As the 11th annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies, Freedom, approaces, we are proud to announce the second of this year’s two keynotes: Eva von Redecker.
Redecker is a German philosopher, critical theorist, and bestselling non-fiction author based in rural Brandenburg.
Redecker’s work focuses on social praxis, feminism, critique of capitalism, freedom, and authoritarianism. Her most recent work includes books on the new fascism (Dieser Drang nach Härte, S. Fischer Verlage, 2026) and the freedom to stay (Bleibefreiheit, S. Fischer Verlage, 2025), and her books, in which she tracks the genealogy of modern property in contemporary violence, have been translated into 15 languages. The Freedom to Stay (Polity, 2026) proposes to understand freedom in a temporal way – as enjoyment of fulfilled time. Receker’s dissertation, Praxis and Revolution, came out with Columbia University Press in 2021. Her public writing has also appeared in The Guardian, le monde diplomatique and Die ZEIT.
In the academic year 2026/27, Eva holds a guest professorship for philosophy at the Academy for Fine Arts, Hamburg (HfbK). She is currently working on an epic poem about fossil energy.
At the conference, Redecker will present a keynote based on her recent book on the freedom to stay:
The Freedom to Stay. On Emancipation from Negative Liberty.
As a philosophical effort, critical theory does not just scandalize cruelty and suffering. It investigates how those are systemically produced, and points out how sometimes even our most progressive achievements cover up, or contribute to, injustice and oppression. In On The Jewish Question, Karl Marx famously criticized bourgeois freedom, newly won in the course of the French Revolution, as alienating and atomizing. Fast forwarding into our present, we witness that beyond ongoing capitalist rule, liberal orders facilitate a fascist turn. Around the globe, in the wake of neoliberalism, at the dawn of the Anthropocene, the appeal to “freedom” fuels fascist mobilizations. To understand this effect, we need to renew our critique of liberal freedom. It is not just egotistic, it is in fact possessive and easily breaks up into destructiveness. Emancipation into liberal self-ownership is not enough to extricate liberty from its abusive underside. Only by negating the abstract spaciality of possession can freedom turn social and ecological. I call the ensuing perspective that of a “freedom to stay”: the right of species and people alike to flourish, and the promise of fulfilled and abundant time rather than mere mobility on a dying planet.
Danish Society for Marxist Studies 