The experience of freedom

Bibliographic Information

The experience of freedom

Jean-Luc Nancy ; translated by Bridget McDonald ; with a foreword by Peter Fenves

(Meridian : crossing aesthetics / Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery, editors)

Stanford University Press, 1993

  • :alk. paper
  • :pbk. : alk. paper

Other Title

Expérience de la liberté

Uniform Title

Expérience de la liberté

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-207) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

:alk. paper ISBN 9780804721752

Description

This is the most systematic, the most radical, and the most lucid treatise on freedom that has been written in contemporary Continental philosophy. Finding its guiding motives in Kant's second Critique and working its way up to and beyond Heidegger and Adorno, this book marks the most advanced position in the thinking of freedom that has been proposed after Sartre and Levinas. If we do not think being itself as a freedom, we are condemned to think of freedom as a pure 'idea' or 'right', and being-in-the-world, in turn, as a blind and obtuse necessity. Since Kant, philosophy and our world have relentlessly confronted this schism. To combat this renunciation of freedom, one must think the experience of freedom in thought itself: what it is that, simply in order for there to be thinking, must partake of freedom.
Volume

:pbk. : alk. paper ISBN 9780804721905

Description

This is the most systematic, the most radical, and the most lucid treatise on freedom that has been written in contemporary Continental philosophy. Finding its guiding motives in Kant's second Critique and working its way up to and beyond Heidegger and Adorno, this book marks the most advanced position in the thinking of freedom that has been proposed after Sartre and Levinas. One could call it a fundamental ontology of freedom if freedom, according to the author, did not entail liberation from foundational acts and the overcoming of any logic that determines the way ontology does, by positing being either as self-sufficient position or as subjected to strictly immanent laws. Once existence no longer offers itself as an empiricity that must be related to its conditions of possibility or sublated in a transcendence beyond itself, but instead as sheer factuality, we must think this fact, the fact of existence as the essence of itself, as freedom. The question is no longer "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Instead, it becomes "Why these very questions by which existence affirms itself and abandons itself in a single gesture?" If we do not think being itself as a freedom, we are condemned to think of freedom as pure "Idea" or "right," and being-in-the-world, in turn, as a blind and obtuse necessity. Since Kant, philosophy and our world have relentlessly confronted this scission.

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Details

  • NCID
    BA2245588X
  • ISBN
    • 0804721750
    • 0804721904
  • LCCN
    93016348
  • Country Code
    us
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Original Language Code
    fre
  • Place of Publication
    Stanford, Calif.
  • Pages/Volumes
    xxxi, 210 p.
  • Size
    23 cm
  • Classification
  • Subject Headings
  • Parent Bibliography ID
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