José Ignacio Scassera: Freedom At Bay?

ASEF organizes a new ASEF Young Minds event. This time ASEF Junior Fellow José Ignacio Scassera will deliver a lecture titled “Freedom at bay?”. The lecture will be held on Thursday, October 21, at 7 PM CET.

REGISTRATION
To attend the lecture, you have to register in advance until October 21 at 6 PM CET (one hour before the event): https://bit.ly/3DFTpSD. All registered to the event will receive a Zoom link on their email address on time.

ABOUT THE LECTURE
Modern liberalism places the autonomy of the individual as a starting point. Therefore, it is not surprising that the year 2020 and the pandemic that marked it revealed significant limits of this view, especially as it concerns the restriction of freedoms that many had taken for granted before.The automatic reaction of most states around the globe was to implement measures where individual liberties needed to be put at bay. With people being the chief cause for the spread of COVID-19, public educational and cultural institutions, businesses, and entertainment providers closed their doors. This way, states curtailed many freedoms that many sections of society had taken for granted. This required not only biopolitical articulation but also some self-limitation practices from the people themselves, both on an individual and communitarian level.From a conceptual point of view, José plays with the claim that 2020 challenged the hegemonic ideology of western civilization: liberalism. By “liberalism,” he refers to the philosophical perspective that places the metaphysical, ethical, and political groundings on the individual and autonomous subject. Therefore, the political structure or ethical constructions are comprehended as results of such a fundamental articulation of individuals and not the other way around.José proposes to think over the foundations of liberalism, understanding them as one of the philosophical causes of the crisis that COVID-19 unleashed. José will try to find other political and ethical ways of understanding society to build up new common platforms where collective decisions can be considered.

ABOUT THE LECTURER
José Ignacio Scasserra is a Philosophy researcher and professor. He is currently doing his Ph.D. in Philosophy at University of Buenos Aires. He was an ASEF Junior Fellow Visiting Slovenia in 2020. He worked under the mentorship of Professor Vojko Strahovnik, PhD, Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy (Faculty of Arts) and Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Theology. José wrote his Master’s Thesis on “Interdisciplinary studies of subjectivity” at University of Buenos Aires. Currently, he works in formal and informal educational projects with adults, teenagers, and kids. His areas of interest are ethics, education, gender studies, psychoanalysis, and literature.