The following paper was presented at the Seventh Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–17, 2013, in New York City.
The philosopher John Caputo starts off his review of Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank’s debate book, The Monstrosity of Christ, by claiming that “Materialism just isn’t what it used to be. Nowadays everyone wants to be a materialist, even the theologians, while the materialists want to look like they lead a spiritual life.”[1] Caputo goes on to claim that today’s battle is “no longer between materialism and idealism, or hard-nosed Newtonians and far out spirit-seers, but between ‘materialist materialism’ and ‘theological materialism’,” and he continues and qualifies, “between crude soulless materialism and materialism with spirit.”[2]
The following essay takes as its conceptual core an investigation into the relation between time and political subjectivity, which is undertaken through a reading of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. The latter’s theorization of liberty and progress is contrasted to the former’s understanding of the political subject via an eschato-theological understanding of time. Ultimately Mill’s position—as a “stand-in” for modernity—will be found to be unjustifiable in its uncritical distinguishing between time and the (political) subject, thereby laying the groundwork for what is perhaps the dominant paradigm of political philosophy today: political not metaphysical. A subplot in the essay argues that Mill’s well-known endorsement of British imperialism can be traced to these problems besetting the theoretical relations between political liberty, time, and notions of progress. Through a constructive reading of Mill (finding echoes and cross-stitching the System of Logic and his political writings) and Locke (finding echoes and cross-stitching the Treatises and Reasonableness of Christianity), we hope to revisit the problem of the political subject though time. In the light of this, the conclusion engages the work of Foucault and Koselleck as they “overlap” in an evaluation of modernity in its temporal articulation. 
Cornelius Castoriadis’s opening line in “Socialism and Autonomous Society”—”Henceforth, the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ will have to be abandoned”—clearly indicate that he is breaking with orthodox Marxism. But one must not rush to a conclusion since upon closer inspection the dissonances are not that relevant to Marx’s overall project as presented by Castoriadis. His criticism of notions such as the “dictatorship of the proletariat” could automatically place him outside the Marxist discourse. Nevertheless he manages to illustrate, even within orthodox Marxism, the minor position of canonical notions, compared to Marx’s essential project of an autonomous society: a society composed of free and sovereign people. 
Autonomy is, arguably, the most fundamental concept in the discursive constellation of modernity. If it is apposite, and I believe it is, to think in terms of the differentiation between political, socio-economic, and cultural modernities, then it is clear that the concept of autonomy—either with reference to the autonomous individual or the autonomous work of art—is a constitutive force within each sphere. In “Saving the Subject: Modernity and the Problem of the Autonomous Individual,” Joel Whitebook offers a historically nuanced overview of the difficulties involved in thinking the “autonomous individual” under the conditions of a dynamic and increasingly complex modernity. Whitebook’s piece is wide-ranging and fuses a deep psychoanalytic insight with a robust sociological consciousness: a fusion that accompanies, to my mind, the best critical theory. To be sure, the many subtleties and divergences that emerge from Whitebook’s dialectic are resistant to a full reconstruction within this preview. Rather, I would like to simplify Whitebook’s account by drawing out the three historical epochs examined by Whitebook and say a few things regarding the key aspects of Whitebook’s reading of Marx and Freud and Adorno and Habermas as thinkers who most significantly appreciate the problematic nature of the modern, autonomous individual. Finally, I conclude by arguing for the innovative character of Whitebook’s thoughts regarding the centrality of affective relationships in the formation of the autonomous individual. 
