Get down to business! New Non-Fiction Books: How Lockdown Gave Us New Freedom

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The French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) wrote that “all human misfortune springs from one thing, namely, from their inability to remain alone in their room at ease.” This proverb stands out noticeably above the frame from the movie “Safety is the last!” (1923): The scene shows the American comedian Harold Lloyd (1893–1971) desperately holding on to a clock on a skyscraper hanging high above the streets of New York City. I hung this poster from my student days in my home office during lockdown.

“I called it ‘the freedom to stay’ as a test,” writes German philosopher Eva von Redeker, 41, who made a lecture trip to the US impossible due to the pandemic. This, of course, is paradoxical: “Why talk about freedom in the face of a disrupted flight?” She did it anyway and is now publishing an inspiring book called Bleibefreiheit. Von Redeker rethought the concept of freedom, which from the time of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) included the absence of impediments to movement.

Freedom is usually understood as the ability to travel – this was the meaning in 1989 in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, this was the understanding in Switzerland on the way to Ticino last Pentecost weekend: to move freely from place to place. It’s no coincidence that the right-wing car party has since called itself the Swiss Freedom Party: free travel for free citizens – even if you get stuck in a tin body in miles of traffic jams in front of the Gotthard Tunnel.

Von Redeker contrasts this spatial thinking with the temporal concept. “The temporalization of freedom simply means that those with more time to live are freer,” she writes. How not to be so – the longer you have the opportunity to do business, the more freedom. If you don’t have to rush from one place to another, you suddenly gain time – an experience that many experienced for the first time during self-isolation, when everything stood still.

“My suggestion to think about freedom in terms of being shifts freedom from a spatial dimension to a temporal dimension,” says von Redeker, who has worked as a researcher in Berlin, New York and Cambridge. Today she lives as a writer in the countryside of Brandenburg. From the point of view of space, “stay” means stagnation, but from the point of view of time, it promises continuity. How great is the longing, all modern pop songs show about staying.

Von Redeker also recognizes the echoes of the fundamental political demands of modernity. “Against open-cast coal mining, the calls “All villages remain” are mobilized, and for the forest – “Danni remains”, “Moni remains” or “Fechi remains,” she writes. “We all stay” is a declaration of war on gentrification and eviction from the city. And against the backdrop of the deportation of refugees, there is a demand for a safe place to live.

Source: Blick