WWe stay at home” was one of the perseverance and motivational slogans that were posted on advertising pillars in urban areas and shared on social media on picture tiles to ensure continued consideration in the shared distance mode. If one follows Eva von Redecker’s recently published essay, this period of domestic withdrawal, which many experienced as a restriction of freedom, should not fall victim to collective oblivion quite so quickly, but could draw attention to a shortening of our concept of freedom, which is mostly designed to be spatial and focused on freedom of movement.
The author would like to relieve the concept of freedom from such imaginary worlds linked to the possibility of permanent change of location, apply it to the temporal and make it clear why in future “the desire to stay” must be used as a “measure of freedom”. What comes into view differently with this temporalization in contrast to the unlimitedness of space is the immovable limit of human death. This central systematic difference is mentioned rather casually: Limitation has a liberating effect, enables an attitude towards one’s own lifetime that recognizes the present here and now as a space of possibility for meaningful experience. So that one’s own lifetime does not become monotonous, Redecker relies on an idea of Hannah Arendt, describes “fulfilled time” as “time marked by new beginnings” and appreciates an experience of nature that shows the human being’s integration into an external, routine and guarantees a time structure that promises regularity.
Against environmental degradation or gentrification
She consequently renounces all transcendence and wants the “freedom to remain” to be understood in a completely secular way. After all, it is not only the late-modern people of the present who are caught up in the rhythms of capitalist activity who are looking for escapes from the precarious situation of finite availability of time. Redecker is reminiscent of Plato’s Socrates, who denied the conditions of his own existence by looking unperturbed at the imminent farewell to his philosophical friends shortly before his death, trusting in the immortality of the soul. Such a contempt for earthly existence is not to be had with their conception: “The lead individual must accept death.”
However, the text not only serves to visualize such existential borderline experiences, but also feeds on genuinely political signs of decay in recent years, which can also be understood in the use of the concept of freedom. Mandatory masks, speed limits, language policies – every form of collective self-limitation is experienced here as a restriction of one’s own arbitrary sphere and dismissed with a reference to freedom.
However, in order to avoid the impression that the thrust of the appeal resulted from the merely subjective imagination of an academic relieved of the pressure to travel, Redecker seeks protection in the demands of current social movements that, driven in the same way by the desire to stay, protest against environmental destruction or gentrification and themselves thus serve as a political subject of freedom to stay.
The superstition of the place
Understood from the side, the plea for the freedom to stay no longer seems quite as far-fetched and makeshift as the somewhat artificial neologism of the title-forming “freedom to stay” seems to suggest. And the concern to embark on the search for a concept of freedom that does not negatively define the changes in practiced ways of life that inevitably occur with the onset of the ecological crisis as compulsion, loss or renunciation can undoubtedly claim topicality for itself.
Nevertheless, the explanations often get lost in personal experiences, anecdotes and encounters. These are quite interesting in and of themselves, but sometimes stand in the way of the development of a coherent idea. However, the text provokes a different impression even more: as strategically plausible as it is against the background of the aptly described, world-forgotten freedom rhetoric of the present, to refer to dependencies on one’s fellow human beings, limitations due to one’s own finiteness and connections with external nature, it blows through Project in many places a defeatist, resigned move.
Unlike Redecker, who sees unrestrained phantasms of appropriation prevailing in the desire for distance from place and earth, in 1961 Emmanuel Levinas hailed the first departure of the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin into space as an opportunity to escape “the superstition of place”: “But what perhaps more important than anything else is the fact of having left the place. For an hour a human existed beyond any horizon – all around him was sky, or more precisely, all was geometric space. A human being existed in the absolute of homogeneous space.” But maybe sixty years later that’s really hard to hold.
Eva von Redecker: “Freedom to stay”. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2023. 160 pages, hardcover, €22.
#Eva #von #Redeckers #book #Freedom #Stay