The Subject of Freedom explores the idea of freedom theoretically as the limit that enables thinking, and practically as something other that constitutes subjectivity. Kant's introduction in the third antinomy of an unconditioned freedom necessitates “the human being” that would embody it. In being constituted by freedom, this book proposes, the subject plays the role of the unconditioned that bounds objectivity. But explaining how freedom constitutes ethical subjects lies beyond reason's reach. The challenge practical philosophy faces is explaining how something that exceeds knowledge constit ... More

The Subject of Freedom explores the idea of freedom theoretically as the limit that enables thinking, and practically as something other that constitutes subjectivity. Kant's introduction in the third antinomy of an unconditioned freedom necessitates “the human being” that would embody it. In being constituted by freedom, this book proposes, the subject plays the role of the unconditioned that bounds objectivity. But explaining how freedom constitutes ethical subjects lies beyond reason's reach. The challenge practical philosophy faces is explaining how something that exceeds knowledge constitutes subjectivity and manifests itself through the subject's effects in the world. Traversed by an excess that lies beyond reason's ability to represent, what we here call subjectivity surpasses the bounds of self-conscious identity and its impulse to represent world and self as objects of thought. What, then, is ethical subjectivity? What is its relationship with the excess that allows it to emerge? Tracing Kant's concept of freedom from the Critique of Pure Reason to his practical works, this book elaborates some of Kant's most challenging insights in dialogue with Levinas's Otherwise than Being. It proposes that Otherwise than Being offers a deeply Kantian critique of Kant that pursues Kant's most revolutionary insights into ethics to their ultimate consequences, shedding unprecedented light on them. These insights, which have not necessarily prevailed in our time, have the potential to surprise and energize our thinking on the ethical and the political today. This book ultimately argues that the autonomous subjectivity freedom constitutes must be understood as a relationship with the alterity or excess that animates its core.