Vive la politique (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
Setting out from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, this article engages with post-Heideggerian thought on community, seeking to bring out and to enhance its political thrust for contemporary democracies. It shows how Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben, 'common the political', that is, how they reconsider politics in light of a fundamental sense of coexistence which clears the ground for social openness, solidarity, plurality and autonomy. It then responds to a series of pertinent objections by further politicizing the post-Heideggerian vision of the common. I set out to translate the ontologies of the common into more concrete political logics by relating them to actual political practices and by joining them to the political theory of hegemony and antagonism set out by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their conjunction of the 'common' with the antagonistic politics of hegemony is tension-ridden, as they draw from conflicting understandings of 'the political', pitting plurality and horizontal relations against division and uneven power. To mitigate that conflict, these two approaches should be situated at different sites of political action, and the hege-monic framework should be recast so as to bring it more into line with horizontalist 'common' politics.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Lignes, and the absence of a political project
This paper derives from my doctoral thesis on the contemporary revue Lignes and the French intellectual left over the last 25 years. In particular, here I wish to explore both Jean-Luc Nancy’s influence on, and participation with, Lignes as a space for politics and philosophy, thought and action, and the tensions between these frontiers. Created by Michel Surya in 1987, the impact of La Communauté désoeuvrée is clear his conception of the revue as a space of intellectual comparution: not a fusional community of writers with a univocal position, but a jointly articulated and collective presentation of singular responses to common concerns. Nancy’s collaborations with Jean-Christophe Bailly to de-ontologise community have been especially utilised by Lignes, penetrating into its discussions of Europe, racism, the new social movements, The Satanic Verses and aesthetic fragmentation. Yet Nancy often argues that philosophy should retreat from politics, so his participation in Lignes alongside the likes of Badiou, Rancière and Balibar is perhaps surprising. Some of his sharpest political texts have been published in Lignes, but also some of his most cautionary. Lignes published original Nancy essays such as ‘La pensée dérobé’, and he personally edited an entire issue on Nietzsche. Yet his place in the revue was never comfortable: a onetime member of the editorial board, and despite stressing his intellectual and personal friendship for Lignes, he resigned in 2007, stating that since there was no, and should be no political project for a revue in the contemporary period, revues themselves no longer have a function. Whilst Nancy occupies a privileged position in the intellectual genealogy constructed by Lignes, especially in the wake of Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot, the increasingly militant tone of the more recent issues made him clearly anxious, and impelled him to distance himself from this milieu to which his own thought had played such a pivotal role. This paper, then, will examine the tensions inherent in Nancy’s participation, and subsequent non-participation, in a specific arena of intellectual and political thought: what for Nancy constitutes the role and remit of philosophical thought, and what crosses over to the political? What, within the political, are legitimate actions and interventions, given Nancy’s aversion to exclusive communitarian positions and clearly defined subjective identifications? What types of writing are appropriate to each? These are the frontiers I wish to probe.
parallax, 2020
For nearly four decades Jean-Luc Nancy has continued to rethink the question of community in the era of globalization and neoliberal hegemony. Although many commentators have analyzed his retracing of the political around the notion of being-in-common, few have explored its relationship with the aesthetic and even less so with the literary. In this essay, I tease out the entanglement between politics, ontology, and literature (or the arts) for Nancy, taking as a point of departure his since abandoned formulation of “literary communism” within the itinerary of his research on “the inoperative community” [la communauté désœuvrée] from the 1980s onward. An elucidation of literary communism lets us reconsider Nancy’s debates on community with Maurice Blanchot, extending from Georges Bataille to Achille Mbembe, among others, while reassessing the stakes of literary experience and communication in the aftermath of the Second World War in France, Europe, and beyond. I argue that Nancy’s approach to literary communism examines altogether different senses of relation, or nonrelation, whose circulation in and through language, as well as other modes of communication, undermines the sovereign structure of relationality constituting the technical-economic domination of capital. It is in this way that Nancy’s literary aesthetic of relation, more generally, enacts inoperative modes of doing and being that remain decisive for current ethico-political thought about plural reconfigurations of the people, the commons, and democracy.
«Politics» and «The Political»: The Mythical Superposition of Two Political States
Philosophy International Journal, 2020
The distinction between «politics» and «the political» has been placed historically within a political narrative which is often overlooked by political science and political philosophy. This narrative pertains to the realm of myth, and, because of this, a clear interpretation of such narrative is still missing. The reason for this is that the relationship between myth and politics is often perceived as dangerous, and closer to totalitarian rather than democratic governments. These two concepts have been understood as different stages in the description of public affaires: first as a stage of emergence, and then as a stage of institutionalization. But by looking at myth as the ground from which political actions and institutions spring, the distinction between politics and the political can be understood in terms, not of stages, but of super positions. Reality collapses into either one of these superposed states with the intervention of a spectator. In this sense, public events no longer need to be seen as manifestations of politics that will eventually, and inevitably, become part of the political.
The underridization of Nancy: tracing the transformations in Nancy’s idea of community
Journal for Cultural Research, 2014
My aim in this paper is to expose a misrepresentation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas on community in the secondary literature. I argue that discussions of Nancy’s work have failed to recognize a transformation that has occurred in his later thought, which distances him from Jacques Derrida. I propose that Nancy’s later work points the way beyond the “persistence of unhappy consciousness” in deconstruction through allowing for the possibility of the creation of a world alternative to globalization. Recognition of this transformation is suggestive for how Nancy’s theoretical framework might be employed in analyses of recent resistance movements.
This world without another. On Jean-Luc Nancy and la mondialisation.
In this paper, we turn to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. In his work La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation of 2002 the French philosopher analyses the process of globalization. Rather than denoting a new homogeneity, the term refers to a world horizon characterized in its inter-palpable multiplicity of cultural, socio-economical, ideological, politico-moral, ... content According to Nancy, globalization refers to ag-glome-ration: the decay of what once was a globe and now nothing more than a glome. On the one hand, Nancy indicates that the world has changed by an unknown increase of techno-science, the worsening of inequalities between growing populations and by the changing and disappearing of given certainties, views and identities of the world and of man. On a large scale, this deformation is due to the relation between the capitalist evolution and the capitalising of worldviews. On the other hand, due to the inter-palpability of the multiplicity, this means that on our planet there is only space for one world. The world gradually becomes the only world. In this paper we will investigate what Nancy means with the becoming-world of the world and how this relates to our being in the world. For Nancy globalisation reveals two possible destinies of our relation with the world. In La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation he discerns globalization from mondialisation to analyze these two possibilities. We will investigate this distinction of Nancy and its consequences for everyday life.