Marie-Eve Morin

This essay originally appeared in French as the Introduction to Joëlle Zask’s Quand la forêt brûle. Penser la nouvelle catastrophe écologique (Premier Parallèle, 2019). The book received France Culture’s 2020 Petrarch Essay Prize, which is awarded each year to a work that sheds light on contemporary democratic issues. When the Forest Burns examines the recent phenomenon of very large wildfires or megafires and human beings’ relationship to them. Due to climate change, the size of these wildfires are on a different scale and unprecedented, they are no longer able to be controlled or contained by human beings, and they are becoming more common and increasing in size. Zask, a specialist in democratic theory, John Dewey, and aesthetics, has recently written on ecology and environmental philosophy. Zask teaches in the Philosophy Department at the University of Aix-Marseille and is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

On the one hand, freedom is said to be the property of a subject. On the other, freedom only happens in the space of being-in-common. Freedom, then, is the place of a conflict between the “self” and the “with,” between independence or autonomy and dependence or sharing. Resolving this apparent antinomy requires showing how the with ontologically constitutes the self. This, in turn, allows for a rethinking of freedom beyond what liberal democracy and political economy have to offer, as the renewed opening of existence onto nothing, or onto an “outside” that the opening itself constitutes.

On the one hand, freedom is said to be the property of a subject. On the other, freedom only happens in the space of being-in-common. Freedom, then, is the place of a conflict between the “self” and the “with,” between independence or autonomy and dependence or sharing. Resolving this apparent antinomy requires showing how the with ontologically constitutes the self. This, in turn, allows for a rethinking of freedom beyond what liberal democracy and political economy have to offer, as the renewed opening of existence onto nothing, or onto an “outside” that the opening itself constitutes.