Broken imperatives: The ethical dimension of Nancy's thought

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 29-50

  Gilbert Walsh, James ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

communication; community; imperative; Jacques Derrida; Jean Luc Nancy; Martin Heidegger; responsibility

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992856537     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370002600202     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. L'expérience de la liberté (Paris: Galilée, 1988). English-language edn, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 138/107. With respect to all cited texts, dual page references will indicate the original text and the English translation, respectively; single page references will indicate an English text or translation. I have occasionally altered translations.
2. For instance, in ‘Lapsus judicii’ (hereafter LJ), which appeared in L'impératif catégorique (Paris: Flammarion, 1983) — a text in which Nancy attempts to explicate, via a reading of Kant, the judicial event of ‘saying right’ — it is the moral imperative that ‘makes the law’, confronting the impulse to judge beyond the limits of experience and forcing it to ‘see reason’ (58). Likewise, in ‘Le voix libre de l'homme’ (hereafter VLH), Nancy orients the Derridean theme of différance in terms of the imperative (131/46).
3. A few examples follow. La communauté désoeuvrée, new revised and expanded edn (Breteuil-sur-Iton: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1990). English-language edn as The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. xl (preface to English edition), 181/73, 198/81.
4. See also ‘The Compearance’, Political Theory 20(2) (August 1992): 392;
5. ‘What is to be Done?’, in Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 157–8.
6. ‘De l'être en commun’, in La communauté désoeuvrée, p. 234;
7. English-language edn, ‘Of Being-in-Common’, in Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 11–12.
8. Since his ‘Sharing Voices’ in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: State University of New York, 1989), Nancy has returned again and again to the ‘theme’ of ‘sens’. Depending on the context, I shall leave the term untranslated or render it as ‘sense’.
9. This ethos is ‘unheimlich’ inasmuch as its relation to its proper end is the very ‘depropriation of the end’ (VLH, 124–5/40–1). Here Nancy echoes Heidegger's Gewissensruf in Sein und Zeit: the call which demands that Dasein be responsible for the ‘nothing’, not in order that Dasein take hold of itself ‘from the ground up’ but in order that it take over or assume responsibility for being its own thrown basis, a basis which it itself has not produced; see Sein und Zeit, 16th edn (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), p. 284;
10. English-language edn, Being and Time, 7th edn, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 330.
11. Indeed, Nancy's own epigraph to ‘Le communisme littéraire’ (hereafter CL), in La communauté désoeuvrée (hereafter CD), is this phrase from Bataille: ‘Literature cannot assume the task of directing collective necessity’ (CL, 177/71). The force of this epigraph should be clear as long as we keep in mind that Nancy would characterize his own reflections on the imperative as ‘literature’.
12. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 5th edn, ed. J. Hoffmeister, Philosophische Bibliothek Band 114 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), §582 ff.
13. The first criticism — that Nancy's thought is at root a ‘transcendentalism’ (73) which fails to engage empirical or normative concerns — is put forth by Nancy Fraser in ‘The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?’, in Working through Derrida, ed. Gary Madison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), cf. pp. 71, 76; then echoed, more subtly, by Robert Bernasconi in
14. ‘On Deconstructing Nostalgia for Community within the West’, Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993): 19, note 3; and by
15. Simon Critchley in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Levinas and Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 215.
16. The second criticism — that Nancy fails to acknowledge radical alterity — is at least suggested by Critchley in Ethics of Deconstruction (hereafter ED), p. 219, and is presented more forcefully by Bernasconi in ‘Deconstructing Nostalgia’ (hereafter DNC), pp. 4, 12–13, 15.
17. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Scène: un échange de lettres’, Nouvelle revue de psychoanalyse XLVI (1992): 73–98.
18. On this topic, see Simon Sparks' clear and concise introduction to Retreating the Political.
19. ‘Le mythe interrompu’ (hereafter MI) in La communauté désoeuvrée.
20. Nancy's indebtedness to the later Heidegger should be evident enough here. See, for instance, Heidegger's discussion of the ‘unter’ in ‘Die Sprache’ in Unterwegs zur Sprache, 11th edn (Stuttgart: Günther Neske, 1959). English-language edn, ‘Language’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 24–5/202.
21. This distinction is at work in Nancy's recent reading of Heidegger's ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, forthcoming as ‘L'“éthique originaire” de Heidegger’; see especially §2. See also Heidegger's ‘Das Wesen der Sprache’ in Unterwegs zur Sprache; English-language edn as On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) and
22. Levinas' Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence, 2nd edn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978);
23. English-language edn as Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 2nd edn, trans. Alphonso Lingis (London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), Chapter 1.3, ‘Le Dire et le Dit’.
24. ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 80.
25. On Nancy's reading, this apparent ‘maintenance of the question before ethics’ (VLH, 137/51) is first and foremost, and before questioning, a submission to a duty: the duty to question.
26. Fraser, ‘The French Derrideans’ (76).
27. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981), p. 15.
28. Cf. ‘The Compearance’, p. 384.
29. Cf. Nancy's brief discussion of the imperative address in The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), §10. This seems to me to resonate with what Derrida says, in Of Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 129 ff., regarding Heidegger's Zusage as the prior address of Sprache itself, an address to which every determinate utterance is a response.
30. See Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971); English-language edn as Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne, 1969). Here Levinas already recognizes that the responsibility to affirm the address is itself prior to any affirmation or negation of what is said ‘in’ the address; he recognizes the ‘yes’ which underlies even every explicit ‘no’: ‘The other is maintained and confirmed in his heterogeneity as soon as one calls upon him, be it only to say to him that one cannot speak to him, to classify him as sick, to announce to him his death sentence; at the same time as grasped, wounded, outraged, he is “respected”’ (65/69).
31. It is worth noting that, in another context (that of theoretical rather than practical reason), Kant highlights — at least up to a point — the limits of universal criteria with respect to the singular case: ‘Now a general criterion of truth must be such as would be valid in each and every instance of knowledge, however their objects may vary. It is obvious however that such a criterion [being general] cannot take account of the [varying] content of knowledge (relation to its [specific] object). But since truth concerns just this very content, it is quite impossible, and indeed absurd, to ask for a general test of the truth of such content’; see his Critique of Pure Reason, unabridged edn, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's Press, 1965), B83. Granted, immediately following this, Kant appeals to a ‘knowledge in respect of its mere form (leaving aside all content)’, thus failing to acknowledge that the ‘formal’ as such has always already fallen into its ‘content’.
32. The ‘default’ I have in mind here is akin to the ‘default of Being’ [das Ausbleiben des Seins] which Heidegger discusses in his Nietzsche lectures; see Nietzsche, Vol. IV, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Frank Capuzzi (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 199–250.