I want to thank Jimmy Casas Klausen for the review of my book. Klausen and I share a commitment to explore the meaning of slavery and slavery’s significance for deciphering the concept of freedom. For me, the notion of marronage—as both a concept and lived experience of flight in its different modalities—serves as a compelling heuristic to answer questions about the dialectic of slavery and freedom often left unexplored in contemporary studies of politics.

I appreciate Klausen’s account of two facets of my argumentation in Freedom as Marronage: 1) the articulation of the category of disavowal and the traumatic effects of disavowing slavery and slave agency and 2) emphasis on slave agency. This second point, as Klausen aptly notes, fundamentally differentiations marronage and the book’s overall framework from Orlando Patterson’s celebrated—albeit misguided—theory of slavery as a form of social death and conception of slaves as, in effect, living zombies without an intrinsic capacity for agency.

There are three areas, however, I wish to focus this brief response on. They highlight Klausen’s constructive critique and concerns I have about misreadings of what I wrote and incomplete documentation of the book’s content.

First, to Klausen’s biggest “hesitation”: the expanded notion of marronage I present. Klausen is correct that the book aims to move beyond the following conventional division of marronage into two notions of flight: petit and grand marronage. My introduction of additional types of marronage—sovereign and sociogenic—, in Klausen’s estimation, “blunts the critical purchase of marronage” and privileges “fight against flight, macro- against meso- or micropolitical practices.”

A confession: yes, I care about revolutionary politics! That does not, though, mean I have jettisoned concerns for micro-level analyses and crucial insights garnered from the fugitive experiences, practices, and thought of individuals and isolationist communities fleeing regimes of slavery. The book seeks to distill how we can interpret those actions along with forms of slave agency involving collectivities and acts of flight at the macro-level. Also, Klausen’s “fight against flight” formulation simply misrepresents my book. Fight, as an act of struggle, is itself integral to processes of flight. The explication of Frederick Douglass, let alone the rest of the book, aims to make this clear.

Second, while reviews cannot include everything, it is striking what readers would not learn based on Klausen’s review. Intricate inquiries into the thought of British Romanticist Samuel Taylor Coleridge and philosopher and black feminist Angela Y. Davis mediate the book’s discussion of Douglass. I mention this because a key subtext of the monograph is an attempt to push scholars in the social sciences to rethink the texts, figures, and movements we draw upon to study ideas. Moreover, the book’s most controversial claim arguably is the assertion that human beings (past, present, and future) are born enslaved and freedom is the process of flight from various forms of enslavement. This adage does not apply only to the modern period as Klausen suggests.

Finally, after reading Fugitive Rousseau and the last two paragraphs of Klausen’s review, I am reminded that, while my training is in political science, my intellectual vocation is interdisciplinary. Klausen’s commentary on experience and blueprint illuminate how my views of lived experience are shaped by the phenomenological, political, cognitive, and conceptions of existence linked to metaphysics that may appear heretical to political scientists. Metaphors are not my preoccupation. Sometimes heresy is necessary to change normative interpretations of freedom shrouded in disavowal and epistemological provincialism.