Exception as rule, purity as corrective: A situated critique of liberal democratic authority

Broadly conceived, this interdisciplinary work consists of a materialist-informed critique of idealism. I analyze the principal tenets of idealist philosophy, as extolled by Immanuel Kant, to ascertain how a pointedly idealist conception of autonomy delineates both subjective and state authority in the liberal democratic context. Through processes of internalization and individuation, this notion of idealist autonomy promotes a self-referential logic of authority that is exercised as the "author/subject corrective". To offer a multifaceted account of this corrective, I look at how it is expounded by Hans Kelsen, critiqued by both Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, and extended by Giorgio Agamben. By way of a challenge the corrective, I pursue a situated critique of the author/subject corrective from an anticolonialist perspective. I argue that liberal democratic state authority emanates from the self-referential logic of idealist autonomy that serves a bourgeois idea of individual freedom. To hold this narrow view of freedom up as a rule—and not as an exception—is to promote the internalizing and individuating functions of the author/subject corrective. The situated critique provides the best challenge to this self-alienating, purifying mode of reasoning. Focused on adverse experience as the basis for emancipatory praxis, this method of critique both invokes and emphasizes a global position toward a reconceptualization of authority.;Overall, I endeavour to make three contributions to political and legal theory: first, the author/subject corrective, which as a conceptual lens illuminates the continuity of idealist autonomy across varied strands of thought; second, the situated critique, which I both develop and deploy as a response to the corrective; and third, a sound method of materialist interdisciplinarity.