Prof. Dr. Veronica Galfione

Research Project

Aesthetic freedom in post-Kantian thinking

The planned research stay in Germany forms part of a broader project that examines the relationship between the contemporary culture industry—particularly in its digital, platform-based configurations—and the rise of new authoritarian movements. The point of departure is the following diagnostic hypothesis: the contemporary culture industry fosters the emergence of authoritarian movements by promoting a conception of freedom that originated in modernity and places the figure of the Ipse at its center. This figure can be understood as a sovereign and proprietary subject: a self constituted primarily through self-assertion, autonomy, and the power of disposal, conceiving of itself both as the owner of itself and of the world. Within authoritarian movements, this conception acquires particular force insofar as it stabilizes an understanding of freedom oriented toward demarcation, exclusion, and the enforcement of a homogeneous will.

On the basis of this diagnosis, the project argues for the necessity of developing an alternative conception of freedom and proposes to do so by reopening the aesthetic dimension. It assumes that the aesthetic tradition that emerged in the late eighteenth century offers concepts of freedom that stand in contrast to the dominant understanding and enable processes of social emancipation that do not necessarily culminate in relations of domination.