Naming the Nothing: Nancy and Blanchot on Community
Abstract This article examines the exchange between Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot around the question of community. It argues that Nancy from the early 1980s onwards offers an understanding of community as an exposure to, or of, a nothing or empty space. This nothing or empty space can be understood as the space left vacant by the withdrawal of any transcendent principle which would underpin or guarantee various forms of political organization or historical becoming. Whether it be the absence of any divine principle which would legitimate monarchical or imperial authority, or the absence of any essence or goal for the human in history (e.g. the bonds of national community or communism), the ‘nothing’ of community is exposed in the wake of the withdrawal or retreat of political transcendence.
Blanchot’s response to Nancy’s essay ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’, entitled La Communauté inavouable is critical of Nancy’s thinking on this subject but, this article argues, he is critical only insofar as he shares with Nancy the problem of thinking, naming, or exposing the ‘nothing’ of community. The difference of these two key French thinkers about this question reminds us that ethical and political stakes of thinking community in the absence of metaphysical ground are always a matter of thinking community as absence. It also remind us that this thinking of community occurs in the experience of the ‘community of writing.’
The current state of the world is not a war of civilizations. It is a civil war. (Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté affrontée)
Nearly twenty years after the publication of his essay ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’ (Nancy 1983; translated as The Inoperative Community 1991a), Jean-Luc Nancy returned to the question of community in a short work entitled La Communauté affrontée (Nancy 2001; translated as ‘The Confronted Community’ 2003a). In French the verb ‘affronter’ means to face, confront, or to clash with an enemy or adversary. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nancy suggests in this short work, our world is one which is ‘tearing itself apart’ [qui se déchire]. It is a global community which ‘is separated from and in confrontation with itself’ [qui est séparée et affrontée à elle-même] (Nancy 2001: 17).1 The opening sentence of La Communauté affrontée, however, firmly distances itself from Samuel Huntington’s widely known argument relating to the ‘clash’ of civilisations (Huntingdon 1996): ‘The current state of the world is not a war of civilizations. It is a civil war’ (Nancy 2001: 11). The contemporary global community may be divided from itself in the mode of clash or confrontation, Nancy contends, but this is more an internecine war than it is one of separate civilisations confronting each other across discrete cultural boundaries. Yet this is a civil war of a rather singular and perhaps unprecedented kind. The community of ‘globalisation’ is not one in dispute over the identity of values or over a possible shared destiny which would be common to all. Rather, Nancy contends, it is a community divided, separated and confronting itself over a gaping abyss. Or, more precisely, it is a community which is an abyss, a community which ‘is gaping – gaping open over its own unity and over its absent essence – and which confronts this rupture within itself’ (Nancy 2001: 17).
In this singular invocation of a civil war dividing global community from itself, Nancy is offering a philosophical account of a specific historical trajectory and a specific historical outcome which, he contends, characterises the beginning of the twenty-first century. ‘What is happening to us is an exhaustion of the thinking of the One and of a unique destination of the world: the world is exhausting itself in a unique absence of destination’ (Nancy 2001: 12). Where once national, cultural or religious communities might have thought of themselves as distinct and fought or clashed over the future preeminence of their respective value systems and world views, what now characterises a community become global, or a community of globalisation defined only by its extension across the finite space of the globe itself, is an absence of value, of destiny or destination. For Nancy: ‘The gaping abyss [béance] which is formed is that of sense, of truth or of value’ (Nancy 2001: 13). What is at stake here is the impossibility of global community being able to affirm a shared essence or goal by which it might define itself in terms of identity or self-presence.2
Writing nearly twenty years after the publication of ‘La communauté désœuvrée’ and fifteen years after the publication of the full-length volume bearing the same title, Nancy appears, in 2001, to be re-inscribing the ‘unworked’ community of the earlier text into the contemporary historical context of post-cold war globalisation and conflict.3 As in the earlier text, community is recast not as the intimate sharing of an essence or identity but rather as the opening of an absence of identity in the spacing of a shared finitude. In both cases, community is an exposure to, or of, a nothing or empty space. This nothing or empty space can be understood as the space left vacant by the withdrawal of any transcendent principle which would underpin or guarantee various forms of political organisation or historical becoming. Whether it be the absence of any divine principle which would legitimate monarchical or imperial authority, or the absence of any essence or goal for the human in history (e.g. the bonds of national community or communism), the ‘nothing’ of community is exposed in the wake of the withdrawal or retreat of political transcendence.4 This nothing or empty space cannot be recuperated into the ‘work’ of any communal identity or shared destiny. At the same time ‘absence’ here (of essence, of theological principle etc.) cannot, as will become clear, be opposed to ‘presence’ insofar as it is affirmed by Nancy as an originary absence which functions as a condition of possibility (and impossibility) of any experience of community at all. The key issue here will be the manner in which Nancy (and also Blanchot) seeks to affirm or think the absence of community as that which is always already anterior to community itself, experienced either as presence or plenitude (of shared essence/divine principle) or as the loss of presence or plenitude and a nostalgic attempt to recuperate that loss.
In La Communauté affrontée, then, the ontology of unworked community developed in the early 1980s in response to the question of the ‘end of communism’ has become the contemporary being of a global community riven from itself. What marks a clear difference in these two moments of Nancy’s thinking about community is the emphasis on war or conflict. In the earlier texts the ‘unworking’ of community as identity or as an intimate sharing of essence was clearly set against a broader thinking of totalitarianism thought by Nancy according to a logic of ‘immanence’.5 In the later text, the absence at the heart of community is the condition for its division from itself, or rather it is its very existence as division, separation, clash or self-confrontation. The exhaustion of value, of a unitary historical destiny for the global community, leaves only the abyssal opening of an empty space.
The question of the nothing is posed in Nancy’s philosophical thinking about community in works separated by an interval of nearly twenty years. In fact, it is arguable that the different ways of thinking, naming or responding to the nothing of community strongly inflects the development and trajectory of Nancy’s thinking over this period. This problem of thinking the nothing is posed very explicitly by Nancy himself at the beginning of La Communauté affrontée: ‘How can the nihil be thought without being returned to an all-powerful and all-present monstrosity?’ (Nancy 2001: 13). The reference here to all-powerful and all-present monstrosity recalls, albeit obliquely, Nancy’s earlier philosophical account of totalitarianism in La Communauté désœuvree, that is, totalitarianism as a project of immanence in which a figure of shared identity would be ‘put to work’ in order to define the collective ‘being-together’ and future destiny of a political community. Nancy recalls the terms of this account of immanence more explicitly slightly later in his discussion: ‘All powerfulness and omnipresence, is always what is required of community or what is sought in it: sovereignty and intimacy, self-presence without flaws and without exteriority’ (Nancy 2001: 15). What is at stake in the question of the nothing, or the thinking of the ‘nihil,’ is the very meaning and essence of community itself: how can community be thought at all without being recuperated into totalising figures of identity, without returning to the violence and potential monstrosity of a totalising project? How can absence be thought prior to the opposition of presence-absence and therefore outside of any dialectical logic which would recuperate absence into a totalising figure of overarching presence?
It might be worth noting at this point that the main section of La Communauté affrontée was, in fact, first published as a preface to a new Italian edition of Maurice Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable (Blanchot 1983; 1988). La Communauté affrontée as a whole is dedicated to Blanchot and offers a contextualisation of, and a further response to, Blanchot’s short 1983 work, itself a response to Nancy’s original essay, ‘La Communauté désœuvrée.’ This is worth noting because it is perhaps precisely around the problem of thinking, naming, or exposing the ‘nothing’ that the exchange between Nancy and Blanchot on the question of community takes place. In the original essay, Nancy unfolds his critique of traditional identitarian models of community in the light of the historical experience of Germany under National Socialism and in the context of George Bataille’s affirmation of a ‘sacrificial community’ in the 1930s. As has already been indicated, totalitarianism is thought in this context as ‘immanence’ and describes an experience of ‘communal fusion,’ that is to say, of organic communion of community with itself in which an intimate communication of an identity and future destiny would occur (Nancy 1985: 30–33; 1991a: 9–11). In order to think community outside its traditional model and outside figures of fusion, totality and immanence, Nancy draws on Heidegger’s thinking of ‘being-with’ as developed in Sein und Zeit and on Bataille’s thinking of sacrifice, communication, sovereignty, and excess as developed in the 1930s and after.6 In particular, Nancy takes up Bataille’s affirmation that ‘Sovereignty is NOTHING’ in order to articulate an understanding of community as a fundamental ‘being-with’ of finite beings in excess of any project or work of identity. It is in this crossing of the language of Heideggarian finitude with that of Bataillian sovereignty that Nancy’s initial thinking of the nothing of community unfolds. It is precisely this crossing of Heidegger with Bataille, however, which sets the terms for the subsequent exchange which occurs between Nancy and Blanchot around the avowability or unavowability of the ‘nothing.’
In La Communauté affrontée Nancy describes the context surrounding the original publication of ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’ and comments also on Blanchot’s subsequent response. That response, he suggests:
was at once an echo, a resonance, a reply, a reservation, and even, in a certain way, a reproach.
I have never completely clarified this reservation or reproach, neither in a text, nor for myself, nor in correspondence with Blanchot. (Nancy 2001: 38)
It may well be that the exact or full nature of this reproach will remain rather obscure or impossible to clarify in its entirety. The opening of La Communauté inavouable suggests that Blanchot’s own engagement with the question of community has, for him, been a matter of ‘uninterrupted questioning’ (Blanchot 1988: 2). If a reproach is made in this work, it relates, in a rather private way perhaps, to Blanchot’s own thought and itinerary, and perhaps also to his shared experience and friendship with Bataille. Certainly the reading of Bataille that Blanchot offers in La Communauté inavouable diverges in key respects from the reading offered by Nancy in ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’. In his original essay, Nancy draws on Bataille in a number of ways in order to think a fundamental being-with outside of any figure or project of identity or communal belonging (see James 2006: 179–86). Yet he is critical of Bataille in a number of ways also. On the one hand Nancy suggests that Bataille’s commitment to the notion of a sacrificial community, embodied most clearly in his activity around the secret society of Acéphale, resulted in failure and, by implication, brought him also into a dangerous proximity with the project of National Socialism (Nancy 1985: 46–47; 1991a: 17). At the same time, Nancy criticises Bataille for retaining a Hegelian language of subject and object in his account of ‘communication’ and of sacrificial community as a shared exposure to death (Nancy 1991a: 23–24). The language of ecstatic self-dispossession and of fusion which characterises Bataille’s singular understanding of ‘communication’ again runs the risk, Nancy implies, of repeating a logic of identity and therefore of repeating a fusional, immanentist model of community at the very moment it aims to think beyond such a model (Nancy 1991a: 17).
For his part, Blanchot contests the terms and substance of Nancy’s reading of Bataille and in so doing he also contests the terms in which Nancy comes to think community in general. For Blanchot, Bataille’s affirmation of sacrificial community, and in particular, his activity around the ‘secret society’ of Acéphale, cannot be seen as a project, that is, as an attempt to inaugurate or embody a sacrificial community. Not being a project of ‘embodying’ community, the secret society of Acéphale cannot be judged by the criteria of success or failure or be compared (even obliquely) to other attempts to embody community (for example, that of National Socialism). For Blanchot, Bataille’s affirmation of the secret society of Acéphale was not an attempt to re-embody a sacrificial community but, rather, an attempt to affirm an absent community, or rather to affirm community as absence:
The absence of community is not the failure of community: it belongs to community in its extreme moment or as the test which exposes its necessary disappearance. Acéphale was the common experience of that which cannot be placed in common, not properly maintained, nor reserved for an ulterior abandon … The community of Acéphale could not exist as such, but only as imminence and as withdrawal. (Blanchot 1988: 15)
It is in this context that the meaning of Blanchot’s use of the term ‘unavowable’, as opposed to ‘unworked’, becomes clearer. For Blanchot, the experience of ‘absent’ community is not something which can be either worked or unworked or thought dialectically or oppositionally in relation to any possible instance of presence. Since its existence is only ever, and always already, one of absence and withdrawal, it exists prior to any possibility of dialectical working and unworking, and, indeed, prior to any logic of existence or being at all. It exists, as it were, only in and as nothing.
The reservation or reproach that Blanchot expresses in relation to Nancy’s reading of Bataille and to his thinking of community as ‘unworked’ appears, in part at least, to relate to the language of being-with or existence (that is to say, to the language of ontology) which Nancy uses to ‘avow’ the nothing of community. As has been pointed out by a number of commentators, Blanchot, in La Communauté inavouable, explicitly rejects ontology in favour of an account of the ethical relation which appears heavily indebted to Levinas:
Ethics is only possible if ontology – which always reduces the Other to the Same – gives way, and can affirm an anterior relation in which the self is not content simply to recognize the Other, to recognize itself in the Other, but is placed in question by it to the point where the self can only respond through a responsibility which cannot be limited and which exceeds it without being exhausted. (Blanchot 1988: 43)7
For Blanchot, it appears crucial to mark the ‘absence of community’ as a withdrawal and as anterior to being and any logic of presence. That ‘extreme moment’ of community where the fusion, identity or substance of community itself disappears must be marked as a withdrawal from being or more precisely as an alterity which would be prior to any horizon or logic of ‘being-with’. The relation to the ‘nothing’ of community is one which precedes ontology and so must be affirmed, not as the ‘unworking’ of community but, rather, as its unavowability.
Blanchot, then, is not only offering a different account of Bataille, of his affirmation of sacrificial community, and of his activity around the secret society of Acéphale. He is also refusing the crossing of Heideggerian and Bataillian language and terminology which Nancy uses to articulate the unworking of community. The reproach of La Communauté inavouable may well relate not just to the way in which Nancy criticises Bataille, but also to the way in which he persists with Heidegger and with the Heideggarian language of being. If Nancy reads an unthought proximity of the Bataillian fusional language of ‘communication’ to that other fusional language, that is, the immanentist language of the National Socialist community, one might suggest that Blanchot returns the compliment by implying that the violence implicit in the language of ontology is also historically and philosophically compromised (Blanchot 1983: 27; 1988: 13).
The exchange between Blanchot and Nancy appears to resolve itself into a question of naming or avowal. For Blanchot, the ‘nothing’ of community, its absence or withdrawal, is not nameable, avowable or presentable as such. He puts this problem in the following terms:
Does that mean that community does not avow itself or that there is no avowal which will reveal [community] since, in each moment that its manner of being has been talked about, one feels that one has seized that manner of being in the absence of that which makes it exist? Would it have been better then to remain silent? … in the final analysis, in order to remain silent it is necessary to speak. But with what kind of words? (Blanchot 1988: 56)
Perhaps the distance which separates Nancy and Blanchot on the question of community is, in fact, a matter of words, a matter of choosing the right words in order to mark an absence, empty space, or opening onto nothing. This distance, then, amounts to very little. It is a difference in philosophical or rhetorical strategy, a difference in gesture. If the distance that separates Blanchot and Nancy here is simply a matter of words, if the unworked and the unavowable affirm differently an opening of community onto and as nothing, then Nancy’s frustration, his lack of clarity in relation to Blanchot’s reproach, might seem quite understandable. They are, after all, trying to say the same thing in different terms. Or rather, they are both trying to think an instance, that is, an originary absence or withdrawal of essence which escapes any logic of the same. If one were to remark, for instance, that Nancy’s absence or nothing is not at all the same kind of absence or nothing that is affirmed by Blanchot, this would make little sense, since such an absence cannot possibly be designated by a concept. No concept would be equal or equivalent to the instance, anterior to all conceptuality, which is being impossibly designated. What is important is the gesture or terms by which such an impossible affirmation is made. The key point to underline here is that both Blanchot and Nancy seek to affirm the difference of community from itself, its withdrawal from substance, identity and presence, through different gestures. It is the specificity of these gestures which needs to be explored since, as Nancy himself concedes, the stakes are in fact very high where it is a question of: ‘How … the nihil [can] be thought without being returned to an all-powerful and all-present monstrosity?’ (Nancy 2001: 13). He outlines these stakes further towards the very end of La Communauté affrontée:
there is a task, the task of daring to think the unthinkable, to think that which cannot be assigned, the untreatable of being-with, to think it without submitting it to any hypostasis. It is not a political task nor an economic task, it is altogether more serious and it governs the full extent of both the political and the economic. (Nancy 2001: 50)
The task of thought then again asserts itself in the most serious terms. Thinking the nothing of community carries with it the task of thinking the political beyond or in excess of its traditional metaphysical foundations and beyond those traditional grounding figures or myths by which community has traditionally sought to embody or instantiate itself as substance, as intimacy, and as the communication or sharing of an essence.
This much, then, is clear. Blanchot and Nancy disagree about the mode or gesture by which the nothing of community might be named, about the mode or gesture by which its unavowability might be affirmed. What is perhaps less clear, and remains to be clarified yet further, is the exact nature of Nancy’s gesture, the exact manner in which he deploys the language of ontology, and whether this can be reduced in any straightforward manner to any kind of (albeit reformed) Heideggerianism. Nancy’s initial response to Blanchot is illuminating in this regard. When La Communauté désœuvrée was published as a full-length work in 1986, the original essay that appeared in Aléa was supplemented with four further essays: on myth, on ‘literary communism’, on being-in-common, and on finite history. The original essay was also supplemented with a note which refers to Blanchot’s book and indicates quite explicitly that the essay on myth in the full-length version represents ‘another way’ of ‘prolonging further the ‘uninterrupted reflection’ of Blanchot’ on the question of community (Nancy 1991a: 42). Nancy also affirms that this is a reflection which itself cannot be interrupted, a reflection which has been prolonged by many names other than Blanchot and Bataille in many different texts too numerous to name or avow:
… interwoven, alternating, shared texts, offering, like all texts, that which belongs to no one and which returns to every one: the community of writing, the writing of community. (Nancy 1991a: 42)
Nancy’s invocation of writing and the anonymity of ‘no one’ here is perhaps significant. His alignment of community with writing and anonymity might suggest that his initial response to Blanchot’s text is to stress the proximity of his own thinking and writing with that of Blanchot. Certainly this would be born out in the emphasis on interruption and literary communism in the essays which follow, both of which could arguably be said to prolong or reinscribe key Blanchottian concerns relating to community and the question of the political.
Nancy’s emphasis on the proximity of his thinking to that of Blanchot is perhaps not misplaced. Despite Blanchot’s reproach, and despite the apparent distance between the two writers on the question of ontology, it is worth highlighting the extent to which Nancy’s formulations in the original essay of ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’ deploy the language of ontology in a very specific manner. In this context, Blanchot’s comment in La Communauté inavouable, that ontology ‘always reduces the Other to the Same’ (1988: 60) is, at the very least, open to question. Community, Nancy writes in the original essay: ‘Is the presentation of finitude and the excess without return which makes [qui font] finite being’ (Nancy 1991a: 15). The emphasis placed here on finitude and on finite being clearly repeats the terms of the Heideggerian thinking of being. The reference to the ‘excess without return’ of finite being could easily be interpreted also as a repetition of the earlier Heidegger’s thinking of ontological difference (the thought that being cannot be reduced to, and is always in excess of, beings). Yet the reference to excess also, of course, recalls Battaille’s thinking. It is here that closer attention needs to be paid to the ‘crossing’ of a Heideggerian and Bataillian language alluded to earlier in this discussion.
It is precisely around the ‘nothing’ of Bataillian sovereignty that this crossing of terms or idiom is most insistent in Nancy’s text:
‘Sovereignty is NOTHING.’ That is to say that sovereignty is the sovereign exposure to an excess (to a transcendence) which does not present itself, does not let itself be appropriated (nor simulated), which does not even give itself – an excess to which being is abandoned rather. The excess to which sovereignty is exposed and exposes us is not, in a sense perhaps close to that in which Heideggerian Being ‘is not’. (Nancy 1991a: 18)
The terms Nancy uses here are slightly different from those used by Blanchot to characterise the ‘absent community’ of Acéphale, and yet the proximity between the two is striking. The ‘absence of community’, it might be recalled, was, for Blanchot, ‘the common experience of that which cannot be placed in common, not properly maintained, nor reserved for an ulterior abandon … The community of Acéphale could not exist as such, but only as imminence and as withdrawal’ (Blanchot 1988: 15). Nancy’s excess, which cannot be appropriated or simulated and to which being is abandoned, is surely also nothing which can be: ‘maintained, nor reserved for an ulterior abandon’. It is not an excess reserved and then abandoned by being, but one to which being is, as it were, always already abandoned. Likewise, one might wonder whether Blanchot’s invocation of absence as ‘imminence and withdrawal’ is really so different from Nancy’s invocation of an excess which ‘is not’. In both cases the nothing of community is withdrawn from existence as an irreducible alterity or excess. The proximity of Nancy’s formulations to those of Blanchot is affirmed even further elsewhere in ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’ when, for instance, he weaves the language of excess and of the nothing in with the distinctly Blanchottian motif of the ‘outside’ [le dehors]. He does this when speaking of the ‘rending apart’ [déchirure] of singular being in ‘unworked community’:
The rending apart consists only in an exposure to the outside: all the ‘outside’ of singular being is exposed to the ‘outside’ … There is not a rending apart of nothing, with nothing; rather there is a compearance to NOTHING. (Nancy 1991a: 30)
It might be clear from this that Nancy does not restrict himself exclusively to a crossing of Bataille with Heidegger in his attempt to think the nothing, absence, or unworking of community in ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’. This nothing is named in a number of ways: as ‘sovereign excess’ (Bataille), as finite transcendence (Lacoue-Labarthe), as an excess that ‘is not’ (Heidegger and ontological difference), as the outside (Blanchot), as ‘déchirure’, but also, elsewhere, as clinamen and as the unidentifiable (Nancy 1991a: 6).8
One might conclude from this that Nancy’s gesture in ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’ is not simply to repeat in a slightly reformed manner the Heideggerian thinking of ‘being-with’ by re-inscribing Mitsein as more fundamental than Dasein on the one hand, and by bringing it into contact with Bataille’s thinking about communication on the other. Rather, he is engaging in a writerly strategy in which a range of different terms are deployed and woven together in order to expose his thinking of community to the nothing. If, in his note responding to Blanchot in the full-length edition of La Communauté désœuvrée, Nancy invokes ‘the community of writing, the writing of community’ as a series of ‘interwoven, alternating, shared texts’ (Nancy 1991a: 42), it is arguable that his original essay was already an affirmation of that community of writing. The nothing of community is named in Nancy’s original essay only in just such an interweaving, alternating and sharing of diverse terms. But the nothing, in a sense, is named only in the space or the distance between these terms rather than in a logic of continuity or sameness that would bind them together. In this multiple naming, the nothing of community is at the same time placed in excess of any name, it is avowed, as it were, only in the affirmation of its ‘umasterable excess’, only in its very unavowability.9
This is worth noting for a number of reasons. Firstly, it suggests that although Blanchot may or may not be right to correct Nancy’s reading of Bataille, his implicit reproach in relation to Nancy’s persistence with ontology and with a Heideggerian thinking of being misconstrues the nature of the rhetorical and writerly strategy adopted in ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’. Nancy is not simply repeating and ‘reforming’ Heidegger’s thinking of being as a more fundamental being-with, and, crucially, he is not seeking to retrieve or enclose absence or nothing within the logos of an ontological discourse. The Heideggerian idiom enters into a resonance with a range of other non-Heideggerian terms and can only be read in relation to its resonance with those terms. This, then, is a community of writing which turns around the very nothing of community itself, and in that play something else emerges: a thinking of the ‘exposure’ or sharing of singular being which is otherwise than Heideggerian being. This is a thinking which emerges from a sharing of thought within a community of writing in which, precisely, nothing is shared, or in which there is a shared exposure to the nothing (Bataille, Blanchot, Lacoue-Labarthe and, amongst others, Antelme and Derrida). Secondly, Nancy’s strategy of repeating terms by interweaving, alternating and sharing them with other terms from other texts is worthy of note because it inflects the nature of his philosophical idiom as it develops in the period of the 1980s, 1990s and after. If Blanchot’s reproach relates to the persistence of ontology in the thinking of unworked community, then he may be aligned with those, often highly influential, commentators who have judged Nancy to be too Heideggerian, too wedded to the language of finite being, or, in other ways, far too willing to retain specific traditional and highly value-laden philosophical terms.10
It is arguably always rather reductive to characterise Nancy as ‘Heideggerian’ in any orthodox sense, and certainly his use of the language of finite being and finitude needs to be set in the context of the strategy of interweaving, alternating and sharing terms described above. Certainly he does persist with the language of ontology and finitude in his major works of the 1980s and 1990s (L’Expérience de la liberté (1988; translated as The Experience of Freedom 1993b), Une pensée finie (1990; translated as A Finite Thinking 2003b), La Comparution (1991b), Le Sens du monde (1993a; translated as The Sense of the World 1997c) and Être singulier pluriel (1997b; translated as Being Singular Plural 2000) to name the most obvious examples). Yet he does so within the demand that ontology be fundamentally refigured, as he puts it in Être singulier pluriel: ‘with a thorough resolve that starts from the singular-plural of origins, from being-with’ (Nancy 2000: 26). This is a task which, as has been suggested, begins at least as early as 1983 with the publication of ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’, where being-with is thought only in terms of a rending of singular being, its exposure to the nothing or to the excess of an ‘outside’.
As Nancy’s refiguring of ontology develops from the early through to the late 1990s, the crossing of the language of finite being with other idioms becomes more and more pronounced. In La Comparution (1991b) the commitment to an ontology of being-with is repeated and developed further in the term ‘compearance’ and in terms which both repeat but also move beyond Heidegger (Nancy 1991b: 57, 65). At this stage, Nancy still retains the language of the excess of finite existence but comes also to stress very heavily the notion of ‘common space’. It is the ‘emptiness the opening of this space, its very spacing or numerous spacings, which form the place of our compearance’ (Nancy 1991b: 53). Once again, community is figured as an opening onto, or spacing of, an absence of essence or identity, the nothing of community is named as emptiness [le vide]. The term ‘compearance’ is mentioned only briefly in ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’, but by 1991 it has come to supplant the terminology of working and unworking as the dominant figure in Nancy’s thinking of being-with. It is clear that the language Nancy uses to name the nothing of community never remains static, it is always shifting, mobile and plural. This can been seen quite clearly in the second half of the 1990s when Nancy’s philosophical language changes once again and undergoes a potentially decisive shift.
1997 sees the publication of two major works by Nancy: Être singulier pluriel (Nancy 1997b) and Hegel: L’Inquiétude du négatif (Nancy 1997d; translated as Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative 2002). The former is clearly a very significant work insofar as it marks a major step in the development of Nancy’s ‘refigured’ ontology and represents a major contribution to recent European philosophy more generally. The latter text might appear, at first glance, to be of rather less importance, published as it is by Hachette in a series of short monographs on diverse figures ranging from philosophers and writers to artists and figures from popular culture (Deleuze, Mallarmé, Flaubert and Melville appear on the series list, along with Klee and Picasso, but also with Hergé and Buster Keaton). Yet, despite the scope of the series in which the Hegel text appears, it arguably marks a decisive moment in Nancy’s thinking, a certain shift or turn which resonates into his works of the late 1990s and into his more recent work at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Nancy stresses in the cover notes to L’Inquiétude du négatif that his short work is not intended to be, nor can it succeed in being, a simple gloss on ‘Hegelianism’, nor a restitution of Hegel’s thinking. Rather, he insists, its aim is to read Hegel, to ‘think’ Hegel ‘such as he has been reread or rethought by us up until now, such as he has already been played out in thinking’ (Nancy 2002: 7). This is not a simple exegesis of the Hegelian text, therefore, but, rather, a rereading of Hegel which occurs in the wake of, and can only be understood in the light of, a prior (largely French) tradition of interpretation.11 What emerges from Nancy’s reading is not a Hegel for whom the operations of dialectical thought and the thinking of ‘absolute knowledge’ constitute a desire for totalisation. This is not Hegelianism viewed as a totalising gesture by which difference and alterity would be appropriated by the logic of the Same.12 This is a Hegel for whom the negative, or the ‘work’ of negativity, represents a ceaseless restlessness which ruptures temporality and the presencing or presentation of the present. Negativity, here, does not determine the finite present through the work of concrete negation, rather, it traverses existence in a manner which exposes it to the instability of any and all finite determination. Once again, Nancy engages in a rather complex crossing of philosophical terms. In this case he crosses Hegel’s thinking of negativity with the language of finite sense and finite existence such as it is developed in works such as Une Pensée finie and Le Sens du monde. In this context, the language of finitude gives way to, or becomes intimately bound up with, the language of infinity or infinitude.13 This crossing of terms and intertwining of the language of the finite and the infinite can be seen in the very opening pages of the Hegel book when, for instance, Nancy talks about the negative in relation to the ‘time’ of the Hegelian subject and of the historical world:
this is what time is, the concrete existence of negativity, this world which is the reign of the finite conceals and reveals within itself the infinite work of negativity, that is to say the restlessness [l’inquiétude] of sense (or of the ‘concept’ as Hegel calls it). (Nancy 2002: 5)
Here, in a careful juxtaposition of terms, Nancy aligns the ‘infinite work of negativity’ with ‘sense’ and, in turn, this ‘restless’ sense is aligned with the Hegelian ‘concept’. Sense comes to stand in for the German Begriff rather than for the term Sinn. This, in itself, might represent a significant shift for Nancy insofar as he talks, in earlier works, about finite sense and does so within a context that both repeats and transforms Heidegger’s thinking of Sinn in Sein und Zeit.14 In the work on Hegel, then, sense (that is to say, the sense of the world, the sense that is or makes a world) both repeats and transforms the Hegelian ‘concept’ [Begriff] of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and with this becomes a figure for the infinitude of the finite.
In some ways, the reading of Hegel as a whole in L’Inquiétude du négatif can be seen far more as Nancy rereading himself in a way which uses the Hegelian ‘restless’ negative to ‘infinitize’ finitude, to transform finite thinking, and to name the nothing differently. The manner in which the finite is ‘transformed’ by the infinity of the negative is articulated very clearly by Nancy himself when he speaks of:
the full and complete actuality of the infinite that traverses, works, and transforms the finite. Which means: negativity, the empty hollow [le creux], the gap, the difference of being which relates to itself through this very difference, and which is thus, in all its essence and all its energy, and thus the infinite act of relating to itself, and thus the power of the negative. (Nancy 2002: 9)
Nancy has arguably found here another language and another set of terms to name the ‘nothing’. Whereas in La Communauté désœuvrée terms such as ‘being which “is not”’, ‘excess’, ‘outside’, ‘rending apart’ and ‘clinamen’ named the nothing of being-with, in the Hegel book of 1997 this nothing is named as ‘negativity’, ‘hollow’, ‘gap’. Only ‘the difference of being which relates to itself by that very difference’ might recall the ontological difference of Heideggerian finite being, but this is a difference become infinite, an infinite act of being ‘relating to itself’ infinitely. In effect, Nancy’s reading of Hegel allows him to re-inscribe the thinking of the nothing outside of the register of finite being and finitude. Just as he formerly took up the idiom of Heideggerian ontology and interweaved it with other registers and other terms, so he now takes up the idiom of Hegelian phenomenology in order again to interweave or cross different philosophical discourses. Here, the excess of finite being is rethought as a relation of infinity or as an infinite relation:
Such is the first and fundamental signification of absolute negativity: the negative is the prefix of the in-finite, as the affirmation that all finitude (and every being is finite) is in itself in excess of its determinacy. It is an infinite relation [dans le rapport infini] (Nancy 2002: 12).15
This represents both a continuity and a shift in Nancy’s thinking. It is a continuity insofar as he continues to develop his own thought in a gesture of taking up, reinscribing, interweaving and transforming different philosophical registers and idioms. It is a shift insofar as the language of finitude finds itself subordinated to a far greater emphasis on the language of infinity. The nothing, the absolute negativity of the negative, is re-inscribed as infinity or the infinite relation of all finite existence to itself.16
It may be that this shift relates to an increasing concern on Nancy’s part to distance himself from the language of finitude. This may itself be a response to some of the critical reception of Nancy’s work, which has arguably tended to focus in too limited a way on the persistence of Heidegger in his ‘finite thinking’ and his ontology of the singular plural. Blanchot’s reproach in La Communauté inavouable has, perhaps, had a long afterlife in the responses of those commentators who have been critical of Nancy’s persistence with the language of ontology. It is possible that such criticisms have to some degree inflected the development of Nancy’s thought. Either way, it is clear that Nancy’s thinking of community, of being-with, and of the nothing which community is, or to which it is exposed, is always a thinking in which ontology, in its persistence, persistently opens out beyond itself. It is always gesturing towards that which exceeds ontological naming or disclosure, it is always itself exposed to excess, outside, or the actual infinite which traverses the finite.
Nancy’s philosophical writing enacts or performs this exposure of thought to its own excess in the weaving together, repetition, and transformation of a range of philosophical idioms. In this sense, his exchange with Blanchot on the question of community highlights the extent to which his thinking always needs to be read as a form of sharing or as itself a certain affirmation of community. The motif of sharing (in French the term is partage) persists in Nancy’s thinking from the early 1980s onwards. It is a term to which Nancy returns once more in La Communauté affrontée to describe, once more, the ‘in-common’ of existence:
There has already been between us – all of us together and through togetherness distinct – the sharing of an in-common which is only its sharing, but which in being shared makes exist and therefore touches on existence itself insofar as existence is an exposure to its own limit. It is this that makes ‘us,’ separating us and bringing us together, creating proximity through the distancing between-us – ‘us’ in the major indecision where this collective or plural subject is maintained, condemned never to find is own voice. (Nancy 2001: 45)
If this is a description of ‘communal existence’, of being-singular-plural, or being-with, it is also a very precise description of Nancy’s ‘community of writing’ and of the ‘writing of community’. Between Blanchot and Bataille, Heidegger and Hegel, between all the proper names and philosophical figures which Nancy’s writing invokes and weaves together, there is a sharing of a thinking of the nothing. This emerges as an always singular and plural naming, in which nothing other than a shared exposure to an absence or withdrawal is shared. This is not a community of identity where that which is named is rendered substantial and substantially present. Rather, it is a community of writing, a writing of absence irreducible to any school and irreducible to the self-identity of a proper name or philosophical idiom.
Towards the end of La Communauté inavouable, Blanchot, it may be recalled, questioned whether the unavowable of community should prescribe or demand silence. Yet he immediately conceded that in order to remain silent it is necessary to speak. In this respect, it may be that the exchange between Blanchot and Nancy on the question of community, and indeed the entirety of Nancy’s subsequent thinking about communal existence, need to be placed under the sign of a certain paradoxical affirmation of silence. This is a silence marked in a certain gesture of words and in an affirmation of that ‘nothing’ which words cannot avow or make present. To this extent, what is at stake is therefore also a silence which precedes any logic of speech or of falling silent in the traditional sense (just as the absence which has been at stake throughout this discussion precedes any logic or possibility of presence). Silence here imposes itself, or perhaps rather withdraws itself, as that radical exteriority or unspeakability, as that radical absence which makes a demand upon thought and upon the thinking of community. It is a silence to which only writing can respond. Towards the end of L’Entretien infini Blanchot writes:
Writing marks but leave no trace [L’écriture trace, mais ne laisse pas de trace]; it does not authorize us to work our way back from some vestige or sign to anything other than itself as (pure) exteriority – never given, never gathering itself in a relation of unity with a presence (to be seen, to be heard), with the totality of presence or the Unique, present-absent. (Blanchot 1993: 426)
The unavowable of community cannot be said, but at the very same time in writing it never ceases to be marked or traced. Nancy himself puts this in the following terms: ‘The unavowable never ceases to be said or to say itself in the intimate silence of those who could avow but never can avow’ (Nancy 2001: 40). In between the texts written by Blanchot and Nancy, and in between the terms and philosophical idioms which are woven together to make those texts, there is the gap, the spacing, the excess which has always already withdrawn. This is a withdrawal in which a certain silence is spoken.
Towards the end of La Communauté affrontée, it might also be recalled, Nancy affirmed that it is the task of thought to dare to think the unthinkable of being-with without submitting it to any hypostasis (Nancy 2001: 50). The task would be to think the ‘nothing’ without returning it to all-powerful and all-present monstrosity (Nancy 2001: 45). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in a globalised world rent apart by internecine conflict, there may be a need, more than ever, to think community outside of figures of totality and projects of shared destiny. In this context, both Blanchot and Nancy remind us that ethical and political stakes of thinking community in the absence of metaphysical ground are always a matter of thinking community as absence. Yet they also remind us that this thinking of community occurs in the experience of the ‘community of writing’. It is only in the anonymity of writing, in its incessant restlessness and indeterminacy, that the ‘nothing’ of community can be spoken in the very moment of its withdrawal into intimate silence.
References
Baugh, B. 2003. French Hegel. London: Routledge.
Blanchot, M. 1983. La Communauté inavouable. Paris: Minuit.
Blanchot, M. 1988. The Unavowable Community. Translated by P. Joris. New York: Station Hill Press.
Blanchot, M. 1993. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by S. Hanson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
Caygill, H. 2005. ‘Bearing Witness to the Infinite: Nancy and Levinas’. Journal for Cultural Research 9:4, 351–357.
Critchley, S. 1993. ‘Retracing the Political: Politics and Community in the Works of Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’. In D. Campbell & M. Dillon (eds), The Political Subject of Violence. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 73–93.
Derrida, J. 2000. Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Galilée.
Derrida, J. 2003. Voyous. Paris: Galilée.
Derrida, J. 2005a. On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by C. Irizarry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. 2005b. Rogues. Translated by P.-A. Brault & M. Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Fraser, N. 1984. ‘The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?’. New German Critique 33, 127–154.
Gaon, S. 2005. ‘Communities in Question: Sociality and Solidarity in Nancy and Blanchot’. Journal for Cultural Research 9:4, 387–403.
Hill, L. 1996. Maurice Blanchot Extreme Contemporary. London: Routledge.
Huntingdon, S. P. 1996 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Ingram, D. 1988. ‘The Retreat from the Political in the Modern Age: Jean-Luc Nancy on Totalitarianism and Community’. Research in Phenomenology 18, 93–124.
James, I. 2005. ‘On Interrupted Myth’. Journal for Cultural Research 9:4, 331–349.
James, I. 2006. The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press.
Nancy, J.-L. 1973. La Remarque spéculative: un bon mot de Hegel. Paris: Galilée.
Nancy, J.-L. 1983. ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’. Aléa 4, 11–49
Nancy, J.-L. 1985. La Communauté désœuvrée. Paris: Christian Bourgois.
Nancy, J.-L. 1988. L’Expérience de la liberté. Paris: Galilée.
Nancy, J.-L. 1990. Une pensée finie. Paris: Galilée.
Nancy, J.-L. 1991a. The Inoperative Community. Translated by P. Connor et al. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, J.-L. 1991b. La Comparution. Paris: Christian Bourgois.
Nancy, J.-L. 1993a. Le Sens du monde. Paris: Galilée.
Nancy, J.-L. 1993b. The Experience of Freedom. Translated by B. McDonald. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. 1997a. The Gravity of Thought. Translated by F. Raffoul & G. Rocco. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
Nancy, J.-L. 1997b. Être singulier pluriel. Paris: Galilée.
Nancy, J.-L. 1997c. The Sense of the World. Translated by J. S. Librett. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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Nancy, J.-L. 2001. La Communauté affrontée. Paris: Galilée.
Nancy, J.-L. 2002. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Translated by J. Smith & S. Miller. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, J.-L. 2003a. ‘The Confronted Community’. Postcolonial Studies 9:4, 23–36.
Nancy, J.-L. 2003b. A Finite Thinking. Translated by S. Sparks. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Norris, A. 2000. ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common’. Constellations 9:4, 272–295.
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1 All translations of Nancy’s works cited herein are mine.
2 One might immediately object to Nancy here that the years following the end of the Cold War have not lacked an affirmation of a shared global destiny, which is to say, that of capitalism, free trade, and liberal democracy. It might be noted, however, that such an affirmation has been the preserve of elites and governments of specific countries, albeit countries with a certain global dominance. The gap that exists between such affirmations of a shared, liberal, capitalist destiny and the reality of the global community (its contemporary existence and unverifiable future) may, quite precisely, be the site of the empty space or ‘béance’ about which Nancy writes.
3 Clearly La Communauté affrontée is written very much with its contemporary resonance in mind. An full exploration of this is beyond the scope of this discussion insofar as the relation between Nancy and Blanchot is the central point of focus here.
4 Of crucial importance here are the analyses given of political transcendence and of the ‘retreat of the political’ by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political. See Le Retrait du Politique (Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe 1983: 192–93), Retreating the Political (Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe 1997: 129).
5 For an extended discussion of this see James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (2006: 173–93).
6 Nancy’s work on the question of community has perhaps received more commentary than any other aspect of his work. Amongst the most important of these responses are: Simon Critchley (1993), Fraser (1984), Ingram (1988), Norris (2000), Readings (1989). See also Ian James, ‘On Interrupted Myth’ (James 2005).
7 This question has been dealt with excellently by Leslie Hill who gives a brief account of the exchange between Nancy and Blanchot in Maurice Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (1996: 200–4). See also Stella Gaon’s excellent account of the question of ontology versus ethics in Blanchot and Nancy: ‘Communities in Question: Sociality and Solidarity in Nancy and Blanchot’ (2005).
8 ‘Clinamen’ is a term in used in the atomistic philosophy of Lucretius to describe the manner in which atoms ‘swerve’ towards each other when falling: it therefore both suggests separation or spacing and the possibility of relation or contact. Inevitably, then, the clinamen offers a useful figure for a void or nothing which nevertheless creates the possibility of relationality between singular instances.
9 This looks forward to Nancy’s later thinking of ‘exscription’, the motif he uses to describe an excess over what is written or, as Nancy himself puts it: ‘writing is exscribed, places itself outside of the sense that it inscribes, in the things of which writing is supposed to form the inscription. And this exscription is the final truth of inscription’ (Nancy 1997a: 79).
10 This criticism has been made explicitly, for instance, by Simon Critchley (1993). Many of Derrida’s critical remarks on Nancy, like those of Blanchot, also question the philosophical terms or language which Nancy chooses to retain; see Derrida Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Derrida 2000; translated as On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy 2005a), and Voyous (Derrida 2003; translated as Rogues 2005b).
11 For an excellent account of this tradition see Bruce Baugh, French Hegel (2003).
12 Nancy very clearly runs overturns a dominant post-war reading of Hegel which sees in dialectical thought a totalitarian tendency. Hegel, he writes, ‘is not a totalitarian thinker’ (Nancy 2002: 8). In this context, his concerns in this text are very different from those of his very early work La Remarque spéculative: un bon mot de Hegel (Nancy 1973).
13 Nancy is very careful to repeat Hegel’s distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ infinity. ‘Bad’ infinity would imply the infinity of a progression or unending expansion. ‘Good’ infinity is actual and, as it were, already traversing the finite; it is ‘the instability of all finite determination’ (Nancy 2002: 12).
14 For an extended discussion of this see James 2006: 80–97.
15 In earlier works such as Une Penseé finie (1990; translated as A Finite Thinking 2003b), Nancy has a rather negative understanding of the infinite. He cites Heidegger for example: ‘“When being is posited as infinite, it is precisely then that it is determined. If it is posited as finite, it is then that its absence of ground is affirmed”’ (Nancy 2003b: 9). Later Nancy adds: ‘All that remains for us is to think this finite character [of being] as such without infinitizing it’ (Nancy 2003b: 11).
16 After the 1997 work on Hegel, Nancy’s writing far more consistently invokes the infinite, the infinity of sense, of relation and of all determinate existence. This is a key aspect of his ‘deconstruction of Christianity’. This shift in vocabulary has been noted by Howard Caygill (Caygill 2005). In particular, Caygill analyses the language of the infinite in Nancy’s short work Noli me tangere (Nancy 2003c). He argues that Nancy’s ‘simultaneous presencing and absencing of the infinite in the finite’ (Caygill 2005: 354) leads him to reject his earlier understanding of community in favour of an understanding which is closer to that of Levinas. According to Caygill, Nancy rejects his early attempt to embody community and, like Levinas, makes of it a: ‘site of witness for the absent God and the joyful promise of an other fraternal community’ (Caygill 2005: 356). One might want to question here both the degree to which Nancy has ever sought to ‘embody’ community, and the degree to which Nancy’s use of the language of infinitude really entails a close alignment of his thinking with that of Levinas. The 1997 book on Hegel might suggest that Nancy is taking his own, rather singular path into the language of infinity.