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The Freedom to Stay: a radical new way to look at freedom

De Balie Podcast

We’re making multitasking that much more interesting and easier with De Balie Podcast. This time with: Eva von Redecker and the freedom to stay. Listen to a selection of our programmes, wherever you want. Whether your on the train, preparing your meal in the kitchen or breaking personal records in the gym, De Balie is always within reach. With two programmes to listen to each week.

Eva von Redecker – critical theorist and feminist philosopher – proposes in her recent book Bleibefreiheit, translated in Dutch as De vrijheid om te blijven (Alfabet 2024) a radical new way to look at freedom. Rather than focusing on space, she focusses on time. Rather than talking about the freedom to move, to travel and to go wherever you want, she talks about the freedom to stay where you want to stay, for as long as you want to stay. In times of climate crises and migration this freedom is far from a given.

Von Redecker proposes that this shift in our understanding of freedom will help us realize a world that is not only better for nature but also better for people, because it ensures to see individuals as embedded in their natural and interpersonal environment. What does it mean for our understanding of freedom when we conceptualize it as the ‘enjoyment of fulfilled time? We discuss this from a historical, from an environmental, from a legal and from a feminist perspective.