Is liberty our most important belonging, the intimate source of self-mastery, an inalienable right? Or is it something foreign, an other that makes up subjectivity, a challenge to our idea of autonomy? To Basterra, the subjectivity we call totally free embodies a relationship with an irreducible otherness that at the same time surpasses it and animates its core. Tracing Kant’s concept of flexibility from the Critique of Pure Reason to his useful works, Basterra elaborates his most revolutionary insights by setting them in dialogue with Levinas’s Otherwise than Being. Levinas’s text, she argues, uses a deep review of Kant that follows the impulse of his thinking to its most appealing effects. The complex concepts of flexibility, autonomy, and subjectivity that emerge from this discussion have the potential to stimulate today’s ethical and political thinking.
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