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Dread. The Dizziness of Freedom | Juha van ’t Zelfde | 9789078088813 | Valiz

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Dread

The Dizziness of Freedom

Author:Juha van ’t Zelfde

Publisher:Valiz

ISBN: 978-90-78088-81-3

  • Paperback
  • English
  • 240 Pages
  • Sep 11, 2013

Constantly changing technology and growing communication networks give mankind ever more choices and options. however, every technological innovation has its counterpart: the military, administrative, existential crash; catastrophe looms. Virilio: ‘the innovation of the ship also meant a new form of shipwreck’.

This imminent, hard to interpret threat evokes feelings of ‘dread’. Dread is an essential and potentially productive element of the human consciousness, and according to the contributors to this volume, a defining characteristic of the present-day condition humaine. Closely related to anxiety and fear, the concept of dread is associated with the ‘dizziness of freedom’, as proposed by Søren Kierkegaard in 1844. However dark and fatalistic its connotations, through its dialectical coupling of caution and transgression, of paralysis and overdrive, it allows us to imagine the world spectacularly differently, offering glimpses of the ineffable. it is precisely this creative agency that seems ever so valuable in our complex times – an agency that is created by the very forces that, in their politicized guises, wish to suppress or even destroy it.


Juha van ’t Zelfde is a Dutch-Finnish DJ, writer and exhibition maker. He is the recipient of the De Hallen Curators Scholarship 2013, for his exhibition proposal Dread: Fear in the Age of Technological Acceleration’. He is co-founder of Nonfiction, an Amsterdam-based office for cultural innovation.

Constantly changing technology and growing communication networks give mankind ever more choices and options. however, every technological innovation has its counterpart: the military, administrative, existential crash; catastrophe looms. Virilio: ‘the innovation of the ship also meant a new form of shipwreck’.

This imminent, hard to interpret threat evokes feelings of ‘dread’. Dread is an essential and potentially productive element of the human consciousness, and according to the contributors to this volume, a defining characteristic of the present-day condition humaine. Closely related to anxiety and fear, the concept of dread is associated with the ‘dizziness of freedom’, as proposed by Søren Kierkegaard in 1844. However dark and fatalistic its connotations, through its dialectical coupling of caution and transgression, of paralysis and overdrive, it allows us to imagine the world spectacularly differently, offering glimpses of the ineffable. it is precisely this creative agency that seems ever so valuable in our complex times – an agency that is created by the very forces that, in their politicized guises, wish to suppress or even destroy it.

This publication is a parallel, autonomous contribution to the exhibition project ‘Dread: Fear in the Age of Technological Acceleration’, curated by Juha van ’t Zelfde, at Museum De Hallen Haarlem, from 6 September to 25 November, 2013.


Juha van ’t Zelfde is a Dutch-Finnish DJ, writer and exhibition maker. He is the recipient of the De Hallen Curators Scholarship 2013, for his exhibition proposal Dread: Fear in the Age of Technological Acceleration’. He is co-founder of Nonfiction, an Amsterdam-based office for cultural innovation.

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