Free Speech and Neoliberalism

In this book, Asbjorn Skarsvag Gronstad challenges us to reconceptualize the notion of free speech. Focusing on the domains of cultural production, aesthetics, and education, Gronstad contends that neoliberalism currently poses the greatest threat to our freedom of expression. Crucially, the book argues that freedom of speech should no longer be considered merely as parrhesia-understood as the license to offend-but also as isegoria, the equal right to speak. The latter denotes the original meaning of free speech, Gronstad posits, and should be restored as the conceptual ambit of the term, despite being largely overlooked after Greek Antiquity. Gronstad examines a variety of texts across formats including Fahrenheit 451, Alphaville (1965), Severance, the performance art of Jingyi Wang, and the films of Yorgos Lanthimos to conduct a multi-faceted engagement with cultural works and discourses spanning both genre and historical period that grapple with issues of free speech, censorship, and neoliberal politics. Ultimately, these analyses highlight how art and aesthetics represent a particular case of isegoria, and more broadly, how neoliberal rationality operates to delimit the space of the sayable and the expressible.