Jean-Luc Nancy: A negative politics?

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 89-109

  Wagner, Andreas ^a  

^a GOETHE UNIVERSITY   (Germany)

Author keywords

deconstruction; ethics; Jean Luc Nancy; ontology; politics; the political

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247657527     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706059847     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. In his article ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common’ (Constellations 7 [2000]: 272–95), Andrew Norris researches the impact Nancy's reflections about community have on political theory. While he subscribes to Nancy's fundamental critique of every form of totalitarianism, he sees a severe lack of determination and an unsettling abstention when it comes to talking about those practices we are normally calling ‘political’. Neither a reader who is interested in political decision-making and -executing in general, nor one who is interested in emancipatory politics in particular, can find in Nancy's texts any orientation for the difficult situations that political actors are immersed in, he argues. Even a somewhat more descriptive theory of political processes is going to have difficulties applying the tools Nancy offers to its own work — all of which by the way corresponds rather well to Nancy's own self-understanding
2. (cf. ‘Opening Address to the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political’, in J.-L. Nancy and Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe, Retreating the Political, ed. S. Sparks [London: Routledge, 1997], pp. 107–21; here pp. 108–10).
3. Norris further argues that Nancy fails to see the positive aspects of a tradition of political thought that understands the admittedly problematic construction of collectivity to be a response to a practical and political need for such orientation. In his analysis, Norris refers to several of Nancy's texts that have been published in English — ‘The Nazi Myth’, Critical Inquiry 16, 2 (1990);
4. The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), in what follows cited as IC;
5. ‘La Comparution/The Compearance: From the Existence of “Communism” to the Community of “Existence”’, Political Theory 20, 3 (1992);
6. The Experience of Freedom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993) — and to Jean-Jacques Rousseau to delineate the tradition of contract theories. If all this is true at least to some extent, and if Nancy does not even see himself as a ‘political philosopher’
7. (cf. D. Köveker, A. Niederberger and A. Wagner, ‘Dem Politischen mangelt es an Symbolizität — Ein Gespräch mit Jean-Luc Nancy’, Information Philosophie 4 [2002]: 33–41; here p. 39), then why should we still explore his texts as telling us something for politics, for political theory or for political philosophy? Is this justified by more than just Nancy's continuing to use terms like ‘communism’, ‘totalitarianism’, ‘justice’? I am not sure how to positively answer this, but I am going to argue that Nancy opens a way to link his ontology to a certain ethics, and a way to spot some points that a political theory at least has to take into account when it reflects about its own categories and perspectives.
8. I am going to refer mostly to The Sense of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)
9. which in what follows is cited as SW; Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), which in what follows is cited as BSP;
10. ‘Des sens de la démocratie’, Transeuropéennes 17 (2000): 45–8, which in what follows is cited as SD;
11. and ‘Tout est-il politique?’, Actuel Marx 28 (2000): 20–6, which in what follows is cited as TP.
12. Norris, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy’, p. 275.
13. In The Inoperative Community, Nancy takes this analysis of ‘immanentism’ even further: the collective identity or common subjectivity that is supposed to be established as its own ‘work’ is presented and presents itself inspired by a model of communion, i.e. by a model of indistinct and homogeneous continuity of its elements which in turn are taken up completely with their immersion in this continuity and which possess no property that would not be reflected in or reflections of that continuity. But this, concludes Nancy, is the continuity of pure matter, the web of uninspired atoms and particles that has nothing beyond, behind or between it. Thus, the truth of this community actually is death, a truth that has been realized in grotesque ways by totalitarian regimes. Cf. Nancy, Inoperative Community, pp. 12–17.
14. As Todd May points out (in Reconsidering Difference [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997], esp. pp. 40–3), Nancy's conception itself is not ‘operable’ in some anti-totalitarian project without self-contradiction. There may be no fundamental reason that would favor Nancy's more skeptical conception of community in comparison to an essential one and preclude the risk of totalitarianism beyond doubt, and while ‘in the end, the idea that there may be a conceptual or philosophical guarantee against totalitarianism is suspect’ (p. 43), May raises an objection similar to Norris's reproach of irony/cynicism (see below, note 10): to adopt a Nancyan conception of community without having strong values of anti-totalitarianism that give good reasons to do so (but which is the very gesture that is criticized by it) will disarm political actors/communities trying to come to terms with the risk of totalitarianism. Thorsten Bonacker, on the other hand, argues for a ‘community of deconstruction’ that pursues a ‘politics of the common by resisting its reification’ and that has transformed the anti-fundamental finitude of community into a conscious and accountable political endeavor of opening essential communities and overcoming totalitarianism in all its forms
15. (cf. Th. Bonacker, ‘Die Gemeinschaft der Dekonstruktion. Zum normativen Gehalt liberaler Gemeinschaften’, in A. Kern and Chr. Menke (eds) Philosophie der Dekonstruktion [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002], pp. 264–88). Below I will be trying to sketch a communicative praxis or an ethos (if such can be construed without essential foundation) that is not as disarmed or disarming as May suspects while it does not need to draw its political effectiveness from a consciously adopted and valued project of overcoming totalitarianism or even only deconstructing other, essential communities, as Bonacker suggests, and I will be trying to elucidate points that a more political (more committed, more power-conscious, more powerful) approach could link up to.
16. In ‘Ex nihilo summum (De la souveraineté)’ (in La création du monde ou la mondialisation [Paris: Galilée, 2002], pp. 145–72), Nancy unfolds this logic of absoluteness. While that text focuses on sovereignty and so concentrates more on absolute altitude, it seems to me that the logic in question would apply to absolute profundity as well. Nancy mentions this himself in a few places, cf. pp. 148, 162.
17. And what a being is, is precisely not determined by an essence but rather produced as the contingent or at least historical process of its situating itself and being situated in those openings, retracing them in turn. Thus, Andrew Norris writes: ‘As being-in-common we are cast into a condition of plurality. And such a condition is by definition one characterized by difference…. [T]he ontology of the individual is always already that of what [Nancy] terms “compearance”…. [I]n this mutual exposure we share an infinite lack of infinite identity. To put it as baldly as possible, what we have in common is precisely not a shared identity, but rather the “fact” that we are different from one another. Because we share this difference, we are in relation to one another’ (Norris, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy’, p. 277). While all of this is true in a way, texts like Being Singular Plural seem to slightly shift the emphasis: the category of difference is used less and less prominently in the explanation of ‘compearance’, presumably because it still conveys too much that it is a matter of different identities. Currently, Nancy tries to argue more with a spatial than with a logical model, focusing on contiguity and being-near (auprès de), on the spatial distance and the ‘material’ aspect of physical touch. (In what could be taken as an explanation of what ‘difference’ could mean in this context, Nancy tells us that ‘the alterity of the other is its originary contiguity with the “proper” origin’ [BSP, p. 6; emphasis added] or that ‘the alterity of the other is its being-origin. Conversely, the originarity of the origin is its being-other, but it is a being-other than every being for and in crossing through [à travers] all being. Thus, the originarity of the origin is not a property that would distinguish a being from all others’ (BSP, p. 11). Also, Nancy's argument concerning the being-with focuses in large parts on ‘with’ (avec) having its etymological origins in ‘near’ (apud hoc).
18. Cf. his ‘Conloquium’, in R. Esposito, Communitas — origine et destin de la communauté (Paris: PUF, 2000), pp. 3–10, esp. pp. 7ff.;
19. cf. also Köveker, Niederberger and Wagner, ‘Dem Politischen mangelt es an Symbolizität’, pp. 36f.) Also, see more on this below.
20. And Nancy concedes this as well: cf. BSP, pp. 73f;
21. ‘Ex nihilo summum’, pp. 166f.
22. Cf. Norris, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy’, p. 289. Norris adds that the requirement of ‘undergoing the experience of one's sharing’ and the associated experience of a lack of foundation and of substance, the experience of self-unavailability and self-strangeness, will necessarily affect one's own political identity. For Norris, such an ethos allows only essentially ironic forms of political identities, and this irony for him seems even to outweigh the mandatory respect and the required keeping-open: ‘It is not that respect has ceased to be a political virtue of the authentic life. It is rather a question of what must be respected. What must be respected is not other identities, but other ironies, other ironic undercuttings of political identity’ (p. 287). In my opinion Norris is right to doubt that it is possible to maintain an all-the-way-down ironical relationship to one's ‘own’ political identity and to one's ‘own’ political community. But it remains to be made clear if what Nancy suggests, or what his suggestions end up with, is indeed an attitude of irony. And this will probably depend on whether we are willing more or less fundamentally to revise what we understand by ‘political’ (identities, projects, capabilities, structures, etc.).
23. In the discussion that follows, I am giving a brief account of a topos that Jacques Derrida brought up in ‘The Ends of Man’ (in Margins of Philosophy [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982], pp. 111–36)
24. and that has been discussed time and again by Nancy since then. It appears, for example, in ‘The “Retreat” of the Political’ (in Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, Retreating the Political, pp. 122–37);
25. I am referring mostly to BSP, pp. 21–8.
26. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (following Derrida who in turn follows Heidegger in this diagnosis) discussed this situation dubbed ‘the closure of metaphysics’ explicitly as early as their ‘Opening Address to the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political’ from 1980 (pp. 107–12), but still in Nancy's more recent The Sense of the World some diagnosis like it is present from the very beginning, but rather as a point of departure from which to embark on the (not so) new ‘theoretical’ endeavor of fully acknowledging it and of understanding its implications (cf. SW, pp. 4–9).
27. But the equality which imposes itself in this imperative has to be understood as an equality of beings that are different in every respect and yet at the same time as an equality that implies each time concrete and substantial claims — a difficulty that has among others led Nancy to adopt the term of ‘fraternity’ as better suited, which has opened an ongoing debate with Derrida, for whom the latter term cannot be purged of its paternalistic-patriarchic logic. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997);
28. Köveker, Niederberger and Wagner, ‘Dem Politischen mangelt es an Symbolizität’, pp. 40f.
29. Cf. BSP, p. 71.
30. Cf. Norris, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy’, p. 274.
31. Nancy mentions three characteristic qualities of the ‘singuli’: their respective uniqueness, ‘whateverness’ and exposition. Cf. SW, pp. 68–75. These three qualities and the lack of an outside, respectively the fact that the outside as the empty and yet constitutive link of all the singuli is in a certain way inside (see below), result in the verdict of inadequateness that has to be passed on any antagonistic model of sociality (as suggested, for example, by Schmitt or Laclau and Mouffe). Any such model which operates with the (projected or imagined) negation of one's own identity — which would then be defined, for example, by the Volk or by the web of differential relations — by a special singular that appears and has its effects as being an essential antagonist, can only inadequately render the profound being-in-common and may be undermined (also on other, more directly ‘political’, levels) by a praxis that would correspond better to it.
32. Again, a possible dispute about whether it is the ‘between’ that constitutes the distinctness of the plural singulars or whether it is the other way round, that these distinct singulars constitute a spatial distance in their ‘one-another’, would ignore that the point Nancy is making consists precisely in replacing the question of originarity and dependency with the recognition of the fact that there is always already distance and poles, between and singulars, recognition of the fact that we always have to deal with plural singulars. He explains that the ‘“with” is at once both more and less than “relation” or “bond”, especially if such relation or bond presupposes the preexistence of the terms upon which it relies; the “with” is the exact contemporary of its terms; it is, in fact, their contemporaneity’ (BSP, pp. 34f.)
33. By alluding to the physical concept of quanta that tries to formulate the discontinuity of material particles, Nancy sketches the project of a quantum-philosophy of nature that could demonstrate workings of différance even in its description of natural objects (cf. SW, p. 62f.). The nothing that is between the quanta is in fact nothing, not another sort of ‘particle’ itself, but it is the ‘transcendence’ that opens up the solid and continuous totality which pure immanentism would be. Without that transcendent ‘nothing’, no ‘contact’ would be possible, but there would just be continuity of some ‘one’.
34. Nancy writes about the passibilité that the world is, and in doing so, he plays with a blending of possibilité, the possibility of appearances, and of (se) passer, which has a whole cluster of meanings ranging from ‘to happen’ (an event) or ‘to become present’ (a barely perceptible detail), over ‘to go by’ (time) or ‘to pass’ (from one place to another), to finally even ‘to refrain from’. In the present text, ‘appearing’ is supposed to reflect at least some of those allusions. (Cf. SW, pp. 59–63.)
35. By using the term aréalité, Nancy wants to point us to the fact that there are at issue at the same time the material-located-spatial constellation of extended singularities (aire, ‘area’); the materiality and the corporeal fact of collision or of being-directed-at-one-another of the singularities (réalité du à); and the nothingness, the imperceptible rien of the res that constitutes the between and in which the being-with is inscribed (a-réalité). (Cf. again SW, pp. 59–63.)
36. SW, p. 55.
37. I cannot go into more details here, but for Nancy's own discussion of this argument see BSP, pp. 83–8
38. and SW, pp. 118ff.
39. And actually the French ‘representer’ conveys already more of that which Nancy has in mind than the English ‘to represent’ or the German ‘darstellen/vorstellen’ (let alone ‘stellvertreten’) do. Nancy's critique can be found more explicitly and carried out as the main issue in texts like ‘Scène’ (together with Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 46 [1992]: 73–98)
40. or ‘La représentation interdite’ (in J.-L. Nancy, Au fond des images [Paris: Galilée, 2003], pp. 57–99).
41. There is a full chapter (‘Art, a Fragment’, pp. 123–39) in The Sense of the World that discusses the question of what ‘fragmentary’ means. Nancy introduces the concept of the ‘fractal’, to make aware of the dynamic and iterating, i.e. deferring, character of the boundaries. He also discusses questions of art and technology and of the ‘coming-to-the-world’ of the singulars. I cannot cover this here.
42. Quite consequently, already ‘The Inoperative Community’ is followed by an essay called ‘Literary Communism’ (pp. 71–81) that discusses this idea. It is taken up again and developed further in later texts as well (cf. SW, pp. 16–21, 118–22;
43. BSP, pp. 85–8) — where, for obvious reasons, Nancy also insists that ‘style’ is not to be understood in a simplifying, philological way.
44. This is not without similarities to Jacques Rancière's thoughts about politics — which present politics as an opening of a ‘partition of the sensible’. Especially in his Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), the argument about the factual measuring and allocation implied in any order of the common is emphasized and then confronted with the naming of a part(y) that is incommensurable to the present ‘partition’, whereby the possibility of a new measure and of a new partition is opened. And it is this very moment of opening (and not the old or the new order) that Rancière calls politics. While the delineating of many of the differences to Nancy would require a more in-depth discussion than I can cover here, two traits are rather evident: first, Nancy is much more skeptical than Rancière about a tight link between the order of the common and politics; and second, he is much more ‘generous’ as to which events can be classified as ‘political’, in so far as for him — emphasizing the praxis of communication — they are better understood as day-to-day events while for Rancière they are rather exceptional. Maybe the reason for both of these differences lies in that Nancy seems to see a much greater indeterminacy and instability in every order, in every articulation and in meaning and sense in general.