Insight Editions · No. 85
On Jean-Luc Nancy
The Sense of Philosophy
Darren Sheppard, Simon Sparks and Colin Thomas (eds.)
This collection examines Jean-Luc Nancy’s accounts of sense, finitude, community, freedom, sacrifice, and political life through essays engaging his philosophical interlocutors.
A study guide to On Jean-Luc Nancy by Darren Sheppard, Simon Sparks and Colin Thomas (eds.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- Sense without horizon. The editors and Van Den Abbeele read Nancy's "loss of sense" as an event, not a catastrophe; Fischer calls writing "exscription"; Gasché follows "Euryopa" to a horizonless, a-human world.
- Community and freedom. Caygill sets Nancy's "sharing" between Jabès and Arendt and charges it with Jacobinism; Wurzer reads a "we, now" after nature; Dallmayr tests the inoperative community against Huntington's clash of civilizations.
- Decision and interpretation. Hamacher finds an "Or-Without-Or" beneath Kierkegaard and Heidegger; Librett shows how Nancy's decision for decision unsettles left and right, theory and practice; Naas stages "sharing voices" through Kurosawa's Rashomon.
- Sacrifice and anger. De Beistegui shows sacrifice returning as offering; Lingis turns Nancy's "distress" into anger at a world split into rich technopoles and an outer zone.
- Homage. Lacoue-Labarthe's "Phrase VII", a prose poem, opens the volume with the friendship behind the philosophy.
The volume's map: one diagnosis, four lines of inquiry, one wager.
| Ch | Contributor: chapter | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| I | Sheppard, Sparks, Thomas: The Sense of Philosophy | "General loss of sens" as event, not loss |
| 1 | Lacoue-Labarthe: Phrase VII | Prose poem of friendship and reading |
| 2 | Van Den Abbeele: Lost Horizons | Areal nation; poetics of finitude |
| 3 | Caygill: The Shared World | Nancy's share between Jabès and Arendt |
| 4 | Fischer: The Place of a Thinking | Exposure, exscription, bodies, love |
| 5 | Hamacher: Ou, séance, touche | Or-Without-Or against Heidegger's decision |
| 6 | Naas: Rashomon | Dialogue as sharing of voices, East and West |
| 7 | Wurzer: Political Imaginary | "We, now" after nature; time-capital |
| 8 | Librett: Interruptions of Necessity | Modal ontology behind left/right, theory/practice |
| 9 | Gasché: Alongside the Horizon | Euryopa's finite look; world without horizon |
| 10 | de Beistegui: Sacrifice Revisited | Unsacrificable existence, still offered |
| 11 | Dallmayr: 'Inoperative' Global Community? | Nancy versus Huntington, with Wallerstein |
| 12 | Lingis: Anger | Archipelago and outer zone; anger as politics |
How the essays talk to each other
The volume is not a primer. Homage pieces (Lacoue-Labarthe, Fischer) sit beside hard critiques (Caygill, Hamacher, de Beistegui). Method essays (Naas, Librett) stage Nancy's hermeneutics; political essays (Wurzer, Dallmayr, Lingis) ask what "inoperative" means for a world after the Cold War. The editors' framing term, "sens", ties them: sense as meaning, direction and the senses at once.
Reading path: from loss of sense to anger as political sentiment.
| Cluster | Chapters | Shared question |
|---|---|---|
| Homage / friendship | 1, 4 | How does finitude sound when spoken as mourning or as joy? |
| Horizon / finitude | 2, 9 | What remains when horizons themselves are challenged? |
| Community / freedom | 3, 7, 11 | Can sharing avoid Jacobinism, myth and managerial globalism? |
| Decision / interpretation | 5, 6, 8 | Is decision for undecidability still a politics? |
| Sacrifice / anger | 10, 12 | What returns when sacrifice is closed and distress becomes anger? |
About this book
On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy by Darren Sheppard, Simon Sparks and Colin Thomas (eds.), 1997. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
The Sense of Philosophy
Asked what philosophy means today, Nancy replies: "There is something like a general loss of sens. Sens, that is what matters to me today." Sens means sense, meaning and direction. Two hundred years after Kant, his work traces a general disorientation in thinking, but not with nostalgia: "far from considering the general flight of sens as a catastrophe and loss, I want to think of it as the event of sens in our time, for our time."
Nancy's philosophy is a work not as une oeuvre but as un travail, a working: not an incomplete project awaiting closure, "anathema" to him, but "the labour of a thinking pursued at the very limit of exhaustion". If he thinks any one thing, it is "the obscure imperative to think", what L'impératif catégorique (1983) calls its "secret summons". His returns to community, freedom, being and the divine answer only the need to think their ossification.
Editors: Nancy thinks the loss of sense as an event.
Dedication, series and what is left out
The volume opens with thanks to David Wood (who introduced the editors to Nancy at Warwick), series editor Andrew Benjamin, Routledge editor Emma Davies, Marian Hobson (for permission to print Hamacher), and translators Leslie Hill, Richard Stamp and Ian Magedera (the acknowledgements misspell him "Magadera"). It is dedicated to Nancy. Series: Warwick Studies in European Philosophy.
Derrida's epigraph from Le toucher (1993) sets the tone: Nancy is "always ready for everything, resolved to change everything, even sense", and "more than anyone else" still "talks of sense, all the senses of the word sense". The editors hear a double claim: Nancy writes about contemporary crises, and he thinks what it is to write and think "today".
Editors' wager: four early paths from the loss of sense.
Snapshot, not canon
The editors refuse to "prescribe what is central and what is peripheral". The collection is a "snapshot" of what contemporaries negotiate with: community, the political, the relation to Heidegger. Psychoanalysis, German Romanticism and painting are left aside. The essays are "deviations" from Nancy's work, meant as a spur while that work continues and translations multiply. Square brackets in translated essays mark the author's original phrasing.
Phrase VII
I-II: the crossing
"If my memory serves... it was on the corner of Sutter and Mason, or Taylor", in San Francisco, and "I won't be going back there again". The wind whirls litter to the rooftops, and Eliot's Four Quartets supply the words: "Men and bits of paper whirled by the cold wind", "a place of disaffection", "empty of meaning". The speaker rereads "Internal darkness, deep lane, the unprayable prayer" and the opening of "The Dry Salvages" ("the river / Is a strong brown god"), and recalls a friend quoting Baudelaire's "Andromaque, des bras d'un grand époux tombé" on the eve of departure.
At the kerb "as by the edge of a roaring river", blinded "by too much brightness", he hears in the traffic "the immemorial annihilation of ourselves... generation upon generation". The sign flashes "Walk!" and "one has to pass on", submitting "to the most scandalous injustice of all, betrayal itself". Across the street a woman reads a letter and weeps, dramatizing "as if they were reciting Shakespeare". When their eyes meet she stops. He knows he has "died" twice; the second was "the easy crossing over from a life not very deep nor very broad", yet her look gave him "le sentiment de ma légère existence". He rereads the last lines of Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "the heart of an immense darkness".
Lacoue-Labarthe: borrowed voices carry a mourning that never ends.
III: in the Lydian mode
The third section turns to Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 132, whose slow movement is marked "in der lydischen Tonart" and titled "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit" (holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the deity), with "neue Kraft fühlend" and "Mit innigster Empfindung", words "you'd think he took from Hölderlin". Lydian is the old mode of church chant, yet "since Plato at least" it has accompanied laments and threnodies. The speaker connects it with mourning for a day in September 1983 and says he has heard the same recording for thirty years, holding his breath at a player's laboured breathing. "But no is the word, no to the unacceptable calm."
IV: the end that never ends
"The hard thing, about a day that reaches its end, is to accept that it doesn't end." The speaker returns from an Armenian funeral at San Jose cemetery; the dead friend had given him the facsimile of The Waste Land. He remembers Gundula Janowitz singing between Santa Monica and Irvine, lessons in prosody in Oakland, and joking "Mehr Licht!" (Goethe's last words), which he insisted on translating as "too much light, even when the ground shook". Time "fell apart into this abyss", and "this end which never ends" must be perpetuated a little. Dated 1993 to 3 March 1996.
| Allusion | Source | Role in the poem |
|---|---|---|
| "Muss es sein? Es muss sein" | Beethoven, Quartet Op. 135 | Necessity of the end |
| "Heiliger Dankgesang", Lydian | Beethoven, Op. 132 | Thanks and lament in one mode |
| Bits of paper, cold wind | Eliot, "Burnt Norton" | City as place of disaffection |
| Strong brown god | Eliot, "The Dry Salvages" | River, crossing |
| Andromaque | Baudelaire, "Le Cygne" | Exile and widowhood |
| Immense darkness | Conrad, Heart of Darkness | The offing barred |
| Mehr Licht! | Goethe's last words | "Too much light" |
Flagged: the translation's mode name departs from Plato.
Friendship as the volume's first method
"Phrase VII" is not an argument about Nancy. It is a performance of friendship: French and English facing pages, dedication "Pour Jean-Luc", Beethoven's necessity motto as heading. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy had co-authored The Literary Absolute, The Title of the Letter and Le mythe nazi; the poem opens the book by refusing commentary's distance. The "I" who will not return to San Francisco, who meets a weeping stranger's look, who hears Op. 132 for thirty years, stages the exposure the later essays will theorize.
Van Den Abbeele: Phrase VII opens singular sharing of world.
Why music and Prosody matter
The Lydian thanksgiving of Op. 132 pairs "neue Kraft fühlend" with lament. The Armenian funeral at San Jose, the facsimile of The Waste Land, Gundula Janowitz on the California freeway, lessons in prosody in Oakland, and the joke "Mehr Licht!" as "too much light" even in earthquake, all keep the poem on the side of voice and breath. The hard thing about a day that ends "is to accept that it doesn't end": mourning without consolation, which is also Nancy's and Lacoue-Labarthe's shared refusal of dialectical recovery.
Lost Horizons and Uncommon Grounds: For a Poetics of Finitude in the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy
The event of sense
In his "epigraph" to the special issue of Paragraph on his work, Nancy lists the trouble spots of the "New World Order", Bosnia, Somalia, Central Asia, and writes: "There is something like a general loss of sense... 'philosophy' deals with nothing else but sense." The "end of philosophy" is "very concretely before our eyes", as "nation", "people", "sovereignty", "community" leak "out of so many cracked vessels". Then the characteristic move: not catastrophe but "the event of sense in our time, for our time".
Quoting Nietzsche, "To introduce a new sense, it being understood that this task itself has no sense", Nancy gives two answers. The Nietzschean: revolution, "the destitution of the authority of sense", "the entry into the unheard-of. For the unheard-of, one has to get one's ears ready", which sounds like Nancy playing Lyotard. The second, sense in saying sense is absent, "with Rimbaud, our refound eternity", sounds like Nancy playing Derrida.
Van Den Abbeele: two answers to the loss of sense, both without horizon.
Communism is not the horizon
The Inoperative Community opens by quoting, or misquoting, Sartre: "communism is the insuperable horizon of our time". Nancy neither mourns nor celebrates the loss of communism and community; he loses the concept of horizon: "It is the horizons themselves that must be challenged." Yet "a communist exigency or demand communicates with the gesture by means of which we must go farther than all possible horizons". Against any immanentism that bemoans lost community and trumpets "communal values", Nancy proposes a communality that undoes horizons: the "compearance" of singular beings in the commonality of their difference.
The border and areality
Equating land and ethnicity installs a literalized horizon, the border, which makes everyone inside identical and everyone outside "barbarous, savage and inimical". This inscription protects identity only by the reinforcement that is violence. States fear "losing control" of borders, "from Eastern Europe to southern California". The fear is justified, since no border can be controlled, but its consequences are less bad than "the bloody and brutal efforts" to maintain borders.
From policed borders to the areal nation and a poetics of finitude.
Poetry and verticality
How do we ready our ears for "the utopics of difference that is postnational space"? Nancy's name for it is "poetry" (in Po&sie, reprinted in The Birth to Presence), but a poetry that yields no work, singular and finite, never a new horizon. The nation-state needs the horizontality of borders and myths; poetry "since at least Rimbaud" speaks the verticality or vertigo of sense, a direction "none other than the other of direction". Philosophy as Nancy writes it is "a poein of thought exposed upon its limit, with no comforting horizon in sight".
| Name | Horizon thinking | Nancy's finitude |
|---|---|---|
| Sense | Lost, to be mourned or restored | Its absence is the event of sense |
| Community | Communism as insuperable horizon | Compearance of singular beings |
| Nation | Land = people, policed border | Areal, suspended, uncommon ground |
| Writing | Poetry as new horizon | Exscription, verticality of sense |
After modernism, communism, structuralism
Van Den Abbeele places Nancy's appeal "after modernism, communism, structuralism, and even after Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida". The loss of horizon is not a new horizon for "philosophical exploitation". Philosophy can no longer be the "giver of sense" nor, as since Kant, the analysis of "conditions for delivering a coherent sense". What remains is exscription: exposing philosophy to the unheard-of outside while speaking the end of philosophy as its internal limit.
Areality: the nation spaced without a sacred enclosure.
Nancy, Paragraph epigraph, as quoted by Van Den Abbeele
Tijuana, east L.A., and the fear of borders
The chapter's most concrete politics is the fear of "losing control" of borders, "from Eastern Europe to southern California". What, Van Den Abbeele asks, is so different about Tijuana and east Los Angeles? The fear is justified in the sense that no border can finally be controlled; the bloody efforts to maintain borders are worse than the leak. The areal nation keeps place without policing identity onto topography as blood and soil. Poetry since Rimbaud speaks the verticality of sense against the nation-state's horizontality of borders and myths.
The Shared World: Philosophy, Violence, Freedom
Jabès: the difficult community
Since The Book of Questions (1963) Jabès had written a difficult community from inside a culture "violently cracking up", where the graffito MORT AUX JUIFS signalled that the Jew could no longer belong. His writing asks whether one can speak of community after the Shoah from within philosophy, doubting philosophy's capacity for irresolution, for the unthought, and for welcoming the other. His refusal of philosophical questioning warns against "the ruses of the philosophical unconscious", which since its foundation has wanted to rule the community.
Nancy: Mitsein and finite transcendence
Philosophy's "making and unmaking" came to require, in Nancy's La communauté désoeuvrée (1986), L'expérience de la liberté (1988) and Le sens du monde (1993), opening philosophy to the dereliction of community. Nancy frames this through Heidegger's distinction of Mitsein and Dasein, which gives it a particular pathos: can a tradition "haunted by the memory of national socialism" yield a community beyond the Volksgemeinschaft?
With Agamben, Blanchot, Dastur and Lingis, Nancy rethinks being-with as more primordial than being, giving community priority over the question of being. He reworks Part 1 of Being and Time without the "heroic transcendence" of Part 2, under a finite transcendence which, following Bataille, names the excessive moment of the Other.
Caygill: Nancy's share between two other thinkers of the share.
"Sharing freedom"
In the central chapter "Sharing freedom" of The Experience of Freedom, "freedom withdraws being and gives relation" (p. 68): freedom dissolves being as substance, putting relation in place of identity. In a characteristic chiasmus, freedom is relation and relation is freedom: freedom is "the discrete and insistent insistence of others in my existence", while "relation happens only in the withdrawal of what would unite" me to others.
Here Caygill sees philosophy re-inaugurating itself as metaphysics, now of dynamic contradiction instead of substantial identity: freedom "possesses" being, it is before being. Nancy specifies freedom against Hannah Arendt, rejecting the claim, "allegedly hers", that public space is anterior to private freedom; both emerge from an originary spacing. Politics is "the liberation of freedom", "the (re)opening of the space of its inaugural sharing" (p. 79). Citing Saint-Just on the need for a just and courageous public behind revolutionary France's armies and judges, Nancy ends with permanent revolution, aligning Mitsein not with the German but with the French revolution.
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe on Arendt's "retreat"
Caygill notes that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's 1982 essay "Le 'retrait' du politique" almost dissolves Arendt's philosophical agenda into political science (totalitarianism) and history (the polis as transcendence). By casting her as an empirical analyst, they claim the quasi-transcendental analysis of the political for themselves. Caygill's counter: Arendt's Mitsein is a genealogy of totalitarianism, neither empirical nor transcendental. Modern being-in-common is war, class struggle on a world scale; philosophy is implicated in the logistics of the share and cannot stand outside it.
Caygill: sharing meets Arendt's war-and-empire genealogy.
The Jacobin nation of human rights
The Origins of Totalitarianism exposes the perplexities of the Jacobin nation of rights: "by infringing on the rights of one you infringe on the rights of all." The Jews' experience, Caygill notes, refuted that equation. Nancy's fragments on liberty, equality, fraternity and death, with fraternity as either totemic meal or maternal sharing "to infinity", still leave Caygill with a "militant concept of sacrificial freedom". The last line of the essay refuses free thinking of the share: writing the difficult share is "not free", because it is responsible for the injustice and violence of the share.
Finite transcendence and the share
Caygill reads Nancy's path as a reconsideration of Part 1 of Being and Time "without the heroic transcendence of Part 2": fresh alignment of community and the political under finite transcendence, reconfiguring being, love and the Other, topology of the political and democracy. Following Bataille, finite transcendence designates "the excessive moment of the Other" and informs community's dynamic character. In "Sharing freedom" (The Experience of Freedom), Nancy deletes substantivist ownership: the share is "an act of finite being". "If being is sharing, our sharing, then 'to be' is…" Community is not prior to the share; sharing makes community.
Caygill: share under finite transcendence meets Arendt.
Death as inappropriable, compearance
Nancy distinguishes death as "presence, property, self-identity" from freedom as "the inappropriable of death": shared death of the community that lives with the dead. Death "gives birth to me" as Mitsein or being-in-common that opens free space where we compear. "The opening of this space - spacing of time, exposure, event, surprise - is all there is of being, inasmuch as it 'is' free." Death effaces itself "in pure time"; common space still "bears the mark… of this effacement." Caygill asks whether that mark is a mourning of violence or something else: the Jacobin risk returns if sharing forgets war's logistics.
Arendt: the battle for the share
Arendt's Mitsein, also shaped by the Shoah, binds the share to violence and historical time. It is neither empirical nor transcendental but a genealogy of totalitarianism: modern being-in-common is a state of war, class struggle on a world scale. In "Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World" (1957) she sets the philosopher's perpetual peace of a world state against the "plurality, diversity and mutual limitations" of political life. Jaspers proposed "universal mutual agreements" leading to "a world-wide federated structure" and ruling war out (p. 93); Arendt warns that "the abolition of war, like the abolition of a plurality of sovereign states, would harbour its own peculiar dangers", concealing the battle for the share.
Arendt's warning against cosmopolitan peace (1957).
In The Origins of Totalitarianism she exposes the "perplexities" of the Jacobin nation of human rights ("by infringing on the rights of one you infringe on the rights of all"), which the Jews' experience refuted.
| Name | Share means | Violence | Philosophy's role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jabès | Owning nothing; bonds of silence | Inside the community, unredeemed | Refused: rules the community |
| Nancy | Spacing that makes community; freedom | Breaking open, revolution | Re-founded as dynamic metaphysics |
| Arendt | Historical struggle for time and space | War, class struggle | Must not hide the battle |
Liberty, equality, fraternity, death
The fragments ending The Experience of Freedom take up the motto, for Nancy "somewhat ridiculous", the French "lie of the State", via Being and Time §26. Freedom leads to an "unbreachable equality" and a problematic fraternity informed by a murdered father, "a sharing of hatred". Nancy asks whether fraternity is "communion with an identical substance (in the totemic meal)" or "sharing of a maternal thing... sharing, to infinity" (p. 168). On death, he contrasts death as "presence, property, self-identity" with freedom as "the inappropriable of death": "the dead person... never ceases to be present... His death... gave him back to an inappropriable freedom" (p. 169).
The closing fragments of The Experience of Freedom, per Caygill.
For Caygill this birth/death mark signs "a militant concept of sacrificial freedom". Is the effacement, as in Jabès, a difficulty to be questioned, or, as in Arendt, the violently established border of the share? His last word: the thinking and writing of the difficult share "is not free", for it is implicated in and responsible for "the injustice and the violence of the share".
Jean-Luc Nancy: The Place of a Thinking
The end of an epoch as a chance
The guide is L'oubli de la philosophie (1986), a small book "which seems to me to open the way for thinking to come", noting "the dereliction and the end of an epoch" in order to engage "positively and joyously" with what is now possible. The West has produced itself from "the retrospective illusion of a loss": lack of sense drove the desire for meaning that metaphysics, "dedicated to the misfortune of desire", never escaped. Against "visionary" discourses one must affirm the exhaustion of sense, the "closure of the possibilities of meaning for the West", marked by the death of God, History or Man. The nihilism that fed on loss is thereby overcome.
Fischer: from the end of an epoch to existence as sense.
Existence without essence
Abandonment is Aristotle's pollakôs, being said in many ways. Against Heidegger, "the meaning of being is existence, on the condition that one stands firm on the without essence of existing". The ethical demand is to give existence back to itself, not "as with Sartre" charged with self-signification, but in the infinite separation (l'écart) of its finitude: "Freedom is the very fact of existence as open upon existing itself, and this fact is sense." Hence no completed sense, which would be "the crushing of existence", insanity itself.
Exscription, bodies, love
Writing "reveals nothing"; it holds itself "upon the very thin line where sense is proposed and dissolved". Heavy and opaque, writing is "as much exscription as inscription": "By inscribing meanings, one exscribes the presence of what withdraws from all meaning, being itself... it presents itself exscribed." In Corpus, the written makes and touches bodies, which "infinitely renew their spacing". Fischer would have liked to show "how much this book was about love": "From love, I only return or end up broken." The body "has become a new world space".
Writing, bodies, love and images in Fischer's homage.
From L'oubli de la philosophie to Corpus
Fischer treats L'oubli de la philosophie (1986) as the book that "opens the way". The West's "retrospective illusion of a loss" drove metaphysics as misfortune of desire. Affirming the exhaustion of sense (deaths of God, History, Man) overcomes the nihilism that fed on loss. Benjamin's "Truth is the death of intention" becomes the rule: exposure precedes meaning.
Fischer: Corpus as eco-technical creation of bodies.
Joy against mourning
Where Lacoue-Labarthe's Phrase VII mourns, Fischer's homage is joyous. The same exhaustion of sense that the editors and Van Den Abbeele refuse to mourn becomes, for Fischer, a chance to think bodies, images and love without restoring meaning. Photography "passionately exposes the real"; the image is "neither empty nor simulation". Readers after 2023's generative-image debates will test that claim; Fischer's Nancy is the one who would still refuse the denunciation.
Ou, séance, touche de Nancy, ici
Here, or here
Those who say "here" do two things at once. They continue it: they repeat repetitions and stabilize the "enthralling" (Bann, both "spell" and "excommunication") by which society stamps its "here and now". And they desist: whoever speaks here already speaks "in another, incomparable... here, in which the here and whoever says it is lost". The title's French puns signal the method: ou (or), séance (sitting, session, secession), touche (touch, key) and ici (here).
The one who is abandoned "will not follow": stripped of "where and word, un-where and un-word". How then can one quote, comment and question? Each needs a here. Since Hegel, the here and now is not sense-certainty but "a language interval". So Nancy writes: "(Here: the most properly, there where that is being written, in front of you. Here is being written here, here is never more than an inscription. Here lies its abandoned letter)." The phrase performs what it says; "In one ici the other cites itself. There is an ici... only as icitation."
Hamacher: every here is exposed to an or before it is here.
The particle "or"
Nancy adds: "The here has no place: it is at each moment here or there." He makes no comment on this or, "but he writes it". Or is at once a particle of disjunction and conjunction, alteration and alternative. It "formulates the law to which every positing of a here and now is subject: the law of their breaking off". Every here is exposed to an or that suspends it before it can be here; it admits places and times "only as other". Hence the quasi-concept: "Or, that is their exposing."
Kierkegaard: the melancholy of Either-Or
The "Diapsalmata" of Either-Or spiral: "Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, you will also regret it... either you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both." This is what Roland Barthes called the "ninisme" (neither-norism) of aesthetic existence, which avoids decision. But "he who avoids a decision makes a decision, namely the decision not to decide". Melancholy is the regret of the onlooker "who has himself become the picture of his possibilities", the passion of the aesthete and the phenomenologist.
The ethical man who decides explicitly is "not free of the traits of melancholy" either. His choice is "the choice of the will to choice". Will, for Hamacher, is "the experience of decision", Plato's nomos as read by the philosophy of subjectivity. But it is will only when it can also be will not to will: "the ability of an inability", with "no power over its power". Kierkegaard's good (as for his teacher Schelling) is the good of an evil before the good: "fear and trembling".
"My Either-Or", writes Kierkegaard (or "Kierkegaard": who could decide between the name and the "name"?), "does not refer directly to the choice between good and evil"; it refers to "the choice by which one chooses good or evil or excludes them". One "chooses willing", and good and evil "are posited once again". So the ethical decision is "a decision for the Either-Or", not between Either and Or.
A decision "valid once and for all, unmodifiable and thus lethal" would no longer be free: "not a decision but a fact". The choice between Either and Or must always be able to become again "the choice of the Either-Or itself", and this always-again (Immer-wieder) suspends the Either-Or into a Without-Either-Or. Acts of will that ignore this become "whims", in Kierkegaard's terms "incurably melancholic".
From Kierkegaard's Either-Or to the Or-Without-Or.
| Name | Stance on Either-Or | Hamacher's diagnosis |
|---|---|---|
| Aesthete | Avoids choosing ("ninisme") | Decides not to decide; melancholy |
| Ethical man | Chooses choice itself | Will to will; still melancholic |
| Heidegger 1936 | Singular decision of Beyng | "Ontocide": no other Or |
| Or-Without-Or | Decision for undecidability | Opens freedom and the other |
Heidegger's Contributions: the decision of Beyng
In a 1936 section of the Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), Heidegger asks why the truth of Beyng is "the most intrinsic essence of Beyng itself", answering: "Because the essence of Beyng presents itself in the ap-propriative happening of the de-cision." Nancy quotes this in "La décision de l'existence" (Une pensée finie, 1990) to stress that decisiveness (Entschlossenheit) is not anthropological but "the opening to openness", a "making-its-own" (Zueignung).
Hamacher shows Being "presents itself" in the decision as appropriation while withholding itself, so appropriation happens as dispropriation (Ent-eignung). This is what he calls "holding-out" (Hinhaltung), what Nancy calls "offering". Against both Heidegger and Nancy, he proposes thinking Being from a carrying (Träglichkeit), a "ference", which points to the unbearable and to an "aferance" perhaps different from Derrida's différance.
Holding-out, ference, aferance
Hamacher presses beyond both Heidegger and Nancy on the structure of decision. Being in decision happens to Dasein "without arriving at itself", so that Dasein is "with 'itself'" only in non-arrival. Against retrospectiveness (Nachträglichkeit), contractiveness and subtractiveness, he proposes thinking Being from a carrying (Träglichkeit), a "ference", which points also to a not-carrying, an unbearable, an "aferance" that "is perhaps different from Derrida's différance, or which allows it to be read differently". The Own then cannot stand against unbelonging as a rival pair in an Either-Or of "ar-rivality".
Hamacher: from Either-Or collapse to anapolitics.
Why Nancy's "itself" still worries Hamacher
Nancy writes that existing "has nothing more its own than this infinite ownability of unownable Being", and that decision "decides while freeing from good or evil". Hamacher grants the advance past Heidegger's ethnic topology, yet asks why decision still happens to an "itself". If decision sketches possibilities "for the first time", ateleologically, then Dasein is the epitome of atranscendence: it opens transcendence without completing it. The political name he risks for this is "Or-cracy" (Oukratie), "anapolitics": politics of the other word, "ici, alibici".
Hamacher, on the Or-Without-Or
Decision for other decisions
Hamacher's mid-essay pivot is logical, not biographical. If a decision were "valid once and for all, unmodifiable and thus lethal", it would cease to be free: "not a decision but a fact". So every decision must leave room for manoeuvre for further decisions. The sequence is "inconclusive in principle"; decision is always "decision for other decisions". That forces the shift from Either-Or into Without-Either-Or, and finally into the Or-Without-Or that "undermines each decision, thus freeing it as decision in the first place". Absolute arbitrariness (decisionism, activism, ontology of the will) ends here: acts of will that ignore the Without-Or become "whims", "incurably melancholic" in Kierkegaard's sense, because they inhabit the decision of the will itself.
Bad conscience and infinite finitude
Heidegger's conscience, as Hamacher reads it, never delivers possession of the ownmost possibility. Conscience is "always bad conscience", testimony to "the inconsolable dependence of the decision". Own (eigentlich) decision is authentic only when it decides for "infinite finitude", for undecidability itself. "Every decision is dependent on another decision"; dependence on another time (Mal) is "the sign [Mal] of its finitude". Nancy's line that decision "decides while freeing from good or evil" is read charitably: freedom does not meet good and evil as external objects; it opens both, and comes from no "uninvolved or indifferent instance".
Hamacher: conscience as dependence, politics as other word.
Séance, secession, Allologism
| Term | Sense in Hamacher | Against |
|---|---|---|
| Or-Without-Or | Decision for undecidability | Decisionism / will ontology |
| Ference / aferance | Carrying and the unbearable | Mere Nachträglichkeit |
| Ontocide | Singular Or kills other Ors | Onto-dicy of Beyng |
| Anapolitics | Politics of the other word | Ethnic / people-Or |
| Atranscendence | Opens without completing | Closed transcendence |
De-cision as a system of the Open
Hamacher's late pages press the hyphen in Ent-scheidung. De-cision is not a faculty the subject owns; it is "a system of the Open" in which Dasein remains "its own otherness and ex-appropriation". The Own cannot stand in "ar-rivality" against unbelonging as a rival Either-Or pair. Being in decision happens "without arriving at itself"; Dasein is "with 'itself'" only in non-arrival. Against Nachträglichkeit, contractiveness and subtractiveness, ference (carrying) and aferance (the unbearable, perhaps other than différance) name a different temporal structure for abandonment.
Heidegger, Contributions (1936), as quoted; Hamacher: a singular Or is no Or
Hamacher close: Open to other word.
Contributions §§44-47 in sequence
Hamacher tracks Heidegger's 1936 sequence closely. Section 44: truth of Beyng as "ap-propriative happening of the de-cision". Section 45: who can decide - the five "future ones", culminating in the people "singular according to the singularity of Beyng", truth "founded uniquely at a singular place in a singular moment". Section 47: further determination of decision. Nancy quotes the appropriation language in "La décision de l'existence" to stress opening to openness; Hamacher shows appropriation as dispropriation, then asks whether Heidegger "take[s] it seriously enough". Answer: no. Belonging-to-Self collapses into "anthropological ethics and ethnic politics". Ontological difference "draws itself together in ontological fusion".
Hamacher: Contributions sequence to the residual itself.
Heidegger's singular decision versus an open politics of the Or.
Dis-appropriation and Nancy
The "most unpleasant" question is whether something "not-fateful, unbelonging and not-a-member" can be thought at all. Nancy comes close: existing "has nothing more its own than this infinite ownability of unownable Being". In decision Dasein "appropriates" its inappropriable being, thereby ex-appropriating itself. But why then "itself"? Since decision always opens possibilities instead of choosing between given ones, the decision is also "testimony" for an "inexecutable decision which is never made as such": séance as secession.
Conscience, dependence and the good or bad decision
In Heidegger's existential analytic, conscience testifies to Dasein's ownmost possibility, which Dasein never possesses; it is "always bad conscience", conscience of "the inconsolable dependence of the decision". Dasein is never the foundation of its existence; its ownmost possibility stays ahead of it as "the possibility of impossibility of existing". So "own" (eigentlich) decision is authentic only when it decides "for infinite finitude", for the undecidability of decision itself. "Every decision is dependent on another decision": dependence on another time (Mal) is "the sign [Mal] of its finitude".
Nancy writes that decision "decides while freeing from good or evil" (décide en libérant du bien ou du mal). Hamacher asks: why "itself"? How could freedom free itself from the Either-Or? Is freedom not found only in "the extended and out-held experience of the absolute irreducibility of the Either-Or", up to the Or-Without-Or? He reads Nancy's sentence charitably: freedom does not meet good and evil as external; it opens both possibilities, and comes from no "uninvolved or indifferent instance". Even the "or" in "the good or bad decision" cannot be decided: alternative, or open series of ever further Ors? Every decision moves before the question "Either or or or" (Entweder oder oder oder). Dasein "sketches these possibilities 'itself' for the first time", ateleological, "its own otherness and ex-appropriation".
Heidegger's collapse
Did Heidegger take seriously his own thought of appropriation as dis-propriation? Hamacher's answer: "he does not take it seriously enough". The Own belongs only to itself in "the outstanding one marked out" and the "singular" people, as in the "self-standing independence" of Being and Time. This "belonging to Self" represents "nothing less than the political and ethical collapse of Heideggerian thought, its collapse into anthropological ethics and ethnic politics". Ontological difference "draws itself together in ontological fusion": an ethnology, topology and political doctrine of Being, a "people" in its "place", its polis.
De-cision as a system of the Open
In the de-cision "decision and un-decision stand together", "the system of the Open", Heidegger's Fuge (jointure): "the gathering into ungatherable apartness". But Heidegger, in the same sentence, makes this let "the belonging of the people to Beyng" come into play. Hamacher's counter: decision must be thought from the Without, "from the un-decision", and even this Without must be written "without Without". Being "is not, rather it is its Not"; the Or "gives its dis-propriation alone": "an Or struckthrough", a "dis-or, n-Or".
Nancy's line from "La décision de l'existence" fits here: "This is not an auto-opening but rather an onto-opening. Or the auto- is here in the mode of the onto- which itself exists in the mode of the 'they'." Hamacher sharpens Heidegger's "Dasein is the epitome of transcendence" into "Dasein is the epitome of atranscendence": it opens transcendence without ever completing it.
Rashomon and the Sharing of Voices Between East and West
Two texts in thirty-six takes
The essay interleaves numbered "takes" from two sources. One is Heidegger's dialogue "between a Japanese and an Inquirer" (On the Way to Language, 1959), modelled on a visit by Professor Tomio Tezuka. The other is Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), built from two stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who killed himself in 1927 aged 35: In a Grove, seven witnesses giving seven perspectives on "the same event", and Rashomon, a servant waiting out the rain beneath Kyoto's ruined gate.
The dialogue opens with a death and a grave: "You know Count Shuzo Kuki... He died too early. His teacher Nishida wrote his epitaph." The Inquirer is "happy to have photographs of Kuki's grave and of the grove in which it lies." Kuki lies in the temple garden in Kyoto founded by the priest Honen in the late twelfth century. In In a Grove a woodcutter finds the body of a man who "died at an early age". Both texts begin in a grove, with the dead.
Naas: two texts in thirty-six takes, one sharing of voices.
Staging hermeneutics
The epigraph from "Sharing voices" sets the frame: analyzing "all the details of the staging" leads to this, "that which is staged is hermeneutics itself, in its infinite presupposition and in its 'enigmatic' character". Heidegger "does not respond to the question because the dialogue, the text, is itself the response". Asked about the word "hermeneutics", the Inquirer suggests listening to "the message that is borne by the question itself": "the matter is enigmatic, and perhaps we are not dealing with a matter at all." Hermeneutics is "the very medium between word and concept", understood only by walking a path. As Identity and Difference puts it, pay attention "to the path of thought rather than to its content".
Naas finds a hermeneut inside the story too. The police inquirer, "spoken to but never speaks", is "inquisitive, always searching for clues, trying to make sense of the whole", like "a hermeneute in the classical sense". So is the reader who wants, "like a good police enquirer", to reconstruct "the 'actual crime'". In a Grove frustrates that wish: it is "the story of many crimes", never resolving into a coherent whole.
Framing: script, film, betrayal
The film "incorporates two stories into a script and then frames them on a screen". Does turning script into film, the written into the photographic, misappropriate or betray them? The half-ruined gate, held on screen like "a gigantic Japanese character on an ageing manuscript", is the site "of not only translation, dialogue, and life, but betrayal, domination, and death".
The film's itinerary is itself translation. It opened in Tokyo; "a year after", it was "translated, subtitled, and transported to New York"; Akutagawa's stories reached English the next year (Takashi Kojima, 1952). Note 6 adds that Akutagawa reworked two tales from the Konjaku monogatari, which "would, no doubt, further complicate" East and West.
Each passage of Rashomon is a translation that may betray.
Iki, aesthetics and the house of Being
Kuki had come to Germany in the 1920s to hear Heidegger and tried to explain iki. Heidegger feared imposing Western aesthetic concepts, the oppositions of inside and outside, sensuous and suprasensuous, that might "transform and betray" Eastern thought. "J: Aesthetics furnishes us with the concepts... I: Do you need concepts?" Kuki spoke of "sensuous radiance through whose lively delight there breaks the radiance of something suprasensuous"; and Ku names "emptiness and the open", yet more than the merely suprasensuous.
The Inquirer once called language "the house of Being". If East and West dwell in different houses, dialogue is "nearly impossible". Yet "one must engage in dialogue before asking whether it is genuine", must begin translating before asking whether translation is possible.
Seven testimonies
Each witness rewrites "the crime". The bandit Tajomaru boasts of seduction and an honourable duel, recalling, Naas notes, late nineteenth-century Western novels (Thomas Hardy) in which the duel stands for sex. So "Where... is the East ultimately betrayed by Western representation: in the postwar films of Kurosawa, or in the stories of Akutagawa, a half-century earlier?" The wife says her husband's "indescribable light" of contempt drove her to kill him: "I killed my own husband... Whatever can I do?" The attacked becomes the attacker; murder becomes duel, then mercy killing.
The dead husband speaks through a medium who, "like Hermes", translates the dead into the language of the living. He says the wife asked Tajomaru to kill him; even Tajomaru "turned pale". His testimony ends "I sank down into the darkness of space", and the story ends "radically undecidable": theft and discovery, rape and seduction, murder and suicide, truth and deceit. "Not even the testimony of the dead is beyond reproach, for mediation is another name for suspicion."
| No. | Witness | Version | Naas's point |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Woodcutter | Finds body, rope; no sword | Discovery in a grove |
| 2 | Priest; mother-in-law | Saw the couple; the mole | Mole as site of decision |
| 3 | Tajomaru | Seduction, honourable duel | Code of honour as mask |
| 4 | Wife | Husband's contempt; she kills | Attacked becomes attacker |
| 5 | Husband (medium) | Betrayal; suicide | Even the dead are mediated |
Translation goes under an alias
In 1921, the dialogue says, Heidegger gave a course "Expression and appearance", whose transcripts reached Japan. Thirty-two years later the Inquirer calls them "muddy sources", but "quickening in it the attempt to walk a path of which I did not know where it would lead". Naas generalizes: "translation" is itself a translation, no "invisible passageway connecting two distinct languages or houses of Being". Having nothing proper, it "must always go under an alias; die Übersetzung, hon'yaku are just two of its names."
Thirty-six takes as method
Naas's "interpretive performance in thirty-six takes" is itself a sharing of voices: Heidegger's dialogue and Kurosawa's film are cut into numbered fragments that never fuse into one plot. The method exhibits what it describes. The woodcutter, priest, bandit, wife and dead husband through a medium do not add up to "the same event"; they disclose "a between". The police inquirer who never speaks stands for classical hermeneutics: always searching for clues, "trying to make sense of the whole". In a Grove frustrates that wish: it is "the story of many crimes".
Naas: many crimes, one between; no recovered whole.
Iki, Ku, and the house of Being
Kuki's attempt to explain iki to Heidegger stages the danger of Western aesthetics: sensuous/suprasensuous, inside/outside. Ku names emptiness and the open, "yet more than the merely suprasensuous". If East and West dwell in different "houses of Being", dialogue is "nearly impossible"; yet one must engage before asking whether dialogue is genuine. Translation "must always go under an alias"; die Übersetzung and hon'yaku are two of its names. The film's hope-ending (abandoned baby, restored faith) and Akutagawa's fear-ending (servant robbing the old woman) leave the Rashomon as "the threshold of the threshold", the place Nancy's "Of divine places" names when temples open into spacing "with no more sacred enclosures".
Staging hermeneutics itself
Naas's parallel reading starts from Nancy's claim in "Sharing voices": one analyzes "all the details of the staging… in order to end in this: that which is staged is hermeneutics itself", in its "infinite presupposition" and "enigmatic" character. Heidegger's dialogue with "a Japanese" (Tezuka) and Kurosawa's film are both stagings. The woodcutter's path through the grove, "flashes… lights and shadows of recollection", moves by a logic "neither necessary nor arbitrary". What matters is "the movement of memory itself": out of the past, into the future, "between conscious intention and subconscious disclosure", revealing and concealing, betraying and deferring.
Hermeneutics as the medium between word and concept
Asked for the etymology of "hermeneutics", the Inquirer refuses a direct answer and suggests listening to "the message that is borne by the question itself". Hermeneutics is "neither a word nor a concept but the very medium between word and concept", understood only by following a path "we can walk… forward and backward", where "only the way back will lead us forward" into "that nearest nearness which we constantly rush ahead of". Clearings strike as strange: a scarf lifts to show a mole, fire shows a sore, the woodcutter finds the hollow, a commoner shelters under the Rashomon.
Naas: memory and photograph stage East/West uneasiness.
Memory, photograph, Europeanization
The Inquirer links uneasiness to "the complete Europeanization of the earth and of man". The dialogue "has grown out of our memory of Count Kuki", yet Kuki also persists in "photographs of [his] grave and of the grove in which it lies". The shift from memory to photograph stages Western objectifying memory. No origin sits outside "the play of differences"; no narrator sits outside "the web of complicity and deceit". The film threatens to end in masks; then a baby cries under the Rashomon. Rain ceases. The priest protects the infant from the woodcutter, who has six children and offers to take one more. Hope-ending (film) and fear-ending (Akutagawa's servant robbing the old woman) leave the gate as threshold of threshold: temples opened into spacing "with no more sacred enclosures".
Why the police inquirer never speaks
Classical hermeneutics wants clues that recover "the same event". In Kurosawa's framing, the police inquirer never speaks on screen as a totalizing voice; the film and Akutagawa's stories multiply testimonies instead. Between "passive mediation and active narration", the past is "retrieved and brought into the protective clearing of the half-ruined gate". Cameras cut "as if trying to trace… the circuitous and fragmented path of the past". Naas's thirty-six takes refuse to close that path. The method is the sharing of voices: East and West, film and dialogue, iki and aesthetics, Ku and the open, betrayal at every translation alias.
Naas: classical hermeneutics frustrated.
Two endings: hope and fear
The essay moves "between two endings of Rashomon, one of hope and one of fear". In Akutagawa's story, the servant, at "the place of decision", tears the clothes off the old woman stripping corpses, kicks her down the stairs and walks into the night: betrayal. In the film the rains cease; the priest finds an abandoned baby. The commoner strips its wrappings; the exposed liar, the woodcutter, offers to raise it. "Thanks to you, I think I will be able to keep my faith in men." He walks into the sunlight, framed by the gate and its signboard, whose characters "no caption retranslates".
In the story, the old woman pulling hair from corpses explains herself: "I pull out the hair... to make a wig." In Kyoto people must "lie, cheat, and steal, even from the dead" to survive; they "cannot be blamed". So "the gate is opened for the samurai's servant to step beyond guilt and innocence", and he touches the pimple on his cheek before robbing her. The old woman herself is undecidable: "a messenger from the underworld... or just another poor woman of Kyoto".
Nancy, "Of divine places", the essay's closing words
Two endings: the place of danger is the place of hope.
The place of greatest danger is "also the place of greatest hope". Clearings are so near, "always just around the corner", that we "abandon these places of difference where we always already live" for concepts and metaphysics. The Rashomon becomes "the threshold of the threshold".
Nancy and the Political Imaginary After Nature
Nature's farewell
Nancy's leap "from the romantic principle of the beautiful-in-nature to a post-Kantian sublimity of finite history" makes community "philosophy's responsibility after nature". Alienated from "truth, God, and nature", philosophy "is suddenly thrown into a world it can no longer understand". The world, Nancy writes, "is our world, the world of us, not as a belonging, but as the appropriation of existence insofar as it is finite" (The Birth to Presence, p. 163). It is neither transcendental (Kant) nor ecstatic (Heidegger): "it is the spacing of time, the opening up of the possibility of saying 'we'" (BP, 164).
Wurzer: community as philosophy's task after nature.
Temporalizing and the comma
Nancy refuses to be political, refusing "to repeat the historical mimesis". This links community to the space Heidegger opens in his readings of time, which Heidegger calls Übermacht: a temporalizing (Zeitigung) by which "nothing present-at-hand may surface", rewriting Nietzsche's Use and Abuse of History. "Philosophy is not the subject... The subject is time, our time, now, our finite history, the 'I' within the 'we'." Indeed "the subject is a non-identical comma, between 'we, now'".
Three difficulties linger: "the intimacy of community and finite history; the historical as absence of 'political' presence; happening as farewell to what happens". Nancy's freedom is "free from freedom" and "does not answer to any concept". Hence resemblances to Heidegger's Zeitigung, Adorno's Nichtidentische and Derrida's différance. But "is it ever an experience as Nancy claims?"
Hölderlin's joy, Descartes' joy
For Nancy, romanticism is "not yet completed" because the poetic speculative "has not taken place. It cannot take place." He "stands in the shadow or parody of Hölderlin". Wurzer asks whether this is "easy philosophy" again. After nature, we are moved not into "Hölderlin's joy" but into electronic expressions "more akin to Descartes' joy". The best model for community is "the conversation, where nobody knows what he or she will say before he or she has said it" (BP, 315). For Hölderlin and Schelling the coming god means "a breaking-forth of a distinct absence of ground", the non-securing foundation of poetry, history and philosophy. Nancy links this romantic politico-poetic discourse with reality: "the new comedy of freedom, 'pirating foundation'". "We are communal not because a law or a constitution says so, but because we are free prior to law and government." Community "signifies the twilight of sovereignties".
Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, p. 95
Beyond Nancy: Wurzer's time-capital.
Beyond Nancy: time-capital
Wurzer reads this with Derrida's The Other Heading, where "the heading splits, the capital is deidentified". Nancy "does not consider capital's rhythmic renunciations of presence": "weightless" electro-economic relations that "obliterate cultural closures". Wurzer coins Zeitkapital: "Capital happening designates 'the global conversation' we are." Time-capital "reveals community at the limit of comprehension", letting resistances "come to new textualities". The ending: "after nature, there then begins community as we, now no longer know it".
Beyond Hyperion, George and Trakl
Wurzer situates Nancy after the fading of "the beautiful-in-nature": beyond Hyperion's joy, Kant's free play, the Dionysian, George's Neue Reich, Trakl's mourning. Philosophy, alienated from truth, God and nature, is "thrown into a world it can no longer understand". Community is not a unified body with common interests but "happening itself". History is "nonrepresentable" (BP, 161); philosophy drafts the design of world according to community rather than representing it.
Wurzer: community as we, now no longer know it.
Time-capital and The Other Heading
Wurzer pushes Nancy with Derrida's The Other Heading: "the heading splits, the capital is deidentified". Nancy, he claims, "does not consider capital's rhythmic renunciations of presence". Zeitkapital names "Capital happening" as "the global conversation we are", revealing community "at the limit of comprehension". The essay ends: "after nature, there then begins community as we, now no longer know it". The romantic unfinishedness of Hölderlin and Schelling (the coming god as absence of ground) becomes, for Wurzer, less Hölderlin's joy than Descartes' joy in electronic expression: conversation "where nobody knows what he or she will say before he or she has said it" (BP, 315).
Philosophy thrown into a world it can no longer understand
Wurzer's diagnosis is epochal rather than local. After the fading of "the beautiful-in-nature", philosophy stands "alienated from truth, God and nature", "thrown into a world it can no longer understand". Community is not a unified body with common interests but "happening itself". History is "nonrepresentable" (BP, 161); philosophy drafts the design of world according to community rather than representing a prior world. The romantic unfinishedness of Hölderlin and Schelling (the coming god as absence of ground) becomes, for Wurzer, less Hölderlin's joy than a Cartesian joy of electronic expression: conversation "where nobody knows what he or she will say before he or she has said it" (BP, 315).
Wurzer: after nature, community as unknown we.
Wurzer, closing line
Interruptions of Necessity: Being Between Meaning and Power in Jean-Luc Nancy
The epigraph comes from L'expérience de la liberté (p. 13): "as soon as existence itself constitutes essence... and as soon as, consequently, these two concepts and their opposition belong only to the history of metaphysics, it is necessary..." The essay has three parts: the ontology of necessity (I), its power over contemporary discourse (II), and its interruptions in Nancy (III).
I. Necessity from a metaontological view
Necessity has always taken its meaning, "at least in the occident", from its relation to possibility and reality. Librett sketches, "in a metaontological manner", the conditions shared by all modal ontologies. One term is taken as first, and the other two become its opposite modifications, "disjunctively conjoined" along its border. There are three versions:
| Name | Begin with | The other two become | Associations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Version 1 | Possibility | Necessary and real possibility | Subject, thought, language; essences, propositions (Leibniz) |
| Version 2 | Reality | Necessary and possible reality | Things, existences; empiricism (Locke to Hume) |
| Version 3 | Necessity | Possibility and reality | The essay's focus: necessity split into essence and existence |
Modern philosophy "from Descartes to Kant" seems to unfold these three versions. In each, the first term "appears utterly opaque": "The non-groundedness of the modal terms obtains for all three." Empiricism's drift from Lockean realism to Berkeleyan idealism to Humean scepticism shows how easily reality "becomes mere possibility" (note 4).
Librett: necessity split into possibility and reality grounds the field.
II. Necessity in practice and in theory
Debates on the human sciences are governed by the opposition between "theory" (hermeneutics in the broadest sense, which hopes "to uncover or recover meaning") and "political engagement", which aims "to act upon and transform the world". Theory privileges possibility; politics privileges reality. But each harbours the other: political activism, "even in its conservative forms", projects possibilities into the world. "Political power is the power to distribute (itself as) necessity, to attach necessity in specific forms to specific populations." Foucault's "Truth and Power" registers this double, positive and negative, aspect of power.
The deeper and "much more interesting" level concerns how each side distributes rights and duties between individual and society. In one common scenario, conservatism burdens society and the state with the duty of bowing before the individual as "freewheeling capitalist subject", who gets all rights, while progressivism gives society the rights and the individual the duty to serve the collectivity. In the inverted scenario, conservatism burdens the individual with existing conventions and gives rights to "the totality as it stands", while progressivism devotes itself to emancipating individuals and obliges society to care for them. That both scenarios persuade "only indicates how powerful is the polemical system constituted by the seemingly endless oscillation between them".
Fascism, as conservative revolution, does not evade the alternatives; it synthesizes them into one totality. It makes the real seem necessary as pure possibility ("the nation absolute as unified subject"), and possibility seem necessary as pure reality ("the blood-and-soil of the people as earth"). The need for a politics that evades realist conservatism and possibilist progressivism "without amounting to their reactionary sublation" is the need to which Nancy's work responds, "in the wake of Heidegger's confusion of his own best insights with the political totalitarianism of the Nazis" (cf. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Le mythe nazi, 1991).
Historicism and formalism
Within hermeneutics, possibility (meaning) is privileged, but reality returns "to haunt meaning" as history (historicism) or as form (formalism). The political resonances are "symmetrically self-doubling". Hermeneutics looks progressive, sharing the privilege of possibility. Historicism looks more political-practical because of its realism, but as realism it "always echoes conservatism" and duty. Formalism evokes the opposite set. Hence "so much confusion about political meaning in the humanities".
Formalism, sharing the possibilist dogma, "seems theoreticist and apolitical, and in this sense conservative". Yet it also seems progressive, since one has "the vague sense that formalism must on some level serve emancipation". Categories are identified or split "depending on whether or not they share the same interpretation of necessity". Librett's point is structural: the system's coherence gives it a power "not in the narrow sense political", but political "in a broader sense", one that "escapes the perspective of most forms of political hermeneutics".
III. Being-in-decision
"More than anywhere else", the interruption of necessity occurs in Nancy's decision on decision. Nancy "does not decide the issue, but everywhere insists on its undecidability". This non-decision is "a decision precisely for decision". By comparison, the traditional decision of necessity looks like "a decision against decision", an attempt to escape decision as fast as possible. Nancy clarifies this in "The decision of existence" (Une pensée finie, 1990; in The Birth to Presence, pp. 82-109).
The essay's thesis is "the mundanity of decision" (p. 82). Decision is traditionally placed in will, subject and possibility; world and existence belong to object and reality. Nancy unsettles this. "Decision of existence" means a decision over existence, a decision by existence, or a decision that is existence. We do not know which term is subject and which object, nor whether they are identical or different.
Notes 13-18 gather Nancy's formulations of this undecidability. Decision is an event as opposed to thought, but thought as opposed to event. "The relation to the 'possible'... is that of (in)decision" (p. 86). "In suspension, by definition, decision escapes... undecidability is the rule" (p. 95). "'To decide' means not to cut through this or that 'truth'... but to expose oneself to the undecidability of meaning [sens] that existence is" (p. 97). Even the existential analytic "is caught up, throughout, in Gerede" (idle talk), and has no privilege over any other discourse (p. 93). Heidegger's "modification" of non-decision into decision should be read, Librett says, as a modalization.
Note 21 adds that against Heidegger's privileging of anxiety, Nancy "risks opposing" moods such as joy. For such a politics, "the only homeland would be the homeland of being-in-decision, (not) a very homely homeland (at all)". Undecidability does not mean inactivity; action is no longer defined by "the realist decision of necessity".
Subject and Citizen
In Le sens du monde (1993, pp. 164-9) Nancy names the two models of political grounding within metaphysics: the collective Subject (le Sujet) and the collectivity of Citizens (le Citoyen). The Subject means participation "in the interiority of a self-negating self-appropriation": essentialist, a ground of pure possibility. The Citizen means sharing "in the exteriority of purely formal relations": a ground of pure reality. Both reduce the political to "self-sufficiency and self-determination"; they appear only in mixtures and "turn into each other".
Two models of political closure and Nancy's practice of linkage.
Figures 1 and 2: the modal triangle
Librett's source essay includes two figures (pages around the modal discussion) that stage the three versions: begin with possibility, reality, or necessity; the other two become opposed modifications along the first term's border. Necessity is "almost synonymous with grounding", yet as a term in the self-relativizing modal triangle it is itself contingent. All attempts to ground necessity must ground it as reality or possibility, and that preference is always dogmatic. The essay focuses on version 3 because it governs "the politics of discourse in the contemporary humanities".
Librett: modal triangle version 3 and its political poles.
Seizure of speech and a-salvationary politics
Nancy determines (un)linkage as "seizure of speech - which is also a being-seized by speech" (prise de parole - qui est aussi bien la prise par la parole). Neither particularist nor universalist, politics "does not come from an Idea"; it surges from cry and complaint to discourse, poem, song, gesture and silence. Being-in-decision refuses both heroic self-removal from the social whole (dying for the whole to live on in it) and mere conformity that dies into the whole for its duration. The third path is "a-salvationary": the only homeland is "the homeland of being-in-decision, (not) a very homely homeland (at all)".
Practice as reknotting: speech seized and seizing.
Meaning, power, being: the opening questions
Librett opens with a battery of questions that set the field: relation of meaning and power; whether hermeneutics studies meaning while political science studies power; whether ontology must clarify the modes of being of each, and conversely the meaning and power of being. Parts I-II sketch traditional determinations of necessity; Part III reads Nancy's interruptions; the close turns to Le partage des voix. The wager: ontology, hermeneutics and politics cannot be kept in separate departments once necessity is interrupted.
Being-in-decision versus decision against decision
Nancy does not decide whether necessity is reality or possibility; he insists on undecidability. That non-decision is itself "decision for decision". Traditional decisions that fix necessity as either reality or possibility look, by comparison, like decisions against decision: attempts to transcend the undecidable as quickly as possible. Being-in-decision refuses both the heroic exit (dying for the whole so the whole lives on in the hero) and mere conformity (dying into the whole for its duration).
Librett: decision for decision versus decision against it.
Left, right, and the missing meaning of the orientation
Nancy links himself with left traditions "in order to distance himself from all forms of conservatism", yet criticizes how far the left still adheres to "political theology and the idealism of self-sufficiency". "(Un)linkage" sits midway between rights and duties: "a duty that is at once a right… neither a duty nor a right". "Left" and "right" as "empirico-transcendental orientation" "ought to mean something else. Its meaning is missing still." The politics of knots: "no tie except taken up again, projected anew, knotted again without end, nowhere purely tied nor untied". Each knot (people, country, person) "is not one except in accordance with the enchaining".
| Pole | Privilege | Nancy's displacement |
|---|---|---|
| Left / rights | Possibility, opening lives | Still risk political theology |
| Right / duties | Reality, imposed limit | Duty=right at once in (un)linkage |
| Subject | Sovereignty + community | Turns into Citizen |
| Citizen | Sovereignty + community | Turns into Subject |
| Hermeneutics | Recovery of meaning | Passing on and passing out |
Three versions of the modal triangle
Because necessity, possibility and reality "define being as a trio", their meanings are mutually dependent. Anyone developing a modal ontology faces three versions (Librett's Figures 1 and 2): (1) begin with possibility, define necessity and reality as opposite modifications; (2) begin with reality; (3) begin with necessity, the others as opposed modifications along its border. The first term is "the border along which the two secondary terms are disjunctively conjoined". Necessity looks like the ground of the triad, yet as a term in the self-relativizing triangle it is itself contingent. Grounding necessity as reality or as possibility is always "dogmatic and arbitrary". Version 3 governs "the politics of discourse in the contemporary humanities". Explicit talk of necessity embarrasses secular fields because it evokes "God, Fate, Absolute Knowledge, and Logical Truths".
Librett: three modal versions; version 3 rules discourse.
Historicism, formalism, and repressed ambivalence
In hermeneutics broadly, possibility as meaning is the privileged modality of necessity. After being submerged beneath possibility, reality re-emerges as the repressed, splitting method into historicism and formalism: two "apparently unequivocal methodological dogmas". The same binary machine runs in politics as progressive/conservative and rights/duties. The system keeps arguing "for a long time to come" until the unequivocal identification of necessity with reality or with possibility is shown to be "impossible and unreal". Nancy's being-in-decision is that disruption.
Decision's double structure
Librett's thesis displaces decision toward the reality it is normally taken to determine, and displaces existence and worldliness toward the subjectivity and possibility they ordinarily delimit. Decision becomes "a name precisely for necessity as undecidable". Structurally, decision can be described two ways: (1) it realizes the possible, seizing possibility and initiating transformation into reality; or (2) it renders the real possible, taking dead external reality and transforming it into a living possibility for the subject, "inessential existence into essential existence". Each experience carries a different ontological dogma: from "necessary = possible" to "necessary = real", or the reverse. Nancy refuses to settle the passage; he keeps decision in the undecidable slot that Librett identified as necessity's own place.
Librett: decision's two structures share one undecidable place.
Progressive / conservative schematizations
Hermeneutics is often called conservative because it seems to sanction the status quo by ignoring reality for "mere possibilities of meaning". Politicization is often called progressive as such, because acknowledging reality "could be other than it is" shares the possibilist determination of necessity. Conservatives then want to depoliticize the humanities; progressive activists sometimes assume "any politicization is always better than none". Librett calls these schematizations vain in their "easy reversibility", yet persuasive so long as the arbitrariness of their ontological associations stays hidden. Nancy's work is read as an attempt to displace exactly these associations.
Interpretation as postponement of meaning
For Heidegger as Nancy reads him, "what we are, in our being, is the interpretation of being". The meaning of being is "the postponement or interruption of the arrival of the meaning of being". Being "has never come (back), but is always still coming (back) out of the future". Interpretation "passes on" meaning in two senses: transfers and defers it along an endless unfolding; and meaning "passes on" or dies in being born, because interpretation "constitutively interrupts and infinitely postpones the arrival of meaning as such". Combined with "passing out" (originary sharing among singularities), this is Librett's bridge from ontology to the politics of discourse.
Understanding before understanding: "Sharing voices"
Librett turns to Nancy's Le partage des voix (1982), citing the English translation but altering it "where it is inaccurate". Modern hermeneutics, Nancy says, is "the recovery or the reappropriation of a subject", whose rule is that "meaning should be given in advance to the interpreter", the circle of pre-comprehension. Its circle is a "double substitution" of anticipated belief for lost belief (note 39). (Librett does not judge whether Nancy's reading of Ricoeur is fair.)
Nancy's starting point is a dialectical hermeneutics subtler than formalism or historicism. It fuses real genesis and ideal structure into "a single structured genesis": history becomes "the history of the loss and recovery of meaning", as in any Hegelianizing dialectic. Understanding moves back from the present desire for meaning to "the prior presence of meaning", and forward to its recovery.
Heidegger's Being and Time offers another model: the phenomenology of Dasein is "a hermeneuein", through which the meaning of Being is "made known [kundgegeben]". Interpretation is announcement, a message "passed on as the incessant recommencement of its passing on". It "does not arrive at what it announces". Nancy: "The meaning of being(-there) is that being... is always still coming (back) out of the future... interpretation constitutively interrupts and infinitely postpones the arrival of meaning as such" (pp. 61-2).
Interpretation as passing on and passing out (Sharing voices).
Heidegger, "A dialogue on language", as quoted; poets "are interpreters of the gods" (Ion 534e)
Librett skips Nancy's long reading of Plato's Ion, where the rhapsode is "a figure of the power of powerlessness", of the performative power of textual repetition. The point remains: "logocentrism" proves given "to the most powerful of decenterings, to a destinal (fatal) division of the logos itself" (p. 82).
Alongside the Horizon
Euryopa: the far look
Nancy starts from "the admittedly questionable etymological meaning of Europe": Euryopa, an epithet of Zeus meaning, per Liddell and Scott, "wide-eyed" or "far-sounding" (thundering). Europe "is the particular way of looking whose singular sighting [visée] is the universal as such" (EU, 8). Since "there is no other idea than Europe", can an idea be the idea of a world? Can a world be sighted, taken aim at, at all?
The idea "exposes itself according to the logos", "the law of autonomy", of what grounds itself upon itself and returns to itself. But the far look ends in darkness: seeing itself leave itself behind, it reappropriates its end "as the dark spot which is necessarily presupposed by the look itself". Nancy's response is to go "Further... deeper into the night, deeper into the blind spot. Deeper into the look of Euryopa" (EU, 10).
Gasché on Nancy: Europe's look goes deeper into its own night.
Alienation by the universal
The universal has turned into "the world launched into the space of the universe", and its values are now worthless. "The entire world has become alienated by the value of the universal and the universal of value" (EU, 11). Gasché reads Nancy as wanting a world "prior to the world of universality", "free from the universal". The universal appears as "a merely oppressive and repressive gown thrown by a particularity around the world": disguised particularity, hence its "intrinsic violence". "Europe, or the Entäusserung and the Entfremdung of self in the other" (EU, 11).
Seeing-oneself-seeing and the Occident
Because logos is the medium of Europe's look, the idea is "seeing-oneself-seeing" of vision and what it aims at (EU, 9). Europe figures itself as "Occident", "occidental civilization", exits itself "all the way to the end of the world", and sees itself as other than the orient: "the world occupied in totality… which comes back to itself as its end." The Occident, or Erebus, is "essentially and structurally a self-dissolving and self-alienating notion: it is the day that sees itself ending" (EU, 9). The universal returns "as the blind spot of its eye" (EU, 10). Distancing oneself from universal vision is already prescribed by that logic; Nancy's "one more step forward" is not another Aufhebung but affirmation deeper into the night.
Gasché: from Husserl's horizon to finite seeing.
Alongside, not beyond, the horizon
Gasché's title "Alongside the Horizon" matters: the finite look does not claim a meta-horizon. The a-human world of singular beings "infinitely exposed to existence as a non-essence" touches infinity without restoring Euryopa's far aim. Leipzig, May 1994: Nancy's conference text becomes Gasché's laboratory for asking whether Husserl's "unlimitedly open" world-horizon is still one more horizon that must be challenged.
Husserl's world-horizon and Nancy's step
Gasché's laboratory is Nancy's May 1994 Leipzig conference text (EU). Husserl's "unlimitedly open" world-horizon still aims; it remains a horizon. Nancy's "one more step forward" is not another Aufhebung but affirmation "deeper into the night". Distancing oneself from universal vision is already prescribed by Occidental logic; the universal returns "as the blind spot of its eye" (EU, 10). The Occident, or Erebus, is "essentially and structurally a self-dissolving and self-alienating notion: it is the day that sees itself ending" (EU, 9).
Gasché: from open horizon to finite look.
Seeing-oneself-seeing as Europe's medium
Because logos is the medium of Europe's look, the Idea is "seeing-oneself-seeing" of vision and what it aims at (EU, 9). Europe figures itself as Occident, "occidental civilization", exits "all the way to the end of the world", and returns as its own end. Gasché's wager with Nancy: the finite look that rests on the infinite as such does not restore a new Euryopa. It stays alongside the horizon. Love remains "the name of the impossible" for existence separated from essence and truth that eludes anamnestic rediscovery.
Gasché: Europe's look beside the horizon.
The horizon: Husserl's world
Nancy's line from The Inoperative Community (on Sartre's "unsurpassable horizon") becomes the test: "It is the horizons themselves that must be challenged." From Greek horizein, to divide or mark out by boundaries, the universal (Europe) "is the horizon of the world". Gasché sketches Husserl's concept, because there "world and universal horizon are so intimately interconnected that a world without horizon appears as a sheer inconceivability".
Why Nancy must go further than Husserl's open horizon.
"To attack the horizon is to attack the world." Does Nancy want only "a limitlessly open horizon"? Then he would repeat Husserl, for whom the world is "unlimitedly open on all sides", giving space to "all the different home-worlds". But Nancy calls for going "farther than all possible horizons", beyond even this openness, whose infinity is Hegel's "spurious infinity".
| Name | World | Horizon | Infinity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Euryopa (Europe) | The universal, sighted from afar | Universal horizon; blind spot | Extension to the universe's limits |
| Husserl | Total horizon of experience | Unlimitedly open | Ad infinitum (spurious, for Nancy) |
| Nancy's finite world | "Just world", a-human | None | Infinitely finite exposure |
The finite look and love
Europe sees itself as "the Selbstanschauung of Selbstentfremdung", but it is also "the Entfremdung of Anschauung" (EU, 11-12). The inalienable is the other self not carried along by the universal Self. These selves are structured "beside-before-beyond" themselves, so they carry the possibility of alienation yet stay irreducible. The world is "at least double". "The universal itself has taken on the strangeness of a dark night" (EU, 12).
The look into that darkness is "a finite look into the infinite... what we currently see is nothing other than the infinite... its ethos become infinite" (EU, 12). Existence and truth are aimed at by "a mode of sighting that Europe and the West have called 'love', as if to give it the name of the impossible" (EU, 12). Since existence is "absolutely separated from all essence" and truth eludes "anamnestic rediscovery", both "are infinite" (EU, 15). The finite look "comes to rest on the infinite as such".
Nancy, "Euryopa" (EU, 14)
The finite look rests on the infinite as such.
A world infinitely finite
A world "is a space for the infinite of truth and existence... and is not something on which one can properly set one's sights". The finite world has no horizon "primarily because it does not rest on visual perception", and no particular world can gain ascendancy over others. It is "the world that is just world", reached by Euryopa's sighting going out of itself and returning, finding itself "carried away, altered in it" (EU, 13). That world "is no longer a human world: not inhuman, though, but a-human", made of singular beings "infinitely exposed to existence as a non-essence", "as many finite looks" touching "the infinity of the world".
Sacrifice Revisited
Nancy's essay ("L'insacrifiable", in Une pensée finie, 1990, cited as PF) is mostly a reading of Bataille, which was inevitable for a thought that since The Inoperative Community has put community and communication at its centre. Can thinking stand away from sacrifice, or does it always lead back to it? De Beistegui's five sections answer.
I. Mimesis
Nancy's brief history of sacrifice borrows from evolutionist theories ("from Tylor to Girard and from Hubert and Mauss to Durkheim") that see Christian moral sacrifice as the truth of ritual sacrifice. Its originality, which "would doubtless encounter very serious reservations" from specialists, is to call the West this dialectical sublation, both philosophical and Christian: onto-theological. So we Westerners "can know... nothing of the ancient or real sacrifice".
De Beistegui on Nancy's mimetic history of Western sacrifice.
II. Fascination
Sacrifice is "living-dead": never as alive as at its announced demise, a revenant (ghost). De Beistegui would add Freud (Kultur as self-sacrificial economy) and Lacan (the sacrifice of the pathological object) to Nancy's list. He also proposes rethinking religious anthropology: the sacrificer gives the god "that which, by rights and right away, is his" (lui re-vient). Western morality, as Nietzsche saw, "continues to die from its own sacrifice".
Nancy declares: "this perhaps inevitable fascination is intolerable" (PF, 85). The cruelty itself seduces. Nancy insists "It is not a matter... of sentimentality" but of whether "horror ought not to be simply... left to horror". For de Beistegui, Nancy does not clarify "its pathological and moral presuppositions". Notes 5-6 recall Kant, who condemned ritual sacrifice yet found "something sublime" in war conducted with order.
III. Supplement
Bataille "tested this sublime fascination to the limit". Spiritual sacrifice ends in "a simulacrum and a comedy" (as Bataille saw in Hegel); bloody horror is intolerable. Bataille's thought was "less a thinking of sacrifice, than a merciless thinking strained and torn by the impossibility of renouncing sacrifice" (PF, 86). For Nancy, art "comes to supplement, relieve or sublate the impasse of sacrifice" (PF, 88), as writing supplements voice in Derrida. De Beistegui counters: in Bataille art does not refer to "the actual exercise of an actual cruelty" (PF, 89); sacrifice takes place as the impossible in art ("Art, the practice of cruelty"). Is it "a pure signifier behind which no signified would be hidden"?
Between simulation and horror: art, or the gift.
IV. Abandonment
Sacrifice thus means "no longer the founding murder" but the impossible. "The very time of sacrifice is thus the sacrifice of time, time exposed to its own worklessness", exposing singularities to "the impassable horizon of their own finitude", perhaps "the limit, even the essence of all community". For Bataille the sacred leads not to a divine reality but to "the being-abandoned" of existence. Nancy accepts community as experience of the sacred but resists sacrifice. Why?
| Name | Sacrifice is | Relation to death |
|---|---|---|
| Ancient rite | Giving the god what is "his" | Blood, immolation |
| Western (Socrates, Christ) | Self-sacrifice, sublated, last | Death made into spirit's work |
| Bataille | Abandon and give; the impossible | Exposes finitude; no murder |
| Nancy | Closed; existence "unsacrificable" | Existence "offered", not sacrificed |
V. Finitude: the unsacrificable
Nancy's impulse comes from history: "our century has seen the end of sacrifice". Its limit "is the experience of the death camps". With the holocaust, "sacrifice has lost every right and every dignity" (PF, 98), becoming "a parody of immolation and smoke rising toward the heavens, which no longer even has the right to this name 'parody'" (PF, 96-7). Bataille "will have remained blind" to what made it necessary to think "apart from sacrifice" (PF, 100). We must "definitively acknowledge that the economy of Western sacrifice is closed" (PF, 101). "'Finitude' signifies that existence is not sacrificable" (PF, 101).
Why community thinking meets sacrifice
De Beistegui's opening question is structural: a thought centred on community and communication since The Inoperative Community cannot avoid Bataille, and Bataille cannot avoid sacrifice. Can thinking stand away from sacrifice, or does every path lead back? The five sections (Mimesis, Fascination, Supplement, Abandonment, Finitude) answer by showing expulsion and return at once.
De Beistegui: five sections from sacrifice to offering.
Three answers to Nancy's "offered"
De Beistegui's close: (1) offering to the world already carries appropriation's possibility; (2) Bataille's sovereignty suspended the servile order to open another community, but finitude may have revealed itself in that order, facing one's own death; (3) if Bataille knows only "literary" sacrifice, it supplements no actual sacrifice. Nancy's 1987 text on God seals the return: the gods "take his sacrifice from him… in the sense of his abandonment. For there is this abandonment which is not a traffic, but which is an offering, an oblation, a libation." Sacrifice is reinscribed as generosity and even abundance at the heart of existence.
Expulsion and return of sacrifice
De Beistegui's five sections answer a structural question: can a thought of community and communication since The Inoperative Community stand away from sacrifice, or does every path lead back? Mimesis ties sacrifice to imitation and founding murder. Fascination names what remains intolerable after the camps: Western sacrifice "ends" historically yet still fascinates. Supplement asks whether "literary" sacrifice (Bataille) stands in for an actual cruelty. Abandonment and Finitude turn Nancy's "offered" against traffic: gods "take his sacrifice from him… in the sense of his abandonment", which is "not a traffic, but… an offering, an oblation, a libation."
De Beistegui: finitude offers without traffic.
Fascination after the camps
Western sacrifice, for Nancy as de Beistegui reads him, reaches a historical end in the camps, yet fascination remains. That remainder is intolerable: thought must neither restore sacrificial logic nor pretend the fascination has vanished. Bataille's sovereignty suspends the servile order to open another community; finitude may instead have shown itself inside that order, facing one's own death. Offering to the world already carries appropriation's possibility. The 1987 Nancy text on God reinscribes sacrifice as generosity and abundance: abandonment that is "not a traffic".
De Beistegui: after camps, abandon as abundance.
Unsacrificable existence and the return of offering.
What separates offering from sacrifice would need a reading of Nancy's texts on existence, from The Experience of Freedom to The Sense of the World and "The decision of existence". The offering suggests that more is at play in being-in-the-world than Heidegger's Geworfenheit (thrownness) or Entwurf (projection): "a 'putting forward' which never settles in presence", "something like an abundance". Nancy tries to move further from sacrifice on the next page: the offered existent is linked "to an order of things and of others" that signifies "the possibility of its enslavement, of its appropriation".
De Beistegui answers in three steps. First, offering to the world already carries this possibility of appropriation. Second, Bataille's sovereignty suspended the servile order to open "another community"; but was that order not where finitude revealed itself, where the existent faced its own death? Transgression points not to an Outside but "in the direction of an immanence or of a self understood as finitude". Third, if Bataille knows only "literary" sacrifice (not simulated), it supplements no actual sacrifice, and its methexis, like Acéphale's, defies religious participation.
De Beistegui's last witness is Nancy's 1987 text on God: the gods "close off his humanity... they take his death from him... they take his sacrifice from him, this time in the sense of his abandonment. For there is this abandonment which is not a traffic, but which is an offering, an oblation, a libation." Sacrifice is thus "reinscribed at the very heart of existence", as generosity and even abundance.
An 'Inoperative' Global Community? Reflections on Nancy
Huntington's clash
Huntington's 1993 essay "The clash of civilizations?" (Foreign Affairs) "shattered public euphoria" just when the fall of the Iron Curtain promised a new pax Americana. Conflict has moved from princely states (after Westphalia) to nation-states (after the French Revolution) to ideologies (after the Russian Revolution), and now to civilizations: "The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."
Dallmayr finds two features worth attention. Huntington removes the Eurocentric blinkers: earlier conflicts were "Western civil wars", while non-Western peoples now become "movers and shapers of history". And he moves from states to cultures, "comprehensive meaning patterns" of ordinary people. But the model is "modified but not radically transformed": the clash of civilizations replaces the clash of superpowers.
Dallmayr: Huntington's advance and its essentialist flaw.
Nancy distinguishes politics (partisan strategies, institutional devices) from the political, "not the organization of society but the disposition of community as such", a synonym for "the sharing of community". This does not neglect power. One never stops "being caught up in it, being implicated in its demands"; counter-energies must be put to "work". But strategic aims must not become "totalizing" in turn: struggles "must remain mindful of a recessed inoperative domain", a shared public space "which allots to politics its sense and measure".
Seen this way, Huntington's chief virtue is the move from the "anarchy" of states to the lifeworlds of ordinary people: in Hedley Bull's terms, from the international "society of states" to an emerging "world society". He also attends to religion, departing from homogenizing secularism. But at "a more basic level", he says, Western standards "differ fundamentally" from others; "the very notion that there could be a 'universal civilization' is a Western idea". Western attempts to export individualism, human rights and democracy meet charges of "human rights imperialism". His analysis "remains tied to the West/rest bifurcation", allowing only "an 'operative' or managerial type of world community".
Nancy's inoperative community
La communauté désoeuvrée (1986) appeared in a climate saturated with Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Bataille. It gathered the main Continental themes: the end of metaphysics, the decentring of subjectivity, the turn to language, and existence as ek-static. Its target is the "immanentism" in which economic ties, technology and political fusion "realize this essence [of community] in themselves", which "we have called 'totalitarianism'". Less radical communitarian and left-Hegelian politics share this flaw; they "have by now run their course".
The inoperative community against every immanentism.
Wallerstein: civilization and civilizations
Immanuel Wallerstein's Geopolitics and Geoculture (1991) treats cultures as "fluid, open-ended meaning patterns" and "West versus the Rest" as "a complex differential entwinement". The opposition of universalism and particularism, global civilization (singular) versus local civilizations (plural), is "a bald metaphysical shibboleth" that he works to dislodge. The liberal imperatives of science and assimilation shaped even the antisystemic movements, from the mid-nineteenth century "until at least the Second World War": "the fulfillment of the liberal dream".
Wallerstein's study, a few years before Huntington, also saw culture as "the intellectual battleground" of the world-system, the latest stage after "multiple mini-systems" and "world-empires". Universalism's deception lies in its "collusion... with concrete power constellations": France's mission civilisatrice, and Napoleon's armies carrying revolutionary ideas, greeted as emancipators until Europeans "soon reacted as locals". Evolutionist "one world" and "stage theory" accounts promised "a single human society and therefore necessarily a world culture". The liberal dream was "that universalism will triumph over racism and sexism". Its political motto: "The minorities were excluded. Include them!... Evening out meant in practice assimilating the weaker to the model of the strong."
Recently, movements have doubted "the utility, the reasonableness of 'science' and 'assimilation'". Green movements question productivism. Wallerstein's "dialectic of Enlightenment": combat the falling away from liberty and equality by creating "particularistic cultural entities... always new, often claiming to be old", whose object is "the restoration of the universal reality of liberty and equality".
| Name | Unit of analysis | Culture is | Policy thrust |
|---|---|---|---|
| Huntington | Civilizations (7 or 8) | Compact "meaningful entity" | Western unity, containment |
| Wallerstein | World-system, world economy | Fluid, differential pattern | Cultural resistance, antisystemic |
| Nancy | Singular beings, compearance | Shared exposure, never total | Unworking, anti-totalizing |
Normative implications
Nancy's work is more than a descriptive account; it carries "a profound normative significance", from its anti-totalizing stance. The absence of communitarian substance "does not mean a lack of bonding", and "in-operation" is not apathetic inaction. "The passion of and for 'community' propagates itself, unworked... it is the propagation, even the contagion... of community itself... by its very interruption" ("Myth interrupted").
Communism's metaphysical flaw
Dallmayr stresses Nancy's opening diagnosis: the "gravest and most painful" experience of the era is "the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community", tied to communism's demise. Communism signalled a desire for community "beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technological dominion", yet its basis defined human beings as "producers of their own essence in the form of their labor". That managerial bent, more than corrupt leaders, accounts for "immanentism" (Nancy's preferred name for what is often called totalitarianism). Neo-liberal individualism, stepping into the void, is "the residue or left-over of the dissolved community", the "abstract result of a decomposition", equally immanentist as self-contained subject.
Dallmayr: from immanentism to Senghor's rendezvous.
Nancy, as quoted by Dallmayr against absolute individualism
Politics and the political; Senghor's rendezvous
Nancy distinguishes politics (partisan strategies, institutions) from the political ("not the organization of society but the disposition of community as such"). Counter-energies must be put to work, yet strategic aims must not become totalizing; struggles must keep "a recessed inoperative domain" that allots politics its sense and measure. Senghor's epigraph, "Le rendez-vous du donner et du recevoir", names the normative horizon Dallmayr wants: cross-cultural encounter as giving and receiving, not Huntington's containment or the liberal dream's "Include them!" that assimilates the weaker to the strong. Wallerstein's dialectic of Enlightenment (particularistic cultural entities claiming to restore universal liberty and equality) supplies the middle term between Nancy and global politics.
From spaceship globe to Huntington's fault lines
Dallmayr opens with perspective: from orbit Earth is smooth; closer, rugged. Speculative metaphysics sees "human nature"; history shows conflict. Huntington's 1993 Foreign Affairs essay shattered post-Cold War euphoria by naming a "clash of civilizations" along "cultural fault lines". He lists "seven or eight" civilizations (Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, possibly African), with Western subdivided into European and North American, Islam into Arab, Turkic and Malay. Differences of history, language, literature and religion are "far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies". A "smaller place" intensifies "civilization consciousness".
Dallmayr: clash thesis versus compearance.
Wallerstein's liberal dream and its doubts
Wallerstein's dialectic of Enlightenment: antisystemic movements from the mid-nineteenth century to at least WWII sought science and assimilation. "The unpropertied were excluded. Include them! The minorities… Include them! The women… Include them!" Evening out meant "assimilating the weaker to the model of the strong". Recent oppositional movements doubt the "utility… of 'science' and 'assimilation' as social objectives". Dallmayr wants Nancy's recessed inoperative domain to allot politics its measure without Huntington's containment or the liberal dream's absorption.
Compearance against the clash
Dallmayr's constructive claim: Nancy's compearance (appearing-with) of singularities undoes both communist managerial essence and liberal self-contained individuals. Being "comes to be defined as relational, as non-absoluteness". Absolute loneliness is contradictory: "I must also be alone being alone." Relation "tears [immanence] open from within and from without". Huntington's civilizations-as-individuals miss that tear; Wallerstein's "Include them!" assimilates the weaker to the strong. Senghor's epigraph remains the normative horizon: rendezvous of giving and receiving across cultures that compear rather than collide.
Dallmayr: from appearing-with to Senghor.
| Position | Unit of analysis | Political risk |
|---|---|---|
| Huntington 1993 | Civilizations as individuals | Clash / containment |
| Liberal dream (Wallerstein) | Excluded groups to include | Assimilation to the strong |
| Communist immanentism | Producers of essence | Managerial totalization |
| Nancy / Dallmayr | Singularities that compear | Desert if refused |
| Senghor | Give and receive | Normative rendezvous |
Normative stakes of an inoperative global community.
Wallerstein offers a corrective. His policy preferences have an anti-systemic edge, stressing "cultural resistance", a cultural version of liberation theology's "preferential option for the poor". Such movements also prevent "the monopolization of 'the political'". Nancy warns that "'democracy' more and more frequently serves only to assure a play of economic and technical forces", and "a good part of humanity is 'paying the price for this'". The inoperative community is "a bulwark" both against totalizing globalism and against atomistic self-interest.
Nancy, Preface to The Inoperative Community
Anger
The archipelago of technopoles
The nation-state with national industries and local markets is being displaced by "the new archipelago of technopoles", linked to one another, not to underdeveloped nations. "The fifteen largest transnational corporations have net incomes greater than 120 countries." The archipelago programs industry, controls information, and runs the entertainment industry: television, sports, videogames, fashion, mass tourism. Inside: clean air, parks, "electronic surveillance systems and private police". Its food comes from high-tech agribusiness.
Lingis: Nancy's four distresses on a divided planet.
The outer zone
Unable to raise capital locally, outer-zone countries court foreign investment with tax-free zones. But "the Japanese and the Saudis do not invest in... Nicaragua and Haiti and Bangladesh"; they buy MGM and the Rockefeller Center. Heavy industry moves from Japan to Thailand, and from Thailand to Laos, Vietnam and Africa. Cities become "swollen concentrations of mass poverty and social collapse". Inside rich nations too, state universities stop providing general education. The archipelago exports "futile information" as entertainment; "last year only three films were made in Brazil".
The outer zone faces new Berlin Walls: "A Berlin Wall is now in the process of being built from the Pacific the length of the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico." California voted to deny medical care and schooling to undocumented immigrants' children; France legislated zero immigration; Haitians are camped at Guantánamo. Under NAFTA, Mexican real wages have fallen for ten years and "now diminish another 40 per cent".
Technicization and the new alienation
In the archipelago, people are trained for a function, not a product; identity lies "in performance", and leisure is "inanity". Technologies obsolesce before they can be integrated into "the enjoyment of a singular presence". Word processors and the Internet produced "an electronic language without producing any corresponding breakthrough". "E-mail has produced a decline in the language." "The 600 million trips on aeroplanes... annually by US citizens have in no way made them world citizens." Deleuze and Guattari: knowledge capital needs "a machinery of the production of stupidity".
| Name | Archipelago | Outer zone |
|---|---|---|
| Extermination | Relief from population "pressure" | Hunger, war, refugees, starvation sieges |
| Expropriation | Capital, research, wealth | Cheap labour, falling commodity prices |
| Technicization | Performance, obsolescence | Assembly plants, no security |
| Simulation | Spectacle, infotainment, consumption | Receives futile information |
From Marx's alienation to a world reduced to consumption.
Anger
The pressure on the archipelago is not of "barbarians" but of "six-sevenths, soon 90 per cent, of humanity" demanding conditions to "live and prosper together". The needed ecological, economic and political structures will have to be built with the archipelago's wealth and research, by minds who see in the disinherited "an ethos of character and conviction" that contests its hedonistic individualism. Distress "puts us in the presence of one another, in anger".
Nancy, as quoted by Lingis
Nancy locates this anger in "thousands of intellectuals and millions of humans" before the silencing of the ethics of humanity that communism represented, now called "an error and an illusion" by neo-liberal theorists. Anger declares intolerable "the walls of technicization and simulacra" and the Berlin Walls built around the outer zone. It "becomes chthonic, oceanic, celestial rage".
Where anger arises: presence, not spectacle.
Archipelago and outer zone as one system
The rich archipelago and the outer zone are not two worlds; they are one system of presentation. Exterminations and expropriations make the outer zone present to the rich; technicizations and simulations make the rich present to one another while alienated. Lingis's mid-1990s inventory (walls, votes, camps, wage collapse, corporate scale) is dated as reportage and still names the structure. Anger that begins from singular faces becomes the sentiment without which politics is "accommodation and influence-peddling".
Lingis: one system, anger as measure.
Four dimensions across two zones
Lingis distributes Nancy's four distresses across the split: exterminations and expropriations make the outer zone present to the rich; technicizations and simulations make the rich present to one another, alienated. The global village of euphoria "never existed".
Lingis: distress zones meet singular lives; anger follows.
Lingis: anger from met lives, not broadcasts.
Main Points
Main Points
- The loss of sense is an event. Nancy neither mourns nor restores lost meaning; its absence is "the event of sense in our time" (Editors, Van Den Abbeele, Fischer).
- Finitude is exposure, not lack. Existence is "without essence", freedom is "the very fact of existence as open upon existing itself" (Fischer); being is infinitely finite (Gasché).
- Challenge the horizons themselves. Not a wider horizon but no horizon: the areal nation (Van Den Abbeele), the finite look and the a-human world (Gasché).
- Community is shared, not owned. Sharing is spacing; community is made by sharing, never a substance (Caygill); singular beings compear (Dallmayr).
- Freedom has a violent edge. Nancy's "breaking open" freedom risks Jacobinism and overlooks the violence of the share (Caygill); Nancy anticipated the charge.
- Decision is for undecidability. Every real decision keeps decision open: the Or-Without-Or (Hamacher), the "decision for decision" (Librett).
- Heidegger's politics is the test case. The singular people and place of 1933-36 is "ontocide" (Hamacher); Nancy rejects the heroic for the everyday (Librett).
- Interpretation is a sharing of voices. Meaning is passed on and passed out, never arriving; Rashomon shows "a between" instead of an event (Naas, Librett).
- Existence is unsacrificable, but offered. After the camps, "the economy of Western sacrifice is closed"; yet sacrifice returns as offering (de Beistegui).
- Politics needs anger. "Anger is the political sentiment par excellence"; distress at a divided world becomes anger in the presence of singular lives (Lingis).
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Exscription | Writing exposes what withdraws from meaning | A text seems to fail to "say" its subject |
| Compearance | Singulars appear together, never as a totality | A group is described as one identity |
| Inoperative community | Community unworks every project of fusion | Politics promises a people made whole |
| Or-Without-Or | Decision keeps its alternatives open | A choice is presented as once and for all |
| Modal grid | Left/right and theory/practice rest on necessity as real or possible | Political labels keep flipping meaning |
| Offered, not sacrificed | Existence gives itself without immolation | Causes ask for lives as their price |
The volume's takeaways and the question it leaves open.
The Nancy and Derrida cluster in this series
| Name | Link to this book |
|---|---|
| No. 25 The Experience of Freedom | Nancy's 1988 book, read here by Caygill, Librett and Wurzer ("Sharing freedom", the closing fragments) |
| No. 26 Democracy in What State? | Nancy's later "finite and infinite democracy", answering the politics Ch3, Ch8 and Ch11 find thin |
| No. 14 A Companion to Derrida | Ch26 (Saghafi) on Derrida and Nancy: touch, resurrection, deconstruction of Christianity |
| No. 21 Writing and Difference | Derrida's essays on Bataille and Hegel, the background to Ch10's sacrifice debate |
| No. 22 Stocker; No. 23 Norris | Guides to the deconstruction that Nancy extends and contests |
| No. 16 Almond, Sufism and Deconstruction | Another reading of "beyond horizon" thinking, from Ibn 'Arabi |
Strongest and thinnest claims
Rank the volume's force this way. Strongest: the event of sense (Editors, Van Den Abbeele, Fischer); compearance and inoperative community (Dallmayr's restatement); Or-Without-Or and decision for decision (Hamacher, Librett); unsacrificable existence that still offers itself (de Beistegui's double finding). Thinnest as politics: Wurzer's oracular "global conversation"; Fischer's dismissal of spectacle; Van Den Abbeele's confidence that leaky borders are "not as bad as all that". Sharpest friction: Caygill's Jacobin charge; Hamacher's ontocide reading of 1936; Lingis's anger as the sentiment politics needs.
Synthesis ranking: force, friction, thin politics, practice, anger.
Fifteen further takeaways
- Exscription is philosophy's practice when sense absents itself: writing exposes what withdraws (Van Den Abbeele, Fischer).
- Areality suspends the nation without erasing place: uncommon ground of difference (Van Den Abbeele).
- Sharing makes community; community is not prior to the share (Caygill on Nancy).
- Arendt's genealogy binds the share to war and imperialism; philosophy cannot stand outside that logistics (Caygill).
- Eco-technics names the creation of bodies as the truth of our world (Fischer).
- Aferance may differ from différance: carrying that points to the unbearable (Hamacher).
- Rashomon exhibits hermeneutics' staging: a between, not an event (Naas).
- "We, now" is a non-identical comma; the subject is time (Wurzer).
- Subject/Citizen, each split into sovereignty and community, turn into each other (Librett on Nancy).
- Euryopa's blind spot is where finite seeing touches the infinite without horizon (Gasché).
- Western sacrifice ends at the camps; fascination remains intolerable (de Beistegui on Nancy).
- Immanentism names totalitarianism better than the word itself (Dallmayr on Nancy).
- Huntington's civilizations are self-enclosed individuals, not singularities that compear (Dallmayr).
- Anger is the political sentiment; distress without anger is accommodation (Lingis on Nancy).
- Homage and critique together map where Nancy is strongest and where politics stays thin (whole volume).