Page - 71 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

72 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom Walker (1776–77) – a text written during his stay on the island of Saint- Pierre situated in Lake Bienne – is emblematic: “In what consists the enjoyment of a like situation? In nothing external, nothing but one’s self, and our own existence; as long as this state lasts, we are sufficient to ourselves, like God. The sense of existence, stripped of every other affection, is of itself a precious sense of contentment and peace, which alone would suffice to render this existence lovely and sweet, to him who knows to remove from his mind all those terrestrial and sensual impressions which incessantly arise to distract and trouble our comfort here below” (Rousseau 1944, 221). What is at stake here is the birth of modern man through a process of sub- traction, immunization, abstraction, and depuration – like the process of the deconstruction of reality we find in Descartes’ Meditationes de prima philosophia. In the middle of an island or in a tour de librerie of a castle in Périgord (Montaigne), the solitary subjectivity withdrawn from the com- mon spheres becomes the irradiation centre of subjectivist particles in the surrounding environment, which are easily incorporated by other individ- uals. What gets slowly produced is a macrocosm of tendentially self-refer- ential subjects, who exercise a new potential of freedom as self-determi- nation, emancipation, and even estrangement with respect to the gravity of the status quo. During the 19th and 20th century, then, one witnesses what Bobbio defines as the “Copernican Revolution” of “the passage from the code of duties to the code of rights” (Bobbio 1997, 54). This anthropological, political, and juridical turn, however, not only affirms the individual liberties of the modern and postmodern subject within a process of emancipation from the traditional authorities and submissions (according to a substantially Kantian line), but it also reinforces the role of state power necessary for institutionalizing and regulating rights themselves, without nonetheless being able to encourage individuals’ trust in the social bond. Commenting on Rousseau’s perspective, Esposito writes: “Rousseau’s work constitutes the first demand of the community as our own truth, notwithstanding the contradiction that subtracts community from itself. As impossible as it is, the community is necessary. It is our What is at stake is the birth of modern man through a process of subtraction, immunization, abstraction, and depuration.