The romantic reconception of freedom: Cavell, Frank, Nancy, Blanchot.

摘要

In recent debates on the philosophy of subject, one important trend is to recover freedom for the subject Heidegger and his French followers deconstructed. Though it is left undefined, the meaning of the word "freedom" that is operative in such arguments seems to be, roughly, self-possession: the reconstructed subject is thought to be free to the extent that it exerts proprietary control over itself in opposition to linguistic, material, economic or historical forces it encounters. Through a study of four contemporary philosophers---Stanley Cavell, Manfred Frank, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Blanchot---this dissertation challenges such arguments. The thesis is that the endorsement of the idea that freedom means self-possession declines into an insistence on the separation from the world and (especially) from others who resist the operation of appropriation that is this "free" subject's mode of being in the world. Drawing together the work of these philosophers, the dissertation argues that adhering to the notion that freedom conceived as possession tends to seal the subject off from the very other towards whom the (reconstituted) subject would conduct itself ethically.;Having assessed the danger to ethics this concept of freedom poses, the dissertation follows Cavell, Frank, Nancy, and Blanchot in their turn to Romanticism for a "reconception" of freedom that takes place in this literary moment that marks for them the threshold of the modern era. In their readings of the poetry of such Romantics as Wordsworth, Novalis, and Rimbaud, the philosophers find the poets abandoning the first, potentially lethal concept of freedom and thereby giving occasion to the "reconception" of a (roughly Heideggerean) notion of freedom according to which the subject is free to the degree that it is engaged in the open disclosure of Being and standing in an ethical relation with the other. Finally, in readings of key texts by the four philosophers, the dissertation shows each writing in his philosophy a repetition of this essential moment of Romanticism, his own abdication of freedom conceived as self-ownership, and thus opening himself up to the experience of a freedom that conditions the possibility for ethics.