The agent becoming aware of the fundamental contradictions in the human condition:

These are the contradictions between our finite circumstances and our longing to the infinite.

That ''everything in our existence points beyond itself. We must nevertheless die.'' (Unger, 2014. p.1 ). The contradictions between our inevitable death and the fecundity of our possibilities, creations and ideas. Between our capacity to learn and to know and our ignorance of the ultimate reasons.

For Unger the agent is a paragon of contradictions: ''The human agent, shaped and manacled by context and tradition, by established arrangements and enacted dogma, fastened to a decaying body, surrounded in birth and death by enigmas he cannot dispel, desperately wanting he know not what, confusing the unlimited for

reflexively in the name of covering the elections or, when honest, because covering the spectacles of clowns bring them profits (some CEO like NBC's have admitted that Trump is bad for the country bad has been really good for them). This operation repeated ad nausem has been called democracy. After all isn't it free speech, free media, free debates, free and fair elections? In fact what this 'democracy' amounts to is the creation of a ''guerre civile rampante, dont nous observons de plus en plus les sinistres effets'' (Badiou, 2016b. p.41), witness the white supremacists series of mass murders, as just one example. This is why it is precisely the task of intellectuals today -if their goal is freedom- to focus on uncovering and exposing these particular forms of extreme violence: the hidden violence of hate speech, the less obvious one, the less spectacular (than open warfare with tanks and fighter jets) violence of manipulative and deceitful political discourse, and the violence of homelessness, of isolation, and debt, of exclusion, discrimination and marginalization. It is not because it is hidden that it is any less cruel or destructive to the lives of those who are affected by it.

And they are millions. Political theory is well placed in its interests, its scope and methods to play a role here.

which he longs with an endless series of paltry tokens, demanding assurance from other people, yet hiding within himself and using things as shields against others, somnambulant most of the time yet sometimes charged and always inexhaustible, recognizing his fate and struggling with it even as he appears to accept it, trying to reconcile his contradictory ambitions but acknowledging in the end or, deep down, all the time that no such reconciliation is possible or if possible not lasting.'' (Unger, 2007. p.37)

This is the idea of personal freedom; we are the beings who cannot be defined or contained by any existing structure; we spill over. As Unger notes, the structures are finite in relation to us. And we are infinite with regard to them. (Unger, 2014. p.2) We can see more and do more and make more than any structure can accommodate or predict. But we cannot understand this personal freedom, let alone practice it (and there is a dialectic between understanding and practice) without starting first from current problems in our societies, from our current historical conjecture. Because if we do start from the self as a separate standalone unit, we are likely to arrive at a distorted conception of freedom.

Unger notes, there is always more in us, in each of us individually, as well as in all of us collectively, the human race, than there is or ever can be in them. We cannot only defy the contexts and the structures, but we can seek to transform their character so that they are no longer just there beyond the reach of challenge, but come to respect and to nourish our structure-revising freedom.

A third way to state the project, is that by realizing how little we have advanced in the political realm, the personal project of a meaningful life has been extremely difficult to live.

Because personal freedom, as it will be argued develops in a collective; work, projects, relationships...etc. Just as a person happiness, be it intellectual, material, affective or spiritual is a collective enterprise. Its conditions of possibility are laid down and enhanced through the work, ideas and affections of others. Similarly freedom is not an isolated free conscious in an indifferent universe. The status of others' freedom and the relationships between the agent and the collective is primordial for the freedom of that agent. For instance, if the realms of work and politics are too ossified into a hegemonic system -what Badiou, for instance, calls

capitalo-parlementarisme⁵² (Badiou, 2012)- then the cost of any deviation, of non-conformity from an individual is too high to bear alone. This is why the second dimension of freedom I discuss here, in groups and social movements is important. Emancipatory or revolutionary politics could act as a buffer between a rigid state with too little flexibility in its structure and an individual living, in a non orthodox way, her project of self-invention.

Because a meaningful life cannot be constructed as a concept let alone lived or realized through an individual moral psychology alone.

A conception of freedom, as at once commitment, praxis, emancipatory/revolutionary politics, and the common will be my focus. Such conception will show that understanding or living freedom at one level requires the others as well. If this is right then this conception will challenge the division commonly agreed upon, and even

52. It designates the fusion of a 'free' market economy with a governing oligarchy.

the irreconcilability seen between private life and public life, means and ends, morality and politics.

We have seen how the nature of consciousness as intersubjectivity, the realization of the contradictions of one's situation and of the human condition all contribute to a move towards commitment. Nevertheless, we are not just our conscious, we carry the burdens of our stories and experiences, of traditions and cultures, of biases, stereotypes and prejudices. In short, we are dragged down we are not yet those beings who can recognize one another as context transcending agents. So what do we do in the meantime?

''The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.'' Marx and Engels, 2008.