This book was born out of a simple thought experiment. How can we define freedom?
While political philosophy has offered us an impressive array of such definitions
over millennia, it quickly becomes apparent that any positive definition of freedom
demonstrates its own insufficiency at the very moment of its enunciation. The very
act of predicating certain qualities and attributes to the subject of freedom logically
invites the question of whether this subject must not retain the capacity to become
free from these very qualities and attributes to remain genuinely free. As soon as
we triumphantly conclude, on the basis of studious research or a spark of creative
genius, that freedom is this or that, this very conclusion instantaneously calls forth
the spectre of another freedom, a freedom from the very ‘this or that’ that we so
arduously tried to posit as its essence. Perhaps, freedom is nothing but this spectre
itself, which keeps rupturing our most rigorous definitions, ensuring that the question
of freedom remains a philosophical problem that must prohibit its own solution. If
political philosophy recurrently manages to awaken from the dogmatic slumber that
it so keenly falls into, this is probably because the spectre of freedom continues to
haunt its discourse, simultaneously marking its radical insufficiency and rendering
impossible any attempt at its successful completion. Thus, to remain faithful to its
own spectre, freedom must always be thought as both absolute and undefinable,
absolutely undefinable in positive terms.