Antonio Matacena

Research Project

Autonomy, Self-Possession, Subjectivity, and the Conditions of Freedom.

My secondment at the Universität Potsdam forms part of REACT, an MSCA Staff Exchanges project investigating contemporary forms of authoritarian subjectivation through the relation between freedom, cultural production, and aesthetic experience. During the Potsdam phase, hosted by the Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy, I will engage with the post-Kantian conceptual framework developed within WP1, with particular attention to debates concerning autonomy, self-possession, subjectivity, and the conditions of freedom.

The main aim of my secondment is to acquire, discuss, and systematise these theoretical results and contribute to their transfer to the Bologna research unit. There, they will be reconsidered from an aesthetic and phenomenological perspective and translated into research-creation prompts capable of informing the work of the artistic and cultural partners involved in the subsequent phases of the project.

This task closely intersects with my doctoral research, situated at the crossroads of phenomenology, Critical Theory, and embodied approaches to normativity and experience. My work is particularly concerned with the ways in which subjects are constituted through embodied, affective, narrative, and social structures. Within this framework, I am interested in the role of narratives and social imaginaries in shaping processes of subjectivation, as well as in their capacity to sustain, naturalise, or potentially disrupt forms of authority and ideological reproduction. My contribution to REACT will therefore focus on mediating between post-Kantian theories of freedom and phenomenological-aesthetic accounts of experience, subject formation, and alterity, with particular attention to how these conceptual tensions may be productively explored through artistic practice.

This project is conducted as part of the Marie Curie Staff Exchange Project REACT, examining how the dynamics of the contemporary culture industry and digital capitalism expose the crisis of contemporary liberalism, reshape subjectivity, and foster authoritarian tendencies.