In Rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari state that: “A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of diversely formed materials, of very different dates and speeds. … One should never ask what a book means, signified or signifier; in a book there is nothing to understand, one should only ask what it functions with, in connection with what it does or does not transmit intensities, into what multiplicities it introduces and metamorphoses its own, with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book only exists because of the outside and in the outside.”
I am interested in situating my commentary on “Sociology of Freedom”, the third volume of “Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization”, by the Kurdish intellectual and activist Abdullah Öcalan, currently imprisoned by the Turkish state, within this shift from the book’s interiority to its exteriority, and therefore, to the articulations it helps to create and imagine. This also relates to the question posed by the Italian feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti in “Towards an Affirmative Politics, Ethical Itineraries”: Is it still possible to imagine affirmative political practices and theories capable of disseminating sustainable alternatives and social horizons of hope and resistance? This shift and question, in my view, resonate closely with Öcalan’s writing, insofar as his “Sociology of Freedom” is itself a practice of freedom, demonstrating the performative, creative character of writing when confined within prison walls. One can speak of a prison writing, which is not exhausted by the prison itself, and whose horizon of meaning is precisely that: […Each step towards freedom can only be an attempt…]. This book is an essay, not only retaining its definition as a discursive and literary genre, but also functioning as a practice. It is an essay of that freedom which no wall can ever imprison. An essay open to an exteriority, which today is this gathering in Santiago, Chile, centered around this line of thought that is difficult to situate within a modern-capitalist geopolitics. Is it sociology? Is it philosophy? Is it a manifesto? Perhaps it is all of these things. What we know for certain is that it is his defense before the courts of the state, a claim and an affirmation. This hybrid writing of Öcalan is undoubtedly also a gesture of breaking with the canon and with the chimeras of purity inherent in that capitalist modernity which his writing helps to undermine. Sociology of Freedom, therefore, is a multiplicity, the trace of a present that connects pasts and futures. It is a writing about freedom, modernity, power, and the demands of society, offering a version of sociology that does not merely describe the state of affairs but assumes a position of rejecting power and affirming oppressed minorities through the very audacity—as Kant would say—of thinking not only for oneself but also to think and write in a place where that is forbidden. Its author claims a collective identity—the Kurdish people—as a weapon in the struggle against a state that operates through the individualization of subjects and identities, to monitor and punish in general, or to exterminate in particular those who dispute its borders and claim their lands. The author writes “Sociology of Freedom” within the walls of İmrali Prison in Bursa, an island prison in the Sea of Marmara, where traditionally […people condemned to severe sentences have been confined and left to die…]. He says that under the regime of isolation to which he is subjected, […I am only allowed one book, one magazine, and one newspaper in my cell. This has made it impossible for me to take notes or cite sources. My main method has consisted of memorizing the points that seemed important to me and integrating them into my personality. I have not slavishly endured all the prohibitions, but rather have responded by increasingly clarifying my memory, the storehouse of knowledge about the universe, and prioritizing ideas of vital importance…] The key to this book is that it is a form of writing that occupies the body itself as the surface for inscribing thought; here there is no separation between mind and body, life and writing. It is intensity, it is a trench.
Therefore, it is no coincidence that the essay discusses the central role of knowledge in social and power structures, which resonates with Marx’s discussion of the general intellect in the Grundrisse. It assumes the historical relationship between the tools of knowledge and information in social life and revolutionary processes, in an immanent sense, where this knowledge, and with it, these intellectuals, do not act from outside the system of knowledge, power, and capital, but from within, as a subversion or a flow that contests, appropriates, and transforms these regimes of truth. It tells us that {…hegemony is not only achieved through accumulation, production, and power; we witness fierce struggles for hegemony in the field of knowledge…}. This is why the critique of the social sciences and its essay on a different sociology is not merely an intellectual matter; it is a struggle over reality. These are the aforementioned weapons of critique that serve to shape categories that not only describe the world, but also give it form, create it, dismantle it, and remake it. The critique that simultaneously develops, of linear and monolithic positivism, establishes that there is no continuous, progressive, and linear development, nor that the universe has such a purpose. A naturalistic objectivity is also impossible, since nothing escapes the observer-observed dilemma, because human consciousness is also part of this process. These essays criticizing these categories are the basis for a practice of thought that, after many decades of hegemony surrounding the question of the subject and power, brings forth the question of freedom. Why speak of freedom today when freedom has become synonymous with fascism? For those of us who have embraced freedom as part of our intellectual, pedagogical, and even biographical project, calling ourselves libertarians certainly no longer fills us with pride. Fascism has appropriated, plundered, and stolen not only common lands but also our words. Freedom today, more than ever, is confined to an image of a free market, an obscene individualism, and, above all, a systematic politics of resentment that corresponds to a merciless hatred of the perpetually dispossessed: the poor, the foreigner, women, even children, as demonstrated by the Chilean parliament today with its shameful debates on the right to land and the health of children labeled as migrants. Freedom has been transformed into a compulsion to commodify society, bodies, and lives. In contrast, the affirmative freedom that our author defends is about the present, not a promise, a new paradise, or a messianic utopia, but rather a renewed way for human beings—now with a greater awareness of nature—to participate in a harmonious coexistence, protecting difference. This is not about an intention or a utopian promise, but about the art of living well and beautifully, which has practical meaning in the contemporary era…] Undoubtedly, the freedom that moves us, the freedom that our capacity to remain alive in all its abundance grants us, is a freedom that is not the property of humankind but of the universe—a universe interwoven, entangled, meaningful, and even, he affirms, beautiful—a freedom that operates like the veins of life. Our author is astute on this point: there is no freedom without politics. Demanding freedom in the absence of politics is a catastrophic error, he asserts. This is why freedom under the wing of the always oppressive state is impossible. The state has strategies, technologies, as Michel Foucault would say, but not politics. Politics addresses another matter; it is a matter of affirmative life. The state arises where politics ends, and therefore, where freedom ends. The essay recovers a practice of freedom that resists its state codification and, on the contrary, is driven by a will to challenge the state apparatus as frozen reason, as it aptly calls this rationality. Undoubtedly, this is a marvelous metaphor to which it opposes the power of society’s collective consciousness. Society thus emerges as both a question and an alternative, amidst a defense and a demand. “There is no society, only individuals,” was Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase that marked the beginning of European neoliberalism. Therefore, it is not only a matter of reconstructing a society that no longer exists, but also of reclaiming the process of becoming society as a fundamental problem for politics and knowledge.
The author takes up the also abandoned critical project of rethinking the relationship between reason and civilization—concepts that, undoubtedly, were demonized and shrouded in shame and guilt following the post-structuralist impulse. The rejection of instrumental reason, which spawned monsters like the atomic bomb, the modern concentration camp, genocide, and transhumanism with its delusions of human grandeur, as well as the rejection of civilization itself, in whose name societies were invaded and colonialism, imperialism, and all forms of imposing the modern capitalist colonial project were justified, is displaced and redefined by the revolutionary current. Revolution or barbarism.
This undoubtedly implies reclaiming modernity, not as a historical stage, but as a threshold, a present moment. To do so, it is necessary to distinguish between capitalist modernity and democratic modernity. The former assumes that there is only one modernity, corresponding to the development of capitalist accumulation in Northern Europe, to which even leftist thought succumbs. Öcalan proposes dismantling this conception of a singular, universal modernity and demonstrates that there is […an alternative to the dominant modernity, and that, despite all attempts to suppress and conceal it, it continues to exist in all its forms…] There is no single modernity, he asserts, nor is there only one capitalism. This assertion is undoubtedly a radical gesture: reclaiming the multiple origins of capitalism, in which what we call the Orient is a key element that describes its own development and is not merely a colonial territory of Europe. This is important because the shift he makes is to propose a world system in which it is possible to identify relationships of conquest, exchange, and dependence, but also histories of their own, which decolonial critical thought sometimes renders invisible by failing to consider the other of Europe beyond, or within, Europe. Öcalan advocates for a modernity as a radical and affirmative multiplicity that neither declares the death of anything, nor a festival of diversity. Hence, this reasoning can lead us to a universalism that is a mutant and blasphemous kind, since it is recovered amidst an intellectual and political consensus that seems to place the local, the singular, the South, the micro, and everything that is closest and most familiar to us at the forefront, replacing what was—for some—the death of meta-narratives. As the provocateur he is, the author repositions these major categories in a deterritorializing intellectual exercise to propose an ethics and a politics that transcends ourselves, the human condition—a civilization not restricted to humanity, but rather proposed as an interface encompassing all living beings and even the non-living, the inorganic, which lead us to temporalities, strata, histories, mythologies, and thoughts. The totality he reconstructs undoubtedly detaches itself from all dogmatism and totalitarianism, including those that might inhabit so-called epistemologies of the South, as if the South existed and were self-evident. He strongly asserts that the social sciences are trapped in a Eurocentric dilemma between being dominated or dominating; therefore, it is necessary to highlight differences. But he is also clear in pointing out—and therein lies the astuteness of his reasoning—that it is not a matter of assuming an anti-Europeanism, as if positions of power were fixed territories to which subjects arrive already formed. He says that anti-Europeanism is also Eurocentrism: […Because Europe can be found in the East, and the East can be found in Europe…] De-territorialized geographies of fury in which nothing is taken for granted. In the beginning was the book, Sociology of Freedom, like its geography; it is an open territory and a catalytic machine that, far from closing off discourse, provides infinite possibilities for articulations and imaginings.
References
Rosi Braidotti, Por una política afirmativa. Itinerarios éticos. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2018
Gilles Deleuze y Felix Guatari, Rizoma. Barcelona: Pretextos, 2021
Abdullah Öcalan, Sociología de la libertad. Buenos Aires: Ciccus, 2025
*Claudia Calquin Donoso specialises in the fields of gender, difference and otherness; she holds a PhD in Citizenship and Human Rights. She is an associate professor at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Santiago, Chile. Her research focuses on feminism, gender studies, social and cultural history, the construction of subjectivity and care policies.