Peter Engelmann: Let’s talk some more about how you distanced yourself from communism. Against the background of your deliberations so far, it seems to me that it wasn’t really based on your experiences in 1968, but primarily on theoretical divergences.
Jean-Luc Nancy: The general idea at the time was simply to reform communism or Marxism, to adapt it to the different historical situation. But essentially people adhered to it, and the concern was only to make it more theoretically precise and potentially expand it. We, however, had different aims – though Marx always remained enormously important to me, of course. Today I would even say that Marx understood that something is wrong deep inside our culture or civilization, not only in bourgeois society. Though he probably didn’t know himself how thought could access that. Then his approach was to start from economy as something that structures society, and to see what insights can be gained from there. In one very famous passage, Marx says that religion is the spirit of a spiritless age.27 I find that notable because it shows that spirit was somehow important to Marx. In retrospect, one can perhaps paraphrase this and say that the history of communism was a spiritless history. I don’t mean to say that Lenin or Mao – I won’t even speak of Stalin, as it seems to me that Stalin was no more than a common dictator – were spiritless people. But when Lenin says that communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country, I do ask myself if this illustrates the mistake made by communism when it allowed the scientific-rationalist overcoming of technological backwardness to replace spirit.
Peter Engelmann: You mean, Lenin mistakes what went by the name of ‘spirit’ in Marx for a technical-rationalist will to power?
Jean-Luc Nancy: I think that mistake can already be found in Marx’s own work. Naturally, what I’m saying isn’t meant to belittle his achievement. But perhaps we’re better equipped today to see and to say that there’s an element of Enlightenment thinking here, that his conception of rationality remains indebted to the Enlightenment – in that this privileging of economy as the ultimate authority indicates something over-rationalistic. Instead, one should locate the Marx who speaks of spirit. But what can spirit mean in his work? In my view: quite simply that God is dead. This not only means that Marx, like Nietzsche, is a critic of religion. Perhaps that’s just an effect. The important thing is that he doesn’t know what could replace God. After proclaiming the death of God, Nietzsche, as you know, lets the madman ask what sacred games will have to be invented to atone for his murder. But the question is left open. And perhaps what drove Nietzsche mad was that he recognized the problem very clearly, but had nothing with which to counter the condition of nihilism. By contrast, the Enlightenment thinker in Marx clings to the conviction that there’s a rationality which could fill the gap left by God’s death, a rationality that will produce a new spirit. And this faith then becomes a faith in production, a faith that in production, he has found an object that secures the scientific nature of his insight, which is at once politically emancipatory. And in this production, he believes, people not only produce things, but also produce themselves as human beings. So Marx thinks this process in a similar way to Hegel’s self-production of the spirit, albeit as material, technical production.
Peter Engelmann: But how is spirit supposed to come about through material production?
Jean-Luc Nancy: That’s the question. I try to get to the bottom of what Marx is thinking when he says that religion is the spirit of a spiritless age. He must have had something in mind, he must have had some concept or notion of spirit. First of all, it means that religion is spiritless, it’s the imitation of spirit, but is not itself spirit. My suspicion is that Marx takes spirit as the absolute value of the human being, or takes the human being as a value, which comes to the same thing.
Peter Engelmann: So then spirit would be the essence of the human being.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, to the extent that the human being is the creature that produces itself. He writes somewhere that the spider weaves its web in a wondrous fashion, but differs from the architect – and this is the decisive point – because it doesn’t have the structure in its head beforehand. That is, he sees the human being, in vary Kantian terms, as the only creature with the ability to turn the objects of its imagination into reality. That’s essentially identical to Kant’s definition of the will. Heidegger would object that when we speak of the will in this way, we remain trapped in the self-image of Western man as a force that produces the world from within itself as its own world. So the central aspect of the idea of production is not the question of whether it’s a material or an ideational production, but rather the relationship between a subject, a project and its realization. So Marx probably sees spirit as the realization of the subject, and in this respect he remains faithful to Hegel.
Peter Engelmann: Do you see this, the metaphysical residue in Marx, as the real reason for the failure of communism?
Jean-Luc Nancy: The popular idea, as I said, was that Marxism was essentially the right way and simply had to be adapted to the new conditions. And we suspected at the time that this wasn’t the right way to approach the problem. Because what if something was wrong with Marxism itself, if Marx himself was still trapped in the realm of metaphysics – in the sense of a metaphysics of presence and presence-at-hand, as discussed by Heidegger – after all? Heidegger’s question of Being as a non-being influenced all of us – Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze – in different ways. Then we set about re-reading Marx, Nietzsche and also Husserl. And what transpired was that with them, in one way or another, Being is thought as a being. So what can it mean to think Being rigorously as a non-being? For me, that remains the central question of philosophy. And the question of spirit is exactly this question of Being as a non-being. If that is the case, one has to ask oneself what could have induced Heidegger to associate this spirit with Hitler? I say with Hitler, not with Nazism, because Heidegger knew that Nazism was a very crude metaphysics of beings – of race, blood and soil and so on. So, he believed in Hitler the man. We know Heidegger’s remark about the Fuhrer’s beautiful hands. Beautiful hands – what can that mean but spirit? So, in a very strange way, there was a moment in which Hitler seemed to present spirit for Heidegger. And perhaps something similar went through Foucault’s mind when he welcomed the Islamic Revolution as the return of the spiritual to politics.
Peter Engelmann: On the one hand, historical developments make it unlikely that a communist society can constitute the solution to all our problems; on the other hand, however, it’s also the idea and the theory of communism – we spoke of Marx the Enlightenment thinker – that have become philosophically questionable, and especially questionable with regard to spirit. Can one still preserve the idea of communism at all?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Well, one can at least return to the core of this idea, the communis – the common, the communal.
Peter Engelmann: And that’s the path your theoretical work took in 1968.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. Fascism and actually existing communism made it obvious that the ‘common’ [gemein] inscribes its own particular ambiguity into community [Gemeinschaft] and every other word in which it appears, that is, both baseness [Gemeinheit] and a connection to the general [das Allgemeine]. This indicates both the possibility of a general sense and the will to a totalitarian form which does not open itself up to all, but rather puts itself in their place by forcing itself upon them.
Peter Engelmann: But isn’t the positing of something general also – not only in the obvious case of positing as a totality, but also in the more discreet case of positing as the supposed offer of a general sense – the suppression and exclusion of particularities?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, naturally there is a risk of privileging the general. But as I said earlier, reflections on community needn’t necessarily lead to totalitarianism. Nonetheless, the concept does create a certain proximity to it. And that’s the reason why some theorists – we already spoke of Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe in this context – backed away from it. They saw the community as the general which is privileged over the individual. There were others who did use it: we’ve mentioned Blanchot, but Rancière also spoke of it and Agamben wrote The Coming Community.28 Ultimately, one probably has to pose the question of the legitimacy of this opposition – the individual/the general – for oneself, for just as there is a totalitarianism that posits a general which suppresses the individual, there is also a totalitarianism of the individual. After all, what is the subject but the totality of an inwardness? In any case, I think that the word ‘communism’, in so far as community is contained in it, indicates the direction towards spirit – because community, meaning a connection to the other, is the thing in which sense or spirit comes about. We already said that sense is impossible for a single individual. From that perspective, communism wouldn’t take the form of a government and the administration of the economy, but rather a shared sense in a joint life. We are always already together; in that sense, the community precedes the individual.
Peter Engelmann: And that’s what an individual-based – atomistic – understanding of politics overlooks. This leads to the notion that the task of politics is to create a unity.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. This understanding of politics goes back to Plato. Because the Republic was conceived and written with reference to a society that lacked unity; the unity displayed by each of the great theocratic empires had been lost. One can say that the polis is by its nature an attempt to restore the lost unity, and that Plato’s Republic also constitutes a response to the question of how that might be possible.
Peter Engelmann: To the question of how one can create political unity in the situation of a society fragmented into individuals?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. I think that the Greeks faced this challenge as a result of the destruction of the theocratic empires and the sacred order, whose framework probably hadn’t even included anything like an individual yet. Probably the individual is even an effect of this collapse. Naturally there is good reason to say that the individual, in a pronounced sense, didn’t exist yet in ancient Greece, and only came to fruition fully in Christianity. But the individual was already on the rise, so to speak.
Peter Engelmann: And you’re saying that essentially, people always kept formulating the problem of politics within the coordinates of this specific historical situation?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. The problem with that is that the French Revolution brought something into play that heightens and shifts this problematics in a radical way, because now the demand to get serious about democracy articulates itself. While Greek democracy was only open to a privileged group – the so-called freemen – and rested substantially on the exclusion of women, slaves and foreigners, the idea that all people are equal and equally free now takes root and starts to grow. That’s something completely new. But to the same extent that this caesura can mean a liberation, it’s also accompanied by a great responsibility and a considerable risk. Because the expansion of the democratic horizon also intensifies its heterogeneity. The plurality of individuals becomes a ‘plurality of pluralities’. And suddenly one’s confronted once again with the danger of a belli omnium contra omnes [war of all against all], which caused Hobbes so much worry and whose attempted prevention led to the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century.
Peter Engelmann: Would you say that both communism and fascism developed as reactions to this radical plurality?
Jean-Luc Nancy: I hold the view that they grew from the failure to give sense to plurality within the framework of democracy.