On Freedom: Technology, Capital, Medium

Description

How do we challenge the structures of late capitalism if all possible media through which to do do is inescapably capitalist? This urgent political question is at the heart of Peter Trawny's major new work. With searing precision Trawny demonstrates how our world has become wholly determined by technology, capital, and the medium. In this world of the 'TCM', we universal subjects remain in a state of apathy that is temporarily punctuated, but also reinforced, by the phantasmatic dream of difference offered us by the 'Hollywood machine.' Our sole motivation is to gain money and the power it brings. The only meaningful difference in the world of the TCM universal is the difference between wealth and poverty. Freedom is then only the freedom to dispose of things (particularly technological objects) and to gain pleasure. It makes our relation to our surroundings essentially 'touristic,' and our relation to the earth an essentially exploitative one. The notion of personal or societal freedom has never been more controversial or, seemingly, more far from our grasp. While exploring in details the difficulties we face in our attempts to be free, Trawny builds a vision of how to break out of the mediums in which we operate and experience a new kind of freedom. Escape from the TCM universal is impossible. Yet philosophy itself is the impossible. So when Trawny writes that "escape-the other-is impossible," we can read this both as "escape is impossible" and as "escape is the impossible," that is, the only possible escape is through philosophy.

Peter Trawny is Professor of Philosophy at Bergische University, Wuppertal, Germany. A specialist in phenomenological and hermeneutical political philosophy and aesthetics, he is the author of books on Heidegger, Hegel, Arendt, and Plato, and a co-editor of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, or the complete works (vol. 35, 69.73, 90). Richard Lambert is a translator based in Berlin. He gained his PhD in philosophy from the University of Warwick.

On Freedom gives us a stark and striking vision of the modern global order. By emphasizing the necessity and seamlessness of our technological, economic, and communicative systems, Peter Trawny paradoxically incites us to dream of something else: a realm of genuine freedom, "impossible" though it may be. Taking inspiration from figures such as Ernst Junger and Martin Heidegger but contributing telling insights of his own, Trawny has produced a disturbing, provocative book. -- Richard Polt, Professor of Philosophy, Xavier University, USA Trawny is familiar to many in the English speaking world as the editor of Heidegger's infamous Black Notebooks. He has also published incisive and original works that deal frontally and without subterfuge or apologetics with Heidegger's - now established beyond any doubt - anti-Semitism. Yet, Trawny is more than an editor and exegete. He is also an original philosopher, writing in arresting German, beautifully captured in his excellent translation by Richard Lambert. Marcuse sought to synthesize Marx and Heidegger in the early thirties of the last century, before he had to escape from Nazi Germany. Habermas carried the challenge by turning away from Heidegger and taking up Searle, Wittgenstein, Mead, and Durkheim, while leaving behind Marx. This book aims to show how we can philosophize about our modern condition, while updating and renewing Marx, Marcuse, Habermas and Derrida, in one heady and poetic synthesis. For Marx, economics was part of philosophy, because it was about elucidating the impossible possibility of freedom. Trawny shows us how we can think freedom from out of our new conditions of necessity: the entanglement of Technology, Capital, and the ever emergent media of the technological medium. -- Eduardo Mendieta, Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor in the School of International Affairs, Penn State University, USA