Steve Martinot

Univ. of California at Berkeley
marto@ocf.berkeley.edu

 

 

Jean-Luc Nancy. The Experience of Freedom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

 

If there were a movie version of Jean-Luc Nancy’s book The Experience of Freedom, the scene would be a dark cabaret and dance hall. In it, the air is smoke-filled and murky, though there are few people in the place. In the background, one hears Heidegger’s music; it has his tonality, his phraseology, his syntax, played in his favorite key. On the dance floor, Nancy is dancing with Heidegger himself. They dance closely and intimately. In a dark corner of the cabaret, someone is leaning against the wall, watching Martin and Jean-Luc dance. He is thin, gaunt, tough looking, in a black beret and turtleneck sweater; a Gauloise hangs from the corner of his mouth. He slowly approaches the dancing couple; his walk is lithe, like a boxer. It is Sartre. He taps Heidegger on the shoulder, as if to cut in. Nancy turns on him shrilly, “Oh go away! It is dead between us. I’m with someone else now.” Sartre smiles. “But I taught you that dance which you’re trying to make him do.” Nancy cuts him off, with an expression of disdain, arrogance, and piety all at once. “Why don’t you just leave us alone?” Sartre shrugs, and wanders over to the bar to continue watching the dancers, who dance more stiffly now and with some space between them. Heidegger begins to look a little out of place. Nancy sighs and says to no one in particular, “I wish I knew some more worldly people, a poet perhaps in a beret and cigarette; I could really go for one of them. Too bad there aren’t any around.”

 

In The Experience of Freedom, Nancy maneuvers between two languages, that of Heidegger — of being, presencing, withdrawing, and the ontological difference — and that of Sartre — of freedom, nothingness, precedence, and transcendence. The secret charm of this book, behind its patina of rigor, is that while Nancy owns one language and disowns the other, he ends up speaking them both. But there is an aura of hesitancy, of appearing to “reinvent the wheel,” in dispensing with Sartre (a tradition, it seems, that has become self-defeating) that truncates Nancy’s project.

 

In the last chapter, which is a series of “fragments” (culled perhaps from the “cutting room floor” of other chapters), Nancy tells what he knows about what he has done. Speaking of the difference, forgotten by metaphysics, between being and beings, he says:

 

But this difference is not — not even the “ontico- ontological difference.” It is itself the very effacing of this difference — an effacing that has nothing to do with forgetting. If this difference is not, it in effect retreats into its own difference. This retreat is the identity of being and beings: existence. Or more precisely: freedom. (167)

 

That is, freedom is to be the arche, the deconstruction of the ontological difference (and of Heidegger with it). Furthermore, Nancy has just asked, “How might a discourse of freedom correspond to its object? How might it ‘speak freely’ in speaking of freedom?” (148). To be still asking this at the end of the book suggests that his project of “setting freedom free” is really a question of language, one whose central problematic is not articulation but the inarticulable; that is, the problem of freedom is one of textual form.

 

Nancy posits the following. With Heidegger, who taught philosophy how to move anterior to subjectivity, anterior to beings and to thematization (philosophy) itself, the thematization of freedom came to an end. Nothing can happen except in freedom. “Existence as its own essence is nothing other than the freedom of being” (23). The problem becomes how not to abandon existence and essence to each other; existence must be “freed” if thought is to have anything left to think (9). Freedom must be thought again. Yet the means to do so have been exhausted. The ontology of subjectivity traps itself between principles of freedom and the freedom that founds subjectivity. The freedom reflected in history, evil, liberty, etc., cannot be made an idea without falling into those things. If, like god, freedom contains all in itself, unlike god, it must belong to finite being since infinite being cannot be free. The question becomes that of liberating freedom from infinitude while preserving the inarticulability of its anteriority. Thus, Nancy’s starting point is that freedom is anterior to all that is anterior in philosophy, and to all foundations; if he is to find an articulation, as he argues he must, it will be through a notion of the experience of freedom.

 

These are the stakes in thematizing freedom. The stakes for Nancy himself extend to how to rethink certain issues in the light of rethematized freedom. Those issues are 1) sharing or community and 2) the possibility of evil (evil will be addressed below). “Sharing freedom” occupies the center of Nancy’s text, just as care does in Being and Time, and Being-for-others does in Being and Nothingness; it is where Nancy makes a connection with the social. Sharing is where “we already recognize freedom” (74). On this issue, he essentially adopts a Heideggerian stance: one’s relations to others are anterior to an “I” and make the “I” possible. This is perhaps the weakest argument in the book because it retreats most heavily into a reliance on Heideggerian rhetoric.

 

The strength of the book is how Nancy grounds this endeavor in a notion of an experience of freedom, for which he does not use language descriptively but rather formally, through the strength of a structure. To address the “experience of freedom,” both Kant and Heidegger must be surpassed, the former toward a factuality of freedom (22), and the latter toward the existent’s (Dasein’s) decision to exist as an obligation to the undecidable limit of its freedom (28). For Nancy, the experience of freedom becomes thinking as experience, thinking knowing itself as freedom and knowing itself as thought (59). In sum, freedom presents itself unrepresentably as and in the experience of experience.

 

If this invokes Sartre’s sense of the term erlebnis,¹ it is also noteworthy in iterating the structure Sartre gives the *non-thetic* self-awareness of the for-itself that he calls conscience(de)soi (though Nancy does not want it to). Both structures are self-referential (thought referring to itself as thought per se), and both rely on parallel notions of obligation (of Dasein to exist and of the for-itself’s “having to be”). Like disaffected lovers, the two thinkers appear to couch the same idea in inverted terms in order to appear to be at odds.

 

Nancy: “Thinking cannot think without knowing itself as thought, and knowing itself as such, it cannot not know itself as freedom.” (59)

 

Sartre: “Freedom is nothing other than existence. . . that of a being which is its being in the mode of having to be it.” (BN, 543; EN, 520, translation modified)

 

Though there is a distinction between “mode” and “knowing” (to which we shall return), the quarrel Nancy picks with Sartre is more gratuitous. For Nancy, freedom is the “foundation of foundation” (35), and he claims Sartre’s notion is different, that it is “foundation in default of foundation” (97). But for Sartre, “foundation comes into the world through the for-itself,” both as the contingency of being and as idea (BN,100). Nancy makes his accusation because he interprets Sartre’s sense of nothingness and lack as absence rather than as difference (cf. BN,105). One can imagine Sartre shrugging and saying, “feel free.” Perhaps Nancy would try again, saying, “freedom has the exact structure of the subject” (90).

 

For Nancy, if freedom is what cannot be founded on anything else, since all foundations are discovered in freedom, it attains a certain factuality. “Freedom belongs to existence not as a property, but as a fact” (29). And Sartre would agree, though in/on his own terms (as usual): the facticity of the for-itself (freedom) is that the for-itself “is not, it is in order not to be” (BN,101). That is, its essence is its inarticulability — which is Nancy’s essential point as well. Nancy understands freedom through its incomprehensibility, Sartre through its inarticulability as such (“the for-itself is always other than what can be said about it” — BN, 537).

 

But the inarticulable is only approachable in form, as a construction rising above the plane of language, a textual form that does not itself “mean,” though it brings meaning into inarticulable play as that construct. The textual form Nancy deploys is interesting. “Freedom is the infiniteness of the finite as finite” (172); “Experience . . . is the act of a thought which does not conceive, or interrogate, or construct what it thinks except by being already taken up and cast as thought, by its thought” (20). In paraphrase, an inarticulable (freedom, experience) is something that cannot be constituted by an aspect of being except insofar as that aspect generates itself and as the very mode of its self-constitution. In each case, it is self-referential across the difference of an iteration, and self-referentiality is the structure of what both is not and is only that structure (what Gasche has called a heterology ²). Another example: “Experience: letting the thing be and the thing’s letting-be, and the thing-in-itself, … is existence” (89). Again, there is a double mode of self-referential iteration, which is not dialectical because there is no contradiction. As iterative, it relies on nothing other than itself for its articulation, and as self-referential, it means prior to meaning; thus, as a structure, it gives reality to the inarticulable. Nancy uses this structure as a logic; it is not a simple form of reasoning, and a lot gets packed into it.

 

But this is a structure, or mode of descriptive reasoning, that had already come into its own in Sartre; it is what gives BN its charm (and for some its inaccessibility). For Sartre, freedom, the being of the for-itself, constitutes the inarticulable (what escapes the cogito — BN, 90) at the core of consciousness; consciousness is always both thetically conscious of itself as not being what it is conscious of, and non-thetically of itself as conscious. The thetic and the non-thetic are incommensurable, inseparable, and constitutive of a self-referentiality whose structure is that its essence is its existence as an inarticulable. It too is non-dialectical; the condition for dialectical negation is commensurability. Here, the difference from Nancy’s approach can be made explicit. In Nancy’s structure (of the experience of experience), it is the knowing of freedom that parallels what for Sartre is non-thetic. Sartre would not couch it in terms of knowing because that would imply a subject matter. If, for Nancy, the experience of experience is nothing other than experience as such, and freedom is the transcendental of experience, as experience, then experience repeats the structure of self-referential incomensurability (and fulfills the function) that Sartre gives to consciousness (87). Sartre, however, would find Nancy’s approach to the inarticulable incomprehensible, and Nancy faults Sartre for being too articulatory. Such is life.

 

What is nicely ironic in this homology is that Nancy’s deconstruction of being and beings gives structure in turn to a fundamental ambiguity in Sartre’s notion of freedom. The ambiguity has been noticed by many commentators, who decry that Sartre can say one is free even if in chains (which even Sartre condemned on one occasion as utter rationalism).³ For Sartre, though freedom is an absolute to which one is condemned, it remains conditioned by tactical choice and situational constraint. That is, inseparable from ontological freedom, there is what could be called situational freedom, reflected in the strategies and tactics by which one realizes one’s project. Each is the condition of the other in the sense of being and beings (or langue and parole in Saussurean semiotics). One can be situationally unfree only if there is an absolute, inescapable freedom, as a trace conditioning the possibility of deprivation. Absolute freedom is the trace in all situational freedom and unfreedom, from which it differs and is deferred. Thus, the irony is that while Nancy arrives at a singular freedom from a deconstructed ontological difference, Sartre begins with a singularity that must in turn be read as revealing within itself an interior difference, an ontological difference of freedom.

 

When Nancy devotes part of a chapter to Sartre, he dispenses with this difference. He critiques a passage from Cahiers pour une Morale,⁴ one of Sartre’s posthumous works. It is a work Sartre promised at the end of BN, in 1943, and then chose not to publish. It belongs to the negative category of “works Sartre refused to publish,” and its publication, in 1983, must be attributed to l’autre-Sartre (or a-Sartre, for short), that is, to a different author from the author of “works Sartre chose to publish.”

 

In what sense is man possessed by freedom? Sartre interpreted this thought in his celebrated formulation: “We are condemned to freedom.” Now this is certainly not the sense in which freedom should be understood, unless we confuse a thinking of the existence of being with an “existentialism.” For Sartre, this “condemnation” means that my freedom . . . intervenes in order to found . . . a project of existence . . . in a situation of “determinism” by virtue of which I am not free. (96)

 

Nancy then goes on to quote a-Sartre describing the situation of a person beset by tuberculosis, who is both unfree against the disease, and still free. In a passage Nancy ellipses out, a-Sartre says,

 

for my life lived as ill, the illness is not an excuse, but a condition. Thus, am I still without surcease, transformed, undermined, reduced and ruined from elsewhere, and still free; I am still obliged to render myself to account, to take responsibility for what I am not responsible. Wholly determined and wholly free. (CM, 449)

 

Nancy then remarks, “the condemnation to freedom is itself the consequence of a condemnation to necessity.” But in BN, Sartre says, “I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free” (BN, 537). And a-Sartre adds that one is free before the illness and free after it, implying the necessity to assume responsibility for one’s life, not to be condemned to it.

 

Sartre speaks here on the ontological plane; a-Sartre’s sense of “wholly determined and wholly free” is a statement of ontological difference. Nancy reduces both to the ontic. In his discussion, he imposes a Kantian sense of causality upon Sartre to revise this sense of the determined. He ignores a-Sartre’s notion that one must give oneself the given (CM, 448) — which means that one’s freedom is always the condition through which the world’s adversities are understood. Nancy reads being “condemned to freedom” as being imprisoned in the necessity to surpass, “to make a life project out of every condition” (97). Nancy doubles causality (100ff) in which one becomes (willfully) causal in the world “because” the world causes one to do so. Nancy appears on the verge of attributing to Sartre the approach of bureaucratic Marxism which held people to be “determined” by their class background and origin — and which Sartre had rejected

 

But the shadow of a more unfortunate politics accompanies Nancy’s argument with Sartre. For instance, in the 60s, the era of the civil rights movement, ghetto rebellions, and the demand for affirmative action, radicals argued that the overthrow of Jim Crow wasn’t enough, that a social environment had been created by racism that had to be taken into account; i.e., until the vestiges of discrimination, separate and unequal schools, apriori condemnation, and a social reality of being watched, noticed, singled out, and continually re-racialized had been expunged, rebellion and affirmative action would be necessary. In effect, to become a subject, one had to find a way actually to confront, contest, and contradict that given environment and its influences (cf. Fanon). Reactionary thinking responded by twisting and revising the argument to render the social environment causal, viz. discrimination caused the rebellions, and impoverishment caused family breakdown and uneducability. Black people were seen as no more free in rebellion than under Jim Crow. If that social environment was to be changed governmentally, through bureaucratic control of civil rights programs and new regulations, these become the first steps toward the new, contemporary criminalization of blackness of the 90s, which grounds itself in causal arguments. The logic of Nancy’s argument is to place Sartre philosophically in the latter category rather than alongside Fanon, a singular violence to Sartre. And the shadow lengthens when Nancy says,

 

freedom . . . matters to us. . . . we have always been defined and destined in her [freedom]. Always: since the foundation of the Occident, which also means since the foundation of philosophy. Our Occidental- philosophical foundation is also our foundation in freedom. (61)

 

Is philosophy (and therefore freedom) only Occidental? Is this what Nancy wants to substitute for the (Kantian?) causality he finds in Sartre? One hesitates to ask just how exclusive this “us” of his is to be.

 

Ultimately, it has a religious tinge. If the “experience of freedom relates the inarticulable to thematization” (97), a different (ontological) difference emerges between unknowability and experience, in terms of a thread Nancy introduces at the inception of his project when he poses two contextualizing questions: 1) Why is there something? and 2) why is there evil? (10). He follows Heidegger’s lead in “The Essence of Truth,”⁵ where Heidegger articulated freedom both as truth (“exposure as the disclosedness of beings”) and as “mystery” (the concealment of being) (41). Nancy recasts “the identity of being and beings” as a distinction between a singular unknowability and the singularity of freedom, that is, between a oneness that connotes mysticism and a unitarity that connotes reification. In Nancy’s exposition, the religious dimension of this confluence of mysticism and reification (of freedom) is given a certain reality. He confronts evil in terms of a similar dilemma as that which besets Christianity; viz. if god is good, then where does evil come from? if freedom is good, then where does evil come from? And he refers to his own ontology as an “eleutherology” (a referrence to Zeus as Eleutherius, the god of freedom) (19). In effect, this term metonymizes a dream of a dual poetics, between a Miltonic loss of paradise and a Lyotardian paganics.

 

For Nancy, evil is the ruin of good, not just its opposite; evil must be decided upon, as this ruin, in a renunciation of freedom and a hatred of existence (for which Auschwitz is the icon). Evil is thus unleashed on the good, on the promise of the good, of freedom, and on freedom itself. But freedom itself is this unleashing; thus, evil is freedom’s self-hatred. (Like Milton, Nancy reifies evil.) Though the wicked being awaits its unleashing, the unleashing of evil is nevertheless the first discernibility of freedom (just as, for Heidegger, the tool first becomes discernible as equipment when it is broken). The unleashing of evil, the hatred of existence as the absence of all presence, substitutes itself for the ground of existence (127-30). One is left thinking that evil is actually the completion of Nancy’s ontological difference of freedom.

 

Again, Sartre shrugs. For Nancy, evil is the fact of Auschwitz. For Sartre, evil is the Nazi occupier’s face, or that of any occupation or invading army, under the aegis of a multi-level knowledge of Auschwitz. For Nancy, Sartre would be in bad faith seeing evil as always elsewhere; for Sartre, evil is always elsewhere if the perpetrator of evil must see his act as good in order to have chosen it at the moment of perpetration. And it is in this sense that, for Sartre, conflict between people becomes possible, while for Nancy, it would have to involve a conflict of existence at the level of the inarticulable.

 

Notes

 

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966); p. 271. Citations hereafter given in the text as BN. Translated from L’Etre et le Neant (Paris, Gallimard, 1943), cited in the text as EN.

 

2. Rudolph Gasche. The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); p. 91ff.

 

3. On this question, see Wilfred Desan, The Tragic Finale (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954); Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and David Detmer, Freedom as a Value (LaSalle, Ill: Open Court, 1988).

 

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Cahiers pour un Morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). Citations given in the text as CM; translations are mine.

 

5. In Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).