J.-L.N.: I once gave a talk at a conference in Cerisy that was dedicated to Jacques Derrida and entitled “Democracy to Come”1—I’d written a text on the notion of “people.” After I’d finished my paper, Derrida said to me: “I would’ve said everything you said, but not with the word “people”; I replied, “Okay then, but give me another word.” He answered, “I don’t know, but not ‘people.’ ” This small anecdote is interesting because it shows that Derrida has the same hesitation with this term as he does with “community” (“too Jewish”) or “fraternity” (“too Christian”). But actually, “people” is different …
P.-P.J.: It should be noted that the title of your talk was a fragment of a lyric … A lyric of Méhul’s “Le Chant du départ” [“Song of the Departure”] and more specifically the notes along which one is supposed to sing: “Le peuple souverain s’avance …” [“The sovereign people comes forth …”] This music was played before you began speaking at the opening of the talk …
J.-L.N.: I’d chosen this part of the score as a title for the talk with the intention of getting closer to what Derrida had said: not to mention “people” in the title. At the same time, I wanted to affirm this notion of “people” in precisely this context—the sovereign people coming forth, who are in motion, who aren’t here—but without letting those words or their signification be heard. What does this refusal or reluctance concern?
It’s a refusal of a word that’s been used far too much for identitarian, or even overidentitarian, affirmations. This conference took place in 2002; perhaps Derrida still had in mind all the things that surfaced as the former Yugoslavia was being torn apart and peoples affirmed themselves, an affirmation that isn’t over yet in a way: the Kosovar people, the Macedonian people, the Bosnian people … Still what Derrida expressed, through his discomfort, the discomfort of our current philosophical situation, was this: At certain moments, we lack the appropriate words. For example, if one wants to avoid the term “subject” because one finds it too tied to the Hegelian tradition, if one adopts the suspicion for grammar that Nietzsche speaks about, what do we use in its place? I gave this talk with the word “people,” a word I haven’t used since very much, except of course in the book called Identity: Fragments, Frankness,2 which, in fact, is a critique of the identity of a people. Yet I really believe in the core of the argument that I developed in this talk, that is, that there’s indeed something like a people and that it’s in the nature of things that there are distinct groups that are separate from one another. It can’t be the case that humanity is only one group, and this is perhaps a weakness of another song that proclaims: “The international will be the human race …”
P.-P.J.: In 1944, the Allies organized a concert that presented all the national anthems together, which was conducted by Arturo Toscanini. The anthem that was presented for the Soviets was The International, and it was therefore heard as the anthem of a nation …
J.-L.N.: But specifically as a nation whose vocation was to enlarge itself. Similarly, for a moment, a brief moment, the French nation—the Great Nation, as one called it then—could be thought of as being destined to become the nation of all of Europe. Foreigners received the right to vote at the National Convention, and for a very short time, too. Thus with the term “people,” one touches upon something that’s not very easy to categorize into supposedly natural, ethnic identities (“ethnic” comes from ethnos, which signifies “people”). A people is not necessarily ethnic at all, and at the same time there are ethnic realities that contribute to the realization of peoples. So there are groups with physiological relationships that have characteristics that don’t necessarily determine what we’ve attempted to call “races.” There really are biological and physiological characteristics that differentiate groups of human beings from one another. On this point, I remember that Georges Canguilhem took the Chinese peoples’ rate of urea as an example, which is constitutively different from ours.3 And within one ethnic group, there are subdivisions, families of people who can be distinguished by their temperament, physical appearance, gestures, and so on. I’ve always been very interested by “types.” Sometimes when I see people I say to myself: “This person belongs to a type,” without this effacing their individuality. I find it quite fascinating that there are physical types; not everyone belongs to a single type, but some people are more “typical” or “type-oriented” than others.
P.-P.J.: The similarity between these two adjectives is a very delicate issue; one thinks about all the possible repercussions …
J.-L.N.: Of course, but we’re very severe, and rightly so, when it comes to “racial profiling” [“délit de faciès”]. If I say, “That guy seemed Swedish,” my remark will probably be viewed as innocent. But if I say to you, “That guy seemed North African,” one immediately feels the suspicion or hint in that remark.
P.-P.J.: This response is rooted in history.
J.-L.N.: Yes, but it continues to exist. One knows how ridiculous it is to hesitate when mentioning that a black person is black. One notices the difference between the discourse of overly politically correct people, who seem to stumble over the word, and an “emancipated” black person, who will say: “I’m black.” Aimé Césaire invented the word “négritude.”4
P.-P.J.: A word that got picked up by Léopold Sédar Senghor in a way that’s perhaps sometimes problematic, like when the author says in his work Chants d’ombre5 that emotion is black and reason Hellenic. This distinction is as ambiguous as the one that’s sometimes made between “sensitive women” and “rational men.”
J.-L.N.: Absolutely, but one could go further, because if I follow your line of thought here I also think that it’s not easy to completely dissociate an idea of the feminine and an idea of the sensible either, which doesn’t prevent the fact that this femininity can also be present in a man. So I think “people” is actually an indication of something that exists, that must exist, but something that, for a long time, constituted itself through the exclusion of others, through relationships of hostility even. As we know, many “archaic” peoples called themselves “men”: the Burkinabes, for example, are “free men.”
P.-P.J.: The Franks named themselves in a similar way, with “frank” signifying “free” in that language. Hence the idea that the “French” are “free men.”
J.-L.N.: Exactly. When I wrote Identity, I was wondering how we went from the concrete to the moral sense of the term “frank” because the term can refer to the quality of a material: one speaks of cuir franc [genuine leather], for example. During the talk at Cerisy, I tried to say that the identity of a people lies in making a self-declaration, in calling itself a “people.” That’s why I qualified “people” with the adjective “so-called,” in order to play with the idea that “so-called” often signifies “alleged” (one should also note that one can never use “so-called” when speaking about a thing [in French], since only people can call themselves something). I found it amusing to suggest that a people “calls itself” something; and during the French Revolution, this is, in fact, what happened. The French people made a self-declaration, and the Revolution began with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and of the French people. I don’t think the French people had ever declared itself as such before through anyone; the king declared himself “King of France” and by the same token all of his subjects were subsumed under or assumed by the royal declaration. The institution of the “sovereign people,” which is not an empty expression, will probably give rise to dangerous political problems. But the “sovereign people” is perhaps first the fact that the people must be able to make a self-declaration, without any superior authority to declare it or institute it as such.
P.-P.J.: If one goes back to the “title” of your talk, one notices that this “so-called” people sings about itself. But when one sings, one has a voice with a timbre. So it would be interesting here to consider what you say about the voice and timbre in Listening.6 With timbre, there’s something that has to do with the singular. One knows for example the range of a tenor, but one wouldn’t confuse the timbre of a Russian tenor with the timbre of an Italian tenor upon hearing it; they don’t have the same timbre.
J.-L.N.: Indeed, one even detects singular timbres. I agree that this characteristic also gets indicated in various languages. I remain fascinated by a phenomenon, the coexistence of several languages of Latin (or for the most part Latin) origin: Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and French. Of course, many particularities distinguish these languages from one another, but for the most part, they are related through the question of pronunciation. And one also knows that the different Spanishes that are spoken in the countries of Central and South America can be distinguished not only by their vocabulary but also through their accents. A Chilean man was telling me that he was translating The Inoperative Community7 despite the fact that there was already a translation in Spanish. I was very surprised, to which he responded, “Yes, but it’s in terrible Castilian!” When books from South America are translated into French, it mentions that the book is translated from Spanish, but the country is also specified. Certain groups developed specificities through lengthy and complex historical processes, always through the creation of original forms: Catalan Romanesque sculpture is different from Romanesque sculpture in the South of France, or from the Romanesque sculpture of the Asturias, for example. I really think one can say that a people makes a self-declaration through a set of forms. The larger problem this raises is knowing at what point it’s legitimate to tell oneself that these forms were abandoned in history and that it’s useless to try to take them up again or resuscitate them (what the Catalans are striving to do now, which doesn’t have much of a future perhaps, even though these efforts bear witness to quite a strong affirmation). In his work Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, Jean Améry titled one of his chapters “How Much Heimat [Home] Does A Person Need?” It’s a serious question; although one knows very well the extent to which the word Heimat triggers horror because of how much it has been appropriated by Nazism, and before Nazism, by an entire land-based, identitarian ideology. But it’s also true that without any Heimat, one is simply “without a homeland,” without a place …
P.-P.J.: A stateless person …
J.-L.N.: Yes, except that if this situation results from a deliberate choice, I really think that in the people, there is something that speaks of a very profound and very necessary desire for a group to be able to acknowledge itself as a group. So the problem lies in asking oneself whether or not this self-declaration of a people has to take place in a way that this people always knows that it’s only a “people” when it tells itself so. So it has to speak of itself and produce forms. I’m not speaking about “folklore,” a term rooted in the word “people,” which is only the moment of the forms’ repetition in the most banal sense, doing the same thing again. Dressing like a bigouden does not revive the Bigouden country; there needs to be a declaration, and it must perhaps be another people at certain moments. I think that within a certain form of internationalism, there has been a kind of a dream of effacing any identity of this kind.
P.-P.J.: Yes, but so as to form only one people.
J.-L.N.: To form only one people, but actually, no one has been able to say what this people’s declaration consists of. The end of the Soviet Union showed how many peoples needed to hold their affirmation in abeyance, and as this affirmation turned sour, curdled, and moldy, it reemerged in an archaic, vain, and most often murderous way.
I’d add, concerning the frequently noted ambivalence of the word “people,” that “people” is close to “population,” and that this latter term immediately brings to mind overpopulation and numerousness. What allows one to make sense out of numerousness is the people, which gets expressed in forms that themselves are no longer numerousness, but suggest a “substantial” unity (“one” people, “one” nation), one might say.
P.-P.J.: Thinking about the people as numerousness is probably connected to the fact that it’s very difficult—if not impossible—to think about the people as a “principle.” In your article “Finite and Infinite Democracy,”8 you point out that we speak of a “mon-archy” and a “demo-cracy,” but not a “dem-archy.” A people doesn’t make a principle. Though it may be a resistance to the assumption of a principle.
J.-L.N.: Sure, but then resistance requires force, and kratos is also force.
P.-P.J.: This is another way to say that community is resistance to immanence.
J.-L.N.: Sure, if you like. Force, which may eventually get expressed as violence, doesn’t let itself be reduced in every aspect to the dominant unity of a principle.
1. La démocratie à venir: autour de Jacques Derrida: actes du colloque tenu à Cerisy-la-Salle du 8 au 18 juillet 2002, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2004).
2. Jean-Luc Nancy, Identity: Fragments, Frankness, trans. François Raffoul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
3. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn Fawcett in collaboration with Robert Cohen (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
4. This term appears in the first and only issue of L’Etudiant noir [The Black Student] (March 1935), in an article by Césaire called: “Négrerie.”
5. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Chants d’ombre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1945).
6. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
8. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Finite and Infinite Democracy,” in Democracy in What State? trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 58–75.