Page - 137 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

138 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom ago local or national regulations were sufficient. Our ‘symbolic cages’ are thrown open one by one whether we like it or not, a process that exceeds the reach of human capacities. Globalization is not something we do; rather, it happens to us – and we have to take it seriously and try to steer it as best we can. That is the mes- sage of Sloterdijk’s captivating essay You Must Change your Life (2013): in a world that has become impossibly large and complex, humanity must continuously recreate itself. Humanity is characterized by an “autoplastic constitution”, Sloterdijk states (2013, 110). This is also picked up in the sub- title of his essay On Anthropotechnics. Human beings work on themselves, always searching; they are their own “self-technique” or “self-practice,” as Michel Foucault called it (1998). Here too, humanity is anything but an answer: Humanity is the search for itself – a strange paradox, for such an assignment would mean that humanity ‘is’ nothing in itself. It lacks es- sence. Camus would confirm this and draw the conclusion that precisely because of this lack, humanity is free – a strange freedom. 3 Why is Freedom Strange? On Creation and Imagination The freedom that humanity appropriates since the axial age is a creating freedom, as Camus calls it. Creation appears in a double meaning here: the first is one of objectification, the second of subjectification. Firstly, I cre- ate the world and make it into my world, and secondly, I create myself in this world. In this double movement, sense is shaped, always temporal. The attribution of sense is thus essentially embedded in a creational act. One gives sense to the world, but this world then becomes a place to live – it returns sense to us. Sense is not only a donative gesture (we give sense to…) but also simultaneously a donation, a gift.8 Hence, creation is a particular and remarkable type of action: not the making of a product by a producer, or, philosophically put, of a subject remaining external to the object subjected to it, but a strange interplay between sub- ject and object that in the end renders problematic this opposition proper. Beyond Negative and Positive Liberty The freedom explored here does not mean the modern liberty to realize the self through self-assertion. Thus, strange freedom is in conflict with 8 This is also the structure of the gift as described by Jacques Derrida in his Given Time (Derrida 2017). Jean-Luc Marion adopts a similar schema but rephrases it in the on- tological terminology of being (cf. Marion 2002).