On Freedom: Technology, Capital, Medium

How do we challenge the structures of late capitalism if all possible media through which to do do is inescapably capitalist? This urgent political question is at the heart of Peter Trawny’s major new work.

With searing precision Trawny demonstrates how our world has become wholly determined by technology, capital, and the medium. In this world of the ’TCM’, we universal subjects remain in a state of apathy that is temporarily punctuated, but also reinforced, by the phantasmatic dream of difference offered us by the ’Hollywood machine.’ Our sole motivation is to gain money and the power it brings. The only meaningful difference in the world of the TCM universal is the difference between wealth and poverty. Freedom here is then the freedom to dispose of things (particularly technological objects) and to gain pleasure. It makes our relation to our surroundings essentially ’touristic, ’ and our relation to the earth an essentially exploitative one.

The notion of personal or societal freedom has never been more controversial or, seemingly, more far from our grasp. While exploring in details the difficulties we face in our attempts to be free, Trawny builds an almost Utopian vision of how to break out of the mediums in which we operate and experience a new kind of freedom - both one of intimacy, and one through philosophy. An ambitious and lively yet completely rigorous work, this book offers a fascinating vision of how to live and live well

Peter Trawny is Professor of Philosophy at Bergische University, Wuppertal, Germany. A specialist in phenomenological and hermeneutical political philosophy and aesthetics, he is the author of books on Heidegger, Hegel, Arendt, and Plato, and a co-editor of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, or the complete works (vol. 35, 69.73, 90).

Richard Lambert is a translator based in Berlin. He gained his PhD in philosophy from the University of Warwick.