Geneviève Rousselière’s insightful review of my book raises important questions about the particularities of the regenerative project in history as well as the prospects for a proposed “regenerative politics” today. She asks definitional questions about regeneration concerning its seemingly unshakeable racial and religious baggage. In the book, I do address the racial elements of the ideas of re- and degeneration in Buffon’s and Bonnet’s natural science; so too do I hope to have paid adequate attention to the debates about the racism of the language of “degeneracy” in the 18th century. I take Rousselière’s challenge about the racial dimension, then, to be one about my choice not to extend this work through my genealogy of the 19th into the 21st century. She is right to highlight that accounts of degeneracy are often united with fascistic nationalism or white supremacy. This is what I take the starting point of the book to be: that both de- and regeneration are currently bound up in this condemnable package. Perhaps I take too much for granted here, but my priority in the book is to de-couple regeneration from these solely negative connotations.

Rousselière also questions whether any idea of regeneration can escape its religious—that is, Christian—domain in its call for being born again. My answer is, I think, implicit in the book: that death and rebirth do not belong only to Christianity. Regeneration’s own 18th-century transformation as a term emerged out of Christian theology, but when it was refracted through scientific history, regeneration became natural and timeless. For all of the thinkers in the book, this transformation of regeneration into a condition of human nature was effected not only through fusing the Christian and natural scientific traditions but also through returning to the ancients, who held beliefs about metempsychosis and palingenesis. We have always been both subject to the world and involved in how it is determined—bringing things into being and having them dissolve. Seeing regeneration and rebirth as before and beyond the Christian conception, the future is then imbued with all the potentiality that history and our imaginations can provide. Importantly, returning to the ancients and naturalizing regeneration also sheds the concept of any messianism. “Regenerative politics” is cyclical and involves the persistent awareness that reconstitution does not guarantee a progressive history or redemptive future.

The question about what it means, practically speaking, for us to embrace regenerative politics is perhaps the most pressing one, and also the one that I left intentionally open. The power of remaking that belongs to the self-regenerative human being is universal, but its effects are historically contingent. “Self-determination,” for example, I take to be the most potent way to express this regenerative capacity in our current political moment, and also the term that has the most resonance with contemporary political language. My main concern was to emphasize the openness to all forms of politics that a self-determinative ethos must entail—an openness that I claim is denied by the liberal democratic order. This does imply that our institutions need to be refounded to be given new life, but not necessarily that they must be discarded. For a truly regenerative politics, constitutions, bills of rights, legal institutions, and so on must be seen not as permanent but as perpetually subject to human remaking. As I conclude in the book, my purpose was to demonstrate what is required of an absolute commitment to self-determinative politics; if this proves to be too unstable, impractical, or risky, we simply need to be more honest about what our political world is serving and what it is sacrificing.

In fact, I take my goal to be very similar to Rousselière’s own in Sharing Freedom: to make our readers take a hard look at the historical and current realities of the commitments to freedom we all claim to hold, either as liberals (in my case) or republicans (in hers). In this project, I am happy to have such a strong critic, and ally, in Rousselière.