The Contradictions of Free Speech

Looking at the Jodi Dean Controversy

On April 9, Jodi Dean, a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, published a piece on the Verso blog entitled “Palestine speaks for everyone.” This article was a full throated endorsement of Hamas and October 7th as part of a legitimate struggle for national liberation. Here’s a sample:

The struggle for Palestinian liberation today is led by the Islamic Resistance Movement –– Hamas. Hamas is supported by the entirety of the organized Palestinian left. One might have expected that the left in the imperial core would follow the leadership of the Palestinian left in supporting Hamas. More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine. In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a previous generation. 

Suffice it to say, I find the contents of Dean’s article to be both disgusting and pathetic: it is an ultimately sad attempt to find some kind of universalistic hope in the slaughter that Hamas initiated in the Middle East; it uses all the clichés and jargon of academia to justify and excuse murder. Not surprisingly, it has generated a great deal of outrage. And, on April 13th, Dean tweeted that she had faced retaliation at work:

This has triggered a meta debate on free speech and academic freedom. Some are calling for those that have caviled about free speech under attack for the past few years to come to Dean’s defense, pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of only doing this when right wingers are under attack. But this cuts both ways: I would wager that many of the same people now shouting for Dean’s free speech to be respected and warning about the horrors of “McCarthyism” had no real problem when their political enemies faced professional “consequences” or were “cancelled.” In not a few cases, they may have even called for it. That was just “accountability.” And this is…something else. The irony goes further: now that Dean has been punished, her critics are being attacked for contributing to the atmosphere of censoriousness and for “tone policing” the anti-war left. In effect they are saying, “Free speech is under attack, so it’s time to be quiet!” So let me just reiterate once more: I find Dean’s piece to be both disgusting and pathetic. (I am merely exercising free speech!)

The fact is that there are very few people who would defend both Jodi Dean’s rights and those of, say, Amy Wax, the UPenn law professor who regularly espouses virulently racist views. What if a White Nationalist professor had called for a racial holy war? Would you, nice leftist academic, really be so worried about their academic freedom or just be happy to see them get a rap on the knuckles? It’s long been my contention that the number of people who actually have a principled commitment to free speech is next to zero: what people mostly believe is that they should be freely allowed to tell others to shut their mouths.

The irony goes further still. Here’s another excerpt from Dean’s piece:

Defending Hamas, we take the side of the Palestinian resistance, responding to a revolutionary subject –– the subject fighting against occupation and oppression –– and recognizing this subject as an effect of a contested and open process. Which side are you on? Liberation or Zionism and imperialism? There are two sides and no alternative, no negotiation of the relation between oppressor and oppressed. Oppression isn’t managed via enervating concessions to the norms of permitted speech; it’s overturned. The illusion of a middle and a multitude withers away as the division constitutive of the political appears in all its stark brutality.

This may suggest Carl Schmitt’s classic formulation of the political in terms of the intensification of the friend/enemy relationship. But where it differs is in its recognition of hierarchy. Colonial occupation and imperialist exploitation produce enmity; enmity isn’t the affective setting of equals in conflict. It’s not a war of all against all. It’s a war of oppressed against their oppressor, the rebellion of those whose right to self-determination is denied against those who deny it. The two sides employ radically different orders of meaning: from within one, the other appears crazed and monstrous, utterly nonsensical. There is no third point from which to assess the situation, no neutral sovereign authority or system of legality that is not swept onto one side or the other. Deaths cannot be tabulated and plugged into a calculation that would guarantee when it all evens out. History doesn’t determine the matter. Dates from which we begin to narrate the sequence of events aren’t simply alternatives. The division constitutive of the political goes all the way down.

Okay, well if that’s the case, and it’s all political enmity and struggle, then, put your money with your mouth is and don’t complain about the nature of the speech norms when they don’t suit you. Fight and die, then, or is that just for others? Hamas, whose leadership she claims to accept, doesn't waste time with that sort of bullshit: they say openly that they willing to both kill and die for their cause. I believe in Jodi Dean’s right to have her say, but to celebrate violence and then cry out so when you are very lightly struck does not inspire my admiration or respect. She can talk, but I don’t have to listen.