P.-P.J.: It seems completely natural, then, that we ask ourselves now about the “possibility of a world,” first by taking into account what you say in Corpus. Our world is no longer simply a cosmos, a mundus, partes extra partes (an extension of distinct places), but the world of the human crowd, the non-place of a proliferating population, “[an] endless, generalized, departure.”1 I’d like to ask you, then, about the role you give to the idea of the numerous or plurality within your entire approach, whether it concerns politics, the thought of community, or, in another register, the plurality of the arts.
J.-L.N.: I completely agree with your suggested point of departure: the world as the place of numerousness or the multiple. We no longer live in a cosmos in the Greek sense of the word—that is, we no longer perceive the totality of an ordered and thus beautiful world—a double signification to which the words “cosmonaut” and “cosmetics” bear witness. Today it’s no longer possible to speak of a beautiful, cosmic order because altogether the galaxies do not really present an order—physicists describe a finite world in an infinite expansion. It’s no longer possible to describe an order that would be comparable to that of the Ancients, who represented this order as spheres containing one another. As for the world around us, even though we still speak of a distinction between mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms and still find a hierarchy in this classification, we can no longer say that this hierarchy is oriented toward a certain end or whether this end is humankind as Kant thought. Indeed Kant thought that human beings were the end of nature because they are the Being of ends. It is rather the case that we are beings that constantly assign new ends for ourselves, and do not—or do not only—do this infinitely but rather in an undefined way, and thus we no longer know for which ends we should really aim.
P.-P.J.: In order to explore this question of the end further, we might return to the series formed by your works from The Sense of the World and The Creation of the World or Globalization to the chapter “Of Struction” in one of your last books, What’s These Worlds Coming To?2 Incidentally, it’s not by chance that you wrote this book with a young astrophysicist, Aurélien Barrau.
J.-L.N.: Absolutely. It must be noted that this astrophysicist is also a philosopher. He’s very attached, and rightly so, to both titles. I learned a lot from him concerning the fact that today astrophysics is compelled in a way to think a plurality of worlds, which has a twofold effect. On the one hand, for scientific reasons that only physicists can expound upon accurately, one must think a plurality of worlds, what they call a “pluriverse” or a “multiverse.” One cannot retain the model of a single universe. In the end, if one admits that the expression “a single universe” is a pleonasm because a uni-verse is directed toward unity, then we even have to give up on the thought that we’re in a universe that can be conceived of as a version of the One.
The second effect is just as important: From now on all theories of physics have to think of themselves as a construction of fictions. Without these fictions, one cannot think that in which one is, but even with their help, one is still unable to say that one thinks an object, or a real to which one would be coming increasingly closer. Currently, but in a way that still isn’t very apparent, we’re getting further away from the scientific model that uses mathematics as an instrument to grasp the real—a model that we’ve had since Descartes, the first to have really conceptualized it as such, but which was already present in Galileo and Kepler. Basically, up until the time of Einstein more or less, we considered mathematics to be a privileged instrument for approaching reality, and the idea that Einstein’s formula, E = mc2, is the formula of the universe is still widespread. In fact, today we know that several theories seem incompatible with one another, like Einsteinian relativity and quantum theory, and the emergence of increasingly more numerous and diverse theories shows us that the objects of observation and measure for contemporary science are entirely fabricated by the scientific operation itself—in a certain way, we philosophers, brought up in epistemology since Bachelard, knew this for a long time already …
In The New Scientific Spirit, Bachelard writes, in effect, that “[I]nstruments are nothing but theories materialized. The phenomena they produce bear the stamp of theory throughout.”3 So today we have at our disposal a new, very powerful particle collider.4 But even with these means, or indeed along with them, it’s absolutely impossible to say that one is observing a reality that could be there, somewhere, at the end of ends. On the contrary, we produce, we multiply new objects according to several approaches, and thus we manage to produce several worlds. It’s better to say, perhaps, in order to avoid harming the spontaneous, realistic feeling, that we produce several possibilities of worlds or even several fictions of worlds. Nevertheless, even this word, fiction, is dangerous because it could allow one to think that behind this fictional world lies the true world, when we are perhaps moving past the representation of science as an objective knowledge that comes closer to a real that exists in itself. A displacement of this kind can even resemble—but it’s simply a question of resemblance—what one imagines to be the world of those who live in myths. These beings don’t represent for themselves a real in itself whereby myth speaks the truth; they are in a world where there are diverse presences, diverse forces that are at work.
P.-P.J.: In a recent issue of La Recherche, Aurélien Barrau writes: “Because no model is eternal, is it not ontologically sensible to consider them as being simultaneously correct?”5 It would then be a question of reviewing one of the founding acts of the philosophical, and thus ontological, discourse, because philosophy initially defined itself as the quest for the true as opposed to the mythical, that is, the fictitious and false.
J.-L.N.: You are referring to something that matters very much to me and is over my head at the same time. As you mentioned, here one touches the limit of philosophy. The question that gets raised, then, is knowing what one ventures into if one goes beyond philosophy. It’s in this sense that one has been able to speak of “the end of philosophy”: When Heidegger proposed this phrase, he was actually referring to the “end of the idea of theoretical constructions that aim at being representations of the world or pictures of the world.”6 The text that Heidegger devotes to this question is entitled “The Age of the World Picture.”7 If one understands philosophy in this sense, I believe, in fact, that Heidegger is correct in saying that we are at its end.
As far as I’m concerned, I don’t use the expression “the end of philosophy” anymore because no one wants to hear it. A general resistance to Heidegger is expressed on the one hand, and to a certain way of thinking the “end” on the other.
P.-P.J.: On this point, one could recall what Jacques Derrida says, which is that the end of philosophy or the end of metaphysics is present from the beginning. This end doesn’t represent a diachronic cut or happen at a particular moment; this end has always been there, precisely as an account that contains the limit.
J.-L.N.: I do think that he must have spoken of a longitudinal and not a transversal cut in the history of philosophy, which is to say that the account with myth or the rejection of myth by philosophy has a founding effect. It’s a question of declaring that the mythos, the history told about the world, the gods, and human beings, is a lie, which at the same time implies that it’s possible to produce the truth in whose name this exclusion is pronounced and, in doing so, to trace a limit. Yet philosophy, in fact, has never been able to produce “the” truth as opposed to the lie. In the end, science appeared as what would present the truth that philosophy had promised. The contemporary evolution still seems to go backwards with this expectation, which fundamentally has only ever been the very poorly informed opinion of these good people who Flaubert mocks through the character of Monsieur Homais, who thought that this expectation could be fulfilled someday. I recall that my father, who was a chemist, didn’t understand that unlike the physicist or the chemist in their respective domains, the philosopher was not able to demonstrate something true about the subject of the totality of the world or God. He was a scientist brought into the bosom of the Church by Jesuits when he was a student, and so he believed in God. One day, after I had already been aggregated in philosophy, he asked me: “So, can’t you philosophers prove the existence of God?” I answered him: “No, not at all, on the contrary! We have demonstrated that we cannot have any evidence of God’s existence.” And he retorted: “But then it’s disastrous, it’s completely useless!”
P.-P.J.: I’ll play off this family anecdote, which goes well beyond a singular experience, by referring again to the word “myth.” One can translate this word with the word “story” [histoire] precisely in the sense when one says that someone is “making up a story,” that is, fictions, things that are not true or real. And yet, without wishing to reopen heated debates that took place at the end of the nineteenth century and later on the historical criticism of biblical texts, among these “stories” [histoires], there’s one that’s considered “sacred.” So it’s a story that has a particular status, which relates to the event of Revelation. The last book that Shestov published in 1938, Athens and Jerusalem,8 raises a question about this point for me. Certainly this isn’t the first author to ponder this twofold legacy—the title of his work is itself borrowed from Tertullian. But what concerns me here is his very polemical approach toward medieval philosophers in a chapter that relies on the 1932 book of Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy.9 Basically, according to him, all medieval philosophers fell down before the word of the Old Testament and all tried, in a more or less nuanced way, to superimpose revealed truth onto demonstrated truth. And just as Aristotle estimated that the poets lied a lot, polla pseudontai, so medieval philosophers are not far from saying that the Scriptures make up a lot of stories. Spinoza himself said that the object of philosophy is truth whereas the object of religion is salvation and submission …
J.-L.N.: This is a set of complex questions because it may well be that there’s a program that imposes itself that’s neither one of demonstrable truth nor authority. What’s troubling, in effect, are Shestov’s remarks about medieval philosophers; this shows quite well that philosophy by itself took the path of demonstration, which was the only path that one could follow in the end if one takes the stories to be false from the start. Then one must demonstrate, that is, one must suppress the question of the primary validity of the statement, or of the enunciation even: What guarantees that whoever tells a story tells the truth? As soon as one raises this question, one becomes suspicious of everyone.
P.-P.J.: Yes, or one conflates the question of truth with the question of the truthful.
J.-L.N.: … and the question of the verifiable. Demonstration implies, in effect, the verification of verifiability. It must be verifiable or, as Popper says, it must be falsifiable. If one can demonstrate that something isn’t necessarily true, one doesn’t yet grasp the truth. In relation to this, I think that since the Middle Ages, two developments in completely opposite directions have taken place. On the one hand, modern science became autonomous and in effect completely took charge of demonstration and verification, but by way of a mathematical reduction. This is entirely the case with the process of Galileo’s rupture from Aristotle on the paradigmatic question of the motion of falling bodies.10 Correlatively, philosophy itself felt compelled to return to the whole of demonstration, verification, etc. Then it had to renounce this since mathematics became at once the model, the ideal, and what had to be accounted for. This is basically the Kantian operation.
Between Newton and Kant, a science that functions was put into place, a sort of great architecture of the physical world that seems to be established, but whose status has not been thought out clearly because it is neither philosophical nor theological. Kant presents it as a knowledge, which he calls understanding, but as a result—and this was very important in philosophy—all of the other knowledges actually involve the question of faith and revelation. Still, and this is fascinating, the idea of revelation is given by way of something that also pertains to myth: There is the entire biblical story, then the renewal by the new story, that of Christ, etc. Let us note, however, that the content of this revelation isn’t the same as that of myths at all. For the first time, the story doesn’t let itself be reduced entirely to the story of this or that well-characterized person, such as Zeus or Osiris, to whom one can attribute qualities and a name. Without going into the question of the name—or absence of a name—of God and/or Jesus (Christ) right now, let us recall the division that occurs in philosophy between positing the knowledge of an object and acknowledging that the concern of desire is different; one could desire or love what one cannot know. Kant speaks well, in effect, about “desire,” which in German he calls Trieb—the same word that Freud would use later to speak about “drive.”
So this essential idea appears, according to which there is a push, a desire that is as much one of life as it is one of thought, as well as one of knowledge just as it is one of pleasure. There’s a sort of—I’m not sure how to say it—fundamental dynamic that’s probably what concerns us most often, even though all of our habits of thought have made us lose sight of it.
P.-P.J.: One could borrow several names from tradition for this desire: ormē, impetus, conatus, or urge, for example. This desire is turned toward a truth that is not verifiable but that presents itself or unveils itself.
J.-L.N.: Yes, that reveals itself even, because this word is not necessarily religious, but can serve to designate an unveiling, which, at the same time, keeps its own foundation veiled. So the beauty of a work, or the impetus of love, or being touched in friendship remain “without reason,” in the words of Angelus Silesius and Heidegger, yet without mystical effusion.
P.-P.J.: One should add that this tension carries us beyond any limited unity. The plurality of worlds about which Fontenelle spoke can still be thought about as a multiplication of our world.11 When you reemploy this expression as the subtitle of a chapter of your book The Muses, where you demonstrate, to put it succinctly, that the multiplicity of the “arts” can’t be subsumed under the unity of a concept of “Art,” you insist on the irreducibility of plurality.12 It’s the world itself that’s plural, and plurality or space is, so to speak, what makes it shatter from the inside.
J.-L.N.: Yes, but it’s rather a question of space and spacing. Even though the hypothesis of shattering in the sense of a nuclear catastrophe, as fantastic as it may seem, isn’t only unacceptable. In any case, it has inspired a number of texts or scenarios for at least thirty years—for example, Cormac McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Road, which was made into a film.13 That we cannot avoid this kind of projection demonstrates that we no longer feel that we’re in a world. The macrocosmos of space probes and the microcosmos of nanotechnologies are no longer—if they ever were, even in Pascal—infinite variations on the same scale. There’s no longer a cosmos, there’s no longer a mundus, the Latin word that meant “pure.”
P.-P.J.: We’ve already mentioned the sense of “beauty” that’s attached to the Greek cosmos. The French “monde” still keeps this double meaning of order and “cleanliness,” even elegance. One prunes [émonde] trees to give them a shape and beauty. And one refrains from the “un-clean” [l’im-monde].
J.-L.N.: So we’re no longer in unity, purity, or beauty: Everything has taken on an adventurous, complex, and scattered aspect.
P.-P.J.: Let’s go back to your book Corpus in which you distinguish between three stages: after cosmos/mundus, and after partes extra partes with its scientific explorers and conquistadors, we’re in the world, mundus corpus, in the world of pressing bodies. I suggest we understand “pressing” in its two senses: on the one hand, as hurry, haste, crowds in all kinds of movements, migrations, as if human beings were all placeless … and homeless, and, on the other hand, as pressure, contact, contagion, all the modalities of the cum. Of course, there appears on the horizon a question about the plural of this particular cum, which is the cum of com-munity. Can we retain this expression “the pressed world,” if it’s also the world of an infinite spacing, a limitless “spaciousness”? We encounter a big question here, which you, following Heidegger, have already outlined: Must we pass from a thought that privileged time and hence presence as present to a reflection that would emphasize space or spacing?
J.-L.N.: Yes, and then one must understand “presence” in the sense of “being next to.” It’s curious that it was the grammarians of Latin rather than the Latin grammarians who noticed that the prefix prae doesn’t have exactly the same sense in praesentia and praesum. In the latter, prae signifies “in front of, ahead,” hence the sense of praesum, to direct, to command, whereas in praesentia, one comprehends “being next to,” “being close to.”
P.-P.J.: What’s more, one can certainly understand “being in front of” in the sense of commanding, but one can also say: “I am in front of you.” But there is also this ambiguity of the “in front of”: “I present myself to you,” “I am ahead of you,” “I am exposing myself to you.”
J.-L.N.: I agree entirely—even if this isn’t the ordinary sense of praesum. This is in any case what guided my choice of the word co-appearance or “compearance” [comparution]: One compears in front of, as one compears before a judge, and at the same time one compears with.14 In our world, it’s multiplicity, the press that compears. It’s a theme I insist on in my book After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes.15 This work responds to a question about the meaning of what happened in Fukushima. To begin with, it’s, of course, about the entire question of the nuclear industry. But on the other hand, what happened in Fukushima shows that the quantitative aspect of the event is potentially transmitted to the entire planet. This proves that today almost nothing happens in the world, in our world, without the mark of quantity, tending towards the infinite. One is immediately in the world of great quantities, starting with that of humanity (seven billion human beings as of October 31, 2011). Each time one talks about things that are important for humanity, one has to refer to enormous quantities that are very difficult to grasp. As for me, when I hear “seven billion inhabitants on earth,” I can’t picture anything. Each time I’m in a crowd, in Strasbourg, at the gare du Nord in Paris, or in the Roissy airport, for example, I wonder: “What’s within my range? How many are there?” And I live in a country of sixty-five million inhabitants … How many Chinese people are there? When I think about China, I can’t picture anything, anything at all. It’s the same if I think about the populations of India or Africa …
P.-P.J.: As one commonly says in French, “I can’t picture it,” “I can’t imagine it”; but one can ask a more acute question on the basis of this fact that would accentuate the ontological reach of these remarks. You know what I’m referencing very well because it’s an old question for you. As you recount in La Communauté affrontée, in 1983 Jean-Christophe Bailly offered a theme to reflect upon for an upcoming issue of the journal Aléa: “Community, Number.” In this “perfect ellipsis,” as you put it, with its two focal points, the quantitative and community, you perceive the problem that is encroaching upon us with a growing urgency: Do we have at our disposal the necessary categories to think “this”?
J.-L.N.: Actually, I don’t believe we do.
P.-P.J.: One should look at this question through the lens of your book Being Singular Plural, which was published in 1996.16 You call for a new ontology, although you clarify that this book is not an ontological treatise, because in an ontological treatise it’s Being or the Subject that speaks, which always implies the effacement of the singular. What you set up is this pair of notions—singular plural—instead of the one and the multiple or the universal and the particular, which have continuously structured Western thought.
J.-L.N.: Jean-Christophe Bailly had illustrated, so to speak, the ontological status of all these remarks on number in choosing for the journal Aléa the photograph of a crowd on the beach in Coney Island that Weegee took in 1938. This feeling of great number—Jean-Christophe drew attention to it by contrasting it with community. This feeling first disturbs something about our habit of thinking in terms of unity [unité]. In fact, the idea of community always comprehends an inner unity that all the members of the community refer back to.17 Be it religious, national, familial, or local like it is in a village …
P.-P.J.: … the town or commune …
J.-L.N.: But the commune is a notion that’s taken from what was initially an institution, the commune of the Middle Ages: the parish and city commune, the urban, civic community that manages itself and sees itself as its own unit. Number, on the contrary, doesn’t envision its own unity because, in a way, it doesn’t have any. In the end, what lacks unity? The world, as it has already been said, but also humanity. When one speaks about “humanity” today, one doesn’t know any more what unity one is speaking about. Kant maintained that one cannot answer the question “what is the human being?” the fourth question18 that we encounter, precisely because the human being is the one who makes, transforms, and produces itself and thus in the end does more than merely reproduce. One could also ask oneself, as a first venture into ontology, whether the human being is trying to produce another being besides the human animal that we have known up until now.
P.-P.J.: You went on to write, in an interpretation of the Kantian categorical imperative, that “the human being is demanded of the human being.”
J.-L.N.: This means from this moment on what is demanded of the human being, at least from the beginning of modern times, is to create a world out of nothing, ex nihilo. This implies that a world cannot be made out of the human being in itself. When one says “to make a human world,” one doesn’t really know what that conveys.
P.-P.J.: We’ve discussed the world about which the first Greek thinkers, the cosmologists, spoke; but one also uses the word “world” when one says that a human being “came into the world” or when looking at a large gathering: “the whole world is here.”19 In order to think about what happens, then, can one hold on to the idea of human form or figure, for example, in the sense in which one says about someone, “you’re in bad shape” or “you’re sick as a dog” [il n’avait plus figure humaine]?
J.-L.N.: Today we continue to speak about a “human” figure, whether it’s related to an individual or to humanity, although we’ve struggled continuously for half a century with a refutation of this assertion. Let’s consider what we call “humanitarian organizations” and the sense of this “humanitarian” classification: with this classification, we imply all that must be taken care of with a sufficient, benevolent, and helpful attentiveness, as well as the vital needs of people and the world, outside of any political and aesthetic considerations. From an affective point of view, the humanitarian could almost be translated as the compassionate; and from the most pragmatic, tangible point of view, a concern for the most basic aid. It’s a question of survival. Yet survival [survie] is not life [vie], which is more than survival, unless one understands “survival” in the sense Derrida gives to it, as “more than life.” In life, there is a kind of thriving—let’s not be worried about being ludicrous—a kind of breathing beyond the need to eat, to not freeze to death, to be sheltered from bombs … So one can say that the invention of the “humanitarian” sector is one of the major signs of the fact that humanity no longer recognizes itself as an essence, which is defined by the quality of being particular—that humanity sees itself only as protecting its survival. As a result, humanity doesn’t even know how it would be the end of nature, let alone manage to think of itself as the image of God.
P.-P.J.: It’s hard, then, not to bring up the famous passage in Genesis where it’s written that man was created “in the image after (ki) the likeness” of God, while God is incapable of being figured.20
J.-L.N.: But doesn’t this mean that our current condition is marked by the loss of what we believed could be conquered, like the human figure, and which manifested itself in what was baptized “humanism”? This thought used to consider that man was in fact his own essence, his own “Idea,” his form (this is the meaning of idea) or figure. This figure was perhaps secretly derived from the figure of God, when humanism used to deceive itself concerning its Christian origin. It thus retrieved all the attributes of the divine, in an operation that resembles the one that was laid out in full by Feuerbach, such as the integral transport of the divine properties in man. This author said very little: One only has to give all the qualities back to man that were attributed to God. However, and this is exactly where the problem lies, because man would have all goodness and righteousness, whereas he seems to approach omnipotence, which is also the power to destroy oneself. What remains is that the man of humanism may have believed that he was able to do without the figure of an all-powerful God, while considering that he would still have the capacity to envision what Kant calls a humanity “living under moral laws.” Without a doubt, for the philosopher from Königsberg, man may perhaps not be able to become an ontologically moral being himself, which in the end would mean being God, but one can envision a humanity living under moral laws. This goes along with what you were saying earlier about the categorical imperative, which tells one to act as if there could truly be a set of moral laws that function like a nature, or what Kant calls the “typical” in the second Critique.21 Yet I think one has to say that humanism has truly run aground from this point of view, that is, from all the points of view …
P.-P.J.: I’d like to ask you, concerning the figure of man that humanism tried to define and which does not seem tenable as such, how do you situate yourself in relationship to two important philosophical positions; first, in relationship to the famous passage in the Letter on Humanism22 in which Heidegger points out that the humanitas of man is not at the level of being, and then, in relationship to Levinas, a young student fascinated like others by the sayings of the master, who would go on to speak of a “humanism of the other man,”23 underscoring that, as for himself, the thought of man is not at the level of man.
J.-L.N.: One should clarify something about Heidegger’s text. He writes: “Humanism … does not set the humanitas of man high enough.”24 Even though the author doesn’t appreciate Latin words very much, he retains humanitas because he is speaking about humanism and he criticizes it for not being faithful to itself in the sense that it doesn’t elevate the human character enough as such. It isn’t necessarily the same thing to say that humanitas isn’t at the level of being. But of course, what Heidegger means is that to think humanitas, one must leave the title of “man” behind for the sake of the title of Dasein, which signifies the “putting into play [mise en jeu] of Being.”
As for Levinas, he says something else, because the “humanism of the other man” defines both a humanism that starts with the other—this is the great schema of Levinas: I am held hostage by the other, I am responsible for the other, I am in submission to the other—and a humanism of the “other” man. But then, to what point is that man “other”?
To respond to your question about how I situate myself in relationship to these two positions, I would say generally: I don’t take a position; instead, I rely on these two alternatives.
P.-P.J.: I would like to refine my question about Levinas. You say that community as co-appearance or compearance is the appearance of the “pearance” [parition] of the “between.” I remembered that Levinas wrote a work called Entre nous [Between Us]25; are you speaking about the same “between” here?
J.-L.N.: What’s clear is that the “between” comes first, because it’s a way to dig deeper perhaps into what “humanism” may mean or may not mean anymore. If the word “man” signifies something, it’s language at the very least. One can say many things about the animal, one can even note the presence of prelinguistic elements in the animal, one can say whatever one wants, but man and language are one; there is no man without language, and there is no language without man. If one supposes that there are other beings elsewhere, if communication is possible—as science fiction tries to depict sometimes—we’re always referred back to language. I can appreciate that we don’t limit expression to language, to languages, that we broaden it enough to include a group of signs that contain indefinable impressions, feelings one has in the presence of one another. But here the importance of the “between” would be underscored even further, and this time, almost as a consequence, the “between” would go beneath the level of the human being. What is the world—or the worlds—if not precisely the possibility of the “between”?
Something happens between things, which means, first, not that there exists “something rather than nothing,” but a few things, some things. A thing does not mean anything, in Hegel’s sense of the One that is its own negation. A thing, meaning more than one thing, means at least two things and thus necessarily three things: thing A, thing B, and the relation between the two, that is, the “between” the two, which relates the one to the other and separates it from the other at the same time. Without a doubt, the great invention of the Christian trinity is to have thought about God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and it’s not by chance that this conception of the Divine Persons prompted the East-West Schism between Orthodox Christians and Roman Christians26—the former considered that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and the latter that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. It remains the case, for me, that the “between” comes first and that the entire problem of the one, the more than one, the “with” perhaps refers back to the story of Adam and Eve, as well as that of Cain and Abel. One recalls that the former is condemned by God when he claims that he’s not his “brother’s keeper.”27 Cain isn’t allowed to say that he’s indifferent or claim that he’s alone. Yet this question of the connection, the relationship—it’s as if it’s avoided by philosophy from the start. Even though there’s no “subject” in all of ancient thought, it’s still the case that there is neither an “us” nor a consideration of co-presence or co-belonging in it. Sure, there is the City, several people together, and the question of how to rule, how to manage a multitude, a consciousness of the fact that interests can be opposed to one another, that some exercise power over the others. But doesn’t this situation relate to what we were speaking about a moment ago, about the truth as verification, that is, about the fact that language, grasped from the outset as logos, is taken to be something that can account for itself? So isn’t there something that was dismissed from the outset, namely that language doesn’t have to account for itself, or that to account for itself, in the case of language, doesn’t involve verifying itself by coming up with its own reasons, but rather, if one can say so, accounting for itself in the fact that one speaks, that one addresses.
P.-P.J.: Language can only justify itself by telling the story of the origin of language through language …
J.-L.N.: And in language, something will always arrive that only language can designate, and which also goes beyond language, and which consequently will never be able to be subjected to logical auto-verification.
P.-P.J.: Based on what you say about language, one could open up this reflection to the shock of the very thought of the “auto,” as you indicated in one of your pieces from 2002:28 “The form of life that has grown old is that of autonomy. Autonomy of premise, autocracy of choice and of decision, auto-management of the identical, auto-production of value, of sign and of image, auto-reference of discourse, all these are used up, exhausted.…”
J.-L.N.: Yes, it’s not an exaggeration to say that an important part of our culture emerged under the influence of the “auto.” To be, do, and think for oneself … One can’t forget that these imperatives of humanism certainly played an emancipatory role. But in the end—and the most demanding philosophers always knew this, Montaigne, Pascal, Nietzsche, Hegel himself if one understands him, Marx too and of course Kierkegaard—the “auto” is not … self-sufficient [auto-suffisant], one might say. Man does not found himself, nor does man fulfill himself. He “infinitely surpasses man.” And this is true for both the collective and the individual: The idea of “community” quite clearly implies (through communitarianisms) the danger of shutting oneself off in self-sufficiency [auto-suffisance]. And “number,” which we have been talking about, indicates both the risk of taking the pure amount of a large number to be self-referencing [auto-référence] (the immense problem of “majorities” or of the appeal to the “masses,” or the “headcount” of demonstrators …) and therefore also the necessity of thinking beyond the “majority” and the “community.” It’s an obligation for us to think about the multiple as dis-position (not a dispersion), as dis-tinction even (with all due respect to Bourdieu …) and at the same time as connection and communication, which isn’t “unity” or “pure multiplicity,” but “uniting,” “meeting,” “assembling” …
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
2. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Aurélien Barrau, Jean-Luc Nancy, What’s These World Coming To? trans. Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
3. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 13.
4. The most powerful collider at CERN is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was put into operation on September 10, 2008.
5. La Recherche 446, July–August 2012, 80.
6. [Nancy appears to be paraphrasing or quoting from memory.—Trans.]
7. This is how Weltbilder was translated into French; it signifies “pictures of the world.” Cf. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. and trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 115–54.
8. Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966).
9. Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, trans. A. H. C. Downes (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).
10. For Aristotle, bodies fall because of a desire to reach the center of the earth. Galileo gives up on any explanation of this kind and decides to measure the space and time of the fall. What is at stake is the thought of space and movement, of “nature” and its knowledge, “physics” (the Latin natura is used to translate the Greek physis). From Aristotle to Galileo, we go from a qualitative physics to a quantitative, mathematicalized physics.
11. M. de Fontenelle (Bernard Le Bovier), Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, trans. H. A. Hargreaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
12. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
13. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Random House, 2006), made into a film with the same name by John Hillcoat in 2009.
14. Jean-Christophe Bailly and Jean-Luc Nancy, La Comparution (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991).
15. Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
16. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University, 2000).
17. [The French word unité means both unit and unity.—Trans.]
18. The first three questions, formulated by Kant first in the Critique of Pure Reason, and then in his Logic, are: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?
19. [The French word monde may mean “world” or “people,” and it is a common translation for the Greek word cosmos.—Trans.]
20. [In what follows, we leave the term “man” and use the pronoun “he” for philosophical and biblical context.—Trans.]
21. Immanuel Kant, “Of the Typic of Pure Practical Judgment,” Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 58.
22. 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), 219–20.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other [Humanisme de l’autre homme], trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
24. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, 210.
25. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
26. The East-West Schism of 1054 is generally presented as a confrontation over the acceptance or refusal of the Latin expression filioque (“and of the son”).
27. Gen. 4: 9–10.
28. Jean-Luc Nancy, Philosophical Chronicles, trans. Franson Manjali (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 9.