The idea that nature might freely dispose of its elements was, for Immanuel Kant, possible only as a figment of human understanding – an analogy. In the same year as Kant’s third Critique, J. W. Goethe published his study of plants, in which he claimed to find both support for Kant’s philosophy and evidence of “the great freedom of nature.”  This seminar will investigate openings toward the idea of nature’s freedom, both in literary and theoretical works that respond to Kant or Goethe, and within a broader horizon of testimonies from nature’s liberal side. When this side of nature shows itself, freedom is no longer what Kant thought it was – the submission to purposes – but more nearly a freedom from purpose, with less to do with free choice than with a free allowance of deviations. From the clinamen of Lucretius to the “natural fantastic” of Caillois, a certain insolence and unwontedness continuously punctures the lawfulness of nature throughout its written and organic history. What’s more, as Caillois himself suggests, lawfulness may itself be nothing but nature’s insolent, unwonted riposte to a more-primordial chaos. The existence of natural laws would be just as much a testimony to freedom as those laws’ violations; what seemed to be a law would, in other words, start to look like a desire.

If we begin to consider nature not as a realm of necessity but of freedom also; and if we think freedom not as a free choice among given options, but as a kind of yielding, less a doing than an undoing; then a number of pressing questions can be asked. What remains of nature, if nature is free to permit its own remaking, its own deformation, its own enjoyment? Should we, can we distinguish it from the freely-permitting activity of the artist? What critical theory, and what politics, could account for such a nature, given that to dominate it, or even submit it to a dialectical thought, would be at worst an unnatural act, at best one natural act among many possible? What form would social revolution take, when it realizes that nature is itself not stable, but constantly self-revolutionizing? And: if nature’s freedom needs to be expressed, at a minimum for human knowledge to abandon its misconceptions about it, what forms or unforms can express it? Does literature have a special talent or mandate to be this expressive form? Can literature or other media make a presentation of nature’s self-undoing without undoing presentation itself? – Papers from all domains of literary study that address these questions, or related ones, are warmly invited.