Peter Engelmann: Let’s return specifically to Strasbourg. Can you say a little more about your collaboration with Philippe, which was a very special kind of collaboration?
Jean-Luc Nancy: I met Philippe in 1967. And it was during the events of 1968 that everything happened between us too: we decided to stay in Strasbourg, and at the same time we began a chiastic personal history. Ultimately, Philippe got together with my first wife and I had children with Philippe’s wife. At first I was still living in Colmar, but after a very serious car accident in late 1969 – I crashed between Strasbourg and Colmar, breaking my hip – I decided to move to Strasbourg. And with that, an important aspect of the whole thing began: living together.
Peter Engelmann: The four of you all lived together?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, the four of us as well as our four children. That was connected to the sexual freedom of the 1968 generation, which my first wife and I had already lived before. And also, of course, to the subject of community: living together. And this communal life was connected to our living and thinking together at the university. By October 1968 everything was more or less over, everything returned to normal, one could say. But in Strasbourg, at least, everything was still in upheaval. So, Philippe and I had started the year very much as usual, but we and the students wanted to deal with completely new content. So, we simultaneously continued with classical topics and also discussed entirely new things – structuralism, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and so forth. And students came who wanted to work on that. So very soon we started organizing something outside the normal courses, together with colleagues from other subjects like literature, history, at times there were a few psychoanalysts too. We called them ‘seminars’, which wasn’t the norm in French universities back then. And we started studying Bataille. I don’t remember exactly why, but Philippe and I could agree on that, we wanted to start with him. Naturally, Bataille’s thought was absent from the university. In the following years we held the seminar more or less every Saturday, each year with a different topic and with several people we had invited. The seminars were always very well attended. We had almost no money, but ultimately we could always scrape together enough to pay for a few trips and the like. Strangely enough, hardly anything from those seminars has been published; although we wrote a lot of texts, they were never made into books. At the same time as holding the seminars on Bataille, we also organized a conference on rhetoric to which we invited Derrida, Lyotard and Genette.
Peter Engelmann: That was in 1969, wasn’t it?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, in the autumn. A year earlier we had started doing Bataille and I had written a short, very naive text, a kind of panorama of current philosophy, heavily influenced by epistemology, specifically by Canguilhem, who was an important figure for myself and my generation. In any case, I tried in that text to contrast this interest in science, which was very much in fashion at the time, with a philosophical interest of the kind I had found in Derrida especially. It was also about the question of whether a new form of science was possible. That’s also what Derrida asks in Of Grammatology: is this a new science, is it an -ology, a parody or a metaphor? This text of mine was published in the university newspaper along with various other articles. And I sent it to Derrida, at the École Normale, because I didn’t have his private address. During the course of the year he replied, and I was very moved, because he wrote that he had already read some of my articles that were published in Esprit and thought that we would meet at some point. That’s how it all started. So, then we organized this conference on rhetoric and Derrida came; he gave a lecture that was later published as ‘White Mythology’.14 Genette also came, as he’d been one of Philippe’s teachers in Le Mans. We had also invited Lyotard, whom Philippe still knew from Socialisme ou barbarie, though we weren’t in contact with him and didn’t know anything about his activities at that time. But his wife, like Philippe’s, was an English teacher at the University of Strasbourg, and that was how we found out that he was also interested in rhetoric. So we invited him too, and he came.
Peter Engelmann: So everyone came together at this conference?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, though it was just for two days. The theme of the conference, rhetoric, came from Philippe. It wasn’t really my topic at all, but through Philippe I’d developed an interest in literature in the broadest sense, and also in rhetoric. So we already had an idea of what would later be termed the ‘linguistic turn’. We wanted to occupy ourselves with language, with the sign, and so we founded the Groupe de recherche sur le théorie du signe et du texte.
Peter Engelmann: You hit the bullseye there: that’s been the central subject ever since. Was Derrida also part of it?
Jean-Luc Nancy: No, Philippe and I were in close contact with him, but the Groupe consisted only of colleagues from Strasbourg who wanted to join in. Then we invited speakers, naturally Derrida and Lyotard, but also Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Jean-Joseph Goux and others.
Peter Engelmann: Did you also invite Sarah Kofman?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, of course. We had met her through Jacques.
Peter Engelmann: Let’s go back to the events of 1968 and talk about what set off those events.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, you’re right, we should look a little more closely at 1968. Because, unlike in Paris, the situation in Strasbourg wasn’t so much a confrontation in the street as a way of gathering at the university. Hundreds of us sat in this beautiful old German imperial university, debating hour after hour. For us it was less about a particular political action than about a way of keeping the entire realm of politics in limbo: a suspension of politics. Naturally political involvement played a part for us too, and we had connections to political movements in other countries. But the main thing was to be together, to have discussions. Obviously, there were people in Strasbourg too who wanted to change something, and for most of them that meant founding a critical university, but that was exactly what we didn’t want. I remember very well the day we went to see a committee for a critical university. After half an hour we decided: we’re not joining in. For us it wasn’t about a new politics, it was about withdrawing and seeing what’s at stake in the current situation. We didn’t see any potential for something new in the political directions of the time, whether communist, far left or Trotskyist. And we felt very soon that the reshaping of the university, which was seemingly the main motive and purpose of the entire movement, was simply an adaptation of the university to something we didn’t have a name for back then, but which was something resembling consumer society. We knew all too well that the reforms enacted by the government would only lead to a co-optation of the movement.
Peter Engelmann: If I understand you correctly, you and the others sensed that both the political demands of the students and the measures subsequently implemented by the government wouldn’t lead to any substantial change, that it was simply a matter of system-immanent adjustments, and that this approach didn’t hold the potential for a real change. And that was why you wanted to question and reflect fundamentally on this system, and based on that you would look for alternatives?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. Philippe and I wanted to do work on politics, we held the view that we needed to rethink the political. For myself especially, that increasingly came down to the question of society or community.
Peter Engelmann: So, the question of community or society came about through a reformulation of the concept of politics? Or was it more of a rupture, an abandonment of the concept of politics, a change of terminology?
Jean-Luc Nancy: No, more of a reformulation. This was accompanied firstly by an interest in literature. Not as an interest in fictions; our point of departure was rather the question of how far literature calls philosophy into question as a system, as a conceptual system. What is the relationship between literature and philosophy, how does literature find its way into philosophy? Literature is something that’s given to others to read, and which stands within a horizon of communication from the start. In philosophy, things are seemingly different. Philosophy presents itself as the intimacy of thought; hence the question of how to practise philosophy. What is the question of theatre? What does the question of theatre, especially Greek tragedy, have to do with philosophy? Plato composed tragedies in his youth, and supposedly burned them later in order to write dialogues instead. These things were very much on our minds in those years. As was, naturally, the literature of Romanticism. Philippe and I published The Literary Absolute 15 on that in 1978. The idea was of an infinite literature as the epitome of a new society, a new form of coexistence. Naturally, the way of life of the Jena Circle, the early Romantics around the Schlegel brothers, was significant for this idea of society. Somebody once said mockingly, ‘those people in Strasbourg are like the ones in Jena, the women knit socks while the men chat’. (Laughs) But, naturally, it was also about reshaping sexual relationships. For a while, some people thought Philippe and I were homosexual. Later we heard that someone had said about us, ‘Oh, the poor women, having to live like that with the men!’ That’s not just an anecdote, it relates to the question of what coexistence means. It’s about the ontology of coexistence, of being together. Secondly, it was important for us to ask where one could find a way of thinking coexistence outside of philosophy. Because philosophy always started from the individual and conceived of coexistence from there. What was missing was the opposite approach, an attempt to begin with coexistence. And this realization led us to Freud.
Peter Engelmann: So you both wanted a change of perspective: to begin with the community, rather than start with the individual and move on to the community from there?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. And who begins before the individual if not Freud! That was how we saw it, at least. But, ultimately, we were disappointed, in part at least, because our experience was that it’s very difficult to find anything in Freud that starts substantially before the individual. Philippe and I wrote two texts together about that: ‘La panique politique’16 and ‘The Jewish People Do Not Dream’.17 We wrote the latter for a conference on psychoanalysis. It deals with the fact that the Jewish people may be a people without a myth, in the sense of the Greek myth. And that maybe one could find some way here to envisage a community without any myth. Naturally that was connected to the question of the Nazi myth, on which we wrote a little book around the same time.18 Those were different attempts to find a beginning located before or outside the individual. It was no coincidence that we read Bataille with the students for a whole year at the time. We’d already dealt with Bataille before that, but more in the context of our studies in literature. At any rate, I had noticed during my reading that there were various reflections on community in Bataille which I wanted to take up.
Peter Engelmann: What year was that?
Jean-Luc Nancy: That was 1981, 1982. And in the spring of 1982, Jean Christophe Bailly suggested devoting an issue of his journal Aléa to this subject, and chose the title La communauté, le nombre. Jean Christophe always finds the right words, and that formulation was absolutely on the mark and greatly inspired me: le nombre refers to pure quantity, the number of individuals. La communauté was a term that I’d previously only found in Bataille, nowhere else. It comes from the same root as communisme, but without the suffix. What does that mean? I immediately wanted to write something about it, and in the spring of 1983 my text appeared in Aléa together with other articles on this subject, then later again as the first chapter of my book The Inoperative Community,19 published the same year. One sign that this subject genuinely had something to do with that time was that, in November of the same year, Blanchot published The Unavowable Community.20 Recently, I reconstructed the whole chronology. In the spring of 1983, Blanchot wrote an article for Le nouveau commerce devoted to Levinas. In it, Blanchot conveyed to Levinas that he offered a different form of relationship with the other to that of Levinas, not a relationship of responsibility but one of passion. And Blanchot explains that with reference to the novella The Malady of Death21 by Marguerite Duras. Blanchot also refers to Bataille here, and speaks of la communauté des amants – the community of lovers. And, evidently, Blanchot was already correcting the proofs of his article when he received my one from Aléa. And so there’s a footnote at the very end of his text in which he refers to my article as important work on Bataille. There wasn’t time for more. Then, in the summer, he wrote The Unavowable Community. He rewrote the first half of the book, with references to Bataille and a critique of my reading of Bataille, which culminated more or less in the claim that I hadn’t read Bataille properly. But the second part is his article on Levinas from Le nouveau commerce, the same text, but with around ten pages added at the beginning and the end dealing with the subject of community. So, what had only been described as the relationship with the other as passion in the first version becomes, in this book, the question of how to think community. And Blanchot concludes that one must not define community as such. I tried to explain that in my last book The Inoperative Community. It’s very complicated. Because what’s behind it is something that’s also part of this whole story: in his book The Unavowable Community, Blanchot reveals himself as a non-democrat, albeit in a concealed way. He also did that a year later in Les intellectuels en question.22 What he means is that democracy as a pure gathering of individuals does not create a community. Community is something that must never be founded, organized or instituted. Community is something that occurs against the background of a non-occurrence, as in the story by Duras: the man and the woman in Duras’s story don’t love each other, they reach an agreement; only the woman knows pleasure in the sense of going-into-the-infinite. But it’s too complicated. Unfortunately I can’t go into that properly now … (Laughs) Anyway, I didn’t understand that book by Blanchot at the time. But what increasingly amazed me was that no one really wanted to understand the book! Not even Jacques. Or Philippe. Nonetheless: in Blanchot’s reading, the woman in the story becomes Duras’s Christ. She gives her body to the man as Christ gave us his body, in an immemorial way. So here Blanchot characterizes Christ’s gift as immemorial, and this is connected to earlier texts, in which he states that mystical experience constitutes an experience in which the subject is not aware of this experience (which is not the same as an experience without a subject). I think that’s the essence of Blanchot’s thesis. This means that one needs something like a myth in order to represent it. And he speaks decidedly of myth in his text; he writes that the body of the woman is mythical. And the woman seems to become a myth through her transformation into Christ. And Blanchot really takes responsibility for this interpretation: the gift of the body and the disappearance of the woman are compared quite explicitly to the death of Christ. Furthermore, Blanchot cites the story of Jesus on the road to Emmaus and compares the man in the story to Christ’s disciples: in the same way that they are only able to recognize Christ as their saviour once he has died as a man, the man can only recognize the woman once she is gone. What is Blanchot telling us here about community? That community only reveals itself once it is no longer present. Though it was never actually present in the true sense, only as the enjoyment of the woman, who ultimately disappears. So, not only is the subject of the experience of togetherness not present; in mythical fashion, it is located in a form of sublime absentia which Blanchot subsequently tells us is actually literature itself. One can see from this that something has remained of the Blanchot of the 1930s. I mean his view of myth, which naturally also has a political thrust – though not in the sense of the Nazi myth, of course. I don’t think that Blanchot was ever a Nazi, nor was he a fascist, but he was certainly very far to the Right. And there was a part of that which he never abandoned, as he always insisted that something like a transcendent could be … Perhaps for him it’s literature itself that plays this part. In my book I try to show this – so: he takes a writer’s story as his topic. But he speaks about it in a way which conveys that although he is not the author of the story, he gradually becomes the author of the truth of this story. Thus, Blanchot takes the place of Duras, in a sense. He also writes that the author Duras must somehow be personally involved in such a story. For Blanchot it’s probably also a reminder of 1968. He speaks of 1968 as the time in which perhaps, just once, an extremely ephemeral community formed – or rather non-formed – in the streets. We know that he took part in a few political activities at the time. Perhaps he also had a brief relationship with Duras. In any case, his book includes a kind of identification between the self, i.e. Blanchot, and Duras, the writer. And as for the title of his text, The Unavowable Community, I think this ‘unavowable’ suggests, ‘Yes, there is something to avow. But I avow nothing. It’s up to you to understand this, be clever!’ I’m tempted to say that this ‘avowing/not avowing’ is perhaps, in an uncanny way, at the basis of every sincere allegiance to democracy. Because this allegiance can’t be a recognition of a pre-existing sense, nor can one simply give democracy a sense – that of a ‘real’ togetherness or a ‘real’ equality, for example. So I tried to read the book very closely. After its publication in 1983, no one spoke about the book in detail any more, even though it was often quoted. The question is, why? For our part, it may be because we were occupied with setting up the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique at the time.
Peter Engelmann: You founded that in Paris in 1981.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Exactly, on Jacques’s recommendation. He had told us, ‘If you want, I could get funds from the École Normale to found a research centre. You could do whatever you want.’ And we said, ‘Then we’ll do something on the question of the political.’ That was the logical consequence of everything we had done before then. We located this centre in the horizon of a particular motif that we called the retrait du politique. To this day, I find it very difficult to make the double meaning of retrait clear. It refers both to the question of retreating the political and to the demand to retrace, to re-enact the political. There was a lot of movement during the existence of the centre, both politically and theoretically. Theoretically speaking, we all agreed at the start that we were dealing with a retreat of the political. But a number of very different approaches developed from that. Luc Ferry, for example, argued that today, politics is concentrated in the question of human rights. There was disagreement, we held the opinion that something else was needed. And then Solidarność was founded, the protest movement against the political rulers and the communist system in Poland. This led to the question of civil society. Solidarność is perhaps the birthplace of the phrase ‘civil society’ that is so common today. Civil society ias something that has nothing to do with the state, which exists perhaps not against, but certainly outside the state and the political institutions. That’s actually rather strange, because, historically speaking, civil society always meant political society. But, in Poland, for a certain time, there was indeed this opposition: Solidarność on the one side, the state on the other. People held the view that foreign policy, the army, was part of the state, but social institutions belonged to civil society. This opened up a rupture within the centre, because some found this concept of civil society very interesting – especially Lyotard – while others rejected the approach because they felt it risked a loss of politics.
Peter Engelmann: What kind of activities were there at the centre? Were there conferences or regular meetings?
Jean-Luc Nancy: We met regularly, roughly once a month, there was a lecture with a subsequent discussion, or sometimes just a discussion on a particular topic.
Peter Engelmann: And the people at the centre were Philippe, you, Jacques, Jean-François ...
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, and also Rancière, Badiou, Balibar, Ferry, Lefort … There were around thirty or forty people who participated regularly. Sarah Kofman too, for example, but she never gave a lecture as far as I can recall. Neither did Jacques, in fact! The only time Jacques spoke at the centre was when he told us about his meeting with the dissidents of Charta 77 after the suppression of the Prague Spring and his time in prison over there. But the centre’s work wasn’t in line with Derrida’s politics. That’s a very interesting question, because naturally Philippe and I asked him repeatedly if he could finally give a lecture. But his response to these invitations was always vague, and he would put us off until another time. I think he didn’t want to at that time, also in the political context of the centre. He didn’t want to take a political stance, especially not on the matter of civil society. So he waited until a few years later, when he finally published Politics of Friendship,23 where this politics – politics in the plural – of friendship also goes beyond politics, one could say, and aims for a new concept of the political.
Peter Engelmann: Why did you decide to close the centre in 1984?
Jean-Luc Nancy: The question of civil society became a kind of doxa, but for Philippe and me it wasn’t the fundamental problem we wanted to work on. I remember that Badiou suggested resuming the centre’s work with a different angle. But then he went in his own political direction and I went to America in 1985, though I ended up only staying for two years.
Peter Engelmann: Where in America were you?
Jean-Luc Nancy: In San Diego. That was pure coincidence. I had met my present wife, Helene, and our son was born in 1985. Our problem was that Helene couldn’t find a position in Strasbourg or in the vicinity, but we needed a second income. So I accepted a position in America at Jean-François’s suggestion. But after two years it was clear to Helene and to me that we didn’t want to stay in America. I’d been to Irvine for a week a number of times before that, but it’s an entirely different experience to work at an American university – it’s impossible – one’s in a different world! At any rate, I continued to examine questions of community and the political after the centre closed. That same year, I was asked if I wanted to put together an issue of Cahiers de L’Herne on Blanchot. I agreed and asked Philippe if he wanted to do it together with me. We started preparing the publication with Blanchot, we wanted to pursue the question of politics further. So we asked various people to contribute texts. After roughly two years it became clear that nobody wanted to write anything on that topic – except for academics doing PhDs on Blanchot, say. But we absolutely wanted to get some writers on board, people like Ungaretti or Enzensberger. Amazingly enough, they all turned us down with the argument that Blanchot was too important, that they couldn’t write about him. Ultimately, we reached the conclusion that there were also political reasons for this: in 1982, a chapter from Jeffrey Mehlmann’s book was published in Tel Quel, and there he examines Blanchot’s proto-fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1930s. So Blanchot was also confronted with this accusation when he wrote The Unavowable Community – perhaps that was one reason why he didn’t make his political stance entirely clear. So probably most of the people we had asked to contribute knew that the question of politics in Blanchot is very complicated, that the discussion about it might still continue, and that they would possibly risk arousing suspicion themselves. So we dropped the project.
Peter Engelmann: Was anything published about it later on?
Jean-Luc Nancy: No. Apparently there’s a new project on Blanchot by L’Herne, but I don’t know any details. It’s very complicated, because there are still two warring factions when it comes to Blanchot. Anyway, I published a little book with Galilée in 2011, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique.24 This included a letter about Blanchot’s political stance which he had written to us in the context of the planned edition of Cahiers. He didn’t address it to Philippe or to me, however, but to Roger Laporte, a long-standing friend. At the end of the letter he wrote that Laporte could give the letter to Lacoue-Labarthe. This letter is very difficult to interpret. But engaging with the subject of community turned out to be increasingly difficult, not only in relation to Blanchot, because over time, people wanted to talk about it less and less, especially Jacques and Philippe – they didn’t want to hear anything about community any more, albeit perhaps for very different reasons. Regarding Jacques: for a Francophone Jew, communauté also means the Jewish community (la paroisse), so it also has a religious meaning. You can imagine that he didn’t want anything to do with that. True, he did go to synagogue in Nice on particular holidays with his sister, his brother, his father and mother, but he still had a very distant relationship with the Jewish community. Anyway, the word had a religious connotation for him. It was a different situation for Philippe, of course. But if he didn’t reject community because of any religious associations, it was because of its affective, mystical baggage and its overtones of ethnic community.
Peter Engelmann: And this proximity doesn’t bother you? Naturally it’s problematic for a German.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, I know that. When The Inoperative Community came out in German, a journalist at the taz25 wrote, ‘Nancy is a fascist!’ Simply because I use the word ‘community’. I didn’t have these associations, but I’d never thought about it; it was only when Jean Christophe came up with the title La communauté, le nombre that this word became fully present-at-hand and ready-to-hand for me. It was only gradually that I too began to view the concept as problematic – though not so much for its connection to National Socialist ideology, but especially through the notion of inwardness evoked by community. What does this ‘inside’ mean? I understood that there was a contradiction in my use of this word. Because I was not talking precisely about inwardness, intimacy or things like that, but with the word ‘community’, I was operating in that exact semantic area. So, this made it necessary to think more closely about the issue of inwardness. Augustine said some important things about this. In the Confessions he says to God, ‘But you were deeper inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest’, which means that I can only refer to intimacy with myself if there is something that is even more inward than this intimacy. But what exactly does that mean? In the light of this, I subsequently began to speak more of être-ensemble [being-together] and être-avec [being-with], than of community. In Being Singular Plural 26 I spoke only of being-with. I even took the position that one should rewrite Being and Time, taking Being-with, not mere Dasein, as the point of departure. That would require a specific existential analysis of the ‘with’ in Being-with. Nonetheless, I think that this ‘with’ – the Latin cum, as preserved in the French communauté – or also the Gemein- of Gemeinschaft doesn’t necessarily, automatically have to end in some concept of inwardness. And that’s what Heidegger means when he writes in §26 of Being and Time that the ‘with’ of Being-with should be understood existentially, not merely categorially. Unfortunately, he leaves it at this short note. This is how I read it: the categorial refers to the categories in Aristotle’s sense, namely that with which one states something. In that sense, the ‘with’ would simply express a spatial and temporal coexistence. But ‘with’, which also invokes the centre [Mitte], means more than this: in Being-with, something becomes something, it is shared and conveyed, communicated – with brings us back to the Latin cum. In German one can also make the difference clear at the lexical level: one can use neben when speaking of the ‘with’ in the categorial sense, and save mit for the existential usage. That doesn’t work in French, because we only have one word, avec, and that contains the Latin apud, which means ‘in the vicinity of’. I’ve written about community on several occasions and in different ways, but I’ve never carried out a thorough analysis of this mit or avec. Maybe someone should do that. But I think one can say that the categorial ‘with’ as a mere ‘alongside’ may not actually exist, that as soon as something enters a relationship of ‘alongside’ with something else, an existential element also comes into play. We humans are never simply alongside one another; we always have something to do with one another as well, whether we want to or not. Sometimes it can seem as if this is not true, in everyday life in the street, for example. But something small, a minor accident, is enough to make it clear that people are not simply there alongside one another, but enter a relationship with one another. Or one takes the metro. Here is a man, there is a woman, and next to her a child. But one immediately notices various things: the man is old, the woman is dressed conspicuously and the child is holding a toy car. And if the train comes to a halt unexpectedly, people start talking to one another. ‘Oh, is it going to take long?’ and so on. And art knows this, it even makes it very obvious: if one puts different things alongside one another, for example in a still life, then something happens. The things aren’t just there alongside one another, they enter a relationship; a context of meaning comes about, certainly not one with a concrete shape or autonomy, but there is a circulation between those elements.
Peter Engelmann: Between the ‘alongsides’.
Jean-Luc Nancy: And that’s the principle of every form of collection. If we look around the flat now, for example – these photos here, Picasso, the family at the dinner table, next to that a banknote … For the inhabitants, what looks like a mere juxtaposition has a sense.
Peter Engelmann: Something shared. Is that a shared sense?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Perhaps it’s not so much a shared sense as a sense of shared life, a sense that can’t necessarily be reduced to meaning.
Peter Engelmann: So you distinguish between sense and meaning?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, the difference between sense and meaning is very important to me, though not in the same way that Frege, who wrote a famous essay about that, defines it. Meaning, signification, is something that takes place in language, the coming-together of the signifier and the signified.
Peter Engelmann: That’s the differential theory of meaning as formulated by Saussure: the movement of the signifier and the signified creates meaning.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. But sense, I would say, is far more than that. Sense comes about not only when we speak, but whenever some kind of communication takes place, when we look at one another, even when – as Heidegger says – we wave. We always, even involuntarily, give some indication of the mood we are in. What happens in this way I would call sense, rather than meaning. So, sense is first of all something that can be experienced sensually. Here, incidentally, one also sees the ambiguity of the word Sinn [sense] that was such a source of joy to Hegel, and lies in the fact that it refers both to the sensual and the spiritual. In addition, sense – as I understand it – is characterized by something that Bataille puts very well when he writes, Il n’y a pas de sense pour un seul: there is no sense for an individual. Here one can perhaps glimpse the possibility of a new beginning for philosophy, the possibility of not having to start from the individual. How could individuals exist if they were radically individual? They would neither be able to convey a sense nor would they have any sense themselves – they simply would not be in sense. And perhaps that means they wouldn’t be at all. And that, I think, is the simplest way to prove that the one all-encompassing God is an impossibility. It is impossible to think a God alone, with no world, before the creation.
Peter Engelmann: So, God, like everything else, needs a counterpart, an other, in order to make sense?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, yes. Sense always already means plurality. One must also interpret Leibniz’s question against this background: why is there something rather than nothing? The problem is clearer in French, where one says, Pourquoi y a-t-il quelque chose – in the singular – plutôt que rien? But one should say choses, in the plural. So it’s important to understand what Leibniz is talking about as a plurality. Because one thing on its own cannot exist. Hegel says that the One is its own destruction. Sense takes place only between several. There is always more than what is given. Perhaps one can say that giving itself is given, or the gift is given. And maybe the question, ‘is a giver given here?’ is a misleading question, since the giver would perhaps appear as singular. And for me this has an obvious connection to Hegel’s foam that we were discussing, and also to Freud. In a letter to Marie Bonaparte, Freud writes about his dog. He writes that when his bitch plays in front of him, she seems utterly carefree and without a trouble in the world, and further on that anyone who starts asking questions about the sense in life is already a little ill. The mere question of sense is itself already an illness. Now, one mustn’t think that being healthy consists in not having any relationship with sense. Being healthy rather means being fully within sense, immersing oneself in it and being subsumed by it, without asking questions, like Freud’s bitch when she plays in front of her master. Freud then tells us that his bitch reminds him of Don Giovanni singing the Champagne Aria. Perhaps it’s not entirely banal to ask, why champagne? Why sparkling wine, why prosecco? Why? – Because it foams! That is, because champagne is more than what is given with the champagne. It foams – perhaps a little bit longer, perhaps not: the fun is soon over. And with regard to art, one could show quite clearly, I think, that one is always dealing with a kind of excess. And that’s exactly what people often say about the arts: that they’re superfluous, excessive. But what does it mean if we need this excess? If excess is a necessity? I need a pencil to write, or perhaps to make a drawing. But why do I need excess, why champagne? Perhaps one will say, to get drunk! That would bring us to the subject of drunkenness, which is certainly a significant topic. In the history of philosophy there is one prominent example of a very peculiar drunkenness: why is it said of Socrates that he drank more than anyone else, yet without getting drunk? Drunk in the sense of dulled, mentally sluggish. It means, in my view, that he exposed himself to rapture more than anyone else, that he advanced into infinity, of which drunkenness can be one mode. Hegel later takes up this idea, for example, when he writes something in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit to the effect that truth is both the calm surface of still water and the drunken throng of Dionysus.
Peter Engelmann: Now if we try to look at the matter soberly again, then it’s about looking for a ‘more’, for something that exceeds the given in the given. And you also want to counter politics as a mere administrative regime with this ‘more’. You’re looking for something that exceeds the limited sense of a politics understood in that way, for something that foams, for champagne. That’s why you keep returning to Bataille, because that’s also Bataille’s theme, transgression. And, to connect this back to our themes, sense and community would be something transgressive, perhaps foaming, which is why it would be a mistake to envisage communication or politics by starting from the individual as the atom of meaning and society. Sense and community would be things that need to be thought not as a mere additive unity, but rather as proceeding from transgression?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, absolutely. Especially with regard to politics, it seems to me that we’ve been defined – since its Greek beginnings – by the notion that practising it has to mean creating a unity.