The Politics of Breaking Up: Freedom and Ambivalence in Undoing the Ties that Bind

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Garsten, Bryan

Abstract

Living in a liberal democracy affords people the chance to cultivate intimate relationships—and the freedom to leave them behind. Yet ordinary experience suggests that breaking up is not so easy. Late capitalism and heteropatriarchal norms conspire to make the past haunt us and fresh beginnings elude us. While it may be hard to leave an intimate partner, it may be even harder to break up with ideals of the good life that tell us to stay the course or, at least, to try happiness again. Why is the freedom promised by breakups often so elusive? Are we wrong to think that breaking up can transform how we live and care for each other? This dissertation defends the transformative potential of breakups while it suggests why their emancipatory promise is much harder to achieve than liberal and feminist thought would have us believe. It argues that disentangling from an intimate relationship is itself a temporally expansive political process. Such a process includes calling a relationship into question, disentangling from attachments, and envisioning the future in breakup’s aftermath. Breakups suggest how collectively cultivated political consciousness may not always be enough to spur change. They disrupt common distinctions between self and other, or autonomy and dependency, and they inform how one rebuilds one’s life. The aftermath often involves a struggle against reactionary impulses or repeating patterns of the past. In giving a fine-grained account of this process, my project proposes that appreciating the temporal, material, and psychic complexities of breakups offers lessons for pursuing change on broader levels. Breakups urge one to call a specific relationship into question and to consider how to live differently, but they also offer an opportunity to scrutinize patterns of power and collective desires that organize political ideologies and civic life. I offer breakups as an architecture through which questions about the politics of subjectivity, narrative, and ethics may be pursued. Intimate life shapes our perceptions of what and who belongs, and in so doing, it orients our capacities of attention. Relationships arrest our affections, guide our sense of direction, and frame our visions of what seems possible. Because our ties with others inform the way we relate to our environments, ending a relationship is rarely clean. Residues of what formerly towered in one’s life narrative tend to remain. The undoing of any relationship typically requires reattachment and reassembly. Negation, pursued as a strategy or an end-goal, can only assist partially. One has to deal with the terms of residual entanglement, a task that is marked by ambivalence. This dissertation lingers with that ambivalence. Although breakups do not earn a person unencumbered freedom, they may help one become a practitioner of freedom. The second half of the project elaborates this point. I show how breakups demand alternative conceptions of responsibility and vulnerability, and I argue that breaking up, understood as an ongoing practice of freedom, requires an ethic of “critical ambivalence.” Critical ambivalence cultivates concern for historically-inscribed patterns of power and sensitivity to the contextual specificities of a relationship. As an ethic which urges one to discern and contend with residual attachments, critical ambivalence lends breaking up its transformative promise, not because it transforms individuals into unconstrained subjects but because it may enable them to be better encumbered. Critical ambivalence may allow one to break up well: to act with sensitivity, to be responsive to shared and distinct vulnerabilities, and to creatively envision and experiment with living anew.

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