Derrida's position on freedom is a tad more complex than I think most people expect. I'm not at all convinced it is radically different from what one finds with say Heidegger's or even in such early texts as in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Derrida doesn't mention freedom that much. He says, "In my opinion, the most 'free' thought is one that is constantly coming to terms with the effects of the machine. That's why I rarely use the word 'freedom'..." (2004) This "coming to terms with the effects of the machine" is, I think, Derrida's particular transfiguration of Heidegger's old notion of freedom as what enables the choice between inauthenticity and authenticity. Inauthenticity is very much the calculus of the machine. The authentic is (in Heidegger's older focus on Daesin) the unconscious and incalculable which is always within the machine.
I think one of the more fruitful ways to understand this is to cast our minds to Gödel and Derrida' use of his theorem. In Gödel's Theorem we have in an axiom system some statements that are meaningful but which can't be proved true or false with the given axioms. The only way to do so is to expand the system by adding new axioms or operations. One way to consider this is that the system has an "unconsciousness" or an "excess" that defies the calculability of the "machine." (With the machine in this case being any axiomatic system)
Now I recognize that many will already have their backs up over this use. But I think it extremely useful to understand what Derrida means by calculability, language, or even the unconscious. I think by language or semiotics in general he means basically an axiomatic system covered by Gödel's approach. (Not all systems are so covered) Now perhaps he'd wish to expand his claims beyond simple axiomatic systems. But I think by narrowing the focus somewhat we make Derrida's linguistic claims easier to understand. An extended quotation from For What Tomorrow... is probably helpful. This is in answer to the question of what the machine is relative to a discussion of freedom. I'd suggest that one ought keep in the back of ones mind Heidegger's notions of das Man and inauthenticity as well.
There is some machine everywhere, and notably in language. Thus Freud, our common and privileged reference, speaks of economy, of unconscious calculation, of principles of calculation (reality principle, pleasure principle), of repetition and repetition compulsion. I would define the machine as a system [dispositif] of calculation and repetition. As soon as there is any calculation, calculability, and repetition, there is something of a machine. Freud took into account the machine of economy and the product of the machine. But in the machine there is an excess in relation to the machine itself: at once the effect of a machination and something that eludes machinelike calculation.
Between the machinelike and the non-machine, then, there is a complex relation at work that is not a simple opposition. We can call it freedom, but only beginning at the moment when there is something incalculable. And I would also distinguish between an incalculable that remains homogeneous with calculation (and which escapes it for contingent reasons, such as finitude, a limited power, etc.) and a noncalculable that in essence would no longer belong to the order of calculation. The event - which in essence should remain unforeseeable and therefore not programmable - would be that which exceeds the machine. What it would be necessary to try to think, and this is extremely difficult, is the even with the machine. But to accede, if this is possible, to the event beyond all calculation, and therefore also beyond all technics and all economy, it is necessary to take programming, the machine, repetition, and calculation into account - as far as possible, and in places where we are not prepared or disposed to expect it.
It is necessary to tract the effects of economic calculation everywhere, if only in order to know where we are affected by the other, that is by the unforeseeable, by the event that, for its part, is incalculable: the other always responds, by definition, to the name and the figure of the incalculable. No brain, nor neurological analysis, however exhaustive it's supposed to be, can render the encounter with the other. The coming of the other, l'arrivance de l'arrivant - the "arriving-ness" of the arrival - this is what happens, this is the one who or which arrives as an unforeseen event. Knowing how to "take into account" what defies accounting, what defies or inflects otherwise the principle of reason, insofar as reason is limited to "giving an account" (reddere rationem, logon didonai), and not simply denying or ignoring this unforeseeable and incalculable coming of the other - that too is knowledge and scientific responsibility. (2004, 49-51)
I recognize already that those not sympathetic to Heidegger, Derrida or that class of phenomenologists will look askance at the above. They might suggest that it is not clear that language (or anything else) is calculable the way Derrida seems to suggest (and that my analogy to Gödel makes explicit). That's fine. Allow me a different analogy and perhaps related thought in analytic philosophy.
In the discussion of free will among analytic philosophers one strain of thought is called event causal libertarian free will. The idea is that rather than talk about agents being free, as one typically finds in libertarian discussions, one talks about the freedom of events. The basic idea of this type of libertarian theory is that for any given event that can not be described determinately that event is free. An agent might said to be free if the events making up them and their relation to the world are sufficiently free. (See this discussion at the blog Garden of Forking Paths for perhaps a helpful insight into the notion) One might thus see this causal-event freedom as being very similar to what ontological interpretations of randomness within quantum mechanics argue. For any event there is a certain incalculability which prevents the event from being determinate.
Now there is an important distinction between this discussion of theory in analytic philosophy and what Derrida is doing. One must always remember that Derrida is doing phenomenology (or at least quasi-phenomenology) and not theory. To make a very loose explanation, Derrida's focus is with the event of our consciousness and not an event the way one might discuss within analytic philosophy or physics. Probably the best way to consider this for an analytic philosopher is to consider "the Given" that philosophers like Sellars have discussed so much. Derrida's critique of calculability might favorably be compared with Sellar's discussion of the myth of the given. On a fundamental level the event always is an event for me. And calculability is always a kind of hermeneutical calculability from within my world. The other that Derrida speaks of might be considered "the real world" or that completely other than my understanding and past experience.
Thus, returning to our Gödel analogy, we must consider the axiomatic system the system of my anticipations, behaviors and language as broadly conceived as possible. The event of experience is what must exceed the machine. (The machine being the mind conceived of as a machine, roughly - although we shouldn't limit it in that fashion)
What Derrida is arguing about freedom is thus that it is this place of "excess complexity" beyond the machine. It is what enables the other (that which is in excess of what can be explained/predicted by the machine) to manifest.
Next time I'll link up how Derrida speaks of responsibility with freedom and once again briefly mention the parallels in analytic philosophy.
Derrida, Jacques 2004. For What Tomorrow.
Clark, what did you think of "For What Tomorrow...."?
I liked it a lot. Thank you for the suggestion. I've found that often in those sorts of interviews he speaks a little more to the point than in his more technical works where he is deconstructing "within" a text. Of course his later work was always clearer than what I like to think of as his "demonstrative" period from the late 70's through the 80's.
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