Summer School: Emancipating the Concept of Freedom

“Emancipation” is a signature theme and unifying leitmotif of the intellectual, political and artistic discourses in the modern paradigm as well as in postmodern critique-projects and reviews. However, current debates have yet to take the measure of the difference between the liberating “freedom from” and the empowering “freedom to do.”

In what navigational mode can the history and future of Western rationalism be narrated and, as an emancipatory project, prospectively conceived, beyond the underlying universals? With what cognitive techniques and practices can the abstract space of reason, as a multitude of particular and concrete spaces of freedom and expanded practices of human existence, be surveyed so that it may be negotiated anew?

In pursuit of answers to these questions, the Summer School, conceived by Armen Avanessian and Reza Negarestani, will navigate transversally between forms of knowledge and perspectives of the widest-ranging fields and disciplines – from mathematics to politics, from literature to history. On two evenings, with the assistance of consulting experts, interim results and theses will be put up for public discussion.

Conceived by Armen Avanessian (philosopher, Berlin), Ray Brassier (philosopher, Beirut) and Peter Wolfendale (philosopher, Sunderland).

Seminar facilitators: Lucca Fraser, Pete Wolfendale, Anke Hennig, Deneb Kozikoski, Ben Singelton, James Traffor, Reza Negarestani, Armen Avanessian

In cooperation with