversion of this original Kantian ideal of autonomy, the discontent of the modern emancipatory subject can be precisely grasped according to Blühdorn.

If, for Marx, it was the proletarian subject that was able to critically position itself against the servitude of capitalist relations of domination, in Blühdorn’s analysis of post-industrial society, it is the notion of a subject oriented toward individual self-realization (today all too visible in identity-political discourses) that seeks to distinguish itself from collective norms.

The crux of Blühdorn’s argument lies in the fact that the principle of the double unsustainability of modern society leads to the conclusion that the very positing of an emancipatory subject is problematic from the outset, as it is already laden with normative assumptions.

This tension between the individual and the universal, between the demand for individual self-limitation and the claim to individual self-realization, is, according to Blühdorn, constitutive for the unsustainability of the eco-emancipatory project.

Nevertheless, Blühdorn overlooks a central characteristic that has always been inherent to emancipatory forms of subjectivity from the outset: the fact of self-reflexivity.

This can be illustrated particularly well using Balibar’s concept of “equaliberty” (égaliberté), according to which the fundamental normative coordinates of liberalism (freedom and equality) often stand in a fundamental discrepancy with the actually prevailing institutional arrangements.

Adorno once aptly expressed this in Negative Dialectics through the concept of human freedom.

The non-correspondence between concept and reality is ultimately not only constitutive for the contradictory nature inherent in the concept of freedom. Rather, the contradiction between claim (concept) and reality is constitutive for the emancipatory subject itself.

Hence, the emancipatory subject cannot exist without a constitutive form of discontent.

Applying these thoughts to Blühdorn’s arguments, a similar consideration could be made: the salvation of the eco-emancipatory project might lie precisely in the fact that the emancipatory subject becomes aware of the discrepancy highlighted above by Blühdorn – that true self-realization is only possible through aligning the collective dimension with the individual.

Florian Maiwald is a German philosopher and research associate at the University of Bonn. He holds a PhD in Philosophy. His latest book Regressive Illusions is forthcoming in December 5.