PIERRE-PHILIPPE JANDIN: Knowing your taste for pastiche and parody, I’m almost tempted to introduce our discussion like Heidegger when he offers a biography of Aristotle: “Jean-Luc Nancy was born, he worked, and he’s still working.” Because it’s very true that you demonstrate constant attention to the world—to our world, which has almost disappeared, and to the coming world. In any case, to understand your approach, and without mistaking “thinker” and “philosopher” for synonyms today, the academic question that presents itself is: How did you become a philosopher? Especially since you gave a lecture in 2002 at the Centre Pompidou entitled: “I Never Became a Philosopher.” What’s this non-becoming, then?
JEAN-LUC NANCY: The title of that talk was a bit provocative and presumptuous. But something suddenly struck me when the Centre Pompidou posed this question:1 I didn’t become a philosopher because I’ve always been one. All that I’ve known, or all that I’ve experienced, took place against a background that I wouldn’t call philosophical, though it’s close to it—a background of interest in the things of thought, in conceptions.
P.-P.J.: I think you also speak about an experience of the uncanny felt in your relationship to the world; like when you were a child and rode in a car at night, you wondered where the trees, which were lit by the beams of the headlights, went once they were out of sight.
J.-L.N.: Many children ask themselves these kinds of questions. During my first years in Baden-Baden, I remember very well that when we returned home, we would walk up a street alongside a vast wrought iron fence that ran in front of several yards. The fence had these elaborate patterns, and I’d get lost in speculations about the necessity or non-necessity of all these adornments. I wondered whether it was necessary to make them or not, or what could be done with the metal that would be recuperated if all of these things were removed—the spectacle of these ornamentations wielded a sort of fascination. I believe there’s something one can find in each of us that comes from having been a bit cut off from the world, without this being a painful or unhappy detachment, and at the same time without it being a sort of withdrawal. Very early on in life, I took great pleasure in walking in the countryside all alone, or with a dog I adopted in high school, who became my companion. I still had friends and many acquaintances. But I’ve always had a taste for meandering alone in nature, or for being immersed in manual labor—for example, with the farmers from a neighboring farm where I enjoyed cutting tobacco, harvesting grapes, picking corn, and so on. I’ve always enjoyed manual labor for how it entails withdrawing from all of the rest of the world. When you’re immersed in a material task, you start to think only about “How will I do this? Which way should I go? How should I chop the wood with my axe, or put the grapes in the basket?”—I felt all of this intensely. On the other hand, I’ve also always been totally absorbed while reading. For me, these two sensations are associated: In reading as well, there’s a kind of solitude, a withdrawal, an entrance into another world that was, in my high school years, for example, the world of Balzac or Zola.
Philosophy was there at least in the form of thought for its own sake. A thought that wasn’t applied to any determinate object. I did apply it to objects in the context of militant action—for example, to the collège unique,2 to the democratization of education, or to biblical objects. But throughout all of this, there was perhaps no object. My taste was certainly frenzied and encyclopedic: I often read dictionaries, such as the two-volume Grand Larousse—for example, the illustration with the fortified castles. But it wasn’t for the pleasure of learning—I never became a real savant. My enjoyment was in seeing words like machicolation, bartizan, and so on. There was a taste for language, but this taste remained tied to what I would call a thought without an object, spinning in its own tracks.
P.-P.J.: You’ve been talking about the terms in which you first related to the world. I’d now like to ask you how the world was when you entered into it. By what path, which was more or less chosen, did you make your way into the world?
J.-L.N.: The world, when I entered into it, was the world of World War II. It’s as if I’d been conceived at the start of the war in late 1939—I was born in July of 1940. But the date on which you’re born doesn’t have much overall importance because you aren’t aware of the world you enter. I was born in the thick of war, in the occupied zone in Bordeaux. My parents had been forced to evacuate after the surrender of June 1940. Then I grew up there until the Liberation in 1945. The world of my early childhood is thus a bit unusual, the world of occupied France, but I was unaware of it. I have a very vague memory of hearing someone talking about the Kommandantur or the fact that a friend of my parents was in the resistance, which I learned only after the war of course. My parents were not in the resistance; I wandered in this atmosphere that was ordinary and removed from the events of the world, which was similar for many children who were born at the beginning of the conflict. At the end of the war, I have a fairly good memory of the Liberation parade in Bordeaux, but this parade was just another form of entertainment. I have a memory of the first election, the ballots that were distributed … and also, immediately, of the first contact with America, because I went to the movie theater in Bordeaux with my grandfather and saw Dumbo, the animated cartoon by Walt Disney … What always struck me is that the Americans were very organized and things arrived quickly—movies too, not only chocolate and chewing gum!
Afterwards, my father was assigned to the French occupation troops in Germany because he was a military engineer and had learned German in school—his own father, a man of very modest means who spoke no foreign languages and had fought in World War I, had wanted his son to learn German so that there would be no more war. So my family left for Germany. I had a sister who was born in 1942. A brother and two other sisters were born later on. I spent the next five or six years in Baden-Baden, so the true location of my childhood was there. I spent all of these years in an occupied country. I have a somewhat strange memory of empty storefronts, but I’m struck by the fact that I don’t remember much of anything else. I had never been told about the war back then, or at least I have no memory of being told about it. Still I have a very precise memory of having rummaged through a huge heap of magazines and books one day that were piled up in the courtyard of a castle in Baden-Baden, and I took a special edition recounting a trip that Hitler took throughout Germany, meeting children, women, and the elderly. I also picked up a Nazi primary school reading book that was printed in Gothic script (Fraktur) and had several images of little boys and girls in Hitler-Jugend outfits, bearing swastika armbands, dancing around maypoles, and so on. I’ve always wondered why I picked up those books. It probably wasn’t by chance, but I don’t know what I was aware of exactly. I really don’t know.
I returned to France in 1951 in the middle of my sixth grade year, which I’d begun in Germany in Baden-Baden in a French lycée that was named after Charles de Gaulle. When I returned to France—in the Southwest, in Bergerac—I was still so unaware about the war that I continued to wear lederhosen because it was an extremely practical outfit that didn’t rip or stain easily. But Dordogne was a place where there had been Maquis and resistance fighters, some of whom had been executed by the Germans. This explains why some of my comrades did not appreciate my lederhosen or the fact that I spoke German, which I probably bragged about. This led to getting into some fights. It was rather strange that people without any political awareness, like my parents, could allow the enormity of what was happening to pass by their child unnoticed. Basically, I grew up with this kind of unawareness, until little by little some things began to happen. One event in particular was the revelation of the Jews’ existence, because, in my mind, I’d completely assimilated the Jews to the Hebrews whom I was learning about in catechism—Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and so on. So one day—I was about 15 perhaps—a classmate from North Africa said to me as we were coming out of a shop where I was having stamps made for an organization: “Did you see that guy?” I replied, “What? What was there to see?” He said, “He’s a Jew!” And then, in 1956, when I was 16, there was the Hungary affair. At this time, I remember seeing the flyers denouncing the Russians in Budapest, and a group of classmates in the street … One of my best friends at the time was Henri Nallet—he’s still a friend—who went on to become the minister of agriculture and justice. His father was one of Pierre Poujade’s lieutenants. I have to say that all of this was pretty foggy to me, even if the political behavior of Henri’s father left a strange impression on me as something of an attitude or cause that I felt wasn’t really defensible. I suspected something, particularly in the opposition to State control, to taxation, and in the refusal of financial audits. And so, for me, the world was steeped in an atmosphere that was extremely vague and politically, morally, and ethically unclear.
Things could have remained that way if the Young Christian Students (YCS) hadn’t recruited me.3 This occurred when I met the chaplain of my lycée, Abbot Barré, a very dynamic young priest who was not an intellectual but whose training had been marked by leftist Catholicism. This took place at the public middle school Henry IV in Bergerac. So I started participating in this movement, which at first consisted of meeting to work on biblical texts. As I realized much later, this was certainly the beginning of something for me, the beginning of a relationship with texts as an inexhaustible resource of meaning or sense [sens]. The biggest revelation that I had through this exercise was that, in a text, there is practically an infinite reserve of sense. This kind of relationship to a text was already a specific one in a Catholic context—which is to say that Protestantism and hermeneutics had influenced it. Basically, this is what I was trained to do: One has to interpret a text and this interpretation is infinite. Of course, we weren’t taught the four senses of scripture, but this was the mindset. In addition to this, throughout these years the YCS took militant action at the school and for the school. We worked in every possible way—by informing ourselves and by participating in campaigns for the democratization of education. The major issue, among others, was the question concerning the steps to reform the collège according to the Langevin-Wallon Plan. I participated in this type of activity for quite a long time afterwards, beginning with student unions, which in turn led me to unionization more broadly and to the internal transformation of the CFTC4 through a movement called “Reconstruction.” The point was to reconstruct syndicalism on something other than a religious basis: that’s how the CFTC became, for most of its members, the CFDT.5
So, for me, two paths opened at once: a path of social and political activism, which was becoming increasingly independent, and another path, a relationship to the Bible and the evangelical message, which continued to have consequences on interpreting texts, even as the adherence to religion slowly diminished. All of this played an important role. This was the initial ferment of my intellectual formation.
P.-P.J.: In the end, this ferment came from a political and religious engagement that, at this young age, you couldn’t have theorized as such …
J.-L.N.: What happened is rather that during this time—I can’t date it precisely, but it was between the last year of high school and hypokhâgne6—I became aware, as a result of an article that I’d read, that social but also intellectual advocacy (thinking and acting for democracy, for example) could be carried out without referring to religion. At that same moment, I felt that the properly religious relationship that I was able to have—what could only be called a relationship based on prayer, I believe—was shaken. The parallelism between religion and politics diverged considerably because, on the one hand, what I did politically did not need a religious basis, and, on the other hand, the mere possibility of being in what I could think of as a relationship to God—addressing him, having to recognize myself as a sinner, having to confess, having to receive the communion of the body of Christ—all of this had completely lost any substance. At the same time, I have to say that another basso continuo7 played on with insistence—the urge to write. I wrote a great deal of poems, which is probably just a childhood practice that’s ingrained in our culture. I think more and more that there’s a marked difference between writing poems and writing stories or diary entries. What really interested me was writing poems in traditional forms, the sonnet in particular.
P.-P.J.: Even as an adult, you’ve worked with these forms quite well. I remember this parody of “The Young Fate” [La Jeune Parque], which became “The Young Skate” [La Jeune Carpe] …
J.-L.N.: Yes, because when I wrote “The Young Skate” it was to go back to a habit that I’d had for a very long time, from the age of twelve to twenty-two. I moved on from the sonnet to free verse—I even tried to publish some and I was put in my place by Camille Bourniquel, who was the literary advisor for the journal Esprit.
P.-P.J.: You submitted your first poems to the journal Esprit?
J.-L.N.: I was put in contact with Esprit in my twenties because the bishops of France had just condemned the Young Christian Students because, since the beginning of the Algerian War, they’d taken positions that were judged to be too leftist—I shared their view incidentally since I worked for the YCS newspaper. This led to some tense family relationships because this wasn’t how my father saw things.
P.-P.J.: 1954 is, in fact, the year the Algerian War began; it’s also the year when the experiment of the worker-priest was condemned.
J.-L.N.: Yes, and in 1956 the YCS was condemned. It was an earthquake for all of the activists. The question then became whether to stay or leave. Henri Nallet, who had been my companion in the YCS throughout high school and who had subsequently become responsible for the national team, decided to stay in order to try to maintain the spirit of the movement, despite the condemnation. But as for me, I said no. So I left. This played an important role: It was an emphatic break from an institution where I had never sensed any discord, even though it could’ve already been there.
And this is why, because I really wanted to have my poems published, I brought them to Esprit. I was told politely that they needed more work. I was bitter … At the same time, I did some theater, I put together a small troupe. Quite a bit of literary activism preceded my entry into philosophical work.
P.-P.J.: In Retreating the Political,8 you recall this double origin: Esprit and the CFDT …
J.-L.N.: Exactly. I was then introduced to the people of Esprit by Robert Fraisse, who died not long ago. He was educated at the École polytechnique9 and spent his life at the Commissariat au Plan10 in a spirit of socialist-leaning progressivism inspired by Christianity. In 1963, we’d both been invited to a sort of internal colloquium at Esprit on the question of our generation’s silence.
P.-P.J.: Hence your article, “A Certain Silence,” published the same year in that journal. Other articles would follow, notably, in 1967, “Catechism of Perseverance.” We should probably note here that the texts are contemporary with the Second Vatican Council.
J.-L.N.: Sure.
P.-P.J.: At that moment, like Gérard Granel, for example, you still had a discourse that was couched in faith, but one that was opposed to a certain conception of the magisterium.
J.-L.N.: At least to a certain conception of the magisterium, if not to its entire edifice. There was the question of the ecclesiastical institution as such. I often thought to myself that basically this question was never really asked because, for Granel, or for myself, I know that there’s a notion of the Church as something other than an institution; the Church can also be presented as a people, a flock, a notion that is not as hollow or communitarian, as sheep-like as it might sound. I think that in general people have neglected this question because everything was covered over by the image of the Roman Catholic Church, the hierarchy, the magisterium, the dogmatic edifice, and so on. One should keep in mind that all of this was happening within a context of great intellectual and spiritual activity.
Concerning Vatican II, I think I had the feeling that it was arriving too late. John XXIII was a person who attracted sympathy, but we already knew that what Vatican II touched upon had been touched upon before as soon as the Church had had to take stock of the new things at stake in modernity. Vatican II intervened ten years after the start of the thinking it concerned itself with, and no one trusted the Church anymore to solve these problems. It was suspected that the attempt at aggiornamento, or reform, lagged desperately behind something that could no longer be dealt with from within the Church. The real situation at the time must have been even more complicated than the one analyzed in my article “Catechism of Perseverance.”
In fact, I remember well why I chose this title. It was a phrase that had become obsolete. It was used to describe the catechism as an educational institution for those who had already received Confirmation, and thus who no longer had to learn a catechism in preparation for Confirmation. The catechism of perseverance meant that those who were confirmed continued to educate themselves in order to gain a deeper understanding of the articles of faith even though there was no longer any institutional requirement for it. With this title, I wanted to imply that beyond any institutional requirement, perhaps even beyond belonging to the Church, there remained something for which one should persevere.
There was a restlessness within Catholicism, which in France represents a great deal and basically meant the entire, extended discovery by the Catholics of all of the Protestant work of demythologization; it wasn’t just a question of the hermeneutic tradition anymore, but also an issue of interpretation that went much further and crisscrossed with philosophical paths. Because interpretation, that was Gadamer’s concern, and Gadamer was one of the first and most important students of Heidegger to have placed an emphasis on the hermeneutic demand. A great number of things came together at that moment. Some Jesuits and a few Dominicans undertook an enormous effort toward the intellectual opening of the Church to philosophy—Jean-Yves Calvez with his works on Marx, Xavier Tilliette on Schelling, François Marty on Kant, and Georges Morel, who gave a course on Hegel to a circle of Catholic students, which a khâgne11 classmate from Louis-le-Grand brought me to … There were all of these transformations and there were also defections from the Catholic Church; at the same time you saw the beginning of an internal reassessment within Marxism, which led to the Althusser phenomenon, himself preceded and accompanied by other signs of reassessment, for example on the concept of “alienation”—I’d been struck by the fact that the communist students’ periodical, Le Nouveau Clarté, had devoted an issue to this question of alienation at the beginning of the ’60s. There had been this entire shift through which several thinkers arrived—Althusser; Foucault, who had already entered the scene but in a less visible way; Deleuze, with his Nietzsche,12 which I had read before Difference and Repetition;13 Derrida, of course; and, in between the two, Lévi-Strauss, as well as Lacan (even though Lacan hadn’t yet published anything at that point). But I believe that if, in 1963 at Esprit, my generation was being interrogated about its silence, this was because people like those at Esprit thought they had a strong, well-established tradition that one only had to manage, a tradition that was Christian, humanistic, social, etc., and they were beginning to be a bit worried because they thought that the younger generation didn’t quite adhere to this tradition and felt that it wasn’t being renewed. Also, at that moment Jean-Marie Domenach wrote a book on the tragic14 and I think that it was because he was aware of this … There was unrest and, at the same time, everything that the other names indicate, what was called “the thought of ’68,” had started to make its mark and spread. As for me, the day that I discovered Derrida’s text for the first time in 1964, a text that had been published since 1962, I felt that something was bursting open. There was a timeliness to this thought, and the very language that was absent, which Esprit had called into question in 1963, was no longer absent. A new language was trying, at least, to find itself. This is how I entered ’68, absolutely not by way of the intra-university tremors that sparked it all, the question of the sociology and psychology students, or the question of the university campuses, etc. All of these phenomena became pressing issues because of a great intellectual transformation that touched upon Marxism and the question of the representation of society and history—the question of the sense of history, the sense of struggles.
One mustn’t forget that this profound upheaval of ideas took place at the same time as the Algerian War was coming to a close, an end marked by an immense ambivalence: On the one hand, we thought that the good cause, that of decolonization, had triumphed, but, on the other hand, I have a very good memory of a general awareness that the leaders of the new Algeria were Stalinists, with a very harsh, very violent party apparatus, which by the way had already undertaken serious eliminations, internal purges, things that were not discussed publicly for a very long time15—even if I don’t recall very well what I knew about it back then. For my part, I became aware of this during a program to train professors for the future Algeria; the project had been developed covertly and was then carried out in broad daylight. But this training program, in which I participated, was supervised by FLN representatives, and I was shocked because I had never experienced authoritarianism or ideological censorship. Because I hadn’t been around the Communist Party much, I hadn’t experienced this kind of situation, and I was overcome by the feeling that the entire anti-colonial struggle had wound up at this impasse.
P.-P.J.: Perhaps this is also the feeling that emerged after Bandung (April 18–24, 1955) when the hopes that this conference had given rise to were dashed. This even led some people to conclude that colonization was preferable given that we’d been unable to get rid of it democratically …
J.-L.N.: For me, it didn’t make me think that colonization was a good thing but that decolonization was going awry. The Bandung Conference signified a great deal of things for us, the young Christian activists. I found a pile of notes a few years ago from around that time on the Quran, which I had been reading in the ’50s. I’d completely forgotten that, as a young Christian, I had read the Quran, because I had been told: To be well educated, one must not only read the Bible but also the Quran.
P.-P.J.: Speaking of which, you’ve quoted the Quran in your recent works.
J.-L.N.: Yes, I reread it. But I completely forgot that I had already read it. I knew I’d read Berque, Massignon—for example, his book The Passion of al Hallaāj16—a little Corbin too … But I was struck in a similar way by the unpublished manuscripts of Levinas—I’ve been working on publishing the third volume of his writings.17 In the texts that were written in Russian, around the 20s, next to some poems, a good number of which are even Christian, there are stories, and among them, one or two are Islamic stories, that is to say that they are written according to the model of the Oriental story with mention of the Prophet, Allah, and moralizing anecdotes … It’s quite astounding that a Jew from Lithuania had any connection to this literary model—a bit like how One Thousand and One Nights could be a model for Proust. I have a rather strange feeling when I think about the presence of this Islamic reference, which was evidently a very literary and bookish one, in the absence of actual Muslim people …
P.-P.J.: I’m noticing something fascinating: You’ve introduced your journey into the world through a religious path and a “political” path, in a broad sense, yet, according to your official title, you’re a professor of philosophy and we’ve witnessed the entry into philosophy through this Hegelian Jesuit.
J.-L.N.: I’d say that when I came upon Hegel, it was the first philosopher that was introduced to me in a lively manner. But as for philosophy itself … I was already studying philosophy at that time.
P.-P.J.: What may come as a surprise for someone who is familiar with your work is to discover that you were a Hegelian at first and to learn, through reading your interview with Dominique Janicaud,18 that you came upon Heidegger—whom you often make references to later on—a bit late, a bit indirectly, even irreverently, through a pastiche!
J.-L.N.: I was introduced to Heidegger through a friend, François Warin,19 who had studied under Beaufret in khâgne, and who had been in contact with François Vezin, among others. I discovered Heidegger through him and, even if he himself had never been a “Beaufretian,” he came out of this environment. Besides Hegel, I knew something else; I’d had a Thomist professor to start with, in khâgne in Toulouse. As for Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism,20 it had had a comic effect on me—man as a “shepherd of Being” … Incidentally, even today, I think that the “shepherd of Being” is not what is needed for thinking. Something about it always runs the risk of verging on a sort of piety, a way of being in devotion. This made me want to parody Heidegger and mock Heideggerians, and I managed to trick François Warin, who truly believed that Heidegger had written a text on Auguste Comte—which is what I had chosen to write. So, that’s how I first encountered Heidegger and I believe that I owe my having persevered with this author to François Warin’s insistence. A little later on I discovered Sein und Zeit;21 incidentally, I’m not finished with Sein und Zeit and I don’t think anyone is. This does not mean that one should always return to it, but that it’s a moment—a turning point—that’s necessarily inexhaustible, it shifted the balance, in the same way that the Critique of Pure Reason did. When I had to study Kant, that is, when I had to study it for the agrégation22—because I had never thoroughly considered his work before—I started to take into account the enormity of the Kantian operation, which appeared greater than that of Hegel to me. Kant accounts for a considerable transformation, which had already occurred and was that of the modern sciences, and secondarily, of modern politics. The point of departure is that of the sciences and the question of sensibility. And to come up with pure, a priori sensibility, that’s really something.
P.-P.J.: A priori sensibility, this seems like a monstrous contradiction, an oxymoron at the very least.
J.-L.N.: I think the tension that’s created in Kant by this oxymoron also generates the greatest difficulties, the difficulty of the definition of the schema or the problem that Juan Manuel Garrido tackled,23 the question of the a priori formation of the forms.
But these difficulties are worth the trouble because, thanks to them a new path or new life of philosophy begins with Kant. The systems of the representation of the world found themselves called into question, long before Heidegger said that the era of the “conceptions of the world” had come to an end; even though new possibilities of representations of the world are put forth with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, from then on something prevents a representation of the world from being constituted and analyzed in the same way as in Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, and so on. What changes with Kant—what he himself says, basically—is that pure reason is practical, that pure reason in its theoretical use can no longer have an object, so that representations are dismissed or at least can’t have the same status as they did before. By contrast, pure reason is in itself practical, which is why it doesn’t need a critique, but rather a critique of its use. What Kant taught us is that, in its simplest formulation, pure reason is practical in itself. I find this lesson lively and dynamic because it means that in our desire for the unconditioned, in our desire for sense, we’re practical, we act in the world, and so, a priori sensibility, one could say, is praxis. In every case, I am in action. This action relates to ends that cannot be grasped by a determinable idea such as freedom; in this sense, I would say that Kant makes Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche possible. From then on, philosophy wants to be an account or act [acte] and transformation of the world. This doesn’t mean that the idea of a self-realizing philosophy is anything more than illusory, but that’s another matter.
To go back to Hegel, I think Georges Morel introduced me to Hegel as an author whose thought, and whose language to express this thought, were engaged in practical, sensible action. In the end, I didn’t see Hegel as a philosopher who drew a large fresco on a wall in order to look at it, but rather as a thought that engages itself at the cost of extremely difficult, complicated work and linguistic effort at the limit of intelligibility. I found something in it that in any case I couldn’t really see in Kant—this extraordinary desire to capture everything, to name everything, to predicate everything in order to be able to suppress all predication in the speculative. This absolutely thrilled me. The idea of eliminating the opposition of the subject and the predicate in what Hegel calls the speculative proposition was completely fascinating to me.
P.-P.J.: Isn’t it also about measuring oneself against this inaugural gesture of separation, be it in Kant or in your own work, between the sensible and the intelligible? Because if one goes back to the example of Kant, one does notice the surprising silence between the Letter to Marcus Herz (1772) and the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), a letter in which he pointed out that basically there was one thing that had never been thought by metaphysics: the relationship between the sensible and the intelligible.
J.-L.N.: I had the feeling that Hegel was the first to go as far as possible to make the intelligible sensible, through the dialectical movement that in fact animates it.
P.-P.J.: “Sensible” is a rich word and it makes me think of the first program of German idealism: that reason must become sensible and sensibility rational. But I heard you saying that, today, we can’t continue on with this distinction, from which we are still unable to detach ourselves, between emotion and thought.
J.-L.N.: At the same time, one mustn’t confuse the two. On the side of emotion and the sensible, there is something that’s necessarily of the order of the obscure; and yet we are, as philosophers, a group of people who want clarity. We want clarity within obscurity, or even obscurity as clarity. In Bataille, we find the sentence: “I look into the night and enter it”; but no philosopher truly takes it upon themself to do that because philosophers are supposed to introduce light into the world. And even for Bataille, it’s still a philosopher’s gesture, because he wants to look; he doesn’t accept letting himself go into the lack of visibility. The philosophical act can only be sustained if it’s oriented, perhaps hopelessly, towards a hypothetical visibility. At the same time, I think that the motif of visibility, bringing to light, representation, or form has been continuously accompanied through the succession of Platonism, Cartesianism—even if none of these “-isms” are really faithful to the proper names from which they are derived—by a degradation of the sensible. I was a child of my time, too; Bataille himself was shaped by the introduction of Hegel in France by Kojève; along with these two, one mustn’t forget the shaping of the sensibility of the French in the ’20s, notably by Bergson, who, through his works, drew attention to registers that aren’t only of the order of rationality. This is why I was particularly receptive [sensible] to Derrida; I would have been more so to Deleuze, but the texts of Deleuze that I would have been receptive to are the ones that came after A Thousand Plateaus.24 When I read Voice and Phenomenon,25 it is precisely the extraordinarily sensible character of the “wink” [clin d’œil] that touched me, when Husserl says that the silent voice refers back to itself in a wink and when Derrida exclaims, “Yes, but the wink has a duration, its own duration!” This implies that the metaphor of the wink loses, all of a sudden, its metaphoric character—it becomes a gesture. Reading this, I had the sensation of what I was reading in the book—the wink—and I said to myself: “Oh my God, it’s true!”—there is no pure and simple presence to oneself, there is no purity of Being to itself or in itself, there is no propriety. So, I believe it is a sensibility that touched me. All of the great philosophers are people who have a sensibility; Bergson is sensitive to flux and duration, Derrida is more sensitive to the instant, its tension, and its gap or spacing [écart]. One could say that temporality, approached in diverse ways, is a question at the heart of modernity.
P.-P.J.: But isn’t it the case that this sensibility is very different from what one expects of a certain philosophy, the elaboration of a knowledge that gives stability?
J.-L.N.: That’s true. And I was just about to speak about the relationship of sensibility to signification, to representation today. The capacities of discourse to signify the sensible, far from solving everything—even if before us there was a succession of operations of philosophical transformation going in this direction [sens]—to me allow for a shortfall of sensibility to persist. I always have the sense in my own work, in my own writing of texts, that I’m too violently propelled onto the side of the concept, that is, onto the side of a discourse that has no grasp on the real. One could say that I begin speaking the language of the enemy or all of the people who accuse us of not sinking our teeth into the real …
P.-P.J.: But in this case, when one reproaches philosophers for not “sinking their teeth into the real,” what’s the status of this “real”?
J.-L.N.: Yes, of course. To sink one’s teeth into what, and what is it to sink one’s teeth into something, and with which teeth do we sink into it … And yet, as time goes on, I envy the writer, the painter, the musician, or the dancer more and more because I have the feeling that these people manage to do things that don’t just sink their teeth into the real, but, in effect, do things which are of the real! As for myself, I have the feeling that my philosophical texts aren’t philosophical enough—that they need to be more philosophical, but in order to be so, they need to no longer be philosophical, but something else.
P.-P.J.: When you read certain authors from the movement to which you belong (Derrida, Blanchot, Bataille, and Levinas among others), you sometimes get the impression that you’re dealing with a language that itself crystallizes the entire significance of the text, precisely because you cannot understand it with transparency. The obscure or the resistant occupies a sort of central position. Is this what’s in question in what you call the “excription,” this desire that writing has to touch what evades all inscription?
J.-L.N.: I speak about my own texts in exactly this way, with the feeling that “it is not enough.” I’d prefer to be able to launch into a story, a poem. I’m never as happy as when I receive feedback from readers who are sensitive to the way that the text is written rather than to the analytical, argumentative, demonstrative, and intellectual understanding of what I wrote—even though this aspect is important. I’m much more touched if people tell me, “I didn’t understand everything, but it had an effect on me.”
P.-P.J.: I would be tempted to call this sensitive thought. Of course, this adjective is very loaded; I was implying a thought that touches, and not a thought that shows.
J.-L.N.: Sure, if you like. In the end, thought has its greatest strength there. Always. Even with the rationalists, whether they be Descartes or Leibniz, there’s a sensibility that’s being expressed, for example, in the role of “passivity.”
P.-P.J.: It’s true that, in French, the words passif and passivité, whether we would like it or not, are in fact too “passive” upon first hearing them. Whereas here we’re probably closer to the notion of receptivity. But with “receptivity,” we fall back into the “monstrosity” that Kant was confronted with, that is, understanding as a spontaneous receptivity (spontaneity as an act and, at the same time, receptivity as “passivity”).
J.-L.N.: Of course. In a certain way. Spontaneous receptivity or receptive spontaneity—one can’t say it any better. Afterwards, indeed, one has to elaborate, but it’s not such a bad thing to be able to think that by itself, sua sponte, a thing or a being—I don’t know how else to say it—receives. The living, isn’t that what it is first? The living, by itself, is able to receive. Not only in the sense that a stone receives a drop of water, but also in the sense that blades of grass are able to receive sunlight and accomplish photosynthesis, and so on. To receive isn’t to be subjected to: To put it in the language of Aristotle, “passivity” is a “power” (dunamis) too.
P.-P.J.: This way of articulating activity and passivity has consequences for the concept of thinking about the relationship between the subject and the object. In Adoration,26 you distance yourself from phenomenology, that is, a distinction between the subject and the phenomenon that implies a “vis-à-vis” attitude. So, the world is no longer a “vis-à-vis” but that to which one addresses oneself, adoration as an address is the adoration of nothing and not the aim of an object. This is one of the most important passages in the work. How can one relate to the world today if the world is no longer a describable, calculable, and predictable object? How does it come to us?
J.-L.N.: One could say that the world isn’t an object at all anymore. And doesn’t this increasing sensitization of philosophy—perhaps it’s merely a resensitization after the entirety of rationalism made us believe that we could float above the sensible while despising it and only dipping our toes in it from time to time—consist in recovering the world? Recovering the world, which also means to be in the world. The world as an object; Descartes gives the most striking example of this when he writes his The World or Treatise on Light [Traité du monde et de la lumière].27 But this world, which has become an object of knowledge, and of exploration and mastery, is at the same time a world where human beings’ presence—and perhaps this can be extended to the presence of living beings in general—has been pushed aside. In fact, human beings no longer live in the world in the sense of Hölderlin, reprised by Heidegger, when he writes: “poetically, man dwells.”28 “To dwell” [habiter] means to be in the habitus, not in the habit but in the “disposition,” an active disposition. In the end, habitus is not far from ethos; what we need is an ethics of the world. This is perhaps the greatest issue of Western civilization, which has now become worldwide [mondiale], or global [globale]—to have had this will to transform the world in order to make it a human world, although it’s possible that we’ve left this world behind. Or that, eventually, we will find ourselves in a group of elements, data, matters, apparatuses, and networks within which we feel captive and from which we have become alienated, because this world that we’ve mastered escapes us. It escapes us precisely as world. Images of the world must be substituted for a dwelling [habitation], a life of the world, in the world. This is what Heidegger meant when he introduced what we translate as “Being-in-the-world” (in-der-Welt-sein); to say that the existent, the Dasein, is essentially in the world simply means that it’s necessarily involved in the circulation of meaning or sense, which is what makes a world. Heidegger himself defines the world as a totality of significance. The world is a possibility of sense or meaning’s circulation and we have to make a world, to remake a world.
P.-P.J.: In fact, this is what I really appreciate about the end of your preface to the Italian edition of your work Categorical Imperative:29 The imperative is what has been given to human beings in order to make a world.
J.-L.N.: Yes, I believe that it’s truly one of the senses that can be attributed to the Kantian imperative. “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become a universal law of nature”—in the end, this means that what’s at stake is to make or remake a world.30
1. All of the talks that were given on this theme have been published in the volume La Vocation philosophique (Paris: Bayard, 2004). These lectures were given at the Centre Pompidou in the context of the “Philosophy at the Centre” lecture series of the “Revues parlées” from January 2002 to January 2004.
2. [Until 1975 in France, a school for students from roughly age 11 to 15 separated them into three groups, one of which allowed students to pursue more academic studies while the other two focused on vocational training. The reforms of the collège unique extended the legal age of schooling from age 14 to age 16 and required that all have access to the same education until roughly 16 years of age.—Trans.]
3. The Young Christian Students was created in 1929 as part of the Catholic Social Movement.
4. The Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens (French Confederation of Christian Workers) was founded on November 1–2 in 1919.
5. The Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (French Democratic Confederation of Labor) was founded in 1964.
6. [An advanced course of study in the humanities that prepares high school students for France’s elite university, the École Normale Supérieure. The first year of study is nicknamed hypokhâgne and the second is called khâgne—Trans.]
7. [A bass line that is characteristic of the vocal and instrumental music of the Baroque period—Trans.]
8. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997).
9. [Nancy uses the word polytechnicien, which refers to a student or former student of a prestigious engineering school whose graduates often secure positions in government.—Trans.]
10. [A former government institution in France that determined economic and industrial policy—Trans.]
11. [Cf. footnote 6—Trans.]
12. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Michael Hardt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
13. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
14. Jean-Marie Domenach (1922–1997), editor of Esprit from 1956 to 1976, published Le Retour du tragique in 1967 through Éditions du Seuil.
15. Cf. Outside the Law (2010), a film by Rachid Bouchareb.
16. Louis Massignon, The Passion of al Hallāj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam, trans. Herbert Mason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
17. The first two volumes of the complete works of Levinas were published by Bernard Grasset/IMEC in 2009.
18. Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger in France, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
19. François Warin, Nietzsche et Bataille: la parodie à l’infini (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994). See also François Warin, Le Christianisme en héritage: roman, gothique, archéologie et devenir d’un contraste (Strasbourg: Le Portique/La Phocide, 2011). This book contains a text by Jean-Luc Nancy: “Déshérence.”
20. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, ed. David Krell, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 217–65.
21. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
22. [A competitive examination that certifies teachers and professors for work in the public education system—Trans.]
23. Juan Manuel Garrido, La Formation des formes (Paris: Galilée, 2008).
24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
25. Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlord (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011).
26. Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
27. René Descartes, The World and Other Writings, trans. Stephen Gaukroger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
28. Friedrich Hölderlin, “In lovely blueness …” in Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2004), 789.
29. “… the subject as subjected to the receptivity of that command (…) receives the command—it receives itself as command—of making a world. However, it is not a question (and this is what the subject must understand) of coming to occupy the place of the demiurgic being, as it is precisely that place that has just been emptied. It is a matter of standing in this void and remaining within it—that is to say, to re-engage anew what ‘ex nihilo’ means.” Jean-Luc Nancy, “From the Imperative to Law,” trans. François Raffoul, in Jean-Luc Nancy: Justice, Legality and World, ed. B. C. Hutchins (New York: Continuum, 2012), 11–18.
30. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31. [Nancy is paraphrasing this passage orally—Trans].