Moral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory

Drucilla Cornell is one of the last grand critical theorists in our time. This great tradition – from Kant to Benjamin and Adorno – is made relevant in her profound and courageous philosophical engagements with redemptive possibilities in our dystopian era. She sustains a contagious utopian defiance of the bleak present with a subtle wrestling with our limits – a wrestling that takes us through empire, class, race and gender toward a just and free world.

Drucilla Cornell’s Moral Images of Freedom places philosophy on the side of hope. Its distinctive contribution is to show how the tendencies in twentieth-century thought that threaten us with nihilism may also inform and inspire a deepening of our faith in ourselves. To read this book is to discover a path to greater freedom and connection in what had seemed to be a history of despair.

In the face of terrible suffering, Cornell advances what she calls an affirmative political philosophy. Offering a theoretical vision attuned to this relationship of reason and sensory existence, Cornell exemplifies just how this can be done by mining what is vital in Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, Fanon, Cassirer, and Benjamin. One of the book’s great gifts is the way that it develops this insight, showing how engagement with Cassirer’s understanding of the diversity and generative power of language can be put to the service of ‘decolonizing’ critical theory. Cornell calls for a new poetics of consciousness. Such a poetics takes us beyond the limitations of conceptual knowledge, opening us to unlikely, and uncanny, connections. The result is a stirring vision of what critical theory can be: hopeful, invigorating, humane.

The power of this book lies in the courage, erudition and openness to the future that it mobilizes in making its case for continuing the struggle on behalf of a moral ordering of our social world. Moving deftly through Kant, Heidegger, Cassirer, Fanon, Lewis Gordon and others, Prof. Cornell makes a powerful contribution to the revitalization of contemporary critical theory by resting this project on the principle that if we attend to the limits of our knowledge, we will discover that it is still possible to imagine the surpassing of our present order by a more just one. As such, it speaks courageously to our present moment of disjuncture.