[csaa-forum] "Farewell to Freedom: and to the individual too" Research Seminar, Centre for Human Rights Education

[Baden Offord]

Centre for Human Rights Education

Curtin University

Research Seminar Series

Thursday 21 February 2019

Time: 3 – 4pm

Venue: Education Boardroom, Level 3

Building 501, Curtin University, Bentley


Riccardo Baldissone

"Farewell to Freedom: and to the individual too"


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 is a Fellow at the University of Westminster, London. Riccardo has 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 evolution of the logic of analogy in Roman law, the medieval emergence of conceptual discourse, and the transformations of modern naturalism. Riccardo is currently working at a genealogy of the Western notions of freedom.


Among his recent publications: ‘Towards a Grammar of the Multiverse: A Genealogical Reconsideration of Humans and Places,’ in Diaspora, Law and Literature, Daniela Carpi and Klaus Stierstorfer eds. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); ‘Mystical Bodies and Bodies of Law: On Juridical Theology and the (Re)Foundations of the West,’ in Fables of the Law, Daniela Carpi and Marett Leiboff eds. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); ‘With Teeth and Nails: The Embodied Inservitude of Étienne de La Boétie,’ in Performing the Renaissance Body, Sidia Fiorato and John Drakakis eds. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).


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


Bookings:

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/chre-research-seminar-1-2019-tickets-55686904029





Professor Baden Offord, PhD
Haruhisa Handa Chair of Human Rights
Director | Centre for Human Rights Education
Research Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights

School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University
T: | +61 8 9266 7186
E: | baden.offord at curtin.edu.au
W|http://humanrights.curtin.edu.au<http://humanrights.curtin.edu.au/>
CRICOS Provider Code 00301J (WA)

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