Abstract
This essay explores the implications of what we call attachments to innocence for critical scholarship and progressive politics. After tracing the appearance of innocence in various strands of contemporary thought, we turn to how it shields individuals and groups from examining the depth of our own participation in oppression and harm. This evasion of responsibility works in our perspective as a hindrance to understanding power and engaging with others ethically. The essay more concretely examines how the reductionist and authoritarian dimensions of innocence dovetail with the neoliberal uptake of ‘progressive’ politics in university and activist settings. We are interested in how academics and activists of different kinds are rewarded for cultivating their innocent-selves through discursive and material interventions that leave power relations untouched. It is not merely monetary or status rewards that perpetuate this, but the crisis produced by our implication in the very violence we reject. Working with and through the mobility of agency, power, abuse, and justice, we explore what is at stake in shedding our attachments to innocence in the hope of a different sort of encounter – one that proceeds from the recognition that innocence is not a precondition for our engagement in political life.
Highlights
This essay explores the implications of what we call attachments to innocence for scholarship and politics
This paper explores what we call attachments to innocence and their implications for ethics and politics
Las Torres de Lucca. 11 (1), 2022: 37-49 contemporary attachments to innocence are intertwined with the operations of neoliberalism and neoliberal institutions, which absorb and incorporate projects of reform, or even radical interventions, in a variety of depoliticizing ways
Summary
The persistent inability of political actors and elites to do anything about it – or, worse, their overt involvement in its root causes – offer an important motivation for political and social activism and for critical intellectual projects alike. Coupled with how it is taken up in institutions, the attachment to innocence and goodness works in our perspective as an epistemological and political blockage to a genuine examination of our individual and collective circumstances and the ways in which, through our own practices, we are involved in (and to different degrees benefit from) oppression and inequality This involvement is not about a pre-given and reified attribute (expressed in our bodies, titles, wealth, and so on); collapsing positionality and demographics, for example, produces the same kind of reductionism that in part motivates the writing of this essay, and that we find in our examination of innocence, around predefined responsibilities and categories of guilt and innocence, or victim and perpetrator. We follow Uruguayan thinker Carlos Real de Azúa (1973) in his observation that liberations need to be interpellated by their own partiality to guard against their becoming oppressive themselves, a point we have raised before and that we think bears repeating (Ravecca & Dauphinee, 2018)
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