Insight Editions · No. 64
The Experience of Freedom
Jean-Luc Nancy · Translated by Bridget McDonald; foreword by Peter Fenves
Jean-Luc Nancy examines freedom as a condition of existence, tracing its relation to thinking, shared life, decision, temporality, and evil beyond the sovereign subject.
A study guide to The Experience of Freedom by Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Bridget McDonald; foreword by Peter Fenves. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- Free freedom from "freedom". Political freedoms are necessary but empty; the philosophical Idea is locked in an ontology of the subject (ch1).
- Freedom is a fact, not a causality. Kant's "fact of reason" points to the fact of existence; ontology must become eleutherology (ch2, ch3).
- Heidegger's interruption. He dropped freedom as a theme but left "the free" open, the space where it must be taken up again (ch4).
- Freedom gives thinking. Thinking is the leap of freedom, not its comprehension; philosophy keeps the access open (ch5, ch6).
- Freedom is sharing. Singular beings "com-pear"; equality of the incommensurable, fraternity, justice (ch7); experience is shared birth and death (ch8).
- Thing, force, gaze; absolute; surprise. Against Sartre, freedom is the thing without cause, a material force (ch9), absolute as ab-solution (ch10), the coming-up of time, tragedy, generosity (ch11).
- Evil and decision. Evil is freedom's self-hatred; Heidegger risks an ontodicy; thinking decides for existence (ch12, ch13); open fragments close the book (ch14).
The book's arc: from the subject's freedom to the shared, decided freedom of existence.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title and texts | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | Foreword: From Empiricism to the Experience of Freedom (Fenves) | Nancy as a strange "good empiricist" after Hume and Kant |
| 1 | Are We Free to Speak of Freedom? (Hegel, Adorno, Kant) | Freedoms are empty; free ourselves from "freedom" |
| 2 | Necessity of the Theme of Freedom (Heidegger, Bataille, Spinoza) | Freedom is the fact of existence; eleutherology |
| 3 | Impossibility of the Question of Freedom (Kant, Heidegger 1930) | Freedom is not a type of causality |
| 4 | The Space Left Free by Heidegger (Heidegger, Schelling, Hegel) | Heidegger's interruption leaves "the free" open |
| 5 | The Free Thinking of Freedom (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger) | Not incomprehensible: freedom gives thinking |
| 6 | Philosophy: Logic of Freedom | Philosophy keeps open the logos's access to freedom |
| 7 | Sharing Freedom: Equality, Fraternity, Justice | Freedom is relation; com-pearance of singularities |
| 8 | Experience of Freedom: And Once Again of the Community | Experience as founding limit; shared birth and death |
| 9 | Freedom as Thing, Force, and Gaze (Sartre, Kant) | Not condemnation: the thing without cause, material force |
| 10 | Absolute Freedom (Kant, Hegel) | "Be free!"; freedom is the absolutization of the absolute |
| 11 | Freedom and Destiny: Surprise, Tragedy, Generosity | Freedom as surprise, the coming-up of time |
| 12 | Evil: Decision (Adorno, Kant, Schelling, Heidegger) | Positive wickedness; the risk of ontodicy; decision |
| 13 | Decision, Desert, Offering | No morality, but spacing, the desert, the offering |
| 14 | Fragments | The stone is free; revolution; Heidegger's Nazism |
On numbering. The chapter numbers here are Nancy's own § numbers as printed in the English edition. Nothing here renumbers the book.
The book's two columns: rejected concepts and Nancy's replacements
Reading path through the fourteen sections
About this book
The Experience of Freedom by Jean-Luc Nancy, 1993. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
Foreword: From Empiricism to the Experience of Freedom (Peter Fenves)
Two slogans that do not fit together
Empiricism (accept no authority but experience) and civil liberties (remove unjustified authority) are united in a liberating imperative: free yourself from dogma and nonsense. The "continent" is seen as renouncing empiricism and removing the grounds for defending liberties. Yet the two slogans clash at one point: the philosophical concept of freedom, to which liberties appeal, cannot itself be experienced. Mill's On Liberty sets aside "the so-called 'liberty of the will'" to speak only of civil liberty; Locke calls the phrase meaningless, since only a person is free. Philosophy, defined as "making indissoluble distinctions and seeking solid grounds", turns the thought of freedom into "de-liberation" (Hobbes's "specious etymology"): to look for its ground is to undo it.
Hume: necessity is never experienced
Kant's Third Antinomy (an absolutely free first cause against the rule that every event has a cause) is solved by transcendental idealism, but only by a self-securing subject that constitutes a unified world, so freedom becomes extra-worldly, "noumenal". Hume offers the alternative. Necessary connection is never given as an impression; so all experience is probable, and freedom opposed to necessity is "the same thing with chance; which is universally allowed to have no existence". Freedom leaves philosophy, but leaves a trace: liberality, a power to make anything possible, lodged in the imagination, the "gentle force" of which Hume says "nothing is more free than that faculty". Imagination gives us both the constancy of objects and causal connection, two ideas Hume shows to be incompatible; "only a free force can let incompatibilities persist".
| Figure | Freedom as | What Fenves draws from it |
|---|---|---|
| Mill, Locke | Civil liberty; "liberty of the will" set aside | Empiricism cannot experience freedom |
| Hobbes | Liberty suspended in "de-liberation" | Seeking grounds defeats freedom |
| Kant, Third Antinomy | Noumenal causality of a self-securing subject | The "solution" Nancy unsettles |
| Hume | Chance (no existence); liberality of imagination | An abyssal "ground" that is free |
| Sartre | "Condemned to be free" | Freedom still subject to necessity |
| Heidegger, Kant book | Transcendental imagination as original freedom | Subjectivity has no self-support |
| Schelling, via Heidegger | Evil positing itself as ground | The "positivity of wickedness" |
The uncouth monster and community
At the end of Book 1 of the Treatise, Hume fancies himself "some strange uncouth monster" expelled from human commerce, "utterly abandon'd". Fenves reads this as an experience of freedom: the thought that memory, senses and understanding all rest on imagination leaves one without relation, monstrous, free. Nancy recalls that experience once meant a perilous crossing (peira) of the limit (peras), "like the pirate (peiratēs)", and Hume, putting out to sea in a "leaky weather-beaten vessel", fits the image. Hume thinks he is expelled because community means sharing a common substance or "human nature". Nancy instead shows the community of the uncouth to be community as such: the dissolution of relation and substance is where community happens, the space of "fraternity" and "equality".
From Hume's scepticism to Nancy's community of the uncouth
Not "lived experience", not Sartre
Nancy is not an irrationalist appealing to Erlebnis: lived experience is, as Nietzsche showed, only a more insidious ground. His experience is "as little an impression as it is a reflection"; it is exposure to groundlessness, the "experience of experience". The "unique fact" of the book is that subjectivity cannot keep itself afloat. For Sartre, human fragility meant "We are condemned to be free", a formula that repeats metaphysics, Hegel and Marx: freedom is the recognition of necessity. For Nancy subjectivity has no causal power at all, and this is its end; what remains is finite freedom, an opening onto existence without essence. Essence does not follow existence (Sartre); it recedes from it (Heidegger: "the 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence"). No common name answers the question "who?".
Kant's fact of reason and the positivity of evil
More important than Sartre is Heidegger's reading of Kant's transcendental imagination as "original freedom", and Kant's "fact of reason", moral consciousness of the categorical imperative, which is a fact yet cannot be stated in empirical terms. It breaks the wall between transcendental and empirical and opens "an empiricism ... of liberality". Taken to its limit, consciousness can deny the fact it is conscious of: to act in order to spite the condition of being unconditioned goes deeper than Kant's radical evil. This is not irrationality but wickedness, which wants freedom to vanish into necessity and community to mean a common substance: "one nation, a particular race". Following Schelling (evil as ground positing itself), Nancy makes the "positivity of wickedness" the urgency of the book, and finds in Heidegger's reading of Schelling a "secret, imperceptible ontodicy".
Fenves s three steps into Nancy's book
Liberation as experience, not labour
Fenves draws a sharper contrast than the first pages suggest. Five centuries of Anglo-American work treat experience as liberation by labour: essays, inquiries, experiments, laboratories that make the given "release itself". The counterpart would be liberation as experience: liberation without labour or elaboration, without empirical support, that does not respect the protocols of civil liberties. That counterpart "does not easily harmonize" with Anglo-American thought, nor with continental motifs of labour and Will. Nancy's relentless questioning of necessity is what lets Fenves place him nearer certain empiricist strains than near essentialism or existentialism that want "to secure grounds, goals, and verdicts".
Strategies that keep freedom from vanishing
Fenves lists the familiar philosophical salvage operations: distinguishing modes of determinacy; showing thoroughgoing determinacy compatible with spontaneous self-determination; sheltering civil liberties in the defeat of systematic philosophy; even making ignorance of specific causes into freedom's guarantor. Each tries to stop a freedom that "cannot be unambiguously experienced" from disappearing without a trace. Kant's Third Antinomy is the most famous of these, and also the touchstone Nancy unsettles: the "solution" needs a self-subsistent subject who constitutes a unified world, so freedom becomes extra-mundane.
Imagination as free force, and Aristotle's aition
For Hume, impressions arise "from unknown causes"; liberality is not in their givenness but in the imagination's "gentle force", "for nothing is more free than that faculty". Imagination gives both the constancy of objects and causal connection, ideas Hume shows to be incompatible; "only a free force can let incompatibilities persist". Fenves adds that when Aristotle speaks of aitia (modes of responsibility), the word cannot mean "cause" as necessitation: modern systems treat causation as necessitation as decisively as they treat cogito, sum as "necessarily true". Empiricism, rejecting innate ideas, cannot keep that analysis without pointing to an experience of necessitation, which Hume denies.
Hume's imagination as free force, read toward Nancy
Haunted consciousness and absolute evil
The "fact of reason" is moral consciousness of categorical imperatives whose necessity lies in their sheer possibility: "attention, respect, must be paid to them". Taken to its limit, that consciousness can deny the fact it knows, acting in order to spite the condition of being unconditioned. This goes deeper than Kant's radical evil toward what Kant called, and denied could take place, "absolute evil". Wickedness wants freedom to vanish into stern necessity and commonality to mean "one nation, a particular race". Fenves ties the book's urgency to Schelling's positivity of evil and to Heidegger's Schelling reading, which never fully acknowledges that positivity and so risks the "secret, imperceptible ontodicy" Nancy names.
Empiricism altered: surprise, decision, communication
Nancy's empiricism does not rebuild a world from impressions. The positivity that tore the world apart is wickedness, not sensation; every rebuilding converts wickedness into a negativity that further labour of recognition promises to overcome. What remains is the event named sur-prise: coming up without ground, taking over without possession. Decision cannot be avoided, but that unavoidability is not Sartre's condemnation: it is freedom's condition, mistaken for a ground whenever one tries to secure freedom or even merely defend civil liberties. Language withdraws into the same position as freedom: it cannot be secured by impressions. Nancy names the experience of language "communication": nothing is communicated but the ability to communicate, and that ability freely gives community again.
Two empiricisms Fenves contrasts
Fenves s Nancy in three strokes
Are We Free to Speak of Freedom?
A divorce between freedoms and freedom
The modern world has divorced the ethico-juridico-political from the philosophical. On one side are relatively precise "freedoms", rights and exemptions whose suspension "opens directly onto the intolerable itself"; on the other an "Idea" of freedom we prefer not to examine, "so certain are we that this would result in Chaos or Terror". Evil, "to the point of wickedness", is now whatever threatens democratic freedoms, while the "good" of freedom is defined only negatively. Freedoms "delimit necessary conditions of contemporary human life without considering existence as such"; they sketch the borders of an empty space. If freedom is the essential fact of existence, that vacancy is the vacancy of meaning, and without meaning existence is "only survival". Nancy cites Hegel: no idea is so generally recognized as indefinite and ambiguous as the idea of Freedom.
Two obstacles
The first obstacle is self-evidence: the common notion of free will, morally obvious and therefore not to be questioned. It cracks once rights require an apparatus, usually the State, to put things at the disposal of freedom: regulating the use of air against pollution, exploiting "Third World" resources, managing data banks. Marx's critique of "formal freedoms" for "imaginary members of an imaginary sovereignty" still applies. Nancy quotes Adorno: philosophy had "an unexpressed mandate from the bourgeoisie to find transparent grounds for freedom", ceding freedom to the rationality that restricts it.
The second obstacle is philosophical: freedom has been "thoroughly subordinated" to the ontology of subjectivity, in which being is the subject of representation and freedom is "the power of appearing to oneself". Will, in Kant's definition, is "the power to be by means of one's representations the cause of the reality of these same representations".
| Thinker | Form of free will | What is really at work |
|---|---|---|
| Descartes | Indifference against a will instructed in the good | The self of appearing to oneself; decision to doubt |
| Hegel | Bad infinity of caprice against the "actual and free will" | Self-determination superseded in necessity; history annulled |
| Kant | Freedom as "keystone" of reason | Reason appearing to itself; a moral "second nature" |
| All three | Free representation of free representation | Subjectivity as foundation |
Why the classical notions of freedom are in solidarity
Buridan's ass cut in two
The fully developed metaphysical free will "will have been the free will of indifferent being, which decides itself in dividing itself". Buridan's ass solves its problem "by cutting itself in two ('I = I')" and reconstituting itself, without history, in the representation of itself eating and drinking. At the limit of foundation, where existence must be thought as its own essence, "in-essential and un-founded", this freedom is no longer practicable. Despotism offers no exit, since "despotism and freedom form a couple": the despot is one subject's ontology of freedom.
Free for freedom
The task is to deliver ourselves from freedom as "a property of the subjective constitution of being", relating both the thought of existence and an ethic of freedoms "no longer merely negative or defensive" to a motif "whose name or idea we do not yet have". It is not our choice. Philosophy was led to this limit by its own initial decision, a freedom prior to every concept of freedom, which Plato called the "philosophical natural": "generous availability and freedom of demeanor". Following Derrida on the difference of the origin, philosophy cannot represent its beginning as a Subject appearing to itself; every decision to philosophize (Hegel) or revolutionize metaphysics (Kant) is delivered by something already given to thinking. "We are therefore not free to think freedom or not to think it, but thinking (that is, the human being) is free for freedom."
Empty freedoms and the demand to free "freedom"
Political and civil freedoms are necessary and yet, Nancy says, empty when they are only secured possessions. Hegel and Adorno mark the dialectic: freedom proclaimed as a slogan can cover unfreedom. Kant's Idea of freedom locks philosophy into an ontology of the subject. The chapter's demand is to free ourselves from "freedom" as that property and that Idea, so that the word can again open a free space of meaning. Philosophy has always been given over to what it cannot master; the thinking of freedom is seized from elsewhere by the thing it thinks.
Are we free to speak of freedom?
Two uses of the word freedom in Sec 1
Necessity of the Theme of Freedom: Mixed Premises and Conclusions
Existence as essence
Existentialism (existence precedes essence) and essentialism are "symmetrical formulas", both captive to a difference between essence and existence. Heidegger's sentence, "The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence" (Being and Time, §9), puts that opposition into the history of metaphysics. Freedom is now "implicated in the chiasmus of these concepts". Existence offers itself as a factuality that contains, hic et nunc, the reason for its presence. The question is no longer "Why is there something?" or "Why is there evil?" but "Why these very questions by which existence affirms itself and abandons itself in a single gesture?". If being cannot be the freeing of being, thought falls into the night "in which not only are all cows black" but their rumination vanishes. Without this, we are left with freedom as a pure Idea and the world as "blind and obtuse necessity", the tear in which philosophy has stood since Kant: "ideology today demands freedom, but does not think it".
God and the freedom of necessity
When freedom had to be founded, and founded in freedom, it was figured in a supreme being, a causa sui whose freedom was in turn grounded in necessity. "God" became "the name of a necessary freedom", the metaphysical concept of freedom as "the freedom of necessity". But "freedom, if it is something, is the very thing that prevents itself from being founded". Nancy cites Bataille: "Is not freedom the power God lacks ... since he cannot disobey the command that he is". The freedom of gods makes them able to die; it is "not their attribute, but their destiny". Spinoza, by giving freedom only to a God who is pure existence rather than foundation, announced the aporia; Hegelian Spirit and Marxian Man inherit it. The end of philosophy deprives us both of a foundation of freedom and of freedom as foundation.
| Freedom as | Framework | Nancy's objection |
|---|---|---|
| Idea or right | Liberal ideology, Kant's tear | Demanded, not thought; world left to necessity |
| Freedom of necessity | Onto-theology, causa sui | Freedom cannot be founded |
| History of Freedom | Hegelian teleology | Freedom reabsorbed into Necessity |
| Fact of existence | Nancy, after Heidegger | Known through the freedom of history |
Only a finite being is free
Freedom is known not through "the History of Freedom" but "the freedom of history", where "time is out of joint" (Hamlet) and "all existence is new, in its birth and in its death". At the limit of foundation there is only "the free dissemination of existence": not the diffraction of a principle but an an-archy, "a singular and thus in essence plural arising". Hence "only a finite being can be free", for an infinite being seals the necessity of its freedom to itself. The task is to free human freedom from "the immanence of an infinite foundation or finality". "Freedom perhaps designates nothing more and nothing less than existence itself."
From the end of foundation to an ontology of freedom
Hatching, surprise, and evil
The closure of the regime of signification, in which meaning is assigned to a beyond, corresponds to a hatching (éclosion) of a new epoch, which we cannot see. Granel, writing of Derrida, speaks of inscribing the epoch "such that it is visible from the monster of the future". History is not causal unwinding but what "surprises itself", and "surprising itself" is "a mark proper to freedom".
This does not make everything equal. Evil and good are not offered first to a free choice; the possibility of evil, "the devastation of freedom", is correlative to freedom. Freedom presents "the possibility, inscribed in its essence, of a free renunciation of freedom", and this renunciation is wickedness. The modern world attests it constantly: a "humanity" willing itself superhuman executing another part declared subhuman, "This is Auschwitz"; but also Marx's Manchester, the "Third" and "Fourth" worlds, the camps, the apartheids and fanaticisms, and any process or institution that "prevents existence from existing".
Why evil belongs to the theme of freedom
Thought as passion, and experience as piracy
Thought, facing evil, must know its powerlessness. It cannot be only an "acting", as Heidegger asks, but also a "suffering", a passion in which "freedom acts". "It is always too soon to say what hatches, but it is always time to say that it hatches." Existence opens a "spaciosity", the space-time in which freedom can be freed or renounced: of meaning, of communication, of the public place, of "embracing bodies", "of war and peace". Heidegger again: freedom must be investigated "as the ground of the possibility of being-there". Ontology must become eleutherology, but as the "thing itself" of thought, not a theme. Experience, from peira and ex-periri, is "an attempt executed without reserve", like the pirate (peiratēs): freedom "cannot be appropriated, but only 'pirated'".
Mixed premises: existence without causa sui
Nancy's "necessity of the theme" is not a moral demand but an ontological one. Once existence is no longer founded in a ground or causa sui, freedom is not an attribute added to beings but the modality of being when being is at stake in existence. God as freedom of necessity (Spinoza's line, and its Hegelian afterlives) is the counter-model: necessity that knows itself as freedom. Nancy reverses: only a finite being is free, because only finitude is exposed without a self-grounding essence. Free dissemination of singular existents replaces the One's self-necessitation.
Hatching, history, eleutherology
Existence "hatches"; history surprises. Ontology must become eleutherology: a discourse of freedom rather than of substance or of a first cause. Evil belongs already to this theme: not as a later moral appendix but as the risk freedom brings when it can renounce itself. Auschwitz and apartheid are named as the free renunciation of freedom, the wickedness that thinking must both hope against and suffer. Thought is passion; experience is piracy (peira, peiratēs): an attempt without reserve, given over to the peril of its lack of foundation.
Why the theme of freedom becomes necessary
Why ontology must become eleutherology
Impossibility of the Question of Freedom: Fact and Right Indistinguishable
Kant's fact of reason
Freedom is "a fact of reason, truly the only one of its kind": not a property whose possession we must demonstrate, nor a faculty to be deduced. Kant insists on it throughout. The Canon of Pure Reason says "practical freedom can be demonstrated by experience"; the Second Critique is a critique "of practical reason" only, since it need establish just "that there is a pure practical reason", whose reality "is proven by the fact itself"; §91 of the Third Critique counts freedom among "things of fact" (scibilia), "the only one of all the ideas of pure reason" whose object is a fact. This fact legitimates itself because it is the given existence of a self-legislation: "with Kant begins the self-legitimation of existence, and existence as the abyss of this self-legitimation". Its reality is apodictic, a necessity, and "we will not depart from this apodicticity".
Why the proof fails in Kant's terms
If freedom is presented in experience as a "particular kind of causality", Kant may be alluding to the Third Antinomy's example: "If at this moment I arise from my chair, in complete freedom...". Then he commits a double violation of critical rules: the free act of rising is slipped out of the dialectical "thesis" where it belongs, and free causality is slipped into the general category of causality, so as to construct an object of experience, "the free subject". That would be Schwärmerei, a schema of freedom the Second Critique excludes. Respect for the law offers no exit, since it concerns freedom's lawfulness, not its causality. The conclusion: in Kantian or metaphysical logic the fact of freedom cannot receive its status as fact.
How Kant's presentation of freedom undoes itself
Heidegger 1930: will willing its own reality
Heidegger's course "On the Essence of Human Freedom" reverses the relation: "If causality is a problem of freedom, and not the inverse, then the problem of being, taken absolutely, is in itself a problem of freedom." Practical reason is pure will; pure will wills only willing; its law is "nothing other than the form of legislation"; "he who wills really wills nothing other than the duty of his being-there (das Sollen seines Daseins)". "The reality of willing is only in the willing of that reality." We may decide for obligation, against it, or "mix willing and nonwilling in turmoil and indecision", but we are always inside this structure. Nancy reads it not as a self-present will but as the un-grounding of a self: existence obliged to its own effectivity because no essence of self is available to it.
| Term | Kant | Heidegger 1930, as Nancy reads it |
|---|---|---|
| Freedom | Particular causality; keystone | Not a type of causality; the problem of being |
| Will | Power to cause the reality of representations | Willing of one's own duty to be there |
| Fact | Fact of reason, moral law | Fact of existence, self-referential |
| Law | Respected or transgressed | Existence as the limit on which it resolves |
| Proof | Demonstration (fails) | Test or experience; "self-freeing of freedom" |
Fact and right indistinguishable
The fact of freedom is "the right of existence", or "the fact of existence is the right of freedom": in Being and Time's words, "being-free for the freedom of choosing-oneself-and-grasping-oneself". Transcendence is "the passage to the limit, not its attainment"; existence has no interiority, yet is not wholly exterior like Hegel's thing. Its law is one "it gives to itself and which it is not", so it can disobey as well as obey. "Existence can only transgress itself." In this an-archy existence de-livers itself from every law, including itself as law. Kant's reality as "the setting into position (Setzung) of the thing in itself" becomes the act of being put into the world, so freedom is "the factuality of its birth and of its death".
Kant's presentation undoes itself
When freedom is "the keystone of the whole architecture of the system of pure reason", Kant presents it as a fact of reason, yet shows it as a kind of causality (rising from my chair, acting under obligation). Nancy's "double violation": the Idea that cannot be presented is presented as causality, and the fact that should be practical is handled with theoretical means that strip its status as fact. Freedom is not a type of causality; fact and right become indistinguishable because the right of existing is the fact.
Heidegger 1930: will willing its reality
The 1930 course promotes the problem of freedom to the rank of ontology par excellence by inverting the relation between freedom and causality. Yet what often appears is will willing its own reality, obligation decided for "pure obligatedness". Nancy keeps the elevation of freedom while refusing the voluntarist residue. Existence keeps itself "through its essence" on the undecidable limit of its own decision to exist; freedom belongs to existence not as a property but as that an-archy in which existence resolves. "Human beings are not born free in the same way that they are born with a brain; yet they are born, infinitely, to freedom."
From Kant's fact of reason to existence's an-archy
Why the question of freedom is impossible
The Space Left Free by Heidegger
Why keep the word
Nancy declines a full study of freedom in Heidegger, for reasons of competence ("far from being ... a Heidegger 'specialist'"), mistrust (a reconstruction might only return us to the suspension) and decision: to take up the word "freedom" in the space Heidegger opens. The word carries a tradition, "an impulse that has never stopped throwing itself recklessly against necessity", a "force of appeal and joy", not to be confused with "liberal, or even libertarian, individualism". Its history is that of a transcendence now recognizable as finite exposure to its limit. Nancy gathers voices of freedom freed from subjective appropriation: Hegel's Spirit that "knows how to sacrifice" itself, a "truly free spirit" that will not dissemble over the "dreadful elements" in its origin, Celan's "Enlarge art? No... And set yourself free". Heidegger used the word to the end "without retaining any of this force".
The stages
| Year | Text | Freedom as |
|---|---|---|
| 1927 | Being and Time | Dasein free "for its proper possibility" |
| 1928 | Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (vol. 26) | "Transcendence of Dasein and freedom are identical" |
| 1929 | The Essence of Reasons | "Freedom to found"; ground of ground; Abgrund |
| 1930 | On the Essence of Human Freedom (course) | Freed from causality; the problem of being |
| 1930/1943 | On the Essence of Truth | Letting beings be; then subordinated to truth |
| 1936 | Schelling course | "Necessity ... of its own essence"; decision for good and evil |
| 1941-43 | Schelling seminars, 1943 note | Metaphysical; "essential self-deception"; abandoned |
| 1946, 1956 | Letter on Humanism; The Principle of Reason | "The free dimension"; the leap into groundless play |
Heidegger's path: from freedom as theme to the space left free
Schelling: almost a repetition
The 1936 course plays Heidegger's discourse in "continuous harmonic composition" with Schelling's. Heidegger finds there the factuality of freedom as "the necessity of the essence of man": "The necessity by which or as which freedom is determined is that of its own essence", an essence of "decidedness" before "essence and deformation of essence", good and evil, encountering a destiny. Then he abandons Schelling, who fails to think the originary unity as "nothing" and so fails to think that "the essence of all Being is finitude". What remains, in Nancy's condensation, is "the pain of the historiality of the nothing, in which finite freedom heroically maintains itself".
The 1943 note
The abandonment comes with little explanation, in a note: freedom is "metaphysically ... the name for capacity by itself (spontaneity, cause)"; it unites cause and selfhood, "that is, ... subjectivity"; "thus ultimately we have freedom as the resolve to the inevitable ... as essential self-deception. Freedom forfeited its role originally in the history of Being". Causality and subjectivity belong to beingness, not to being; if being is ground, it is not in this mode. "Yet no other kind of freedom is proposed." Nancy suggests Heidegger saw in Hegel's Philosophy of Right §27 ("the free will which wills the free will") the mirror of his own 1930 course and his Schelling. But the note abandons "freedom" in quotation marks "in the name of an other and more authentic 'freedom'": a freedom of being.
What Heidegger abandons and what he keeps
Truth over freedom, and the free dimension
On the Essence of Truth relates truth to freedom as its essence: freedom lets beings be what they are, "the exposure to the disclosedness of beings", neither caprice nor readiness for the necessary. Then the hierarchy inverts: freedom "receives its own essence from the more original essence of uniquely essential truth", since truth holds concealment ("mystery") and errancy, the "free space" to which existence is exposed. Heideggerian ontology thus remains "an eleutherology", though Heidegger does not want to be read so. Nancy asks whether this is a recoil of the "practical" into the "theoretical", and whether the singular factuality of freedom drops out of sight. In The Principle of Reason the "leap" from being as ground to being "without reason" opens "the essential province of freedom", and the Letter on Humanism names "the free dimension in which freedom conserves its essence", but the quality of this space, its Libertas, "will not otherwise be determined".
Why keep the word after Heidegger drops it
Heidegger largely abandons freedom as a theme after the early 1930s, yet keeps a semantic root: the free, free space, the free dimension of time. Nancy's fidelity is not repetition: he asks why the concept was dropped so easily and what space that drop leaves. The stages he marks run from 1927-29 (transcendence, founding) through 1930 (freedom not a causality), 1936 (Schelling), and 1943 (self-deception, quotation marks around an "other" freedom), toward truth's priority and the remnant "the free".
Schelling almost a repetition; 1943 note
The Schelling confrontation almost repeats the metaphysical unity of the capacity for good and evil. The 1943 note's quotation marks are, for Nancy, evidence that another freedom flickers even as the concept is abandoned. What is abandoned is freedom of the subject (cause by itself, spontaneity, selfhood); what is kept is freedom of being (letting beings be, the open, withdrawal, errancy). Nancy's task: make the transition visible and preserve together "the withdrawal of freedom's being and its singular factuality".
Heidegger's interruption as Nancy's opening
Stages Nancy reads in Heidegger
The Free Thinking of Freedom
The necessity of necessity
Rousseau's Social Contract is "the clearest matrix": freedom, becoming self-conscious in the contract, produces the sovereign's absolute self-knowledge and absolute constraint ("We will force him to be free"). Kant turns this into the identity of freedom and law: freedom projected as the lawfulness of a "second nature", known through a "type" borrowed from physical nature. Freedom "holds the secret of causality", the power of causing absolutely that theoretical causality lacks; it is "causality that has achieved self-knowledge". The law of freedom thus represents "the necessity of necessity", a line that runs from Kant to Hegel, Nietzsche and "probably even" the Heidegger of "the will to will".
Hence the "major philosophical ideology of freedom": to be free is to assume necessity, "liberation through law", an "inner freedom" that takes charge of outer constraints, with pure libertarian arbitrariness as its mirror. These are "admissions of a theoretical and practical powerlessness", the "resolve" toward the "inevitable" that Heidegger rejected.
| Model | Formula | Freedom becomes |
|---|---|---|
| Rousseau | "We will force him to be free" | Sovereign self-knowledge and constraint |
| Kant | Freedom = rational legislation, typed on nature | Causality aware of itself |
| Hegel | Ethical life, the State as "actuality of the ethical Idea" | Practice comprehended by theory; contemplation |
| Ideology | Assume necessity; inner freedom | Resignation, or arbitrariness |
| Nancy | Freedom precedes and gives thinking | Burst, leap, generosity |
Comprehending the incomprehensible
Heidegger, glossing Kant: "The only thing that we comprehend is its incomprehensibility", since freedom "transposes us into the realization of Being, not in the mere representation of it". At Davos he withdrew freedom from "theory" into the practice of "philosophizing", a "liberation". But this gesture has a long philosophical history. Hegel already understood that Spirit can grasp itself as freedom only "practically and outside of itself": "Ethical life is the Idea of freedom"; "The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea". Philosophy then no longer comprehends but contemplates, for example "the majesty of the monarch". This "self-comprehension of the comprehension of incomprehensibility" means that freedom is "despite everything, comprehended", and once again "necessity is comprehended as freedom", from Rousseau's and Kant's enthusiasm to Marx's reversal and Heidegger's "thinking" as "acting".
How the "incomprehensible" freedom is captured again
Sacrifice or prodigality
Heidegger's "essential thinking" "expends itself in Being for the truth of Being", man surrendering his historical essence to "the freedom of sacrifice", "born of the abyss of freedom". Nancy hears in this both a sacrifice at the altar of truth (in which, as Bataille might say, nothing essential is lost) and another facet: prodigality. Thinking "expends what it thinks, free of 'calculation'". "Freedom is primarily prodigal liberality that endlessly expends and dispenses thinking."
Existence is free, phenomena are necessary
That there is thinking, human beings, existence, "cannot derive from a necessity for essence, and can only be given, freely given (which is a tautology)". "Phenomena are necessary, the very existence of the thing is free." If "there is something" were necessary, there would be no "there is", no "some" and no "thing", only immanent repletion: "it is" and no thought. So "every thinking is ... a thinking about freedom at the same time that it thinks by freedom and thinks in freedom". Thinking is always on the limit; it is neither a "supra-comprehension" (the mystics' impasse, "including what remains of the mystical in Heidegger") nor Schwärmerei. "The necessity of freedom would not be the freedom of necessity."
Nancy's positive account in this chapter
The abyss, generosity, the leap
The "abyss" of freedom is not a reserve from which things are drawn: "The 'abyss' (of freedom) is that there is something, and it is nothing else." It is only "the unleashing, prodigality, or generosity of the being-in-the-world of something". "Generosity precedes the possibility of any kind of possession"; its secret is "not ... giving what one has (one has nothing, freedom has nothing of its own), but ... giving oneself". It acts "without an idea of generosity", "like hitting one's head". Freedom is not volition or representation but "a bursting or a singularity of existence", the "insistence of a burst" here and now rather than an ek-static opening. So "it is freedom that is the 'leap', whereas Heidegger would have the leap provide access to freedom". Thinking holds itself in the leap, from Pascal's "chance which gives thoughts and takes them away" to the point where it has no thoughts at all; it "leaps into and over nothing", not into "the Kantian dove's empty space".
Rousseau's matrix and the type of nature
The Social Contract scene is not a side note. Freedom becomes self-conscious in the contract and at once produces the sovereign's objective self-knowledge: the people as a whole knows itself as absolute constraint on each. Kant's moral philosophy inherits the schema when freedom is known only through a "type" borrowed from the lawfulness of physical nature: a "second nature" of rational beings. Freedom thus "holds the secret of causality", the absolute causing that theoretical reason cannot exhibit. Nancy's charge is that this identity of freedom and law is already the necessity of necessity, not a late Hegelian twist.
Davos, contemplation, and the ideology of resolve
At Davos Heidegger withdrew freedom from "theory" into the practice of philosophizing as liberation. Nancy situates that gesture in a longer history: Hegel already held that Spirit grasps itself as freedom only "practically and outside of itself", so philosophy ends in contemplation of ethical life and of the monarch's majesty. The "major philosophical ideology" that follows treats freedom as assuming necessity, "liberation through law", an inner freedom that manages outer constraint, with pure libertarian arbitrariness as its mirror image. Both poles, for Nancy, are "admissions of a theoretical and practical powerlessness", the "resolve" toward the "inevitable" that Heidegger himself later rejected in the will to will.
Prodigality against sacrifice
Heidegger's "essential thinking" "expends itself in Being for the truth of Being"; man surrenders his historical essence to "the freedom of sacrifice", "born of the abyss of freedom". Nancy hears two tones. One is sacrificial: at the altar of truth, as Bataille might say, nothing essential is lost. The other is prodigality: thinking "expends what it thinks, free of 'calculation'". "Freedom is primarily prodigal liberality that endlessly expends and dispenses thinking." The chapter's positive thesis rides on this second tone.
Limit-thinking without mysticism
From Rousseau's matrix to Nancy's prodigality
Comprehension versus gift of thinking
Philosophy: Logic of Freedom
A philosophy of freedom has already happened
Should there be a philosophy of freedom? "It has already taken place: ... in all of philosophy and as all of philosophy", but as philosophy's Idea folded back on itself. Hence, where philosophy has not been abandoned, freedom has been abandoned in it, so that a philosophical discourse on freedom now seems "ridiculous or indecent". Still, freedom "matters to us", not as a good we have a right to enjoy, but "because we have always been defined and destined in her", since the founding of the Occident, which is also the founding of philosophy. Heidegger tried to replace "philosophy" with "thinking", for good reasons, but he did so as a philosopher.
Logos as freedom
There is a "pure discipline of concepts" only because the order of the concept belongs to freedom: "the concept of the concept ... cannot be anything other than the freedom through which the access to representation occurs". The same fact opens philosophy when "man" is defined by thought, as zōon logon ekhon, not as part of a cosmic order, a creature of God or the heir of a lineage. Logos is "before all the freedom in which is presented ... the 'reason' of every 'reason'", depending on an "order of matters whose first matter is nothing other than freedom". Whether logos masters freedom in a logic or renounces giving it a reason, it is "already seized by freedom".
Why philosophy is the fold of freedom in discourse
| Philosophy is not | Philosophy is |
|---|---|
| A founding discipline | The fold, in discourse, of the freedom that defines logos |
| A free market of "great ideas" and world-views | A test, in language, of the freedom that articulates thought |
| A guarantee or defence of freedoms | The keeping open of access to the essence of logos |
| A relay between moral, political, aesthetic practices | The praxis of logos: "thinking receives itself from the freedom of existence" |
Keeping the access open
We cannot leave this determination by stepping "outside" philosophy, because thought and freedom are determined together in the logos. Philosophy is not "the Phoenix of knowledges"; it is incessantly beyond itself because "philosophizing" keeps open "the vertiginous access to the essence of the logos, without which we would not have any idea of even the slightest 'logic' (discursive, narrative, mathematical, metaphysical, etc.)". Heidegger says philosophy is "rigorous conceptual knowledge of being", but only if the conceptual grasp (Begreifen) is "the philosophical apprehension (Ergreifen) of Dasein in freedom". Nancy reads this as freedom grasping the concept, not the concept grasping freedom: "existence as thinking".
Philosophy keeps access open
Philosophy is the logic of freedom: not a system that produces freedom as a result, but the logos that keeps open access to freedom. It does not construct or guarantee any freedom; it may mediate in actual struggles, but its axiom is that thinking receives itself from the freedom of existence. Freedom is not a "problem" to solve; what addresses thought cannot be reduced to a problem-form.
Philosophy's role in Nancy's account
Philosophy as logic of freedom
Sharing Freedom: Equality, Fraternity, Justice
Each time just this once
Singularity is "the 'just once, this time'", like "the infant's cry at birth": it creates a relation while hollowing out the supposedly common space around it. Ontology has two formal options: either Being is unique and absorbs all beings (then it is not singular, "if there is just one time, there is never 'once'"), or "there is no being apart from singularity". Heidegger's Jemeinigkeit, "each time as my own", is not a substantial ego but mineness defined by the "each time". Being is not a continuum; it has no being "except in the discreteness of singularities". So Mitsein, being-with, is "rigorously contemporaneous with Dasein": "the singular of 'mine' is by itself plural". Singularity, distinct from individuality, installs "relation as the withdrawal of identity, and communication as the withdrawal of communion".
Freedom withdraws being and gives relation
Freedom is "the discrete play of the interval" in which the each-time occurs; it "precedes singularity, though it does not found or contain it". "Freedom is the withdrawal of being ... This is why freedom is not, but it frees being": "freedom withdraws being and gives relation". This is not my freedom ending where yours begins, like two tangent circles; the spacing of singularities "can not include tangency" yet is "infinitely intimate". "What divides us is shared out to us." Freedom is not property, since only from freedom can anything be appropriated; it replaces every dialectic of recognition and "throws the subject into the space of the sharing of being". It is logos: "reason", "speech" and "sharing".
From the sharing of being to equality, fraternity, justice and the political
Equality and fraternity
Freedom is "equal to equality". Equality is not commensurability under a unit; it is "the equality of singularities in the incommensurable of freedom", which does not exclude the need for a technical measure of equality and justice. Freedom "measures itself against nothing", "the very 'measure' of 'measuring oneself'": an excess (démesure) of which heroism and ecstasy are figures, but so are grace, forgiveness and "the surprises of language". This excess is common. Fraternity, beyond sentiment (but not beyond passions "from hatred to glory"), is "the relation of those whose Parent, or common substance, has disappeared", like the sons of Freud's primal horde sharing the dismembered body of the Father. "The 'us' is anterior to the 'I'": because Descartes can say we know, each of us, that we exist, he can say ego sum.
| Value | Usual sense | Nancy's sense |
|---|---|---|
| Freedom | Autonomy of a subject | Relation: the withdrawal of being that gives relation |
| Equality | Same measure for all | Equality in the incommensurable; plus a technical measure |
| Fraternity | Family or sentiment | Sharing after the common Parent has vanished |
| Justice | Just mean, given measure | Just measure of the incommensurable; renewed challenge |
| Political | Guarantee of freedoms; powers | The "spaciosity" of freedom; an archi-politics |
Public space and justice
Freedom gives humanity, not the reverse; in relation, "human beings are not given", and "man" is "a figure that is susceptible to being effaced". Existence-in-relation is the ontology of what Hannah Arendt saw as the anteriority of public freedom: freedom was first "the free man's status, which enabled him to move ... and meet other people in deed and word". Free space is not provided in advance (the agora can mislead); it is opened by the trajectories and encounters of singularities, "a fabric without weave ... contrary to Plato's conception". The political is not the apparatus that guarantees freedoms but freedom's "spaciosity". Justice is "a just measure of the incommensurable": "the renewed decision to challenge the validity of an established or prevailing 'just measure'". Nancy sets beside this Lacoue-Labarthe (the political traced by the withdrawal of its essence), Lyotard (the nothingness at each occurring phase) and Badiou: "Revolutionary politics ... is essentially interminable".
What is interminable is the beginning
Not an endless approach to a regulative Idea, a Hegelian "bad infinity" that accompanies the resignations of today's left "to the point ... where one no longer knows what 'left' and 'right' mean". "What is interminable is not the end, but the beginning." Kant could not accept that a people or serfs are "not yet ripe for freedom", since "we must be free in order to be able to make purposive use of our powers in freedom". "Freedom cannot be awarded, granted, or conceded ... Freedom can only be taken", and in being taken it takes itself. The political is not first a mechanics of forces or Foucault's "political technology" but the opening of a space where freedom produces itself as praxis, "as an actor ... produces himself on stage". "Power has an origin, freedom is a beginning."
Jemeinigkeit without substance
Freedom cannot be presented as autonomy of a subjectivity in charge of itself. At every birth-into-the-world there is "mineness" (Jemeinigkeit) that does not imply substantial permanence or identity: the unpredictably arising surprise of an existence. Relation is not added to a prior self; the "self" is what remains when nothing comes back to itself. Freedom is also relation to "me", and symmetrically relation is freedom's element.
Equality of the incommensurable, fraternity without Parent
Equality here is not equal shares of a common measure. It is equality of the incommensurable: each singularity's uniqueness cannot be measured against another, yet that incommensurability is shared. Fraternity is not the relation of those who unify a common family, but the relation of those whose Parent has gone: sharing after the dissolution of a common substance, from hatred to glory by way of honor, love, competition for excellence. Justice challenges every measure that would close the incommensurable; it is the endless contestation of instituted measures.
Politics as spaciosity of freedom
Before freedom was an attribute of thought or a quality of will, it was the free man's status in a public space. Nancy redirects: what matters is not space as apparatus but the political as the "spaciosity" (spatiotemporal) of freedom. It gives place and time where freedom can begin. Freedom does not wait for politics; politics is measured by the fact that freedom is initial. Being-in-common arises with the withdrawal of being's aseity; the political is the leap and the strike of that beginning.
Sharing freedom: from mineness to the political
The political triad of Sec 7
Experience of Freedom: And Once Again of the Community, Which It Resists
The black fulguration
In Hegel's sentence freedom is not yet the dialectical sublation of the negative but a "pre-dialectical burst": "Freedom = the self-deepening nothingness". Nothing precedes it, conditions it, or makes it possible or necessary; "freedom is even free from freedom: thus it is free for freedom". The nothingness is not negated but concentrated to incandescence, "the burst of lightning ... the strike of one time". Freedom "does not apprehend itself, but takes itself, and this means that it always surprises itself". The will foresees contents, never its own modality: "Freedom = the nothingness surprised by its fulguration". It answers to no concept or intuition, being "the beginning of itself at the same time that it is itself the beginning"; a poet writes "No notion of beginnings".
Foundation of foundation, and the founding of a city
Heidegger: "Freedom is the foundation of foundation ... The breaking-forth of the abyss in founding transcendence is the primordial movement which freedom makes with us." This is finite freedom, not a limited freedom within borders (as nearly every ethical, political and aesthetic conception holds) but the absolute freedom of a being whose essence withdraws. The Abgrund is the Grund of every Grund. Nancy names the truth of abyss and intensification experience: founding is "the act par excellence of experiri". The model is the founding of an ancient city, the tracing of its limits, which precedes any architectural foundation: on the chōra, "pure matter-for-places", a decision "here and now" traces a limit and with it "its law and its transgression". Foundation is a poiesis "which is in itself a praxis", and it is piracy: "pirating foundation and founding piracy".
How freedom founds: from nothingness to the traced limit
The transcendental that is experience
The founding gesture belongs to no founding subject and supports no founded object: "the experience of owning no capital of experience". Experience "does not experience anything, but it experiences the nothing as the real that it tests and as the stroke of luck it offers". There is no act of freedom without it, whatever we calculate about choices, wills and laws. For Descartes, all one can say of freedom is "that each individual should encounter it and experiment with it for himself"; like the ego sum and the union of soul and body, "freedom proves itself by itself". It is "a transcendental experience or the transcendental of experience": "Freedom is not 'inconceivable': freedom is not conceived, and this is why it is freedom."
| Source | Experience as | Nancy's step |
|---|---|---|
| Hegel, Phenomenology | Science of the experience of consciousness; experience becomes subject | Heidegger: Hegel "retreated" from the word |
| Heidegger | Thrownness; letting the matter "demonstrate itself" | Did not keep the word "experience" |
| Classical empiricism | Impressions, experiments | Not this |
| Lévinas, as reputed | "Empiricism without positivity" | Not this either |
| Nancy | Thought as experience, empirical and transcendental at once | Material: body, history, language, chance, "a cry" |
Freedom grasps itself released
The objection: this is only self-presence again, the cogito where freedom and necessity convert into each other. "Nothing of the above is incorrect": "freedom frees itself", and philosophy has never said otherwise. But what freedom makes is "its not appearing to itself". "Freedom grasps itself released; it is a releasing of the grasp at the heart of the very gesture of grasping." It is "not the negative of the subject" but self-presence pushed to the point where the self vanishes into presence and presence into a self given over to sharing. Being free "by birth", as in antiquity, meant receiving a free place before birth; but our condition is not a status owned like the ancients' freedom. "Every birth is a releasing of being." "Freedom ... is the fact that existence is exposed."
Two ways to think coming-into-presence
Surprise and exposure
Truth, before adequation, is the gift of the given, a coming-into-presence. Where dialectic puts the negative to work, the withdrawal of being requires "not an operation, but a liberation": being "makes itself available" without appearing to itself. Existence relates to being "as the improbable is to necessity"; in Kant's terms, "there is no reason that there should not be chaos". Against Hegel's formula ("What is revealed is precisely that God is the revealable"), disclosure surprises what is disclosed and conceals again, as in Heidegger's alētheia. The there of Dasein "is not a position ... but it is a surprise". "To be exposed means to be surprised by the freedom of existing", and "I will never appear to myself as my own surprise, as my own birth, as my own death, as my own freedom."
Hegel's sentence read as pre-dialectical burst
Nancy insists that, "at least at the literal level", freedom here is not first the dialectical reversal of negativity into positivity. It is a pre-dialectical burst: the self-deepening of nothingness until affirmation breaks open. There is nothing before freedom and nothing at the moment of freedom; freedom is "even free from freedom", free for freedom. The "black fulguration" names that flash in which a beginning can arise without a prior condition.
Foundation of foundation, founding a city
Experience in Nancy's strong sense is the founding gesture that traces a limit where nothing was given. He links this to the antique founding of a city: the founder and the founded arise together; the act does not apply a prior plan but cuts a space. The "experience of experience" is this tracing. It is transcendental only as the condition that is itself an event, not as a standing structure of subjectivity. Descartes's cogito is reread as the surprise of thinking's happening, not as a secure ground.
Experience against Erlebnis and against revelation
Nancy refuses "lived experience" (Erlebnis) as another, more insidious ground (Nietzsche). He also refuses a model of revelation in which a subject turns absence into presence or makes God "revealable". Freedom's disclosure is liberation and making-available, the surprise of a coming that is not the negation of a negation. Existence is improbable and surprising; dialectic converts that surprise back into a necessity of Spirit's path.
Birth, death, and shared exposure
"My birth and my death are present to me and are my own only through the births and deaths of others, for whom in turn their births and deaths are neither present nor their own." We share what divides us. Freedom grasps itself as released: not as property recovered but as exposure. The antique "free by birth" image is used and marked: the free child receives freedom as condition, as the slave's child receives slavery; Nancy wants the image of a condition that is given as sharing, not as blood essence. Community founded this way resists every appropriation of a collective or individual essence of its sharing; that is why the subtitle says community "which it resists".
Experience of freedom as shared founding
Experience that founds and resists
Freedom as Thing, Force, and Gaze
Sartre: condemned to freedom
For Sartre "We are condemned to freedom": I am not free to be ill or not, yet I am "obliged to assume this determinism in order to place the ends of my freedom beyond it", "condemned to will what I have not willed". Nancy finds a lack and an excess. The lack: freedom is "the foundation in default of foundation" in beings who "lack ... being their own foundation", a power commanded by its own deficiency, hindered from outside by "determinism", and given back an essence (the project) and a self (the decision to assume itself). The excess: "the world must appear to me as issuing in its being from a freedom which is my freedom", which would need Hegel's infinite Spirit; with a finite subject, "the goal has no meaning", and Sartre's "finite pursuit of each person in the infinite pursuit of humanity" juxtaposes finite and infinite as a bad infinity.
Sartrean freedom, "in some ways the last 'philosophical freedom'", is the unhappy consciousness without sublation. Its project is "a wishful causality launched in defiance of experienced causality: the heroism of despair", a pattern shared by many discourses on freedom as the assumption or redemption of "harsh necessity".
| Sartre | Nancy | |
|---|---|---|
| Freedom is | Foundation in default of foundation | Foundation of foundation; existence itself |
| Relation to necessity | Assumes determinism, oversteps it | Not measured against causality |
| Possessed by freedom | Forced into knowledge of deprivation | Affirmatively: the thing without cause |
| Finite and infinite | Juxtaposed (bad infinity) | Finite transcendence |
| Figure | Unhappy consciousness, heroic despair | Force, resistance, gaze |
The thing without causality
As long as freedom stays inside causality, it can only be a doubtful spontaneous cause. Kant's principle of causality is the permanence of substance: "Coming into being and passing away of substance are not alterations of it." A free causality would require me to be the cause of my own birth and death, and the unconditioned causality of the totality "is nothing other than the idea of being itself". A "unification of two heterogeneous causalities" can only mean "a cause without causality, or a substance without permanence", which is the thing itself. "The thing [chose] of the phenomenon is not its cause [cause] ... it is its existence." "Causality by freedom" names only the Setzung, the birth and death of the thing. Hence "metaphysics is exactly the forgetting of freedom (resulting in Sartre)".
From free causality to the thing that exists
Force and the cadaver
What is given as fact is also given as force and action. The freedom of someone deprived of power to act is not "a pure interior disposition" or a protest of spirit against a chained body: "It is ... the very existence of this body". This force does not vanish even when the body is destroyed; it vanishes only when the relation of existences is turned into a relation of essences in a causality: "such is the difference of relation between the murderer and his victim, and the difference of nonrelation between the exterminator and his mass grave". Freedom is "the force of force in general", the thing's resistance to absorption into immanence, a transcendental force that is a material actuality. "Who would dare simply to appreciate in this way the free force of the cadaver before its murderer?" "'We' are the freedom of every thing."
What it means to be "possessed" by freedom
Thinking and the gaze
Thinking neither comprehends nor uncomprehends this force; it collides with "the hard matter of freedom itself", as the resistance of language, of thinkers, and of "the body that thinks, with muscles tensed". The existent's life "is identically its thought", so neither a philosophy of "life" nor of "spirit" suits it. Freedom's force, considerable or minute in effects, is "as thing and not as cause, always the same", an absolute intensity: "the absolute price of existence ('dignity' in the Kantian lexicon, which means what is no longer a 'value')". It is visible "as soon as two gazes cross", perhaps not only human ones: the invisible in the gaze that gazes.
Thing without cause, force, gaze
Against Sartre's "condemned to be free", Nancy treats freedom as the thing without cause (chose against cause), a material force even in powerlessness, and a gaze that exposes rather than masters. Freedom is not the subject's project but the density of existence as fact. The chapter's triad (thing, force, gaze) blocks both spiritualization of freedom as pure will and its reduction to political rights alone. Materialism here means irreducibility, passivity, hardness: not physiological base of the psychic.
Freedom as thing, force, and gaze
Thing, force, gaze
Absolute Freedom
Beyond caprice and fate
All philosophy before Kant knew that caprice can depend on fate and fate look like caprice. Kant's two causalities made the antinomy and its solution possible; once the difference is seen to be "fallacious", since both sides remain causality, every question of freedom is condemned "to inanity", whether as subjective assumption of necessity, relative freedom within a group, spiritual and non-material freedom, or "ethico-political freedoms incapable of understanding themselves". The absolute is "the thing, not the cause ... presence, not essence ... existence, not being". To think this absoluteness is "the categorical imperative of every thought of freedom".
"Be free!"
The imperative has meaning only for a freedom, and freedom has meaning only in receiving it: freedom is "the allocutor of its own injunction: be free! Or: free yourself!" ("be what you are, that is, freedom, and ... free yourself from an essence and/or concept of freedom!"). Plato's free condition of the philosopher, the Cartesian decision to be oneself, Spinoza's freedom of God, Hegel's State all end here. Auto-nomy is "a legislation by the self in which the self does not preexist", a law that founds the very possibility of right: "the right of what is 'by rights' without right". Freedom is "singularity of the law and law of singularity": one law prescribing "that there be only cases".
Why the command of freedom is impossible and yet effective
"Be free!" "commands the impossible" (no freedom exists before it) and "commands impossibly" (there is no authority). We can say it only to someone who already knows what it means, who has already been set free. The imperative is powerless to execute, not a cause, but not without force: the force of intonation, "a force without function", the intensity of a singular existence.
| Hegel | Nancy | |
|---|---|---|
| Formula | The Absolute is free | Freedom is absolute |
| Absolute | Self-relating whole, beyond yet related | Ab-solution: detached from all relation, even itself |
| Where | Spirit's self-actualization, the State | The singular fact of existence, "the throw of an existence" |
Absolute as ab-solution
"Absolute freedom" is not unlimited power. To be absolute is to be detached from everything: ab-solution, being withdrawn into itself short of itself, essence dissolved in the fact of existence. If that is being's extremity, then "'freedom' is the philosophical name of this absoluteness, or is nothing": the detachment and unleashing of being, "absolved of its being in the sharing of existence". Kant and Hegel supply the vocabulary Nancy twists; the absolute is no longer the self-knowing whole but the sharing that undoes self-enclosure.
Two senses of "absolute freedom"
Absolute freedom as ab-solution
Freedom and Destiny: Surprise, Tragedy, Generosity
Time as substance and its coming-forth
Destiny controlled from beyond, or a necessary History, presupposes "time as being; time as substance and as subjectivity". Freedom then exists only from a position outside time, where it merges with fatality, either as ecstasy in God or History or as "resolve to the inevitable". The Western obsession with fatality grows exactly as temporality is made a substance. For all of philosophy time is held within presence; for Kant time is "the only thing that does not flow in time". But the present cannot originate from another present: each present is a birth or death, the Setzung of the thing, which "escapes permanence as well as succession". Heidegger named this giving Ereignis: "The giving of presence is the property of Ereignen. Being vanishes in Ereignis." Nancy declines to extend Heidegger's partly suspended analysis and uses it "freely". The coming-forth is "the origin of a possible origin"; he calls it a coming-up (sur-venue): "'coming' does not come".
From the course of time to its coming-forth
Surprise
Surprise does not add itself to the course of events; it offers within the course "the withdrawal of the course of time". It has the structure of the present seen as the limit of presence: it "takes place without having happened", opening a time of astonishment or of questions such as "Why is there something?" The time of answers is the time of necessity, but "no necessity opens by surprise". The empiricist's question, will the sun rise tomorrow, has no answer except surprise, which says only "that tomorrow's sun, if there is one, will not be the same sun".
Freedom is not a subject, so "freedom surprises itself", at the limit of subjectivity (ego sum). It strikes the whole system of will: Nancy cites two sentences, the second "She throws herself beneath the train without having made the decision to do so. Rather, it was the decision that took Anna". Freedom separates itself from resignation and revolt, neither the Stoic will to will the world's order (which Nancy says is not resignation) nor a revolt secretly bound to destiny: "it is freedom that decides, freedom makes them free or not." Kant is right that standing up from my chair adds no second causality, yet in that gesture something "comes-up" that delivers its time to existence.
| Stance | Relation to destiny | Nancy's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Resignation | Resolve to the inevitable | Result of the metaphysical concept; the Stoics are not this |
| Revolt | Opposes destiny, still bound by it | An illusion if it claims escape |
| Free act | Cuts time, appropriates the event | Neither choice nor constraint: exposed existence |
Tragedy and filled time
Surprise exposes existence "as an infinite generosity to time's finitude". Only so can time be "filled", in Walter Benjamin's model: historical time is "infinite in every direction and at every moment not filled", and a fulfilled event is "an idea". The tragic hero, exposed to his "flaw", fills his "time proper", in an instant, "by a cut in the middle of the instant". "In tragedy, the hero dies because nobody is capable of living in filled time. He dies of immortality." Death surprises the hero in moments of repose, delay, catastrophe. This tragic has little to do with the metaphysical conflict of "freedom" and "destiny": it "knows nothing of sadness".
Two readings of tragedy
Birth, death, destination
One does not die of each free act, though "there is no freedom that does not involve death, as Hegel knew". Birth and death share a structure that runs through a whole life: existence is present only "in being freely offered to presence". Freedom, initial, is equally final, not as a goal but as Blanchot's "workless inoperation [désoeuvrement] of existing". "To be born free" and "to die freely" say that we are born and die "to nothing other than freedom", in an "immortality" that is no supernatural life. Heidegger's destination, "donation of presence" rather than destiny, comes close, but still sounds like willed action.
Surprise, tragedy, generosity
Freedom and destiny are not opposites once freedom is the coming-up of time (surprise, sur-venue) rather than a choice against fate. Tragedy names existence's exposure without a theodicy that would redeem it; generosity names being's giving without possession. The Stoic and Benjaminian and Blanchotian threads converge: destiny is not a script written in advance but the free spacing of time in which existence is offered and can be ruined. Generosity precedes having; it is the ethos that later chapters oppose to fury.
Freedom and destiny: surprise, tragedy, generosity
Destiny as free spacing of time
Evil: Decision
We cannot remain silent
Evil has blocked the "freedom" that was the main thought of Western culture. Heidegger acknowledged "the greatest folly of my life", but "he did keep silent", and that silence was also a silence about freedom. To give up thinking freedom in favour of "the hastily acquired consensus of a moral and political liberalism" would be to give up thinking. Thinking is not intellectuality but the experience of its limits, which are birth and death. "Auschwitz signified the death of birth and death, their conversion into an infinite abstraction, the negation of existence." Thought must be tested against Thomas Mann's sentence of 1939: "Yes, we know once again what good and evil are", not as a return to a known good and evil, but as a new knowledge.
The modern knowledge of evil
| Lesson | Content |
|---|---|
| 1. No theodicy | Closure of all theodicy or logodicy: evil is strictly unjustifiable |
| 2. Positive | Not the defect of a particular being but inscribed in existence: positive wickedness |
| 3. Incarnate | The exterminating horror of the mass grave: unbearable and unpardonable |
The evil that was "nothing" has become "something" thought cannot reduce. Nancy lists the modern fascination with evil (Sade, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, Bloy, Proust, Bataille, Bernanos, Kafka, Céline, the roman noir, horror film). The diabolical can no longer be pictured as a sublime "appalling black sun": "For us the night can no longer radiate ... Nacht und Nebel."
Kant saw "radical evil" but refused the word wickedness for "the disposition ... to adopt evil as evil into our maxim" ("that is diabolical"), calling it perversity of heart. Yet a few pages later he finds in the biblical devil an incomprehensible origin of evil: for relative evil to exist there must be at the origin "the absolute evil of the determination toward evil". So, almost without Kant knowing it, the incomprehensibility of evil sits at the heart of the incomprehensibility of freedom. Once freedom is cut loose from causality, "The mystery of freedom is no longer that of a spontaneous cause, it is that of a spontaneity of wickedness."
Wickedness as stillborn good
Evil is not the privation of a good left intact, nor the cessation of a good. It is "absolutely relative" to good: "the ruin of the good as such". "Neither good nor evil precedes. Freedom alone precedes." Deciding for evil is "deciding to ruin in the very decision the possibility of the good"; it attacks the good "in statu nascendi". "Wickedness is stillborn good." Since freedom is wholly given in its surprise, "it is freedom that unleashes itself against itself ... as if with an initial self-hatred." Wickedness "hates singularity as such ... It hates freedom, equality, and fraternity; it hates sharing." "Evil is the hatred of existence as such": the existent withdraws existence into the abyss of being, pure immanence or pure transcendence, "the relation taken as a mass, and the mass in a mass grave". Evil must not be imputed to a few to spare the rest: it belongs to freedom "such as it has been freed and surprised in our history".
Nancy's account of wickedness
Fury, Schelling, and the risk of ontodicy
The identity of "good" and "evil" in freedom came after Kant through Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger. Heidegger, in 1946: "The essence of evil does not consist in the mere baseness of human action but rather in the malice of fury." Being grants healing grace and fury's compulsion to ruin; but "fury ruins 'healing', but healing does not repair ruin". Hegel's System of Ethical Life had made fury the first level of crime, the "restlessness of the absolute concept's infinity", which annihilates itself; in our world it does not suppress itself but "institutes total devastation".
In the Schelling commentary, evil arises when "the ground elevates itself to existence and puts itself in the place of existence", and "freedom 'is' the capacity for good and evil". Heidegger judges Schelling's unity too metaphysical, but Nancy asks whether Heidegger keeps a sovereign, quasi-dialectical indifference to good and evil, making discord what "makes unity appear": "a deaf return to a theodicy or logodicy, this time in the form of an ontodicy". The question is stated plainly: "to what extent ... did Heidegger silently justify Auschwitz?", and, for us, is this a weakness of the thinking of being itself? The same is asked of Bataille, for whom "the unleashing of passions is the good" and freedom needs "a vertigo": is there an "atheological" theodicy of sacred evil, a fascination with the abyss? What is groundless can also rise "suspended in free air, the simple pulsating of a released existence". A last suspicion: a secret egoity of being, "Being alone 'is'", whose tonality allows an abandonment of beings to fury.
Two ways the thinking of being can go
Decision
"Freedom is freedom for good and evil", so its act is "good or bad decision", not an indifferent unleashing, which would only be fury "concentrated in itself". The thinking of existence "cannot think free decision without having actually decided for its own existence, and not for its ruin". In Being and Time, Gewissen (conscience) discovers Dasein as schuldig, indebted and guilty for a being it never possesses; "the attestation of being-wicked" is "more ancient" than any act. The existent is not innocent: "not to be in-nocent is to cause harm". Resoluteness: "On what is it to decide? Only the decision itself can give the answer." Nancy reads this as a decision for decision and for singularity, for "grace" of existence against "fury" of essence, and admits "This is not written as such in Heidegger's text": it is a reading that shares freedom. Decided existence "saves" the finitude of being from devastating ego-ity and offers an ethos, a "shelter".
Adorno's circle and Mann's sentence
Adorno's claim that post-Auschwitz culture, including its critique, is "garbage" is not Nancy's last word. "Not even silence gets us out of the circle." Heidegger's acknowledged "greatest folly" and subsequent silence about freedom are the local instance of a wider blockage: giving up the thought of freedom for a "hastily acquired consensus of a moral and political liberalism" would be to give up thinking. Thinking here means the experience of limits that are birth and death. Auschwitz "signified the death of birth and death, their conversion into an infinite abstraction, the negation of existence." Thomas Mann's 1939 sentence, "Yes, we know once again what good and evil are", is not a return to known values but the demand for a new knowledge after theodicy's closure.
Three lessons and the modern fascination
Nancy's three lessons are strict: (1) closure of every theodicy or logodicy, evil unjustifiable; (2) evil as positive wickedness inscribed in existence, not a defect of a particular being; (3) the incarnate horror of the mass grave, unbearable and unpardonable. Beside that knowledge runs modern fascination: Sade, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, Bloy, Proust, Bataille, Bernanos, Kafka, Céline, roman noir, horror film. The diabolical can no longer be a sublime "appalling black sun": "For us the night can no longer radiate ... Nacht und Nebel."
Kant: radical evil, wickedness, and the devil
Kant named "radical evil" but refused "wickedness" for the disposition "to adopt evil as evil into our maxim" ("that is diabolical"), calling it perversity of heart. Yet a few pages later the biblical devil supplies an incomprehensible origin: for relative evil to exist there must be at the origin "the absolute evil of the determination toward evil". Almost without Kant knowing it, the incomprehensibility of evil sits inside the incomprehensibility of freedom. Once freedom is cut loose from causality, "The mystery of freedom is no longer that of a spontaneous cause, it is that of a spontaneity of wickedness."
Stillborn good and hatred of sharing
Evil is not privation of a good left intact. It is "absolutely relative" to good: "the ruin of the good as such". "Neither good nor evil precedes. Freedom alone precedes." Deciding for evil decides "to ruin in the very decision the possibility of the good"; it attacks the good "in statu nascendi". "Wickedness is stillborn good." Because freedom is wholly given in its surprise, "it is freedom that unleashes itself against itself ... as if with an initial self-hatred." Wickedness "hates singularity as such ... It hates freedom, equality, and fraternity; it hates sharing." "Evil is the hatred of existence as such": the existent withdraws existence into pure immanence or pure transcendence, "the relation taken as a mass, and the mass in a mass grave". Evil must not be imputed to a few to spare the rest: it belongs to freedom "such as it has been freed and surprised in our history".
Fury, Schelling, Bataille, egoity of being
Heidegger in 1946: "The essence of evil does not consist in the mere baseness of human action but rather in the malice of fury." Being grants healing grace and fury's compulsion to ruin; "fury ruins 'healing', but healing does not repair ruin". Hegel's early System of Ethical Life made fury the first level of crime, restlessness of the absolute concept that annihilates itself; in our world fury "institutes total devastation" without self-suppression. In the Schelling commentary, evil arises when "the ground elevates itself to existence and puts itself in the place of existence"; freedom "'is' the capacity for good and evil". Nancy asks whether Heidegger keeps a sovereign indifference that makes discord what "makes unity appear": "a deaf return to a theodicy or logodicy, this time in the form of an ontodicy". The same question hits Bataille: if "the unleashing of passions is the good" and freedom needs "a vertigo", is there an "atheological" theodicy of sacred evil? A last suspicion: a secret egoity of being, "Being alone 'is'", whose tonality abandons beings to fury.
From Adorno's circle to decision
Decision, Schuld, and authenticity without content
"Freedom is freedom for good and evil", so its act is "good or bad decision", not an indifferent unleashing (which would only be fury "concentrated in itself"). Thinking of existence "cannot think free decision without having actually decided for its own existence, and not for its ruin". In Being and Time, Gewissen discovers Dasein as schuldig, indebted and guilty for a being it never possesses; "the attestation of being-wicked" is "more ancient" than any act. "Not to be in-nocent is to cause harm." Resoluteness: "On what is it to decide? Only the decision itself can give the answer." Nancy reads a decision for decision and for singularity, for "grace" of existence against "fury" of essence, and admits "This is not written as such in Heidegger's text": it is a reading that shares freedom. Decided existence "saves" the finitude of being from devastating ego-ity and offers an ethos, a "shelter". Authentic freedom has no prior content: it frees freedom for finitude, sharing, equality, community, fraternity, and their justice, "singularly withdrawn from the hatred of existence".
What decision affirms and refuses
Evil chapter: from Adorno to decision
Decision, Desert, Offering
Decision gives no morality
"Every decision surprises itself." I cannot decide without abandoning myself to my finitude and giving up appearing to myself as the deciding subject, so my decision is always one for relation: its subject can appear as "you" or "us" without being less mine. "Nothing finishes with the decision, but everything begins": only here can wickedness start, for fury needs a singularity to ruin. Letting-be, "always the contrary of a 'laissez-faire'", must decide at each moment its ethical relation to what it lets be. But "This does not arm us with a morality": it does not say when or how to respect others or "to treat humanity as an end", nor when to respect and not give death. "This gains us neither determined duties nor rights", which can only come from "infinitely renewed decisions"; it frees us "for duty and right, and for the perversion of the one and the other".
Spacing and the desert
Heidegger: "Just as the spatiality of the 'there' is grounded in disclosedness, the Situation has its foundations in resoluteness." Decision is disclosive, "spatializing"; Heidegger came to stress "free space": "Spacing is the setting free of places". Nancy links this to Yves Bonnefoy's "true place", where "I would also be profoundly free, for nothing in it would be foreign to me". This space is not Arendt's public space, an institution, but the gift of a spatio-temporality. Its description is borrowed from "another thinking": nomads who "make the desert no less than they are made by it", "vectors of deterritorialization", in a space of "haecceities" without perspective. This desert is not devastation: freedom "gives itself space", and the nomad is also habitation, an ethos, "a generosity of ethos more than an ethic of generosity".
| Space | Given how | Relation to freedom |
|---|---|---|
| Arendt's public space | Institution, prior foundation | Freedom appears in it |
| Bonnefoy's true place | By chance, beyond enigma | Nothing foreign: profoundly free |
| Nomadic desert | Made by those who dwell in it | Freedom gives itself space |
| Devastation | Fury's growth | Its exact reverse |
Generosity and fury
The offering
Generosity "does not dominate fury, which is born with it": it is "the infinite gift of finite freedom, while fury is the finite appropriation of infinite freedom". The gift is not an economy returning profit to the giver; it is an offering, "freely held back at the edge of the receiver's free acceptance" (one never passes a gift on to a third party "lest one annul the gift as gift"). There is not "a" decision but "each time, my own ... yours, theirs, ours".
Desert, offering, hope after the wait
After decision comes the desert: exposure without foundation, Bonnefoy's and Arendt's and a nomadology's figures of a space that is not a homeland of substance. Offering is existence given without return; generosity dispenses that there be something and that we exist. The history of waiting for total liberation is over. "Today the threat of a devastation of existence alone has any positivity." Hope of thinking means we would not even think if existence were not the surprise of being.
Decision, desert, offering
Hope after the end of the wait
Fragments
Why fragments
The fragment carries the ambiguities of freedom since Romanticism and the moralists: escape from all rules and also self-sufficiency. For Blanchot the fragment is strict "because of a tightening and strangling to the point of rupture". "Philosophical discourse today is fragmentation itself." Pushing discourse "against this rock (thing, force, gaze) of freedom, until exhaustion" would be "cheating": it would place the experience in a beyond, when "the experience is already taking place". Since Nietzsche every philosopher, "Bergson as much as Heidegger, Deleuze as much as Derrida", runs the risk of reclaiming in "literature" what is lost in "philosophy". What is at stake is what Derrida named writing: "the movement of meaning in the suspension of signification", an indecision between philosophy, literature and science that still demands their distinction. Writing "is of the community or it is not writing": to write is to submit to sharing, "a political and ethical minimum", without which the most democratic writing "can cover up the worst lie and accompany the worst politics". Robert Musil's 1937 lecture On Stupidity, aimed at fascism, warns that freedom and reason have been corrupted "less a success of their enemies than of their friends".
Words, etymologies, things
"You offer no semantics of the word 'freedom'." True: the senses matter little, its "strategic position, much", always beside "necessity". Nancy lists etymologies "without commentary": libertas and eleutheria from a root for "public" and "growth"; liber as book (less certain); free/frei as "beloved" (friend, Freund); Gaius on ingenui and libertini; necessarius as a close non-kin friend. None of the many senses (free will, rights, anarchy, "the free end of a rope") "exactly matches what is at stake".
Against Heidegger's split between Dasein's factuality and the stone's (Being and Time §27), there is one factuality of the world, of mineral, plant, animal, cosmic, and rational. "Will I say that all things are free? Yes, if I knew how to understand this." The world is not "for me" but "the essential co-belonging of ex-istence with the existing of all things"; neither the world nor any thing is simply "necessary". What we find is "something like a clinamen", the slant of the "there is". "In this sense, the stone is free." "We are the freedom of all things" means we are responsible for the freedom of the world, with consequences for technology: "in technology we liberate, and we liberate ourselves to the freedom of the world".
"The stone is free"
Authentic decision, revolution
"Undecidability ... is not the equivalence of all decisions": it is the impossibility that a decider precede the decision. Heidegger's decision stays "too 'heroic'", tied to "a 'system of values'". Freedom is "free for and against itself", "freedom of 'grace' and of 'fury'". The decision for evil "is a decision for what leaves nothing more to be decided"; it "can appear to itself as 'good'". The authentic decision is a "holding of decision", always new, against both letting everything happen and doing "everything". "Decision is the empty moment of every ethics", "the ethos at the groundless ground of every ethics", without which there would be "neither Plato's Good, nor Kant's good will, nor Spinozistic joy, nor Marxian revolution, nor Aristotle's zôon politikon".
Revolution must still be thought: reform changes nothing, "Revolt is a prisoner of the despair that produces it", while revolution "signified: the opening of decision, the community exposed to itself". Nancy concedes that "Fascism and Nazism were also revolutions, as were Leninism and Stalinism", hence "revolutionizing revolutions". People "die of hunger, drugs, wars, boredom, work, hatred, revolts, revolutions"; "Freedom Manipulated (by powers, by capital): this could be the title of our half-century"; "'Freedoms' are also pieces of 'technology'."
| Fragment theme | Claim | Ties to |
|---|---|---|
| Writing | Meaning offered by withdrawal; a political minimum | Ch. 6, 13 |
| The stone | One factuality; all things free | Ch. 9 |
| Authentic decision | Holding decision open; ethos of every ethics | Ch. 12, 13 |
| Revolution | Opening of decision; revolutionize revolutions | Ch. 7 |
| Fraternity | Love without communion (Blanchot) | Ch. 7 |
| Death | Freedom is "the inappropriable of death" | Ch. 11 |
Heidegger, Schmitt, and the last thesis
Heidegger "was the first to take the measure of the radical insufficiency of our 'freedoms'", yet thought "the free" in tones of "destiny" and "sovereignty", and "in the name of this he was undoubtedly seduced by Hitler and later remained silent on the subject of the camps". "That Heidegger should have been a Nazi was an error and a mistake. That he could have been one is what belongs to the archi-ethical principle of freedom." Moving from a thinking of principles to a politics "is never good" (Nancy recalls the many "philosophy of values" theorists who backed Nazism). Authentic decision is not decisionism: unlike Carl Schmitt's decision on the exception, it happens within the "inauthentic", at its surface. The motto "liberty, equality, fraternity" looks ridiculous in France as "a lie of the State", yet Heidegger's "equality ... of being as being-in-the-world" belongs to freedom; fraternity can be read not as the brothers' murder of the Father but as sharing "to infinity", or Blanchot's "we love them, we cannot do anything for them, except help them to reach the threshold".
Where Nancy parts from Heidegger
Freedom has, Nancy says, the structural place of Hegelian death but is not the negative: "Not 'freedom or death!' ... but: freedom in place of death." Thought is not a tomb but "a nomad space". "There is no 'experience of freedom'; freedom itself is experience." Freedom "consists in not consisting, without any contradiction", never Hegel's "freedom of the void".
Fragment form: Blanchot, writing, Musil
Nancy gives "no particular credit" to the fragment as a Romantic badge of freedom. As form it is ambiguous: disengagement from rules and genres, and also concentrated self-sufficiency. Blanchot: the fragment is strict "not because of its brevity (it can prolong itself to the point of agony) but because of a tightening and strangling to the point of rupture". "Philosophical discourse today is fragmentation itself." To push discourse "against this rock (thing, force, gaze) of freedom, until exhaustion" would be cheating: it would place experience in a beyond when "the experience is already taking place". Since Nietzsche every philosopher, "Bergson as much as Heidegger, Deleuze as much as Derrida", risks reclaiming in "literature" what is lost in "philosophy". What is at stake is what Derrida named writing: "the movement of meaning in the suspension of signification", an indecision among philosophy, literature and science that still demands their distinction. Writing "is of the community or it is not writing": a political and ethical minimum without which the most democratic writing "can cover up the worst lie and accompany the worst politics". Musil's 1937 lecture On Stupidity, aimed at fascism, warns that freedom and reason have been corrupted "less a success of their enemies than of their friends".
Etymologies that do not settle the stake
"You offer no semantics of the word 'freedom'." True: the senses matter little, its "strategic position, much", always beside "necessity". Listed without commentary: libertas and eleutheria from a root for "public" and "growth"; liber as book (less certain); free/frei as "beloved" (friend, Freund); Gaius on ingenui and libertini (children of the free; those freed or born of the freed); necessarius as a close non-kin friend. None of the many senses (free will, rights, anarchy, "the free end of a rope") "exactly matches what is at stake".
One factuality: the stone is free
Against Heidegger's split between Dasein's factuality and the stone's (Being and Time §27), Nancy posits one factuality of the world, mineral, plant, animal, cosmic, and rational. "Will I say that all things are free? Yes, if I knew how to understand this." The world is not "for me" but "the essential co-belonging of ex-istence with the existing of all things"; neither world nor thing is simply "necessary". What we find is "something like a clinamen", the slant of the "there is". "In this sense, the stone is free." "We are the freedom of all things" means we are responsible for the freedom of the world, with consequences for technology: "in technology we liberate, and we liberate ourselves to the freedom of the world", not only exploit.
Fragments: from form to the freedom of things
Undecidability, authentic decision, revolution
"Undecidability ... is not the equivalence of all decisions": it is the impossibility that a decider precede the decision. Heidegger's decision stays "too 'heroic'", tied to "a 'system of values'". Freedom is "free for and against itself", "freedom of 'grace' and of 'fury'". The decision for evil "is a decision for what leaves nothing more to be decided"; it "can appear to itself as 'good'". Authentic decision is a "holding of decision", always new, against both letting everything happen and doing "everything". "Decision is the empty moment of every ethics", "the ethos at the groundless ground of every ethics", without which there would be "neither Plato's Good, nor Kant's good will, nor Spinozistic joy, nor Marxian revolution, nor Aristotle's zôon politikon".
Revolution must still be thought: reform changes nothing; "Revolt is a prisoner of the despair that produces it"; revolution "signified: the opening of decision, the community exposed to itself". Nancy concedes that "Fascism and Nazism were also revolutions, as were Leninism and Stalinism", hence "revolutionizing revolutions". People "die of hunger, drugs, wars, boredom, work, hatred, revolts, revolutions"; "Freedom Manipulated (by powers, by capital): this could be the title of our half-century"; "'Freedoms' are also pieces of 'technology'." All liberations (national, social, moral, sexual, aesthetic) are ambiguous and arise from manipulations, "and yet each has its truth".
Heidegger's Nazism, Schmitt, fraternity, death
Heidegger "was the first to take the measure of the radical insufficiency of our 'freedoms'", yet thought "the free" in tones of "destiny" and "sovereignty", and "in the name of this he was undoubtedly seduced by Hitler and later remained silent on the subject of the camps". "That Heidegger should have been a Nazi was an error and a mistake. That he could have been one is what belongs to the archi-ethical principle of freedom." Moving from principles to a politics "is never good" (Nancy recalls "philosophy of values" theorists who backed Nazism). Authentic decision is not Schmittian decisionism: unlike decision on the exception, it happens within the "inauthentic", at its surface. The motto "liberty, equality, fraternity" looks ridiculous in France as "a lie of the State", yet Heidegger's "equality ... of being as being-in-the-world" belongs to freedom; fraternity can be read not as the brothers' murder of the Father but as sharing "to infinity", or Blanchot's "we love them, we cannot do anything for them, except help them to reach the threshold".
Freedom has the structural place of Hegelian death but is not the negative: "Not 'freedom or death!' ... but: freedom in place of death." What resists, "resistance itself - which is properly the community's - is the freedom that the dead person (not abstract 'death') never ceases to be". Thought is not a tomb but "a nomad space". "There is no 'experience of freedom'; freedom itself is experience." Freedom "consists in not consisting, without any contradiction", never Hegel's "freedom of the void".
Last stakes of the fragments
Closing fragment arc
What to Keep from The Experience of Freedom
Numbered takeaways
- Free yourself from "freedom". The freedoms we defend are necessary but formal; the philosophical Idea of freedom belongs to an ontology of the subject that has reached its limit.
- Freedom is a fact, not an Idea or a right. Kant's "fact of reason" points to the fact of existence: existence as its own essence "is nothing other than the freedom of being".
- Freedom is not a kind of causality. As long as it is a cause beside causes it stays doubtful; the free is the thing without cause, the Setzung of existence.
- Ontology must become eleutherology. To think being is to think its freedom, or existence is left to blind necessity.
- Freedom is relation. An autonomous subject could relate to nothing; singular beings com-pear in the withdrawal of a common being.
- Freedom gives thinking. Thinking is not the grasp of freedom but its leap; declaring freedom "incomprehensible" is just philosophy's last way of grasping it.
- Heidegger's interruption is a resource. He dropped freedom as a theme, but "the free" he left is where it must be thought again.
- Equality is of the incommensurable. Singularities are equal precisely because none can be measured by another.
- Fraternity has no common Parent. It is the sharing of those whose origin has withdrawn, and Blanchot's love "without communion".
- Justice keeps reopening every measure. Politics is the space where freedom begins "each time".
- Experience is founding, not receiving. Experience is the perilous crossing that traces a limit; freedom is "the experience of experience".
- Sartre's freedom is the last unhappy consciousness. Condemned to assume necessity, it is "the heroism of despair".
- Freedom is a material force. It persists even in the powerless and the dead, "the free force of the cadaver before its murderer".
- "Be free!" is the only command freedom gets. It commands the impossible, and can be heard only by someone already free.
- Freedom is absolute as ab-solution. Not "the Absolute is free" but freedom is detachment from all relation, even from itself.
- Freedom happens as surprise. It is the cut in time that opens time, neither resignation nor revolt.
- Tragedy is filled time, not freedom against fate. Benjamin's hero "dies of immortality".
- Evil is positive. Not a lack of good but wickedness, the ruin of good in statu nascendi: freedom's self-hatred.
- No theodicy, no ontodicy. Nancy asks whether the thinking of being, even Heidegger's, quietly justifies evil.
- Decision decides for existence. Thinking cannot think decision without having decided for existence, not its ruin.
- Decision gives no morality. It is "the empty moment of every ethics", the ethos beneath all contents.
- Generosity is born with fury. "The infinite gift of finite freedom" against "the finite appropriation of infinite freedom".
- The world, even the stone, is free. We are responsible for the freedom of the world, technology included.
- Revolution must still be thought. Not seizure of power but "the opening of decision, the community exposed to itself".
The master question and the book's four answers, joined in decision.
Frameworks
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Freedom as fact | Freedom is the fact of existence, not a right or Idea | A debate assumes freedom must be proved or granted |
| Ontology of subjectivity | The Idea of freedom as self-possession of a subject | Diagnosing why "freedom" talk feels empty |
| Eleutherology | Thinking being as freedom | Asking what being means without necessity |
| Foundation of foundation | Freedom founds by having no ground | Contrasting with Sartre's foundation "in default" |
| Sharing / com-pearance | Singulars appear together, no common essence | Thinking community without identity |
| Equality of the incommensurable | Equal because unmeasurable by each other | Testing equality claims based on sameness |
| Experience as piracy | Experience as perilous crossing, a traced limit | Reading "experience" beyond the empiricist sense |
| Thing without causality | The free is existence, the withdrawal of cause | Escaping free-will versus determinism |
| Surprise | Freedom as the cut that opens time | Thinking events, births, deaths, decisions |
| Positive wickedness | Evil as freedom's self-hatred, not privation | Facing extermination without theodicy |
| Authentic decision | Holding decision open, for existence | Ethics without fixed contents |
| Generosity / offering | A gift kept as gift, born with fury | Thinking gift beyond exchange |
Strengths and limits of the book
Whole-book closer look
Who's who
| Name | Role in the book | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Jean-Luc Nancy | Author (d. 23 Aug 2021) | Freedom as fact of existence, shared, decided |
| Peter Fenves | Foreword | Nancy as "good empiricist" via Hume/Kant |
| Bridget McDonald | Translator | Moved French ch. 2 to English §1 |
| Kant | Fact of reason, radical evil | Touchstone Nancy unsettles |
| Heidegger | Space left free; Schelling; Nazism | Engine and risk of the book |
| Schelling | Positivity of evil | Capacity for good and evil |
| Hegel | Nothingness as freedom; State | Pre-dialectical burst; ideology of necessity |
| Adorno | Post-Auschwitz culture | Opens the evil chapter |
| Sartre | "Condemned to be free" | Last unhappy consciousness |
| Blanchot / Derrida | Fragment; writing | Form and community of the ending |
Three habits the synthesis recommends
- Free yourself from "freedom". The freedoms we defend are necessary but formal; the philosophical Idea of freedom belongs to an ontology of the subject that has reached its limit.
- Freedom is a fact, not an Idea or a right. Kant's "fact of reason" points to the fact of existence: existence as its own essence "is nothing other than the freedom of being".
- Freedom is not a kind of causality. As long as it is a cause beside causes it stays doubtful; the free is the thing without cause, the Setzung of existence.
- Ontology must become eleutherology. To think being is to think its freedom, or existence is left to blind necessity.
- Freedom is relation. An autonomous subject could relate to nothing; singular beings com-pear in the withdrawal of a common being.
- Freedom gives thinking. Thinking is not the grasp of freedom but its leap; declaring freedom "incomprehensible" is just philosophy's last way of grasping it.