WHATS LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

The Race of Freedom and the Drag of Descent

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Intimate Voyages
As long as there was race, there was the savage. Tribes would come later as
those who invented their descending lines and segmentable surfaces projected them into the classical past of gens and phatries. And as long as there
were savages, there were indels. Christianity, defeated in the old Jerusalem,
established a New Jerusalem through conquest and settlement, conversion
and genocide, enslavement and rectitude in the Americas and Pacic. Some
savages would be bestowed with cultures and some religions with the power
of enlightenment. And yet, in the shadow of the enlightenment project, all
of these social gures and social histories seem to collapse into a unilinear
process of historical descentthe Crusades begat voyages of discovery, which
begat the problem of the twentieth century, namely, the color line and the
international division of colonizer and colonizer, the North and the South,
the East and the West, the politics of recognition and the refusals of secularismand a univocal problem of race, racialization, and racism. Race seems
to have begat race: what makes discourse of tribalism, racism, and the savage slot seem the same and seem different than the national citizen/subject
is that they are all the effect of the same razza (lineage). Their actual social
divergences and specicities are bled out. But he who listens to history nds
that things have no pre-existing essence, or an essence fabricated piecemeal
from alien forms (Foucualt 1984: 78).
This brief essay suggests another way of understanding what constitutes these
social gures and social histories into one constellation. I suggest how discourses
of individual freedom and social constraintwhat I call autological and genealogical imaginariesanimate and articulate the razza of savagery, tribalism, race,
color, and colonialism. In this way, autology and genealogy provide the diagram
and logic that collapse all the razza of race, with the result that everyone appears
Social Analysis, Volume 49, Issue 2, Summer 2005, 173181

174 | Elizabeth A. Povinelli

to belong to the same species. Intimacywhat I call the intimate eventprovides

a powerful means of unpacking this diagram because many ordinary subjects,
critical theorists, and political pundits believe that the intimate event denegates
race and racism. Instead, I suggest that the intimate event makes the normative
horizon of freedom productive in liberal settler colonies by creating lineages and
separations between populations along which power can act. From this point of
view, the savage slot, the color line, the colonized and colonizer, multi-culturalism,
and post-secularism cease being a discursive bloodline that should be tracked
backwards. Instead, they are strategic maneuvers of power whose purposeor
resultis to distribute life, goods, and values across social space.

The Autological Subject

The autological subject of liberalism is projected by discourses and practices
that measure the worth of life and society relative to their capacity to constitute
and vest sovereignty in the individual. I must be the citation and the site of
enunciation and address. What do I want, desire, and aspire to? With whom do
I wish to share not merely my worldly possessions but the narratives of who
I think I am and who I desire to be? This mode of sovereignty functions as a
foundational eventalso known as an explicit performative and a bootstrap
performativein which the act of referring to the event or thing actually creates
the event or thing. This form of subjectivity is illustrated by many termsthe
autological subject, the parvenu, the self-made man, die Autonomie. Such an
idiom disseminates this form across the liberal diasporae.g., French republicanism, American pluralism, Australian multi-culturalism, and Turkish secularismand then reunies this dissembled form into a coherent singularity.
In the liberal diaspora, the subject-in-love is experienced and understood like
the self-governing subject insofar as both are ideologically oriented to the fantasy
of the foundational event. Both self-sovereignty and intimate recognition establish a new subject out of the husk of the old, resetting the clock at zero and obviating social history. In liberal legal and political theory, modern love has nothing
to do with race and other social gures. It is what exfoliates the social skin, what
produces racial difference as if it were simply a skin that can be peeled away,
leaving behind the true self. This notion of race as social skin, or of sex as a
social fold, is a proto-typically progressive thought that seems to oppose oppressive power rather than extend it. For instance, C. L. R. Jamess seminal study of
the Haitian revolution relates the origins of the articulation of the aristocracy of
birth and the aristocracy of religion to the aristocracy of the skin (James 1963:
139). In addition, Jurgen Habermas (1989) and Anthony Giddens (1993) view
the social dynamic that was inaugurated by the subject-in-love to be the singular
achievement of the Western Enlightenment. Indeed, Habermas argues that this
new form of intimate sovereignty provided the conceptual foundations for the
democratic revolution and its models of freedom, public reason, and equalitybased schemes of justice; for direct and representational democracy; and for
democratic notions of freedom (Habermas 1989). Similarly, Randall Kennedy,

Whats Love Got to Do with It? | 175

a leading US constitutional lawyer and race theorist, suggests that in matters of

love, the issue is the humanity of the person, not the accident of her birth or her
forced enclosure within a social skin (Kennedy 2003). In a New York Times interview (2 September 2003), Kennedy asserts that love trumps racial status with
regard to his childrens intimacy: Ill say go into the world and try to nd good
people that feel genuine affection and love for you and disregard everything else
about their background. Love is just such a crucial, wonderful thing, and if you
are lucky enough to nd somebody who genuinely loves you, grab that person
and hold on to that person and nothing else matters.
Except, of course, where these thickly eneshed bodies do matter. The imaginary of the intimate event is always disrupted and secured by the logic of the
exceptionexcept, of course, in the case of The nothing more than of
deracinating intimacy always projects out the question what about this, then?
referring to the color of skin or the fold of esh. Kennedys reections on love
and the immediate conceptual and legal conundrums they trigger take us to the
heart of the promise and problem that the intimate event holds for those who put
some store in it as a liberal mode of governance. One problem concerns viewing
the intimate event as an actual event: the liberal subject is presumed to become
sovereign at the moment she projects herself as her own authentic ground.
But this foundational self is necessarily phantasmagorical, as no one can pick
herself up by her own bootstraps. Rather, the felicity of this foundational event
depends on a myriad of social institutions. As Jacques Donzelot (1997) shows
in his study of the bourgeois family and social welfare in France, the contract
between power and self-authorization is insinuated into the tissues, membranes,
and practices of state disciplinary care. And Ann Stoler (2002) demonstrates that
this insinuation occurred in colonial practices of child care as well. Thus, the
sovereign and intimate subject of recognition was anything but free, in the sense
of undetermined and stabilizeda social determination prevailed.1
An additional problem concerns the categorization of the intimate event as
a singular versus general kind of contract. No matter how closely the intimate
event is aligned to other kinds of economic and political contracts, it is also
continually distinguished from them. The intimate contract is often represented
as if it were in imminent danger of collapsing into the political and economic
contract. If all of these contracts are based on the same kinds of subject, then
what is the difference between buying and selling a car, marrying and divorcing a spouse, choosing and rejecting a state representative?2 The fungibility of
goods and services focused on human life has only intensied in court cases
sorting through the new reproductive technologies (Dalton 2000; Franklin 1997;
Ragone 2001). The importance of the dense hermeneutic and institutional mirroring between economic, political, and intimate contracts is not that it shows
how these contractual forms have collapsed into each other in some absolute
way, but how their possible implosion creates widespread anxiety.
Finally, liberal forms of democratic governance did not move from social status to the intimate contract as the foundation of liberal government. Instead, it
reorganized how social status was deployed. Certainly, liberal societies have not
freed themselves from the external constraints of family, class, and religious

176 | Elizabeth A. Povinelli

poweras countless feminist scholars have demonstrated. Accordingly, the

foundational event is also phantasmagorical since the conceptual form of state
citizenship, insinuated into the deep tissues of economic, state, and national life,
is based on birth from a human body or a territorial body and is thus inected by
gender and sexuality (Cott 2002). Immigration policy, for example, is shaped by
the heterosexual family, as are inheritance legislation, tax codes, health benets,
and the distribution of adoption and new reproductive rights (see Fassin 2001).
Intimacy, in sum, is a method of constituting two different kinds of truth about
the subject and her social world; one truth is reduced to mere fact, while the other
rises to a normative end. Discourses of liberal intimacy presume that in matters
of the heart and the labors of a life, attitudinal and discursive practices should be
based on foundational events most of the time, at least in the context in which this
social form is being advanced as the end of history. The intimacy grid is a facet of
normative politics, not actual politics. This thin but resilient regulatory ideal renders actual life irrelevant, reduced to an object like that of Lacanian desire; it is that
away from which we should move, that with which we should be disappointed.

The Genealogical Society

How, then, do discourses of intimate freedom deepen their grip on social life
even though they are internally unstable and referentially untrue? And what
do these practices of love have to do with race? To answer these questions we
need to understand that the power of the modern intimate event lies not merely
in its ability to emplot the social order, nor merely in its ability to anchor itself
to other like-structured institutions, nor merely in its ability to invest itself
with magical qualities and ethical purpose. Its power derives equally from a
mirror image that supposedly marks its geographical and civilizational difference. In other words, the intimate event does not merely characterize some
truth about liberal desireit asserts and constitutes the differential truths of
social geographies and global civilizations as a difference between individual
freedom and social constraint, autology and genealogy. If the imaginary of the
autological subject involved discourses, practices, and fantasies about selfmaking, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with
the enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracy and capitalism, imaginaries of the genealogical society involve discourses, practices, and
fantasies about social constraints placed on the autological subject by various
kinds of inheritances.
Autological and genealogical discourses are not in this view different in
kind, even though they are used to differentiate kinds of people, societies, and
civilizational orders. They both presuppose a liberal humanist claim that what
makes us most human is our capacity to base our most intimate relations, our
most robust governmental institutions, and our economic relations on mutual
and free recognition of the worth and value of another person, rather than
basing these connections on, for example, social status or the bare facts of the
body. These presuppositions circulate through the subjects and institutions of

Whats Love Got to Do with It? | 177

liberal settler colonies, informing how people talk about themselves and others, how they govern themselves and others, and who they think they are or
who they think they should be. As people go about their ordinary livestheir
practices of love, work, and civic lifethey continually constitute these discourses as if the discourses were the agents of social life, as if there were such
a thing as the sovereign subject and the genealogical society, as individual
freedom and social constraint, and as if the choice between these Manichaean
positions were the only real choice available to us. They do this as if all other
actual and potential positions and practices were impractical, politically perverse, or socially aberrant.
Genealogy consists of concrete practices and regulatory ideals that, no matter their internal incoherencies, have three major topographies: the materiality
of genealogy, the symbolics of genealogy, and the economy of genealogy. First,
discourses about the materiality of genealogy gure the truth of the body and
its reproduction as simultaneously escaping and leading social and individual
sovereignty. The materiality of genealogy is what is behind, or before, the individual and the socialwhat material they inherit to work with and what can
be given life or death by the sovereign. This is corporeality, the gure of bodily
reality within any discursive formation. In this sense, Giorgio Agambens discussion of naked life as the separation of some simple fact of living common
to all living beings from the form or manner of living particular to a single
individual or groupand especially to a human community that constitutes
the modern political subjectdescribes one kind of corporeality (2003: 3).
Thus, the division between naked life, or corporeality, and social life results
from a social division. It is a bio-political fracture that has a specic history
and path of circulation in capitalism and empireand it is already racialized.
Corporeality represents a metaphysics of substance that posits a material legacy
beyond the control of a person or society. This metaphysicality does not determine where this truly deracinated materiality lies: within the thin skin of the
individual body, in the hormonal systems coursing through it, in the DNA that
provides a code for it, or in the particular manner in which that DNA is wound
and unwound.3 Rather, this metaphysics projects a space beyond the dialectic of
social determination and individual freedom. In projecting this space, it incites
the hope that we might transcend the division between esh and discourse and
the despair that esh can never be extracted from its discursive conditions.4
Second, symbolics of genealogy include discursive practices that organize
corporeality and meta-discursive practices about the relative value of these different methods. Symbolics of genealogy include actual practices of kinship,
race, and nationalism along with theoretical and political discourses about the
meaning, shape, and value of these kinship, race, and national practices to the
health of the nation, to the people, and to an ethical way of life. In this manner,
symbolics of blood encompass all conventions around the body, its reproduction,
and the means by which goods and materials and rights and obligations move
through these corporealities as markers of inheritance. This discursive play is
also found in what David Hollinger has called the hypodescent of race politics in
the US (Hollinger 2003; see also Fields 2003, and Munasinghe in this volume).

178 | Elizabeth A. Povinelli

However, the symbolics of genealogy run the ideological gamut from biological
essentialism to cultural relativism to radical (de)constructionism, in which the
semi-autonomous materiality of the body itself disappears under the deferred
scribbling of discourse (e.g., see Butler 1989; Gilroy 2001). And yet all these
ways of guring the meaning, shape, and value of inheritances fashion them
as specters, the ghostly remains of the past that are still imprinting the present.
Finally, symbolics of genealogy are dispersed across bureaucratic space in such a
way that different social classes within the same social group are denied access
to different languages and styles of genealogy. This bureaucratic dispersion continually ruptures and fragments social groups that are already fractured.
Third, the economy of genealogy encompasses the ways in which genealogical inheritances are deployed to circulate wealth and power, including discourses whereby societies organize personal and communal wealth on the basis
of descent, along with discourses about the legacy of historical events, such as
the colonial extraction of people, wealth, and ideas from the South. Therefore,
the economy of genealogy encompasses the family inheritances of individuals
as well as the historical inheritances of empire, such as debates about taxing
the nancial markets in order to redistribute monetary wealth from the North
to the South. Though the discourses of genealogy within liberal settler colonies
vary, two general rules apply. When culture/custom is considered to have a
negative social or economic value for the settler society, that culture/custom
is repressed. When culture/custom is considered to have a positive social or
moral value for the settler society, then demanding this determination is seen
as merely recognizing facts on the ground. The exfoliation of the social skin
in one place is now seen as the demand for the foliation of the social skin in
another place. This is illustrated in recent laws of recognition in settler nations
such as Australia and Canada, where indigenous people have been granted
special legal status on the condition that they show a genealogical relation to
their customs and their bodies. The state and public demand that indigenous
people demonstrate that they come from a lineage associated with a particular
territory and that a cultural genealogy connects their present beliefs, desires,
and hopes to the beliefs, desires, and hopes of their pre-colonial ancestors.
Unlike the US Supreme Court ruling Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia,
in which ancestry was ruled out as legitimate grounds for prohibiting forms of
adult marriage, contemporary laws concerning indigenous cultural recognition
demand that the subject of cultural rights demonstrates the determination of
individual choice, mystery, and discovery with regard to cultural and racial
inheritance. The cunning of recognition, as opposed to the law of recognition,
is that, given the dense relationship between intimate sovereignty and liberal
humanism, the demand that indigenous people demonstrate their rule by custom within the eld of racial difference is also a practice of dehumanization.
Dehumanization is the price they must pay for even the most remedial forms of
recognition. In short, they are presented with a mirror that is actually a doublebindeither love according to liberal ideals of self-sovereignty and deculturalize
yourself, or love according to the fantasy of the unchanging dictates of your
tradition and dehumanize yourself.

Whats Love Got to Do with It? | 179

Begetting Empire
Perhaps this is the begetting of empire, in which race always conjures up the
specter of unfreedom and the enclosures of genealogy. Writing diagonally
through these discourses of the autological subject and genealogical society
demands great care. On the one hand, one must nd and refuse difference as
it is produced by discourses of personal freedom and social constraint. On the
other hand, one must resist the temptation to atten out the social differences
between these worlds. To say that there is no difference between social worlds
is as misguided as saying that their forms of difference are reducible to the
dichotomy of autology and genealogy. Anti-colonial and post-colonial thinkers
have pointed us in this direction.
Frantz Fanon, for instance, posited what a genuine eradication of the colonial order would consist of after a real struggle for freedom had taken place.
Individualism is the rst to disappear, Fanon argues, carefully describing
what he means by individualismthe idea of a society of individuals where
each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity (1963: 47). The very
form of organization of the struggle will suggest [to the native intellectual] a
different vocabulary, the language of brother, sister, friend (ibid.). Brother,
sister, friendsuch an unobtrusive series of social addresses. And yet they do
not collapse into the same intimacy grid of the liberal diaspora. After all, the
hail of a friend is, from the perspective of autology, nothing more or less than
a form of stranger sociability made intimate.
To be a friend is to go beyond kinship into a self-reexive, chosen relation.
We say, she is not simply my sister, she is more: she is my best friend. Yet the
exit from kinship as the condition of becoming a friend is exactly the kind of
work that the assemblage of the intimate event and the genealogical society
does, inserting a European history into an indigenous social imaginaryinserting a difference where none necessarily existed before. It is not that indigenous
worlds had no term analogous to friend or had nothing that could be called
intimacy, but this local kind of intimacy may well be derived from an intensication of kinship rather than its negation. Aboriginal friends of mine do say
that their close sisters are considered sisters or cousin sisters rather than
something more or other than this.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute for Research on

Women and Gender at Columbia University, where she is also Co-Director of the
Center for the Study of Law and Culture. She is the author of three booksLabors
Lot (1994), The Cunning of Recognition (2002), Love and Empire (2006)that focus
on the politics of recognition.

180 | Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Notes
1. It is hard to recapture the intensity of the threat to the community faced by this new
kind of subject, when for the most part we see the issue the other way around, that is, in
terms of the threat to the individual posed by the collectivity. Max Weber perhaps best
captured the anxiety of the potential of this form of subjectivity to the social collective
in his discussion of Calvinism (Weber 1958).
2. Just this difference was noted as early as Locke and as recently as the California Supreme
Courts decision in Perez v. Sharp, in which the court struck down Californias miscegenation legislation 19 years before Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia. In Perez,
according to Randall Kennedy, the court argued that the fungibility that was arguably
present with respect to some goods and services was absent with respect of marriage
because human beings would be diminished by a doctrine that would make them as
interchangeable as trains (Kennedy 2003: 262).
3. A point addressed in Paul Gilroys recent book (Gilroy 2001).
4. This metaphysical stance does not preclude the present deployment of corporeality for
disciplinary ends. Indeed, rather than precluding these ends, the metaphysics of substances helps to legitimate certain disciplinary regimes. Biometrics, for instance, has
emerged as a means of surveillance in the postSeptember 11 world. New reproductive
technologies are also riddled with social regulation, as are First World multi-national
thefts of the genetic material of the Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds.

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