Peter Engelmann: We said that modern democracy differs substantially from Greek democracy, a democracy for freemen for which certain exclusions are constitutive.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Modern democracy marks a decisive cut: for the first time in the history of humanity, nothing is given to us any more. Greek democracy didn’t have a problem with accepting certain things almost as given by nature – most of all slavery. There was no cause for discussion: whoever is captured in war becomes a slave. But for us, nothing is given in this way any more. And I think that because of that, politics is no longer given to us either, that politics as a toolbox of administrative means has had its day. I think this is something that Foucault sensed when he started becoming increasingly interested in different ways of ruling and being ruled. I don’t know Foucault’s work very well, but I suspect that when he said about the Iranian Revolution that the spiritual was entering politics again, he had something similar in mind. He soon backed away from that again. But maybe we haven’t asked ourselves hard enough why he said that. After all, Foucault wasn’t a Muslim, he wasn’t a believer. I think he had a very acute awareness of the fact that politics – from that of the Greeks to that of the French Revolution – always needs to give itself a spiritual sense.
Peter Engelmann: A transcendental principle of legitimation?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. That’s the difference between the French and American revolutions. What matters isn’t that the latter didn’t present itself as a revolt to the same degree, but that the Declaration of Independence in which it culminated starts with God: God created humans in such a way that they have the right to act in an autonomous way. So, they received their autonomy from him; in that sense it’s given to them.
Peter Engelmann: So, the French Revolution is a caesura, and then bourgeois society develops.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Bourgeois society is the society that recognizes no principle outside itself. The democratic republic is the legal-political unity of this society and guarantees its immanence. But bourgeois society is also the society of an incipient new mode of production: capitalism. Marx therefore held the view that democracy as a form of government is only the exterior of the real government, which consists in the play of economic forces. Badiou, who follows on from there, speaks of capitalo-parliamentarianism. As far as parliamentary, representative democracy is concerned, I share this assessment, without sharing his faith in a revolution. There’s a close connection between democracy and capitalism. The development after the Second World War in particular makes it clear that democracy is the political form taken by the expansion of capitalism. This is where I see it as an intellectual trap always to think of democracy and totalitarianism in terms of oppositionality. Because to me, totalitarianisms stem from the failure of democracy to produce sense, and to be more than an administrative apparatus of capitalism.
Peter Engelmann: So, to summarize: ancient Greece saw the dissolution of the theocratic empires; the polis, perhaps Platonism itself, came about as a reaction to this collapse. As a result, our understanding of politics essentially remains shaped to this day by that historical moment in which politics sought to (re)establish a unity. Finally, with modern democracy, the explosive potential of this unity was intensified.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. Perhaps we can put it like this: the inception of democracy was not only the beginning of a new form of politics, but of a new anthropology. Because democracy is not simply a procedure to establish a political unity or the form of this unity. Rather, the birth of democracy raised the question of whether the concern for political unity can justifiably constitute the only political concern. Naturally a minimum of homogeneity is required; we need laws, institutions and so forth. But the decisive question is whether the unity defined in this or that way enables the realization of sense. The self-conception of the historical social formations – classical democracy, the Roman Empire, feudalism, and the state of modernity as a state of sovereignty – started from the assumption that they would bring about the realization and circulation of sense. But there are grave doubts about that. It’s likely that politics is always occupied with the formation of unity in one way or another, that it must seek to bring the multitude of individual interests and social forces into a certain organizational unity. But beyond this technical sense, we are still dealing with completely heterogeneous spheres of sense – thought, art and love, for example, so all the things that totalitarianism strives to deny.
Peter Engelmann: So, the democratic question is whether, against the background of a radically heterogeneous society, it is possible to avoid reducing the political to a striving for unity?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, exactly. Democracy can’t be content to produce a formal unity of society via technical procedures of administration; rather, it has to open up to what this unity cannot offer – that is, to all the different spheres of sense. And, against this background, one has to ask with every concrete political unity whether it opens up a space in which sense can realize itself and be circulated. The particularity of democracy also manifests itself in a different way. The word ‘democracy’ means: rule by the people. Very well. But what do we gain through it? Because one immediately has to ask who or what the people are. And we don’t have a good answer to that. When we speak of theocracy, oligocracy, aristocracy and so on, we at least think we know what we’re talking about. When we speak of democracy, on the other hand, we don’t have a very specific idea. One can also see this in the fact that it’s always a matter for debate at what age a person should be allowed to vote. When should one receive citizen status? In France, the voting age is eighteen; it used to be twenty-one. And it’s possible that in the future, people will already be allowed to vote at sixteen. That means one doesn’t know what a citizen is. Starkly put, one could say that in Athens and Rome and until the French Revolution, people knew more or less precisely what a free person was. There was clarity, to name a simple and powerful example, about whether a woman could be such a person too. And even during the French Revolution and at the beginning of the Republic, people were capable of deciding whether someone who didn’t own any property and had to sell their labour power for a wage could also be a citizen. The answer – at least in lived practice – was no! Marx saw that very clearly: civil rights are the rights of citizens in the sense of the bourgeoisie, namely those who have property, and therefore they are chiefly proprietary rights. Democracy not only lets the people become owners of power, it also transforms them. The idea of the demos in democracy contains something that opens itself to the possibility of communication from the start. Democracy opens up for the people, for every person, the horizon of a shared provision of sense, but it doesn’t fill it. In the previous social formations, by contrast, politics offered everyone not only a social order, but also a singular world of sense.
Peter Engelmann: So, the central point of politics concerned the belonging of humans to a world of sense, and the historical forms of society were different modalities of this belonging? Does that also apply to the nation state?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes! The nation is the idea that this belonging must be produced, if necessary by force. The French nation was created by the French kings and their ministers, sometimes very violently. In southern France they almost destroyed an entire civilization. In the sixteenth century, Francis I issued the edict of Villers-Cotterêts, which made French the sole administrative language. But long after that, many inhabitants of France still didn’t speak the French language. In the time of Louis XIV, Madame de Maintenon founded a school in which children from the provincial aristocracy were to be taught French language and culture. There’s a very good film about it. At the end of the film one sees a group of young daughters of nobles from the Bretagne, Languedoc, Alsace and so on, all speaking wildly at the same time in great excitement – but none of them are speaking French! And Madame de Maintenon says to them in French, ‘Mademoiselles, you must become French!’ The nation could only come about through the destruction of the entire feudal system. Think of Nicolas Fouquet, the last great feudal lord, who was thrown in prison by Louis XIV and whose property was annexed to the kingdom.
Peter Engelmann: So, the nation state offers a historical example of how, under the banner of an ideal – here the nation – social diversity was reduced. Then it remains the problem of democracy that it has to think universal equality and plurality together?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, but in its efforts to do justice to plurality, it mustn’t descend into a crude liberalism along the lines of ‘Everyone does what they want’. Because, as everyone knows and everyone can see, this leads to a massive deficit of sense. The equality that arises in this way is actually an enormous inequality, because people don’t all have the same chances or the same means to realize their supposed individual sense. Marx saw the ideological nature of this claim very clearly. The problem is that equality is reduced to mere equivalence, to equality before the law, for example, in such a way that the unlimited possibilities granted to each individual are simply formal possibilities, which not everyone has the same means to fill with content. If one proclaims, ‘Everything for everyone!’ it’s vital to ask what this ‘everything’ is, and what kind of subject it is that one is so generously prepared to grant a share of it. In my opinion that’s an important question. Let’s take a look at the so-called democratization of school, for example. In France we have a situation today in which the democratization of schools has revealed itself for what it is: its genuine consequence is the reinforcement of the distance between the elites and everyone else. And it’s clear to everyone that the French ministry of education currently has no interest in those who aren’t destined for the elite. Naturally people often lament the low standard of education: ‘The children can’t speak or write well any more’, and so forth. But in reality that’s not a problem at all, because it’s not necessary for everyone to be able to speak and write well. There’s enough bad cinema and the like for those who remain untarnished by culture. One could easily get worked up because no one learns Greek any more. But what one would be neglecting to ask is whether there’s actually any sense – and naturally I don’t just mean a financial sense, an economic use – for everyone to learn Greek. The ideology of democracy covers up this questionability by responding to this – and every other – political question by pointing to pure, universal equality. Then one says: everyone learns Greek. And then whoever doesn’t make use of this supposed offer, which is actually a command, only has themselves to blame. Therefore the ideology of universal equality ultimately boils down to an apologia for the elites. That’s the particular hypocrisy of democracy, or democratism. We think: yes, democracy – that’s something everything for everyone. But that’s a consumerist distortion of the actual situation. What do these words, ‘everything’ and ‘everyone’, mean here? One demands, ‘Health for everyone!’ But what does ‘health’ mean? How long should one be able or allowed to live? A hundred, two hundred years? Forever? This is an attitude that makes health subject to equivalence and to the logic of production. But what we don’t know is how anything resembling sense is supposed to result from this.
Peter Engelmann: You’re saying here that the idea of equality is reduced to the concept of equivalence. Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment: wouldn’t it at least be possible to ask whether the thinking of différance, that is, the semiotic turn in philosophy brought about by Derrida, among others, with his rejection of the representational model of language, in reality constitutes an assimilation of philosophy to capitalism? To the extent that capital floats and doesn’t stay still in capitalism, meaning drifts in the universal text.
Jean-Luc Nancy: I don’t think that’s the case. The freedom of capital comes from equivalence in the exchange of commodities. When Derrida speaks of différance or Deleuze of difference, then I think this is always an appeal to a genuine difference, something other than the difference between a hundred and two hundred euros. Anthropologically put, it’s about the difference of each person, about what Kant calls dignity (and whose status, by the way, strikes me as increasingly precarious).
Peter Engelmann: But doesn’t this description substantialize difference? Can difference actually be anything? As a divergence, isn’t it rather non-being or the non-determinable?
Jean-Luc Nancy: No, because différance with an ‘a’ isn’t a divergence. It’s the way – this is how I understand it, at least – in which a thing or the nature of a thing differs from itself, and is thus forced to becomes infinitely itself. That is, you become Peter Engelmann. But even when you die, you still won’t have been Peter Engelmann completely. And yet somehow you will have been him. This ‘have been’ points to something that’s simultaneously finished and unfinished, finite and infinite. Its meaning can’t be fixed. So then it’s not a matter of a substantialization – I’d even say: a subjectification – of difference, because an infinity opens up with every person or every living creature.
Peter Engelmann: Let’s return to our central question, namely how one can give sense to democracy as community. Do you think the project of the European community is a possible answer to this question?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Historically there have certainly been different opportunities to refer to Europe as a shared sense. I’m thinking of the Europe of monasteries in the Middle Ages, the Europe of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, or of the big cities, the bourgeoisie and trade in the nineteenth century. But then came a century of wars in which the nation state was at the centre as a unity that could provide sense, and destroyed any element of European sense that might have existed. So far, this fragmentation hasn’t led to a new Europe, at least not one of sense. It’s a popular question: will there be a united Europe again? I don’t think it’ll happen. Because, as I said, there’s no shared form, no sense, that could unite Europe. Succinctly put: Europe has no sense, Europe has a market. A large market with many problems that finds it hard to become a real market, as it were, and Europe finds it even harder to become more than a market.
Peter Engelmann: So you’re saying that the only narrative that works, because it supposedly provides sense, is the nation?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. And that’s why patriotism and national pride are flaring up everywhere today, and in some cases, like that of the Lega Nord in Italy, even regional pride. Perhaps Europe is a name that has been lent a different sense time and again over the centuries. One period in which Europe managed to give itself a shared sense was the Enlightenment: in the Enlightenment, people could feel like Europeans. From Voltaire to Goethe, from Hume to Frederick the Great … But the competition between the nation states began soon afterwards.
Peter Engelmann: But isn’t it conceivable – and this is precisely what the post-war discourse is about – that one might overcome this competition, which cost millions of lives, within Europe in favour of commonality, not least recalling the 2,000 years of history in which there was a Europe, as you say? I wouldn’t want to write off the project.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Today I would ask: isn’t it already too late for that? Wasn’t it already too late in 1945 too, when America and Russia divided up Europe among themselves and Europe found itself caught in the middle between a capitalism and what presented itself at the time as an anti-capitalism but, in reality, as we know today, was just a state capitalism – so that Europe was no more than the battleground on which one capitalism and another capitalism fought for supremacy?
Peter Engelmann: Well, in 1989 democratic capitalism won and expanded to European countries that previously belonged to the Soviet Union. Can’t we entertain the hope that a new Europe might come about with the end of this division, or is everything already America anyway?
Jean-Luc Nancy: That’s the question. I don’t want to say whether I think that’s the case. If I look out of the window here I see Paris, but if I go out into the street, if won’t take long before I see McDonald’s and so on.
Peter Engelmann: I don’t think it’s happened yet. I think that there’s at least a longing for a European identity, a longing not to be America.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, that’s true. Perhaps it means that ‘Europe’ is becoming the term for the very thing we’re talking about. A name for something for which we don’t have a political model at the ready yet, which would also be the reason why we can’t practise European politics. From that perspective, Europe would be the name for a sense that hasn’t taken place yet, for a way of dealing with capitalism, technology, democracy and so forth that has yet to be defined, but which would be neither that of America nor of China.
Peter Engelmann: The attempt to enshrine the rule of law as a principle of society strikes me as characteristically European. In your opinion, would the expansion and consolidation of the rule of law be a worthwhile prospect?
Jean-Luc Nancy: That’s a very difficult question. Let me just point out two things with reference to that: first of all, the rule of law is not a guarantee that prevents any severe violations of the law. Furthermore, the establishment of law always takes place via an exclusion. In the case of Europe, that might mean that its establishment would come at the cost of fencing it in.
Peter Engelmann: But that doesn’t mean one should view the subject of the rule of law as finished. I had to encounter conditions in the GDR where the law didn’t count, everything was controlled by the tyranny of the secret police and the central committees. Against this background, I think that the rule of law in Europe is very much worth striving for, both within the European states and in the relations between the states.
Jean-Luc Nancy: But you just said it yourself: within.
Peter Engelmann: But I also said, in the relations between the states.
Jean-Luc Nancy: But you’re simply shifting the problem. One can see that in Schengen: we can’t found a new Europe without establishing a new border around Europe.
Peter Engelmann: But how are things outside of Europe? We can see people fighting for the rule of law in Tunisia, for example, for regulated ways to negotiate between interests, the right to freedom of speech and similar things. Equal rights for women were recently enshrined in the constitution. Surely it would be arrogant to bury the question of human rights because we’re so well off in Europe.
Jean-Luc Nancy: I agree with you, of course: we need human rights. But what we – perhaps only we philosophers – don’t have to hand is the human. Who is the human of these human rights? We don’t exactly know, even though we live in a world that began with Kant and his three questions of knowledge, morals and religion, which culminate in the fourth question, ‘What is the human being?’ We are a culture or a civilization that stands without the answer to its own question, as it were. Perhaps it’s not such a bad thing to be without an answer, because it’s possible that having an answer always leads to religion. Nonetheless, I don’t think one should adopt a purely negative point of view. One can, for example, content oneself with only speaking of democracy in a negative way (as the absence of its own sense). Claude Lefort took this approach and spoke about democracy in a very American way, demanding that one should dispense with the symbolic presence of democracy in the same way one dispenses with a cult of personality. That’s the topos of the jointly inhabited empty space of democracy, where no monument should be erected. That’s already familiar from Jules Michelet – I think Lefort also quotes him – in whose time the Eiffel Tower hadn’t been built yet and the Champ de Mars was still empty. In his history of the French Revolution, he writes: Le Champ de Mars vide est le seul monument de la Republique – the empty Champ de Mars is the only monument to the Republic, and the citizens can assemble in this empty space.29 All right, but I always ask myself: is that enough? We’re living in a different time now. The Champ de Mars has the Eiffel Tower, which in turn belongs to a time when technology could still monumentalize itself. The Eiffel Tower – that’s technology sacralizing and monumentalizing itself. But the Eiffel Tower as a monument to technology is also the last of its kind. The most monumental thing in our time is probably the Internet, but that doesn’t look like a monument. So, what have we gained, if we refrain from erecting a monument to democracy on the Champ de Mars or making reference to it in a positive fashion in our discourse? What does this shared place offer us, what kind of publicity is supposed to come about here? We don’t know. That means the place that was supposed to be reserved for democracy remains empty. And to escape the quandary of this emptiness, we speak of elections. That’s what leads to the constant repetitions of the same discussions about elections: what does it mean to vote? And one also hears the old slogan again: élections, piège à cons –
Peter Engelmann: A trap for fools.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. A person who votes and believes they are carrying out a political act is really only performing an empty gesture. In 2012, the magazine Ligne devoted a whole issue to elections (I think I also wrote an essay for it). If you read that issue, you’ll find that roughly half of the articles are in favour of elections, while the other half reject them. But even those in favour don’t simply support elections; each one suggests different modalizations. In the light of this, Rancière suggested that one should go all the way with political equality and assign political posts, as the Greeks did for certain positions in the state, by tirage au sort – drawing lots.
Peter Engelmann: So that means that even elections can’t give democracy any sense – they’re simply a trap for fools. So, we remain in search of sense ...
Jean-Luc Nancy: I would say, yes, we’re searching for spirit. The search for spirit, unlike the search for a better form of politics – to me, that’s the decisive thing. Of course, it’s probably possible here and there to improve politics in the technical sense, as administration. For example, you spoke in this context of expanding the rule of law. But the question remains, even in the face of such measures: what about spirit? Though one should also avoid speaking too hastily of spiritlessness. Perhaps spirit is indeed there, and one just has to know how to look. Perhaps it’s the same as with God, of whom Hölderlin says that he’s as evident as the sky.
Peter Engelmann: But you don’t agree with that, do you?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Why not? I don’t know. Naturally there are conditions that give one a strong urge to do something about them, for example to take steps to improve the lives of workers. And obviously that’s desirable. But one shouldn’t overlook the fact that the lives of the people one is seeking to help are not just limited to work and wages, or rather, that the work is part of a life praxis. There’s now a direction in the theoretical study of work which is increasingly moving away from Marxism, because Marxism views work primarily in terms of wages and neglects the lives and the praxis of the workers.
Peter Engelmann: You’re referring to the meaning of work for the workers?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. Nowadays, with a company going bankrupt every other week and factories closing, one sees that very clearly. Because the workers who are losing their work and their wages as a result don’t only lament the loss of what may be their only source of income, but also the loss of their activity. They’re saying: we were the ones who produced this or that thing; we know how to make it and make it well; we prided ourselves in our work ...
Peter Engelmann: That means work has a sense for them – a spirit?
Jean-Luc Nancy: A spirit, yes. Naturally this spirit is very modest, very questionable, and if I speak of work in this way, it’s certainly not unreasonable to accuse me, or at least to point to the danger, of secretly drifting rightwards and thus becoming a cryptoliberal who serenely claims that there are no problems with wage labour. Naturally that’s not my intention. But I do think we’ve reached a point where it’s no longer purely about working conditions and wage conditions. It’s also about giving our coexistence a specific sense, and to ask where the spirit is in the face of this society, which wants to be neither one thing nor another and is therefore hardly a society at all. Until the nineteenth century, people knew in one way or another that sense can only come about in coexistence. Perhaps it’s simply that we’ve forgotten that, and really don’t know how to live with one another any more. But that’s a drastic assessment that I can’t entirely agree with. Because, as one can see, there is communication and we live together, even in a world of globalization that enables us in a completely different way to engage with foreign languages, customs and cultures. The forms of Asian or African art, for example, are no longer as foreign to us as they were for Europeans in the eighteenth century.
Peter Engelmann: You say, with certain qualifications, that community – or at least the knowledge about community – has been lost. I would disagree. I think that even after the emergence of the nation state as a political principle, communities didn’t disappear. There are still national communities, communities of faith or interests, and so on. And people also see themselves as communal beings, as part of one community or another.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Naturally people still nominally belong to communities today: they’re members in communities of work or interests. But if one looks for a moment at the national communities you refer to: where do national communities stand today, what significance does the nation have for the community? What does the popularity of regional autonomy movements in Europe mean in this context, for example?
Peter Engelmann: Do you mean to say that the sense of these types of community is somewhat lacking, especially because of their particularism? There’s never been a global or universal community.
Jean-Luc Nancy: No, the problem lies elsewhere. Communities call each other into question because there are competing senses of belonging. For humans, that leads to the problem of their identity. One asks oneself: am I an Arab or a Muslim; can one be an Arab without being a Muslim? Am I first of all a Frenchman or a Catholic? That plays an important part in the current debate in France about same-sex marriage, for example. Fundamentally speaking, one can say that Europe is defining itself less and less as a community of faith. That’s quite different in America, where the motto is still ‘God bless America’. On the one hand, many people who used to define themselves as Christians have become humanists, socialists and so forth. That’s more or less true of me. On the other hand, Islam has a stronger presence in Europe than before, and brings into play its very own understanding of the relationship between humans and God or the community.
Peter Engelmann: So, there are various attempts to find and provide sense among highly particularized communities, each with their own horizon of sense.
Jean-Luc Nancy: The field of the political has always been characterized by a certain ambiguity: on the one hand, people simply expect politics to regulate social forces and interests, but on the other hand, politics should also be the name for precisely what we’ve called community, for a sense or spirit. But naturally there’s a suspicion that from Rome to the Third Reich, this spirit, in its various manifestations, was never anything but an idol – an empty, spiritless phantasm for the benefit of those in power and to the detriment of all others. Yet one can also ask oneself whether Bataille, when he wrote about the gloire du roi – the glory of the king – which radiated positively upon all his subjects, was pointing to something true. Bataille himself doesn’t insist on it, and concludes that the whole of history is rather a sad history of oppression and war. But to me, the question remains nonetheless.
Peter Engelmann: You’re saying that those weren’t just idols, there was genuine spirit there?
Jean-Luc Nancy: I’m saying that it remains an open question. Was Marx right – and others too, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard – when he declared his time a spiritless one?
Peter Engelmann: That was the usual diagnosis from the middle of the nineteenth century on.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. But Heidegger took it a step further when he said, in his famous interview with Der Spiegel, that even democracy can’t save us, only a new god can. What does that mean? Some people drew the most obvious conclusion and spoke of Heidegger’s turn towards religion. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Heidegger was more intelligent than that. The mention of God can only be a reference to the possibility of a sense being somehow conveyed in society. It’s along the same lines as Pascal’s dictum that man infinitely surpasses man. The question of spirit is the question as to the possibility of humans to gain access to something superhuman.
Peter Engelmann: And religion offers a possible way to achieve that?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, but religion, as far as we know, was also always a means of social oppression.
Peter Engelmann: That means that religion presents us with the same situation as communism: both of them are characterized by the ambiguity that on the one hand, they aim to provide sense, yet on the other hand – as far as their historical realizations go – they lead to oppression and death.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Perhaps it was even worse with communism than with the church. What’s clear is that the old ways of asking and answering won’t get us any further. We have to understand that we’re at the start of a new era, where it leads nowhere to keep bringing the same means and ends into play. It’s a matter of developing a feeling, a notion of what new things are in the process of emerging. That’s very difficult, of course. At the beginning we spoke about how I had the feeling with Derrida back then that something new, a new way of philosophizing was in the offing. Derrida wasn’t alone; Deleuze, Foucault and others had a share in it too. Of course, everything isn’t renewed at the same time, there are regressions and the like. We saw how in Marx, for example, there is already an ambivalence: the adherence to the rationality of the Enlightenment and the thematization of spirit. I hold the view that this intuition also manifests itself in the work of other philosophers. I’m thinking of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Kierkegaard’s relation to the absolute, and of course Heidegger’s Ereignis. If one takes a look at the history of art, one will likewise find intimations of something new here. Think of Cézanne, who, in the nineteenth century, began painting in a way that perhaps wasn’t just unusual at the time, but even – against the background of established art – could be interpreted as a mistake, an error of painting. In music, it was above all Wagner who paved the way for a transformation of music with his endless melody.