Seite - 131 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Band 2:2

132 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom 1 Opening: From Camus to Neoliberalist Freedom In 1954, the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus gave a lecture in the Remonstrant Church in The Hague. The church was rented for the jubilee anniversary of the Booksellers Association of The Hague, and it was packed, fuller than during most services. The lecture, entitled “De kunstenaar en zijn tijd” [“The Artist and His Time”], has a fascinating his- tory. The text was never found in Camus’ estate and had been long forgot- ten. But when the booksellers celebrated their next 50-year anniversary in 2004, a copy of Camus’ lecture was unexpectedly discovered in the dusty archives and then translated into Dutch and published in the literary jour- nal Raster.2 Camus was the odd man out in the fashionable existentialism of that time. His book The Rebel (1951) got trashed in Les Temps modernes, the existen- tialists’ home journal, and Sartre’s attacks on Camus’ philosophy were devastating. In his lecture in The Hague, Camus diagnoses the role of art in post-war European societies. But his argument is primarily a concentrated treatment of freedom, in which he tries to position himself over against his existentialist critics. For Camus, freedom is not so much the freedom to engage with the “project” we call history – a history in which Sartre had willingly assigned himself a leading role. Instead, freedom is first and foremost an activity of creation, and this creating activity has something strange about it: it requires engagement in the world precisely by means of disengagement. “How can this strange freedom of creation survive in the midst of so many ideological police forces?” (Camus 2004, 156) This is the question Camus raises at the beginning of his lecture. He argues that freedom is an activity of creation because it “creates its own order.” (Camus 2004, 167) Freedom does not engage a priori with the existing order in order to change or im- prove it. Freedom creates something completely new and unexpected with- in the existing order, and this requires both detachment and discipline. The freedom Camus seeks is thus not estranged from the world; rather, it brings the strange into the world. Camus here touches on a point that has become increasingly important in contemporary theory of art, such as in the work of the Austrian philosopher Konrad-Paul Liessmann. For Liessmann, free- dom points to the “asocial” and “ruthless” nature of modern art (Liess- mann 1991). Art should not be socially relevant or economically profitable, an idea that is completely foreign to today’s art policy. 1 Parts of sections 1 and 2 of this ar- ticle are adapted and translated from my inaugural lecture in 2016, De vreemde vrijheid. Nieuwe betekenis- sen van vrijzinnigheid en humanisme in de 21ste eeuw [Strange Freedom: New Meanings of Liberal Religion and Humanism in the 21st Century], Amsterdam: Sjibbolet 2016. Parts of sections 3 and 4 are adapted and translated from my “Sacraliteit en seculariteit. Over de complexe relatie tussen humanisme en religie” [“Sa- crality and Secularity: On the Com- plex Relation between Humanism and Religion”], in: Coene, Gily / Van den Bossche, Marc (eds.), Vrij(heid) van religie [Free(dom) from Religion], Brussels: VUB Press 2015, 45–82; and from my “The Play of the World: Social Imaginaries as Transcending Spaces – from Taylor to Nietzsche,” in: Alma, Hans / Vanheeswijck, Guido (eds.), Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World, Berlin: De Gruyter 2017, 119–139. I am very grateful to Paul Rasor for his contribution to the translation. 2 Camus 2004. All translations P. Rasor.