Join the Centre for Human Rights Education for the first in our Research Seminar Series for 2019 with guest speaker Dr Riccardo Baldissone.

Farewell to freedom: and to the individual too

About the seminar:

There was a time before freedom, which first appeared in its Greek version eleutheria in the poems of Pindar, at the beginning of the fifth century BCE. Since then, a plurality of Greek, Latin, and then vernacular derived words not only populated Western texts, but variously shaped Western culture and politics. Nowadays, it seems impossible even to imagine a world after freedom, and after its (nominally) current bearer, the Western individual subject. Yet, one may suspect that such a double supposed impossibility makes us hostages of the neoliberal horizon, with its simplistic ideology of individual competition and its ferocious ethics of disregard for the others. What if each of us is trapped within an individual cage, and (individual) freedom is little more than the justification of this prison? The narration of the overlapping and interweaving stories of liberty, autonomy, and freedom over the last twenty-five centuries may help us to bid farewell to both freedom and the individual, in order to let another world grow: a world in which human dignity and respect are built on the careful participation in the life of each other.

About the speaker

Dr Riccardo Baldissone

Fellow at the University of Westminster, London. Riccardo reconsidered human rights discourse within the modern theoretical framework: furthering his genealogical commitment, his research spans the Greek construction of the logic of identity, the medieval emergence of conceptual discourse, and the transformations of modern naturalism. His most recent publication is Farewell to Freedom: A Western Genealogy of Liberty (London: University of Westminster Press, 2018). He is currently completing a companion book on Western processes of individuation, Autós, which will be in print in 2019 for Rowman and Littlefield.

Open access download: Farewell to Freedom: A Western Genealogy of Liberty

Academia webpage: https://westminster.academia.edu/RiccardoBaldissone

Email address: riccardobaldissone@yahoo.com.au

To find the venue, come to the reception on level 3 of Building 501 at Curtin University, turn right and go through the glass sliding doors, past the kitchen area and room 313 is on your left before the next set of glass doors.

Please note: Curtin University is a Smoke Free campus.