Freedom

Author’s note

This essay does not define all freedom. It isolates its live, constituent form. The event in which a person appears as the author of the move that makes a new possibility practicable in a maille*. And it draws from it a political concept, dead freedom. A legally intact right in a maille that no move crosses anymore.

* Maille (French): a stitch, a single loop of knitting or of chain mail, the smallest place where the thread passes and holds. The word names the local place where a move can enter, be received, and change what follows. See The Maille.

A man has been voting for forty years. Some Sundays, his move is a simple renewal: he chooses from an offer already constituted, and nothing new becomes practicable in the political maille. Other times, the same ballot commits a real rupture, opens a change of power, exposes a fidelity or a refusal. The act is identical; its state of freedom is not. The outer form of an act never allows, by itself, a diagnosis of its constituent character.

The same man, one Tuesday in November, tells his forty-year-old son that he has been wrong their whole life about what separates them. No one expected it, no procedure authorized it. He is afraid, precisely, of what he is going to say. He says it. And in the move, the father appears as the author of a word none of his previous roles contained — and his son, in the silence that follows, finds himself facing someone he did not have in front of him five minutes before.

The difference between the two scenes is not in the person, nor in the legitimacy of the acts, nor in the lived intensity — the vote can be more intense than the conversation. It is in what the move does to the maille: a continuation previously impracticable has become practicable, or nothing of the kind has taken place.

I. A constituent freedom

Freedom is not what the subject possesses. It is what makes the subject appear.

I call constituent freedom the event in which a person appears as the author of the move that makes a new possibility practicable in a maille. This freedom does not replace legal or political freedoms. The ordinary reversible decision, the peaceful exercise of a right, are really free without constituting a new subject. It names their live form; the moment they become capable of making a subject appear.

What the constituent form adds to choice can be seen on the father. The tradition thinks freedom as a selection: a subject before a range of possibles, freer as the range widens. Choosing from a given menu is free; it is not yet constituent, because the options preexist the move. The father could always have spoken his sentence; but before he said it, it did not exist as a livable passage between him and his son. The move makes practicable, in their common world, a path that was not there. That is what no description of automatism exhausts: not only what produced the move, but what the move now makes practicable.

Maille, here, keeps the sense The Maille gives it: a local place where what is in play is whether a move can enter, be received, and change what can happen next. The move that does this I name the structuring movement; constituent freedom is its subjective face (what, on the side of the one who acts, appears when the move is accomplished). The subject constitutes itself as the author of this move, and only recognizes itself as such after the fact, by answering for what it has done.

II. Person, functioning, subject

Three terms to keep apart. The person: the legal, moral, and biographical continuity of the living human. Every person is one, from birth to death, whatever their state and their moves; the person is what carries rights, responsibility, dignity. The subject: the appearance, in the move of crossing, of the one who attests himself there. It is discontinuous; it surges up at the instant of the passage and maintains itself, or vanishes, by the hold. Functioning: the regime where subjectivity does not have to reconstitute itself in a new move. These are roles and other incorporated automatisms. Functioning must not be disparaged as inferior. A great part of attention, care, craft, and fidelity passes through it, and it is what carries ordinary life and makes available the resources of future crossings.

You are always a person; you are not always a subject; mostly, you function. Nothing there denies dignity or responsibility: it only makes thinkable a fact the tradition said badly. The subject appears in flashes, against a background of functioning, carried by the continuity of the person.

The subject appears intermittently, but it does not start from nothing. Each attested crossing leaves a trace, and these traces pile up. The consistency of a subject is not a substance lodged beneath the flashes; it is the thickness of its held crossings. You become able to hold by having held. The circle one might object — the hold requires a subject that only the hold fabricates — is in reality a spiral: it is the operation The Hold isolates, converting the flash into thickness.

III. Freedom and causes

This is a local compatibilism: freedom sits in what a causally situated move makes newly practicable. Determinism describes the causal genesis of all moves, ordinary or constituent; functioning names only the situations where that causality produces no new practical possibility in the maille. The crossing does not escape causality either. The move has causes. They can be described. But that description does not exhaust what the move has instituted. After it, in this maille, a continuation previously impracticable has become practicable. Causality describes the genesis of the move; freedom names what it reconfigures. These are two levels of description of the same act. Why it happened, and what it has now made possible.

Everything in Anselme’s move can be explained. Eight years preparing numbers someone else presents; a short night, two coffees, a position left vacant the day before, and that vanity he knows in himself and is ashamed of. In the fourth minute of the meeting, voice a little too loud, he says the plan is wrong, and why. The causes are all there; you can count them. What remains is what none of them contains. In that room, from now on, contradicting is practicable. It was seen being done.

So, determinism in disguise? No. Asking where the subject was before the move is asking where the flash was before the discharge. A grammar mistake. The person names the legal, moral, and other continuity, and it never ceases; the subject names what takes place. Nothing, in a fully causal world, forbids there being flashes.

IV. Recognizing a free crossing

Three marks, taken together.

A real threshold. The move meets a resistance and commits a possible loss. Fear can be its index. A precise fear of a precise move. The father knows exactly what he dreads. Keep in mind that some thresholds are crossed in calm self-evidence, and that you can feel intense fear without any freedom being practicable. Fear can point to the threshold; it proves neither that the passage is open nor that the move will be free.

An unprogrammed opening. The move is not content to select an option already installed; it makes practicable a continuation that was not practicable in this maille. Note that an impulsive move can be a crossing, and a long-weighed move can be a mere execution. That is not where it matters. Does it open something new, or does it repeat?

An imputable trace. The move changes what follows. It leaves a trace that cannot be canceled. Its effects can be corrected, but there is no going back to a world where it was never laid down. And the person can recognize it as his own, in the sense of Ricœur’s attestation: the “Here I am.” To attest means “I am the one who did it, and I answer for it.” Let us also grant that you can choose freely, be wrong, regret, and still recognize yourself as the author of the choice, and to be sure: regretting a move does not mean it was not free.

One limit remains, and I leave it open. Some reconfigurations are born without a conscious decision and without their author being able to recognize them right away. The sentence that slips out, the body’s instinctive movement. It would be artificial to strip them of all freedom. Imputability can come later. It can also never come (illness, constraint). Someone created a possibility without ever being able to recognize himself as its author. I don’t know whether to speak, then, of an unfinished freedom, of a crossing without a subject… or what to do with it.

V. Dead freedom

The political concept that comes out of this grammar points at what the liberal tradition sees badly. A configuration where freedoms are guaranteed, protected, recognized. And dead, because no maille is alive enough anymore for a move to cross them. The tradition knows privation (censorship, oppression), less mortification. When no constraint prevents the move, and yet nothing depends on its exercise anymore. Berlin’s grid (negative liberty, positive liberty) measures interferences and self-governments; neither of its axes sees the state of the maille, and a paradise of negative liberty can be a cemetery of dead freedoms. Pettit probably sees more. Yes, you can be unfree without interference, under the mere shadow of a master. But he needs that master: procedure and saturation kill without a dominator, and that is the case non-domination does not cover.

The process extends, into politics, the dead-true. A passage is opened one day; it gets named, codified, inscribed as a right. The move that opened it is forgotten while the form remains. Two figures suffice. Procedural closure: the rights exist, but the decisions can no longer really be bent. There is debate, there is deliberation. Everyone knows the outcome is written in advance. The man in the first scene knows it too. He still votes (even if he is more and more tempted by abstention). Regularly, the Republic gives him the occasion to express a choice. And yet he struggles to remember the last time that choice changed anything. He had said no; they went on. His move is intact; it is the maille around it that is dead. Where is the political act here? Because to me, it looks more like a commemoration. Expressive dissolution: when everything can be expressed, but no word settles enough to orient a common action. The click replaces the crossing, expression replaces the move. A democracy can combine the two, with institutions too closed to be crossed and a public space too fluid to retain what crosses it. Let’s remove the doubt. A power can also very well organize both at once. Dead freedom is then no longer suffered, but manufactured.

This diagnosis ordinarily lacks an intermediate category, without which it would romanticize persecution. A pacified freedom no longer costs because the maille carries it. A dead freedom no longer costs because nothing depends on its exercise. A woman who votes without risk, a Catholic/Muslim couple who marry without a stir, a journalist who asks a disturbing question without losing his job exercise a living freedom without paying the price of previous generations. That is the very success of a freedom conquered, then protected. Cost is sometimes the signal, never the essence. The test is rather: “when was the last exercise of this right that could really change a decision, open a contestation, or commit a consequence not written in advance?” And if someone exercises it otherwise than expected, can the maille still receive that move and draw consequences from it? When every exercise is without consequence and meets no resistance, you have to ask whether the right has become pure procedure. Note that the absence of suffering never proves its death.

None of this dismisses rights, or the vote, or the institutions (justice first). They are the frame that keeps the political maille open. Whoever empties democracy does not deliver us from a dead freedom, he manufactures it; and whoever believes it already dead and stops defending it finishes the job.

VI. Responsibility and dignity

Legal and moral responsibility stays attached to the person. The fact that an act was executed in a serial or automatic mode does not cancel it. The category of the subject only adds a question: under what conditions could this person have interrupted the automatism and appeared as the author of another move? “I was just functioning” is not a defense. It is the diagnosis.

Dignity, likewise, belongs to the person, not to the intermittent appearance of the subject. The theory of constituent freedom therefore conditions no right and no human value on the actual exercise of a crossing. And yes, infants and the comatose are entirely covered by the person/subject distinction. The subject only allows us to name one further experience: the one where the dignity of acting is honored or prevented in a precise situation.

VII. Lineages

Kierkegaard sees with rare sharpness that freedom is not the property of a preexisting subject but the event that constitutes it. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” already names the index of the threshold, and his leap is the constituent crossing; I extend it outside his religious program. And the leap plays out a thousand times in an ordinary life, and it needs a place. Arendt makes freedom a phenomenon that appears in action and ceases with it. Her man is free because he is a beginning; she thinks an already constituted agent who acts, I think the subject who appears in the move, and her freedom is political through and through where this one is first local. Badiou is the closest neighbor: for him too the subject comes about, summoned by an event, and exists only in fidelity. But his event is rare and makes a date; my threshold is a Tuesday in November, and a thousand of them present themselves in a life. His subject constitutes itself in the duration of fidelity; mine appears at a stroke, and what lasts is called the hold. And dead freedom has no analogue in him, because his ontology has no local place that can die. Where he needs an event, a threshold is enough here, and that difference is a democratization. Ricœur, finally, gives what grounds the third mark: ipseity, the “I can,” and the attestation (the “Here I am”) by which the self answers for what it has done.

The position is compatible with a complete causality of conditions; it distinguishes itself from compatibilisms centered on the agent’s desires or control by locating freedom in the reconfiguration of a maille.

**The conclusion **Freedom is not possessed. It is crossed.

And the one who crosses it — insofar as he crosses it, at the precise instant he crosses it — is what appears in that crossing.

Constituent freedom is the event in which a person appears as the author of the move that makes a new possibility practicable in a maille. It replaces none of the freedoms the tradition guarantees; it names their live form. And the concept that comes out of it, dead freedom, names a major political fact. Guaranteed rights, and mailles where nothing depends on their exercise anymore, by procedural closure or by expressive dissolution. The dead-true, the dead bond, dead freedom say one law: form outlives transmission.

In many crossings, three moments can be distinguished: something becomes visible; a move crosses it; a presence makes the new form livable. I call them truth, freedom, and the hold.

Truth makes the threshold seen. Freedom makes it crossed. The hold makes it inhabited.