Jean-Luc Nancy

The confronted community a

The present state of the world is not a war of civilisations. It is a civil war: it is the internal war of an enclosed city, of a civility, of an ‘urbanity’, which are in the process of fanning out to the very limits of the world, and, because of this, spreading right to the extremity of their own concepts. At its limit, a concept breaks, a distended figure shatters, a yawning gap appears. This war is not a war of religions either, or else all so-called wars of religion are wars internal to monotheism, a religious schema of the West and a schema within that West of a division which, here again, takes itself to the edges and to the extremities: on to the Orient of the Occident and right to the crack and the gaping hole in the very middle of the divine. For that matter, the West will have been nothing but the exhaustion of the divine, with respect to all forms of monotheism, and whether it be a case of exhaustion by atheism or by fanaticism. What is coming upon us is an exhaustion of the thought defined by the One and by a unique destination for the world: this thought is exhausting itself through a unique absence of destination, through an infinite expansion of general equivalence or, then again, and as a repercussion of this, in the violent convulsions that reaffirm the all-powerfulness and the all-presence of a One become—or re-become—its own monstrousness. How, ultimately, to be seriously, absolutely, unconditionally atheist whilst able to make sense and truth of this One? How to, not so much exit religion—since, when it comes down to it, that is already done, and the imprecations of the fanatical can do nothing about it (they are, indeed, the symptom of it, like the ‘god’ engraved on the dollar)— but exit the monolithism of thought which has remained ours (simultaneously, History, Science, Capital, Man and/or their Nullity ...). That is to say, how to go to the ends of monotheism and of its constitutive atheism (or what one might call its absentheism) in order to grasp, from the reverse side of its exhaustion, whatever might be extracted from nihilism, brought out of it from the inside? How to think the nihil without turning it back into an all-powerful and all-present monstrousness. The yawning gap that is taking shape is that of meaning, of truth, of value. All forms of fracture and rupture—social, economic, political, cultural—have, in this gap, their condition of possibility and their fundamental schema. This cannot be ignored: the primordial stake must be taken to be a stake in thought, including those times when it is a question of its most material implications (of death through AIDS in Africa or of poverty in Europe or of struggles for power in Arab countries, for example, among a hundred examples). Political and

The Two Secrets of the Fetish

Jean-Luc Nancy’s text, ‘The Two Secrets of the Fetish’, was commissioned for the catalogue of ‘Mixed Blessings’, a major exhibition of the work of Guillaume Paris, hosted by the Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg from February to April 2002. This text was originally published in French and appears here in an English translation. Guillaume Paris’s practice is complex but often centres around the processes of transformation of an object (sublimation, reification...) within a dialectic of commodity capitalism. The context of Paris’s artistic practice draws him into a broad, multi-disciplinary discursive context and for this reason he regularly commissions essays for his catalogues from a diverse range of interests and often from authors outside of a professional visual art background. It is within this context that Jean-Luc Nancy’s text is positioned through an examination of the fetish, a key aspect of Marx’s thinking. But here the fetish is not present in the conversation to simply diabolize commodity capitalism, as a straightforward question of détournement. The interest here is more in how to reappropriate the power of the fetish rather than simply confronting it with pious denunciation. As Nancy remarks, this situation can be likened to the difference between the satyr and the saint. Guillaume Paris presents us with, and addresses to us, ‘Mixed Blessings’. To bless is to sanctify or hallow, to call upon divine grace to intercede on behalf of something or someone. It is intended to ensure some kind of happiness or prosperity. If a blessing is mixed, or mitigated, this is because, at one and the same time, it dooms something to misfortune and dereliction, and reduces the promised grace to naught. The first reading persuades us right away that the promise of happiness is one of commodity consumerism, and that the threat has to do with the inanity of what the Situationists called the ‘market-spectacular’ (spectaculaire-marchand). If this were all that was involved, there would be nothing to write home about, or rather a harping on. (This harping on is forever with us, and criticism of the consumerism, advertising, simulacrum and virtuality veiling and dissolving the real has itself turned into a commodity of current intellectual consumption. So denunciation of the media becomes media-inspired humdrum, and it is not just the medium that’s the message, to borrow MacLuhan’s phrase, but rather the revelation of the secret of the medium as an absurd or manipulative secret that is itself the media message, be it announced in the media itself or in learned works which in turn mediatize knowledge and reason in their revelatory function.) 139 JVAP 3 (2) 139–147

The Insufficiency of ‘Values’ and the Necessity of ‘Sense’

A moral doctrine consists of values and the norms which attach to them. If one asks for a moral doctrine, one therefore asks for values and the dictate that they be respected. For example – and in no particular order – the ‘person’, ‘right’, ‘freedom’, ‘life’, and the ‘community’ can represent ‘values’. Certain people, perhaps, expect nothing else from the philosopher other than a discourse which recalls, and which pounds out, similar ‘values’, exhorting that they be put into practice. We are consequently swamped from all sides with complaints about the ‘crisis of values’, together with calls for their ‘restoration’. Such value discourse is produced and reproduced countless times. The discourse of values has, however, had no positive effect on all the great collapses, on all the dramas, nor on all the mutations of this century. It has even been an accomplice in their worst excesses. One knows, for example, that the quasi-totality of the corporate body of the German philosophers of the 1930s, of which a majority were ‘philosophers of values’, either belonged, unfalteringly, to Nazism, or failed to oppose it. Reproduction of the discourse of value is precisely the role which I cannot and do not wish to play. For it is never the role of the philosopher. The philosopher attempts instead to reflect upon what is happening; and what is happening is not so much a ‘crisis of values’ as the consciousness of the resounding failure of the ideology of values in general. It is important, therefore, to ask oneself, what is value and what, in this discourse of ‘values’, must be called into question. Value consists in a relation. It is the price of something, measured by another thing. There can, therefore, be no absolute value. That which is good for everything, or the general equivalent (currency), is worth nothing of and for itself. It is worth only what it represents in given conditions. That which is reputed to be of value in itself – freedom, equality, happiness, existence, art, God, or the

Rives, bords, limites

Qu’est-ce qu’une singularité? C’est ce qui n’a lieu qu’une fois, en un seul point – hors temps, hors lieu, en somme – ce qui est une exception. Non pas une particularité qui rentre sous un genre, mais une propriété unique qui échappe à l’appropriation, une touche exclusive et qui, comme telle, n’est même pas prélevée sur un fond commun et ne s’oppose pas non plus à lui. Singulier est le Dasein, l’existant qui n’a lieu que je-mein – chaque fois-mien –, ce dont il ne faut pas penser que le “mien” se marque au sens de la représentation d’un “moi”, mais plutôt que le “chaque fois” est l’occurrence toujours singulière qui détermine l’instance (ou la chance) d’un “sujet”, lequel n’est rien d’autre que l’instant évanouissant de son énonciation (d’un What is a singularity? It is that which occurs only once [c’est ce qui n’a lieu qu’une fois], at a single point (out of time and out of place, in short), that which is an exception. Not a particular, which comes to belong to a genre, but a unique property that escapes appropriation – an exclusive touch – and that, as such, is neither extracted or removed from, nor opposed to, a common ground. Dasein is singular. It is the existent [existant] that occurs only je-mein – each time mine – that of which one must not think that the “mine” is marked in the sense of the representation of a “me,” but rather that the “each time” is the always singular occurrence determining the instance (or the chance) of a “subject.” This “subject” is nothing else than the vanishing

Rühren, Berühren, Aufruhr

Rühren, Berühren, Aufruhr:1 The German language allows us to place in the same semantic family of ruhr three notions that in French would correspond to bouger (move), agiter (agitate), toucher (touch) and soulevement (uprising), each understood in all the diversity of their possible meanings. Move and agitate are taken in their physical senses as well as their moral/emotional senses, as are touch and uprising. The latter orients its moral value in a socio-political direction. This semantic family is that of movement that is neither local (in German, Bewegung) nor a movement of transformation (Verwandlung— metamorphosis, for example generation and decay, growth and decline). Rather, ruhr designates the kind of movement that might best be called “emotion,” a term that stems from motion, the closest transcription of the Latin motus, from the verb movere, which persists in French as mouvoir and émouvoir, both understood in the English move—both physically and emotionally. The French toucher and English touch are semantically disassociated from movement, whereas in German they are linked. In French and in English, touch, tact or contact seem to arise from a more static than a dynamic order. Obviously we know that we must move in order to touch, that we must “come into contact,” as the saying goes, but touch itself seems to designate a state rather than a movement, and contact suggests a firm adhesion rather than a mobile process. Nevertheless, the French and English languages also acknowledge the mobile, moving and dynamic value of touch, apparent when we say that a person or a work of art “touches us,” and when we speak of a piantist’s or a painter’s “touch,” as well as the notion of being “touched” by divine grace.

Nothing but the World: An Interview with Vacarme

An interview with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (first published in 2000 in the French journal Vacarme) discusses the relation between a new political field articulating new social movements and his philosophical work. It explores three questions of particular urgency to Nancy: the relation today between philosophy and politics, the future of the Marxist and communist legacies, and the relation between globalization (mondialisation, or becoming-worldwide) and the concept and possibility (or impossibility) of a “world.”

Politics and Beyond: An Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy

In this interview, Armstrong and Smith invite Nancy to go further in his reading of philosophers such as Rousseau and Foucault. In that respect, this interview presents Nancy’s view on power, a topic that Nancy seldom talks about in his own works. Here, Nancy argues that it is not power itself that is problematic, but the image of power. The question of (pre)positions, again our title for the special issue, is at stake too in this interview: for we will see Nancy insisting that politics must not be limit of sense, community, life, or the world; what politics has determined, Nancy argues, must be surpassed.

What Is to Be Done

This essay offers a “post-deconstructive” take on the question what is to be done? Working through the question’s first appearance in the title of Chernyshevsky’s novel, through Lenin’s political mutation of it, to Derrida’s deconstruction of the question precisely as a question, it argues that what really is at stake in the question is the advent of sense—sense that always precedes, exceeds, or else even fall short of what we determine as that which should be done. It also suggests that what is critical in the question is the preposition “to,” which opens all actions or gestures involved in “what is to be done” to a multiplicity of sense.

Deconstruction of monotheism a

The West can no longer call itself the West from the moment it witnesses the spread, across the entire world, of the form that could once have seemed to constitute its distinguishing features. This form entails techno-science just as much as it does the general outcomes of democracy and the rule of law, and just as much a certain kind of discourse and argumentation, which are also accompanied by a certain kind of representation in the broad sense of the word (for instance, cinema and the whole family of post-rock and post-pop musics). By this very fact, the West no longer knows itself as the keeper of a world view or a sense of the world that would go hand-in-hand with this globalisation (its globalisation), with the privileged role that it believed it could attach to what it had called its ‘humanism’. Globalisation appears, on the contrary, for the most part, to boil down essentially to what Marx had already perfectly well identified as the production of the world market, and the meaning of this world seems to consist in nothing but the accumulation and circulation of capital, accompanied by a marked aggravation of the gap between the dominant rich and the dominated poor, as by an indefinite technical expansion, which no longer devotes itself, except very minimally, and worriedly or anxiously, to the ends of ‘progress’ and the improvement of the human condition. The outcome of humanism is in inhumanity: that would be a crude summation of the situation. And the West does not understand how it comes to be there. Yet, it is indeed the West that came there: it is indeed the civilisation, as it is called, built first around the Mediterranean by the Greeks and the Romans, the Jews and the Arabs that has borne its fruits. To this extent, it cannot be enough to go looking elsewhere for other forms or other values (as some would put it) that one might seek to graft onto this henceforth global body. There no longer is an elsewhere, or rather, in any case, there can no longer be an elsewhere in the former Western sense (such as the elsewhere of an East passed through the prism of orientalism, or such as the elsewhere of worlds represented as living in the ‘first’ immanence of myth and ritual). Our time is thus one where it is urgent for the West—or what remains of it—to analyse its own future, to look back at and examine its provenance and its trajectory, and to question itself about the process of the breaking-down of meaning which it allows to take place. For it is striking to observe that, within this former ‘West’, though it happens relatively often that we question ourselves, in order to re-evaluate these things, with respect to the Enlightenment (following the model of a continuous progression of human reason) or with respect to the will to power of the industrial and conquering nineteenth century, or then again, differently, with respect to the

“Our world” an interview

Translation of an interview by Peter Hallward with Jean-Luc Nancy, with translator’s introduction.