Nancy's often poignant disquisition on freedom is perhaps the most robustly philosophical aspect of his expansive speculative vision. It strives to divest philosophy of recalcitrant notions of freedom that have been informed by ideological requirements. It offers two crucial arguments, each of which attempts to collapse the thinking of freedom into the open immanence of the circulation of sense.

• On the one hand, one cannot define freedom by theories such as those that originate in the presupposition of a “right” to freedom (libertarianism) or the rational intelligibility of the necessity of freedom (Kantianism). On the contrary, freedom can only be conceived in terms of the “finite thought” of a singular event free of theoretical constraints.

• On the other hand, freedom is intelligible as a “burst” that is not for the purpose of being free, does not stem from any antecedent condition or essential property of being free, and is not even a mode of comprehending oneself as free.

Generally speaking, in conjunction with his criticism of substantialist metaphysics and “closed” immanence, Nancy objects to ontological views of freedom discernible in works as diverse as those of Kant, Hegel and Sartre. Wherever freedom is understood to be a physical property of human being and/or an existential state of the human condition, in which the essence of human being is presumed or established, ontological views are in play. In this respect, ontological freedom presupposes substantialist selves that possess essential properties definitive of the human condition.