Peter Engelmann: Let me try to summarize. This whole setting of practical experiences and theoretical reflections that you’ve described led to an increasing distance between you and communism. And you were looking for different forms of community, of coexistence, for social alternatives.
Jean-Luc Nancy: We felt a lack of community, even though we lived in a society that seemed quite healthy at the time. There were no economic problems – on the contrary, it was the period of Les Trente Glorieuses,2 the years of the French economic miracle. But we lacked perspective. And at the same time we were reading books by Althusser, Deleuze ...
Peter Engelmann: And you agreed with their critique?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, but above all, there was something new in these books. They opened up a different way of thinking. It’s difficult to reconstruct the exact chronology … . At any rate, I felt most clearly – though not for the first time – that something new was beginning when I read Voice and Phenomenon by Derrida.3
Peter Engelmann: So, it was neither structural Marxism nor Deleuze, but rather Derrida. That was the point.
Jean-Luc Nancy: I remember that Philippe and I started talking about Derrida very soon at our meetings. Heidegger and Derrida, those were the two reference points. Naturally we also read Of Grammatology,4 but for me it was above all Voice and Phenomenon that was a decisive event, specifically the passage where he writes that the inner voice of the consciousness speaks or speaks silently, that this moment takes a certain time, perhaps only a very short time, but a time nonetheless. In French he writes une durée – a duration. And this durée is the content of différance. I remember this passage very precisely, because this idea was like the rebirth of Hegel for me. Certainly, I was very strongly influenced by Hegel, absolutely not the systematic Hegel of the Science of Logic, but quite the opposite: a Hegel of openness, of consciousness’s coming-outside-oneself, its stepping-outside-itself, and so forth. Strangely enough, I came into contact with Hegel’s philosophy through a Jesuit, around 1960, 1961, after a friend had drawn my attention to his Hegel seminar. That was wonderful, my first philosophical infatuation. Since then I’ve always felt connected to Hegel, in different ways.
Peter Engelmann: Did you deal with the Phenomenology of Spirit 5 there?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, especially the Phenomenology. At the end of the Phenomenology there’s a slightly altered Schiller quotation: ‘from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude’.6 That became a kind of motto for me. I suppose that in this foam, I had found what I needed for the first time. And this foaming, this excess, was what I found again in the durée of the moment in Derrida.
Peter Engelmann: So, one could say that this experience marked your philosophical awakening, and has informed your philosophical work since then?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. Then I came across Heidegger, probably in 1961 or 1962, again through a friend, a student of Beaufret. At first I didn’t understand Heidegger at all. He gave me the Letter on Humanism,7 and I laughed, and said, ‘What’s all this about the shepherd of Being?’ At the same time, there was a statement that had a strong effect on me, namely that humanism doesn’t value the humanitas of humans highly enough. That was very important for me. When I read that I thought, ‘Yes, the man is right!’ I think to me it was a repetition of Pascal’s dictum: man finally surpasses man. Perhaps it was because of my religious background that the idea that humanitas goes infinitely beyond humans felt intuitively right. But Heidegger was concerned with more than that. When I read those words by Heidegger, I had no idea of his involvement in National Socialism, really none at all! Until then I had never heard of Heidegger, I didn’t even know his name. I probably had the impression of recognizing something familiar in that statement. At first I sensed a sort of kinship with what I’d encountered in Derrida as the moment and in Hegel as foam. In addition, it showed a sensitivity to a certain emptiness in humanism. There had been so much talk of humanism, and I had started to feel that this word was moving completely in isolation, it had no content. Obviously one’s a humanist, how can one not be a humanist! Whether one’s a Christian, Marxist, phenomenologist … one’s always a humanist. I remember that in my final year at the university I had to write a text on Sartre’s essay Is Existentialism a Humanism?8 And Roger Garaudy, who later converted to Islam, wrote a book about Marxism as humanism. The communists also claimed humanism for themselves.
Peter Engelmann: Yes! Amazingly, that was a very important book for the opposition in the GDR, precisely because it introduced humanism into the discussion on communism. In the GDR it was the critique of actually existing socialism that took place in the name of humanism.
Jean-Luc Nancy: At any rate, everyone considers themselves a humanist. And suddenly Heidegger says that previous humanist interpretations of humans did not value the essence of humans – and he uses the Latin word humanitas – highly enough. In my memory, it’s about this height. I had a feeling of sublimity that’s absent from the usual situation of contemporary thought. So, my first encounter with Heidegger was very ambiguous; on the one hand, I found this sublimity or tone of being sublime funny, for example, when he speaks of the shepherd of Being, but on the other hand, I took him completely seriously where he deals with the humanitas of humans. Then I read more Heidegger, I only read Being and Time 9 much later. Today I would say that this mystical understanding of history unfolding as destiny [Geschick] in Being and Time marks the politically neuralgic point in his philosophy. Without the assumption of destiny, without a conception of history as destiny, Heidegger would never have become a Nazi.
Peter Engelmann: So, Heidegger’s Nazi involvement is already implicit in the logic of his understanding of history as destiny?
Jean-Luc Nancy: In my opinion, one can see that very clearly in Being and Time. Specifically, where Heidegger writes about history, historicity and destiny, starting around §72. That’s the decisive point, it’s where everything changes. Because now one learns that the finite Dasein of the individual is only fateful, and can only become destined if it goes into battle for the people [Volk].
Peter Engelmann: That’s already the model for his political involvement.
Jean-Luc Nancy: That’s the model, of course. I think the point is that destiny needs the common, the With. The With is the decisive aspect. Heidegger already introduces it very early, around §26, where he explains that the Being-with [Mitsein] of Dasein is an existential, not only categorical. But after that, Heidegger only occasionally speaks of this With, there’s no comprehensive analysis of Being-with in Heidegger. Only in his reflections on history, on historicity, does one learn that one finds one’s own ‘with’ [Mit] in the community. And the community is what it is, in the battle for the people, because the people are or present a historical and destined entity. And that changes almost everything.
Peter Engelmann: Is that an example of an ideological anticipation of a totalitarian, political structure?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, of course!
Peter Engelmann: So, you would say that there are thought figures which at least anticipate and legitimate a totalitarian political system ...
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, and I would even say that I’ve occupied myself more and more intensively with it. It’s the question of history, one can expound it quite well using Being and Time. As long as there is no reference to history in Being and Time, one could think that there is no reason to address the problem of history again, and if there is, then one has to pose the question in terms of history as a process or history as an event. It’s actually hard to understand why Heidegger is thinking in the direction of a process. Well, naturally this view of history has prominent exponents in the history of philosophy, think of Kant, Herder, Hegel … Especially in the German tradition, one finds the notion of history as progress, that is, as a teleological process, and thus as something that functions precisely without Hegel’s foam.
Peter Engelmann: Essentially a deterministic process.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, and foam rather aims at an excess: there is no end.
Peter Engelmann: Excess as the unforeseeable, the uncontrollable, the unexpected, the event.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, event, of course. I take up the word ‘event’ because it plays such an important part in Heidegger slightly later on. Nowadays we can no longer understand how the schema of a process and a teleology can have such a strong effect. Naturally it’s far more complicated in Heidegger, and later he moved very far away from it. He spoke of the destiny of the occident, but naturally he didn’t say that he could imagine the end of that process. Nonetheless, there is a notion of telos in Heidegger, namely in the form of the idea and the prospect that a true relationship with Being can be attained. At the end of ‘Anaximander’s Saying’,10 he writes that perhaps the occidental catastrophe will be reversed, and the oblivion of Being will be or enable a recovery of Being. In my view that’s irreconcilable with his warning not to forget that there is no one Being, that the one Being does not exist, that we can never speak of the one Being. That’s the argumentation he develops with reference to the event or en-owning [Ereignis] when he speaks of appropriating [Ereignen], dis-owning [Ent-eignung], dedication [Zueignung] and so on. For me, this is where Heidegger’s real point lies. But, on the opposite side, the side of history as destiny, oblivion of Being and so on, one returns to the process and the telos, even if Heidegger rejected the notion of a final purpose. For me this is not only a problematic area in Heidegger, but actually a pressing question for all of us today: how can we conceive of history as non-processual and non-teleological? I think Foucault was one of the first to take steps in this direction. And I think that with the word destinerrance,11 Derrida found something that operates precisely on the reverse of Heidegger. It means destiny, destin, but destiny as errance, as aimless wandering. Incidentally, there’s a Heidegger feature in the next issue of Le Monde, and I contributed an article to that in which I develop precisely this argument, namely that Derrida’s word destinerrance is a way to depart from Heidegger’s thought where it remains tied to teleology. But one also has to take into account that Heidegger only conceived of history as destiny, and not also errance, during a certain time – roughly from 1939 to 1942. In other words, Heidegger could only have understood the errancy of errance as error at that time. To the extent that Heidegger poses the question of Being in a radical fashion, however, his thought remains the philosophical event of the twentieth century for me. I don’t see how one could think any differently. The question of the happening, the occurrence of history is our question too. I’ve already mentioned Foucault – why did he develop his whole reflection on history if not because he picked up something from Heidegger that’s precisely not connected to destiny, but in a certain sense far more to what Derrida called destinerrance? But the figure of destinerrance preserves something of destiny [Geschick], and perhaps it’s not possible here to dismiss this conception of a sending [Schicken], but certainly the notion of a telos. This throws up an incredibly serious metaphysical and even anthropological question, because it seems impossible, from today’s perspective, not to view history as a process, as we see that a history which began with the Greeks truly became the history of the world.
Peter Engelmann: You mean, from today’s perspective, history actually presents itself as a process?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. What are the Chinese doing today? They’re doing everything we are: capitalism, computer science. Africa is perhaps the only continent that hasn’t really joined in yet, or only to a minor extent. Nonetheless, it seems there is only one rationality ...
Peter Engelmann: … and it’s getting globalized. In that sense it’s a process.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, because globalization didn’t just follow by chance from a beginning, it’s already inherent in the essence of the beginning. In the form of Christianity, for example, of universal religion, universal equality. In Marx, this equality takes the form of general equivalence. The capitalist system was invented as a way of forming a universe.
Peter Engelmann: That’s the logic of capital.
Jean-Luc Nancy: In my view, it’s connected to something one could call the regime of production. In the fourteenth century there was a major shift in Europe. For example, the coin production trade changed fundamentally: it was no longer just a matter of producing money for a prince’s household, but also for trading, and about trading in such a way that one could always turn money into more money, which resulted in the monetary economy, money-lending with interest, and so on. The history of anti-Semitism is intimately connected to this. In Marxian thought, this production is expanded to include human life: human life is its own production as social production. On the one hand, that means the complete liberation or autonomization of humans from the context of nature – man as a creator.
Peter Engelmann: An anti-religious, anti-theological stance.
Jean-Luc Nancy: On the other hand, this subsumes everything under the order of production. And this means that something is endangered, forgotten or lost, namely reproduction. Before this regime of production, humanity lived in highly varied forms of a reproduction of life. People cultivated this and that to continue living, but they didn’t try to produce a different life. Even in as great a civilization as China, the order of reproduction was maintained, even if the forms of culture, art and thought very gradually changed. Nonetheless, China seems like a model case of reproduction, because it was there that this form of life took on the largest proportions and persisted the longest. That’s why some people consider China’s current situation a disaster: the old China has disappeared, but nothing new has replaced it.
Peter Engelmann: That means there’s a form of society that reproduces itself, economically too, but doesn’t pursue any further goals. And then comes capitalist production, which is not only a production of surplus value, but also a self-design in regard to a different form, a different form of community, a different society. And the idea of communism is also one of these models that belongs to productive, not reproductive forms of economy and coexistence. Is that what you mean?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. Regarding communism, perhaps one should point out first of all that the word ‘communism’, historically speaking, comes from Christianity. In Catholic Church law, a communist good was one that belonged to the community, not to one person. The word ‘communism’ then appears for the first time in the writings of Restif de la Bretonne – a contemporary of Rousseau, tellingly enough, who aims to provide a comprehensive overview of political governmental forms, and refers to the first form of society as communism, only practised by two tribes on the Pacific coast of South America, where people do everything together; they work together in the morning and have fun together in the afternoon. That’s his entire description of communism!
Peter Engelmann: But that’s exactly what Marx writes in The Communist Manifesto!
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, of course. It’s really wonderful! I don’t know if Marx knew that text by Restif. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Restif uses the word ‘communism’; I’d say it expresses a longing. It articulates the awareness that society – society at the end of the eighteenth century – is lacking something, namely a communal spirit. That’s nothing amazing, since the whole of political theory, political and social thought, already took the individual as its point of departure two or three centuries earlier. Hobbes, Locke, von Pufendorf, whoever. They always begin with the one, followed by the question of how to bring together the different individuals. And how one can make it possible for them to live together. This is precisely the question that no one asked in the Middle Ages, because – to put it very simply – the way people lived together was predetermined: they lived together first of all because they were all God’s children, and secondly, because everyone had a social rank assigned to them in the feudal system. In a sense, feudalism is a cosmos of its own. The peasants farmed the land and bred livestock so that their ruler would have something to eat, and in return the ruler gave the peasants protection. The strict notions of honour – think of the oath of fealty, for example – can be interpreted as a way of developing a sacrality of society as such. This secular system wasn’t Christian at first, it was only interpreted in Christian terms later: we are all God’s subjects. This results in an addition: Christianity, which initially lacked a model for life in this world, was given a model for earthly life in the shape of feudalism. Conversely, feudalism found its religious legitimation in Christianity. Perhaps this is why Carl Schmitt argues that all our political concepts are secularized concepts.
Peter Engelmann: Feudalism as Christianity for the mortal world, as it were? (Laughs)
Jean-Luc Nancy: But the pre-modern world already took a direction that destroyed precisely that, because history became the history of those who didn’t want to stay in that sacred system, but demanded a complete autonomy of the state. This characterizes the whole of modern state theory, the theory of sovereignty of Jean Bodin and others, perhaps one even has to include Machiavelli too. And it’s connected to the memory of the Roman Empire, which was always present. In a sense, Europe always wanted to found a new Rome. Rome is the only case in history in which a civil religion truly existed. Rome was neither the city nor the state, Rome was Rome. One could say that Rome was its own goddess. Perhaps that’s why Rome was a society where gods were everywhere, where every action requires a religious action first. Christianity established itself because the substance of this civil religion ultimately disappeared. Why it did so is another matter.
Peter Engelmann: What are you referring to as the substance of this civil religion?
Jean-Luc Nancy: By substance I mean that Rome could always imagine itself as something that hadn’t existed before then, namely as the world. Unlike Athens, Sparta or Carthage, for example, Rome wasn’t tied to a particular ethnicity or locality. Rome founded and justified itself. Hence the legend that Rome had kings, but could dethrone them. Rome was the invention of law. Here law is both a means and an end: if one was subject to Roman law, one was a Roman. Saint Paul is the perfect example. When he was taken captive by the Romans, he invoked his Roman civil rights, that is, he asserted his legal right to be tried by a Roman court as a Roman citizen.
Peter Engelmann: So, Rome means the invention of the world as a state under the rule of law?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, exactly.
Peter Engelmann: Human coexistence is based on a system of law that no longer requires any justification and has no preconditions. And this law is the law of the world. But now, one or two centuries bce, a certain sadness spreads among all these Mediterranean peoples; Freud refers to this at the end of Moses and Monotheism12 when he speaks of a general unease and premonition of disaster, invoking the historiography of his time. This would mean that something became unbearable for all the peoples of the Roman Empire. But what, and why? I don’t have an explanation, but we do know that there must have been an immense religious need, because there were more religions in the Roman Empire during the first two centuries bce than at any previous time anywhere ...
Peter Engelmann: You mean that this sadness came from a lack, that this world as a state of law was missing something?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, exactly. And it seems to me that one can also tie this lack to the Stoics and the Epicureans. It relates to what Foucault called care of the self. It’s already a symptom, because what does care of the self mean? It comes from the feeling that one’s lost in the world. One doesn’t know where this world is going. The question of fate became a central question for Stoics at that time: how can I gain knowledge of my fate? And what can I do if I am denied it? The Epicurean doctrine, on the other hand, states that you shouldn’t worry about that, you should simply live in the way that causes you least discomfort or pain. So, the two centuries before Christ were genuinely dominated by something disturbing, something unpleasant. People no longer knew how to act in life as human beings.
Peter Engelmann: And Christianity entered this situation as an offer of meaning?
Jean-Luc Nancy: No, I’d actually say that Christianity is a product of that situation! First of all, Christianity was an inner transformation or reformation of Judaism. I find Jan Assmann very convincing when he argues that the history of the Jews is the history of the attempt to separate human salvation from worldly rule: the Jews were slaves of Pharaoh, they left Egypt, founded a Jewish kingdom, but soon there were internal divisions and also the separation of king and prophet. The prophet became a critic of the king. This led to the doctrine of the messiah, which means ‘anointed one’ and initially referred exclusively to the king, and was only used to refer to the prophet later on. The entire history of messianism is at once the history of the messiah who will perhaps never come and the history of the increasing separation or distinction between the religious and the political order. So Judaism split into two: rabbinical Judaism and Christianity. Incipient Christianity was then a movement of an inner transformation of Judaism as a renewed liberation from oneself, from political order. Recall the words Christ speaks to Pilate: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ So, at the time when Rome seemed too much like a world, a second world burst in. From that point one could say, ‘I’m in this world, but I’m not of this world.’ With Saint Augustine there are two kingdoms, two civitates. And from this perspective, the history of communism can be read as the history of the reunification of these two worlds, the overcoming of this schism.
Peter Engelmann: You say that Christianity created a second world.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Until roughly the time of Charlemagne, Christians had the expectation that the second world would come, and with it the end of this world. Gradually Christians realized that the end wouldn’t come, and subsequently started thinking about how they might be able and allowed to live in this world in order to preserve the possibility of the second world. But there was always an ambivalence: will this world come later, or does it already exist now? Throughout the entire history of Christianity, both ideas are always there. The mystics lived in the awareness that the second world was already here. Other thinkers remained faithful to the traditional religious view that a second, eternal life begins in heaven after death. This question is complicated by the Last Judgement, because one can’t easily see from a worldly perspective how the end of history can come. And this is what the Reformation, what Protestantism addresses, think of Weber’s thesis about the connection between Protestant ethics and the emergence of capitalism. But here one can also refer to the Franciscans. Giacomo Todeschini shows in his book Franciscan Wealth 13 how the Franciscans contributed to the genesis of capitalism – which doesn’t imply that they wanted a capitalist form of life. For the Franciscans, the whole issue of poverty really meant just that one shouldn’t use wealth for oneself, one has to use it for the good of all. It was a doctrine of use: wealth must be used for the common good, one has to take away the wealth of the rich and give it to the people. And ‘people’ essentially meant citizens at that time. I think this can help us to see more clearly how capitalism comes partly from this Christian idea of a good use of this world in order to reconcile it with the second world.