This is the most systematic, the most radical, and the most lucid
treatise on freedom that has been written in contemporary Continental
philosophy. Finding its guiding motives in Kant's second Critique and
working its way up to and beyond Heidegger and Adorno, this book marks
the most advanced position in the thinking of freedom that has been
proposed after Sartre and Levinas. One could call it a fundamental
ontology of freedom if freedom, according to the author, did not entail
liberation from foundational acts and the overcoming of any logic that
determines the way ontology does, by positing being either as
self-sufficient position or as subjected to strictly immanent laws.
Once existence no longer offers itself as an empiricity that must be
related to its conditions of possibility or sublated in a transcendence
beyond itself, but instead as sheer factuality, we must think this fact,
the fact of existence as the essence of itself, as freedom. The question
is no longer "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Instead, it
becomes "Why these very questions by which existence affirms itself and
abandons itself in a single gesture?" If we do not think being itself as
a freedom, we are condemned to think of freedom as pure "Idea" or
"right," and being-in-the-world, in turn, as a blind and obtuse
necessity. Since Kant, philosophy and our world have relentlessly
confronted this scission.