LAUSR

provided the original author and source are credited. Liberation, how to think it? Enrique Dussel helps answer this question. He tells us that liberation is not the experience of “a something”, neither can it be understood in relation to a system, nor is it simply action. Rather it that praxis, that subversion of lived materiality, that opening into a thinking that is able to undo all that is fixed, normalised and unchanging. Here then is the kind of praxis that enabled Nelson Mandela to experience freedom in prison, while also at the same time his accepting responsibility for the other, whose pain and suffering he heard. Doing so was/is not a matter of “compassion” or “sympathy,” but a “placement with and alongside” which is solidarity – a “solidarity of the shaken” (Patocka). To hear the cry, the protest, of the other was/is to be decentred from the conditions of confinement (of which prison is just one example) and to allow the acceptance of responsibility to govern one’s destiny, as Mandela demonstrated. The truth of liberation as histories tell it, and as Dussel reiterated it as “liberative justice”. It can only arrive with the overcoming, displacement and destruction of the old order, as such it puts the very notion of “the system” into question. It follows that it cannot come to be by reform. The act of liberation breaches the restrictive orders of the past while simultaneously opening into future conditions of possibility. None of this happens without a praxis being prefigured to enfold: a historically constituted historical formation; the humanisation of technology; reconfigure conditions of exchange; and planning and design. But what of design? What is there to say? What can be heard against a backdrop of repetitious and overflowing instrumental chattering of so often trivial preoccupations.