Liberty

Summary

1774, shortly before the French Revolution, somewhere between Potsdam and Berlin.

Madame de Dumeval, Count Tesis and Duc de Wand, libertines expelled from the Puritan court of Louis XVI, seek the support of the legendary Duc de Walchen, a German seducer and freethinker, lonely in a land of hypocrisy and false virtue. Their mission is to spread libertarianism, an Enlightenment philosophy based on the rejection of moral boundaries and authority, but above all, finding a safe place for their delusional games, in which the pursuit of pleasure is subject only to the laws of unfulfilled desire.

At first it is a refuge. Libertines, still in the minority in an unyielding Prussian court and are not allowed to practice their lifestyle openly, and sometimes they're libertines just out of curiosity - because news of customs in France had come to them - find that sheltered place where they can freely indulge in excesses and talk about libertarianism. The curiosity they feel extends to a crime that satiates desire and satisfies the refining lust, which, the more capricious, the more it reveals itself as the strongest of all urges, as the mistress who needs freedom. But it is a place and a refuge for the libertines who had to flee France, since a new chastity and moral rigor, a new moralism, prevailed in the court.

What remains of a culture that touched the extremes, the highest linguistic expressions, the fearlessness of thought and a criminal act, and even the apathy of action, are a few costumed characters and a few magnificent palanquins in a place that does not exist, or more does not exist in the world where the cellphone menu has replaced cruising. What remains is an enigmatic naivety that, when you don't really know what to think of it, is revealed as unexpected innocence. What remains is no consolation, nothing reassuring: What remains, if anything remains, is an unexpected innocence that renounces its opposite, its loss and its guilt, and therefore seems untouchable.

Now that culture has failed, other powers have proven themselves more resilient: business and reputation, the barbarity of neoliberal capitalist exploitation, the relentlessness of global control, and the complementary narrow-mindedness of ethical correctness. Culture can no longer do no harm, nor are we able to hurt it, no matter how involved it may be.

(Alexander García Düttmann)