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Listen to Your Conscience: That's Why You Have One

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Frank Sonnenberg

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“Whatever it may be that comes to us from elsewhere, even the worst exploitation, the very fact that it comes from somewhere else is positive. This is why alienation has its advantages, even though it is so often denounced as the dispossession of the self, with the other treated in consequence as an age-old enemy holding the alienated part of us captive. The inverse theory, that of disalienation, is equally simplistic, holding as it does that the subject merely has to reappropriate his alienated will and his alienated desire. From this perspective everything that befalls the subject as a result of his own efforts is good, because it is authentic; while everything that comes from outside the subject is dubbed inauthentic, merely because it does not fall within the sphere of his freedom. Exactly the opposite position is the one that has to be stressed, while at the same time broadening the paradox. For just as it is better to be controlled by someone else rather than by oneself, it is likewise always better to be made happy, or unhappy, by someone else rather than by oneself. It is always better to depend in life on something that does not depend on us. In this way I can avoid any kind of servitude. I am not obliged to submit to something that does not depend on me - including my own existence. I am free of my birth - and in the same sense I can be free of my death. There has never been any true freedom apart from this one. The source of all interplay, of everything that is in play, of all passion, of all seduction, is that which is completely foreign to us, yet has power over us. That which is Other, that which we have to seduce.”

FreedomPositive ThinkingPositive LifeAlienationDependency
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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