Questioning Freedom in the Later Work of Derrida

Abstract

"What must be thought," Derrida writes in the closing pages of Voyous, "is this inconceivable and unknowable thing, a freedom that would no longer be the power of a subject, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without servitude, in short, something like a passive decision."1 What could be more undemocratic, less open and intelligible to the demos of democracy, than this and what Derrida called in The Other Heading a "'freedom' to be invented. Every day. At least. And democracy along with it."2 The question that confronts us: Are we free to rethink freedomand democracy along with it-when freedom has become yet another or rather the alibi for hegemony and Empire-building? Freedom, we are led to believe, in the political rhetoric of the day, is on the march, and one does not need to be an enemy of democracy-far from it-to tremble at the martial rhetoric that has too often underwritten freedom in the West. It is because of this alibi that Derrida long hesitated, as he admits in Voyous, to present his own thinking on freedom, worrying, for strategic reasons, that such a thinking of freedom, however self-deconstructive, could only have the effect of bolstering neo-liberal ideologies that present themselves as being founded on certain conceptions of freedom. Nevertheless, Derrida's work offers a thinking of freedom that is a corrective to thinking of freedom as mastery and independence, that is, as sovereignty. Derrida, of course, is not the first to challenge traditional conceptions of freedom, of the coupling of freedom and sovereignty, as we will note.3 We can cite two exemplary moments in Arendt and Levinas in this regard. For example, Levinas challenges in "From Existence to Ethics," a thinking of freedom as sovereignty, a mastery and a "power" "without memory or remorse," yet one that will always already come undone with a thinking of the Other, especially the otherness of death, the absolute future that calls into question the "bonne conscience" within which a certain freedom operates.4 For her part, Arendt argues, "politically, [the] identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will.... If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce."5 Freedom, Derrida notes, has for an entire heritage of thinking been the political aligned with democracy and also a certain conception of sovereignty, the moment when a decision within a democracy is to be made. "This will be true throughout the entire history of this concept, from Plato's Greece onwards" (R, 22). For Derrida, the autoimmunity of the democratic, the indeterminacy and self-criticism at the heart of any democracy worthy of the name, is nothing other than the "freedom of play, an opening of indetermination and indecidability in the very concept of democracy, in the interpretation of the democratic" (R, 25).6 This freedom in the concept of democracy is intrinsic to its "plasticity," that which gives rise to a democratic thinking of the democratic. "Democracy is what it is only by spacing itself beyond being and even beyond ontological difference; it is (without being) equal and proper to itself only insofar as it is inadequate and improper, at the same time behind and ahead of itself," he argues (R, 38). Derrida's thinking of freedom not only challenges a certain concept of the political, as one finds in different ways in Arendt and Levinas, but also the politics of the concept.7 For Derrida, there is no democracy without deconstruction, as he argued in the Politics of Friendship; there is also no deconstruction without freedom.8 Derrida has long been attuned to indecidability in political structures and concepts, articulating the view that "ethics, politics, and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of the aporia" (The Other Heading, 41). In Voyous, Derrida argues that any politics worthy of the name must be marked through and through by structural indecidability and aporia. …