My thesis suggests that mastery, which is arguably the telos of the Western world, is a repressive reaction, the means by which the modern West has deliberately forgotten its subject-ivity, its subject-hood. Following Jean-Francois Lyotard, as he peregrinates among Marx, Freud, Kant, and Levinas, I examine the tendency, on the part of totalizing, dialectical philosophy, to hold emancipation as both the goal, and inevitable result, of history. I argue that the interminable quest for freedom is itself limiting, and that this irony might be suggestive of an alternative.