Page - 133 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

134 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom Despite the “end of the grand narratives,” the large-scale stories and interpretive frameworks that help us navigate our lives,4 our continent seemingly becomes more and more like a fort. The freedoms of post-War Europe are under pressure. And the blame cannot be placed on refugees, let alone Muslims. Rather, the cause of this crisis can be found in one of the ideologies Camus referred to, which has survived and has now achieved a complete monopoly: that of the world as a neoliberal market where every person is the entrepreneur of his or her own existence. It could well be that this neoliberal view of freedom is precisely what is gradually undermining the quality of life of the public space today, the res publica. I am referring to the functionalizing, formalizing, minimalizing and deculturalizing5 of the public space, of the public order and public ser- vices – education, health care and communication, for example – as these are carried out by a retreating government. This is an enormous problem, perhaps the most difficult and dangerous problem of our time. How does this problem relate to the theme of freedom, and to freedom’s alleged strangeness? The call for another sort of freedom, one that Camus calls “creating,” is more relevant than ever. Can his question help us reach a new understand- ing of freedom, one that is not completely entangled in the freedom of the market? Why did Camus call the freedom he sought a strange freedom? Because freedom brings us face-to-face with the strange in the world, in ourselves? In order to reflect further on the relationship between freedom, strangeness, creativity and the world, I will draw on thinkers that can of- fer different approaches beyond Camus: Charles Taylor, Peter Sloterdijk, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Hannah Arendt. Their thinking opens up the realm of play and imagination as vital features of freedom, marking freedom’s strangeness. Before we get to this discussion (in sections 3 and 4), I aim to demonstrate to what extent the liberal-religious traditions emerging in the modern era shed new light on the problem of freedom sketched out above. 4 On the postmodern collapse of grand narratives, see Rasor 2005, 63–64. 5 See, for example, Groeneweg 2016, 12: “The [neoliberal] belief in a free relationship with culture evokes the illusion that we are independent of cultural conditioning. […] That is the trend that leaves us blindly at the The world as a neoliberal market: functionalizing, formalizing, minimalizing and deculturalizing the public space, the public order and public services. The call for another sort of freedom is more relevant than ever.