"I will begin with this confession: whatever I have done in the course of my life, whether it be good or evil, has been done freely; I am a free agent"
About this Quote
A boast and a defense stand together here. The speaker claims absolute authorship of his acts, good and evil, and declares himself a free agent. He begins not by pleading circumstances or fate but by seizing responsibility, a stance at once morally disarming and theatrically bold. The confession signals candor, yet it also asserts a kind of sovereignty: if every deed is chosen, then no external power, divine or social, can claim decisive sway over his life.
That posture fits the Enlightenment world in which Casanova moved, a Europe arguing about free will, providence, and human autonomy. He adapts the tradition of religious confession, strips it of penitential tone, and replaces it with secular self-fashioning. Where Augustine seeks grace, he proclaims agency. The coupling of good with evil is crucial. He does not curate a saintly ledger; he insists that virtue and transgression alike bear the same signature of freedom. Shame loses leverage when the subject accepts blame and glory with equal composure.
The line also works as strategy. Casanova lived by improvisation: cleric and soldier, gambler and spy, seducer and writer, fugitive and confidant of nobles. To say I am a free agent is to cast these roles as acts on a stage he directs, rather than masks forced upon him by need or authority. The defiance resonates against prisons literal and figurative, from the Venetian leads he famously escaped to the strictures of church and court. Yet his life shows how contested freedom was, tangled with patronage, surveillance, and money. Agency here is not a fact so much as a performance, asserted again and again in the face of constraint.
Still, the sentence fixes the moral frame for his story: judge, but judge a chooser. The lasting seduction is less the catalog of adventures than the claim they embody a radical liberty, a self who will neither apologize nor pretend to be anyone’s pawn.
That posture fits the Enlightenment world in which Casanova moved, a Europe arguing about free will, providence, and human autonomy. He adapts the tradition of religious confession, strips it of penitential tone, and replaces it with secular self-fashioning. Where Augustine seeks grace, he proclaims agency. The coupling of good with evil is crucial. He does not curate a saintly ledger; he insists that virtue and transgression alike bear the same signature of freedom. Shame loses leverage when the subject accepts blame and glory with equal composure.
The line also works as strategy. Casanova lived by improvisation: cleric and soldier, gambler and spy, seducer and writer, fugitive and confidant of nobles. To say I am a free agent is to cast these roles as acts on a stage he directs, rather than masks forced upon him by need or authority. The defiance resonates against prisons literal and figurative, from the Venetian leads he famously escaped to the strictures of church and court. Yet his life shows how contested freedom was, tangled with patronage, surveillance, and money. Agency here is not a fact so much as a performance, asserted again and again in the face of constraint.
Still, the sentence fixes the moral frame for his story: judge, but judge a chooser. The lasting seduction is less the catalog of adventures than the claim they embody a radical liberty, a self who will neither apologize nor pretend to be anyone’s pawn.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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