On Freedom

Reviews / Votes

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 Juenger 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