Freedom at the end of history

CARLA GALFIONE

Congreso; Paradoxes of Autonomy: Normativity, Liberation and Domination; 2024

This paper examines Alexandre Kojève's conception of the end of history in the light of contemporary discussions on the problem of freedom. It aims to show that the crossroads to which Kojève's approach leads, forcing us to choose between a bloody history and an animal post-history, cannot be avoided unless we abandon the conception of freedom as self-determination, that is, unless we stop thinking of freedom as the capacity of the mind to overcome external determination and reach a higher form of (self-)determination. For this purpose, I will take as a reference the interpretation of freedom as "aesthetic liberation" proposed by Christoph Menke. As I will try to show, it is only in the aesthetic realm that it is possible to go back to the moment before the constitution of subjectivity and reconstruct a form of freedom that separates negation from determination, that is, in which negation is not oriented toward the production of a new state of determination, and thus does not establish a new form of domination, as in the case of the post-historical relapse into immediacy to which Kojève's approach leads.