P.-P.J.: The people, which is an expression of force that bears witness to this resistance, is also the place where affects manifest themselves. We’ve mentioned it already; the multitude is also a reservoir of desire or libido; all of our thought is permeated by a question of trying to reactivate affect or the passionate. Think of Libidinal Energy1 by Jean-François Lyotard, or Anti-Oedipus2 and A Thousand Plateaus3 by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Negri inherited something from this. And even though I expressed some reservations earlier, I also want to underscore the importance of this aspect.
In fact, the question that sums everything up might be: Do political affects exist? What are they? One could go as far back as the theme of philia in Aristotle, but I’d like to return in particular to two texts that we’ve already mentioned by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and yourself—one entitled “La panique politique,” published in 1979 in the second issue of Cahiers Confrontation that was edited by René Major, and the other, “The Jewish People Do Not Dream,” a lecture you gave at a conference in Montpellier in 1980 entitled “Is Psychoanalysis a Jewish Story?” If we don’t think about the social bond simply in terms of contracts, exchanges, and relationships of interest or power or force, then what about intimacy, which is longed for but considered to be lost in community? Can one grasp it in terms of affects or affectivity? You’ve already remarked that society itself is conceivable in terms of cold affects.
J.-L.N.: Yes, in terms of cold affects that tend toward the freezing cold, one could say, evoking Nietzsche once more, that the State is “the coldest of all cold monsters.” This reminds us that the State and society can’t be confused with one another, just like society and relationships … Because if “society” designates the sphere of interest and power relationships that must be managed, then society is rather “cold”—but one should add that this cold is not devoid of forms of heat … Passions are also at work in relations of trade, law, and so on. But if one thinks about all the relations together—beginning with “relation” itself—then one must also consider that any relation is a relation of affect: It’s acceptance or refusal, assimilation or rejection, retraction, fear, identification, preference … It’s as if throughout modern history the “private” sphere had reserved warmth for itself, increasingly so, as cold was taking over the public sphere. This glacier spread progressively throughout modern history, basically since the end of the feudal system. In the feudal system, the relationship between the overlord and the vassal contained a religious, and thus at the same time an affective, aspect of fidelity, sworn faith, the vassal’s pledge of allegiance, and so on. And so, if the feudal model had taken over, it’s because it came after the demise of the Roman Empire (at least the Western one), in which civil religion had given rise to a very strong bond; this civil religion had degenerated into a formal ritualism and the Empire had slowly been collapsing for several centuries. Christianity, at least in the beginning, didn’t yet represent a social bond even though it offered a very strong affective bond; it’s been said that this religion presented itself as the religion of love or affect while also taking on an eschatology of salvation. It’s probably not a coincidence that feudalism—a social-political model that comes from the Germanic people, which wove together religious and affective relationships—developed at this time.
The modern State that began to be developed at the time of Machiavelli and Jean Bodin then took the prominent form of the French monarchy throughout Europe. From the reign of Philippe Le Bel on, and during the history of its self-constitution throughout the lineage of the kings of France, this modern State, unlike the feudal system, is defined by sovereignty, a sovereignty that’s directly opposed to divine sovereignty. What took place during feudalism gets reversed, and this reversal accomplishes all that had been present in Christianity since the beginning: the complete separation between the two kingdoms, between the two regimes of existence. When questioned about paying taxes, Jesus replied: “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”4 So all of the affective weight is anchored on the religious side, whereas on the political side, the disappearance of the affective is very visible, as one can see in Machiavelli, even if it’s unfair to mix up the Florentine author with his “Machiavellian” image, as many studies, such as Claude Lefort’s, have shown;5 nevertheless, what remains linked to Machiavelli is the idea of the calculations that are needed to acquire and maintain power …
P.-P.J.: Very early on, already in Elizabethan theater, Machiavels became synonymous with politics. What was offensive during this time was the separation between the moral and the political; Claude Lefort explains this very clearly when commenting on the famous and “scandalous” Chapter XVIII of The Prince, “How a prince should keep his word.”6 The question, he says, is not about knowing whether the prince is virtuous—perhaps he is—the question is about knowing whether it’s in the interest of the prince to seem virtuous.
J.-L.N.: Because Constantine dedicated the Empire to Christianity, Christianity became interested in the State and would ask specifically that the prince be virtuous. Thus, in the name of this demand, Thomas Aquinas, for example, could justify regicide in the case in which one could truly testify to the fact that the prince was not at all concerned with the happiness and the salvation of his subjects. One sometimes responds to this claim with the passage in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (XIII) where Paul advises them to obey the authorities “because every authority comes from God.”7 But those who comment on this passage—and the passage itself if we put it back into context—actually show that, for Paul, the authority that’s being spoken about is good in itself. One could say that throughout Roman history up until Caesar, citizens weren’t worried about the threat of a tyrant. Cincinnatus, who’d been called upon for “dictatorship” twice, in 458 and 439, had been praised highly, and had returned after each time to work the plow by his own volition. On the other hand, the Greeks, the Athenians at least, were terrified of tyrants, and tyrannicide was seen as a heroic, virtuous act; one thinks of the honors that were given to the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton.
To return to the topic of the modern State, one can say that, on the one hand, it’s forced to constitute itself outside of the affective realm of religion if it wants to claim its full independence, which would come to be called sovereignty, but on the other hand, it would still be forced to seek to qualify itself affectively in several ways and at several moments. Henry IV provides an amiable figure because his religious conversion, which is entirely one of political calculus, is also set against an affective backdrop that is connected to the sharing between the Reformation and Catholicism. Louis XIII and especially Louis XIV always kept their distance and remained imposing. Louis XV was called, at least for a while, “the beloved.” Finally, it’s hard to forget the frequently remarked upon affective aspect of the French Revolution; the critique of the monarchy shifted into hostility toward Louis XVI and the Royal Family. Many historians have underscored that the episode of Varennes was decisive because the king’s escape, which was felt as treasonous, indicated a breach of affective trust. The pathway to a constitutional monarchy had been closed, and the crisis of August 10, 1792 was brewing. Today constitutional monarchy, as it exists in the UK and somewhat in Belgium, Sweden, or Spain, could be considered to be an affective pole.
P.-P.J.: When one speaks of affectivity, it seems legitimate to mention the figure of the father. One still remembers the expression, “the little father of the people,” which applied to the tsar as well as to Stalin. But this paternal metaphor can already be found in the very title of Robert Filmer’s classic work, Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings.8 In order to justify the government’s monarchic form and its absolute power, the author resorts to an analogy: The king is to his subjects what the father is to his children.
J.-L.N.: Yes, you’re touching upon something extremely important. The question is this: Why are we facing a problem that’s affective? One speaks about the people, one speaks about politics, one speaks about the relationship between the State and the people—today one comes across this very strange label of “civil society” [société civile]9 to designate the entire society without the State, outside of the State, as something separate from its own organ of government, whereas in the eighteenth century, this expression used to designate “citizen society,” a politically organized society, as opposed to a barbaric, savage society.
I think this whole series of problems started with Greek democracy because one could actually be worried about the threat of tyranny. Rome, after its effective success, encountered the problem of rendering the emperor sufficiently “amiable” and started to achieve this by “putting too much onto” or overemphasizing [surcharger] his figure. What the very fact of inventing the Empire consists of is this: overemphasizing a figure, which would progressively lose its force of attraction. One can, in effect, call “putting too much weight onto” or overemphasizing first, the fact of creating the permanent title of emperor itself, there where permanent power’s identity was the “republic” itself, and then, making the bearer of this title divine, creating the phenomenon of the “court,” developing the image of the “empire of the world,” and so on—all of this, one must recall, did not proceed from an already established theocratic order (like in Egypt, for example), quite the contrary.
P.-P.J.: Until Constantine, one could say, a figure that Paul Veyne speaks about?10
J.-L.N.: Yes. Paul Veyne doesn’t use the word “affective,” but when he mentions the moral and intellectual disarray of Constantine’s time, it’s actually the disaffection with the imperial figure … Let’s not forget that the title had been held by Caligula and Nero among others. If we encounter these difficulties and questions, it’s precisely because the beginning of our culture, the Greek beginning, corresponds to a rupture away from a model in which there was naturally a father, paternity, filiality, or at least what we refer to with these terms, which aren’t necessarily the most accurate. In any case, one can hardly ask the question of political, communitarian affect before the Greeks. The centuries of ancient Egypt have given us love poems, but very few, as far as I know, concern affective problems about the people in general, the Empire, that is, the pharaoh, and so on. Something from the affective was completely taken over or absorbed by the sacred; perhaps that affectivity did not even appear as such until there was a sacred, mythical system …
P.-P.J.: As I listen to you, I’m noticing that we use the word “affectivity” as if it were a positive attachment, which is equal to recognition and legitimization. Nevertheless, when Caligula speaks about the subjects of the Empire, he declares: “Oderint dum metuant”11 [Let them hate, provided that they fear]—he actually plays with the affects of fear and terror. But these affects aren’t the ones that interest us.
J.-L.N.: They’re not the ones that interest us for a very important reason that’s seen throughout the entire history of political theory: Fear is not enough to ensure the durability of a government. Despite Pascal’s and Rousseau’s assertions, everyone in the world agrees on saying that if we reach a political arrangement in which force becomes law, then it’s no longer force. In a way, even if it’s difficult to express it like this, force must present a figure that’s somewhat “amiable” so that one gives it some trust. The true question is the question about trust.
P.-P.J.: This makes me think about your lecture in Cerisy in which, after underscoring the preposition cum in “con-tract,” “con-tact,” and con-fiance [trust, confidence, faith, belief], you reminded the audience of Paul Valéry’s words: in order for there to be a people, there has to be at least something “fiduciary.” This confiance, or shared “fiance,” could also offer a path for reflecting on “faith” (fides).
J.-L.N.: Yes, and while agreeing with Valéry, one should perhaps also say that in order for there to be a fiance, there needs to be a people. Why this question? Very simply because in our tradition everything begins with an isolated subject, an individual. It’s only afterwards that the problem of the other’s recognition emerges, which Heidegger responded to well and also poorly. Well, because he dismissed all the other ways of recognizing the other, which were based on reasoning or empathy, by maintaining that what’s given from the start is myth. Poorly, or insufficiently, because he didn’t delve into an analysis concerning the thought of this myth. This is our task. In our tradition, almost no one, from Aristotle and his philia to Heidegger and his myth, really thinks this “being in relation to.” So we rely on revolutionary, democratic fraternity, which is actually a Christian notion that refers to paternity (which is the reason why Derrida didn’t like this “masculine” notion that refers to “phallocentrism” and patriarchal order; one can think about it differently in relationship to the “dead father” but I won’t expound on this here).
P.-P.J.: We should recall that, for the French Revolution, the true national holiday takes place on July 14, 1790.
J.-L.N.: Yes, it was the Fête de la Fédération.
P.-P.J.: In Michelet’s History of the French Revolution,12 he very much insists on the fact that it is the day when we loved one another. We loved one another on the 14th, but we should have loved “the day after.” Michelet deliberately plays with this subtle ambiguity: Is “the day after” the direct object of the verb “to love” or is it an adverbial phrase of time?
J.-L.N.: It’s very beautiful. I understand the ambiguity that you’re pointing out very well. Michelet’s sentence simultaneously implies that one must continue to love and that one must love the fact that it will continue.
P.-P.J.: One must love for there to be a day after.
J.-L.N.: But, actually, we have a problem with the day after, which is the problem of the Revolution as well as the problem of simply prolonging.
P.-P.J.: Is it also the problem of the question, “What is to be done?”
J.-L.N.: Yes, exactly. It’s an entirely different side of the problem, because “What is to be done?” signifies “What is to be done in an enduring way?” I’m trying to be done with this sort of turn backward, inasmuch as it’s possible to do this … All of this recalls an image for us, which, of course, can only remain an image because we know nothing in the end about its inner, “intimate” life. We were speaking earlier about intimacy—a very important notion. Before the Greeks, before the City, there’s a world—or several worlds, what have you—Egypt, Babylon, the Hittites, all kinds of realities that are also represented elsewhere to us by the Chinese Empire and by tribal societies. And we don’t regard the African empires as having the same exact appearance as the Mediterranean or Chinese empires; we’re nevertheless referred back to a world or worlds in which one can say that intimacy isn’t a problem, it’s not a posited notion or one on the basis of which one has to interrogate oneself, nor is it a practical reality that would require modifications. For example, I remember when Lévi-Strauss describes a love scene amongst the Nambikwara people, perhaps at dusk, he says: “Couples leave, and one can hear laughter behind the brush …”13 Some modesty remains, these people leave and I don’t think there’s any culture in which people don’t isolate themselves somewhat to make love.
P.-P.J.: Even with the Cynics, what’s shown publicly isn’t shared sexuality, but solitary pleasures.
J.-L.N.: Diogenes masturbated in public, but Hipparchia, a cynic from Alexandria, one of the few women philosophers from antiquity, mated with her husband in the streets. There needed to be this extreme situation, a female philosopher and cynic for this boundary to be crossed, but this would be a question for anthropology or ethnology. Still, I have the impression that in general there’s never a complete absence of intimacy in sexual intercourse and that at the same time, there are very many different ways to inscribe it in public space, which has to do with the way people lodge, lie, and arrange the spaces inside of their houses, huts, and so on. I’m mentioning these situations because sexual intimacy is an image of intimacy that comes to mind immediately, but more generally, what we imply by the intimacy of consciousness, the intimacy of each person within themselves, the inner self, and so on, is what we have a hard time knowing how to characterize or convey in ethnological descriptions.
P.-P.J.: Is it this same superlative form—because intimus is the superlative form of intus—that we find in Augustine when he speaks about God: “[…] more inward than my most inward part […]”: “interior intimo meo”?14
J.-L.N.: I was hoping we might come to this, actually. I wanted to say that it’s surely not by chance that it’s through Christianity—and effectively through Augustine—that this intimacy wasn’t recovered but invented as a particular category of the superlative that’s entirely connected with God. This is perhaps the great strength of Christianity, the discovery of a realm that was left untouched, or that had disappeared from those societies that were called “holistic.” In these societies, there’s a “whole” (holon in Greek means whole) that encompasses, but—and this is difficult for us to understand—this “whole” is not totalitarian. One can immediately assert, this I know, that a society with a caste system is extremely oppressive, and that’s a fact. Nevertheless, we know that one would have to determine what a caste society is when it’s not in contact with any casteless, but not classless, society. Today, many democrats in India ask for the repeal of the caste system, which really doesn’t seem tenable anymore. But we must also acknowledge that we have no idea about what the true, inner life of a caste society is, nor what the inner life of imperial Chinese society was with its Mandarin system, which seems incredibly strange to us. This implies, in fact, a very strong power that’s capable of very strong oppression, but one that was able to function for centuries. Here we come back to Caligula’s “oderint dum metuant”: It’s not possible for a social system to persist on the basis of fear alone. There needs to be a kind of adherence; something of what we call “intimacy” has to be able to occur, even before, I would say, it’s recognized as intimacy.
P.-P.J.: So, being the good “Greeks” that we are, can we go as far as saying that even despotism, or tyranny, cannot achieve domination through fear alone?
J.-L.N.: Of course. Incidentally this is the sense of the “virtuous appearance” of Machiavelli’s Prince; there would need to be a very detailed analysis of what “appearance” means here, because one first hears the hypocritical aspect of this demeanor or act that’s put on.
P.-P.J.: “The tribute that vice pays to virtue,” according to La Rochefoucauld’s maxim on hypocrisy.15 Even someone who has a cruel or perverse personality must be careful to present themself in a certain way. We can now concisely formulate the question that interests us: Why must there be something from the affective realm in order for political life to be possible?
J.-L.N.: We have to talk about affects when we speak about politics because two problems are at stake. The first problem concerns government in the broadest sense of the word, that is, the way to ensure relations and, as much as possible, the balance of forces and interests of a social group. The second problem concerns maintaining co-presence, cohesion—a word that’s perhaps not strong enough—without which there’s no individual presence. As we’ve mentioned before, one of the most important problems of our culture probably comes from philosophy’s lack of interest in categories of the “between,” the “with,” and thus the entire cum in all of its forms. The reason is the following: Philosophy, which appears with the City in a way, as if it were necessary for it, is charged with thinking the political cohesion of this City. Yet at the same time, the City experiences a loss, an original deprivation of what was provided before with the group: trust [confiance], the group’s self-recognition. For us today, this idea seems to belong to a communitarian identity, a voluntary identity that’s looking for a nature, an essence, a figure for itself. This is what has made all of the thought about a community’s “nature” or “figure” suspect for us. But one mustn’t forget that this suspicion appeared because of the experience of fascisms, and Soviet communism, too, in a way, even if it’s within fascism that it posed the most difficulty. What happened? Something that Georges Bataille saw very well: Fascism was the violent, unstoppable irruption of the motif of affectivity and a feeling of common belonging, beneath the level of social cohesion, that was precisely what democracy found itself to be lacking the most.
P.-P.J.: But one should then recall that the question of common co-belonging of which Bataille speaks is also connected to the question of sacrifice. And one could say that, in a certain way, Christianity is the end of sacrifice, unless we continue to think the sacrament of the Eucharist as a form of sacrifice.
J.-L.N.: I think the Eucharist represents the perpetual sacrifice of Christ. Through the Eucharist, the body of Christ is incorporated into everyone, into each Christian at least. This incorporation is that of Christ’s glorious body and his human—let’s say historical—body from before the resurrection. Transubstantiation, which is what makes the body of Christ entirely present in a piece of nourishing substance that can be absorbed into the body of everyone, actually signifies that it’s Christ’s human body that once again joins the human condition indefinitely and joins what is mortal about it too. At the same time, Christ can only be ingested because he offered himself as a sacrifice and as the real, effective memory of his presence. So this presence, both his divine and human presence, is renewed indefinitely among human beings. One can interpret the host as both the sacred species—that is, as having at once the appearance of a human body, that of Jesus of Nazareth, and also the appearance of a glorious body, which is that of the same Jesus of Nazareth, only resurrected. This immensely delicate articulation contains a very important teaching of Christianity: This teaching is less about the triumph over death in the most banal sense of the term, and more about the possibility of being in the belonging of a common body. One mustn’t forget that the doctrine of the Eucharist is continued in the doctrine of the Church as the mystical body of Christ. Some theologians employed this thought of the mystical body toward the totality, not only the totality of humanity, but also of nature. Christianity has had a very strong role in implementing a feeling of belonging, which is why it’s the religion of love.
P.-P.J.: Your analysis brings to mind a word of caution that you expressed in a note in your work Maurice Blanchot, passion politique,16 which concerns Blanchot as well as Georges Bataille: No one can build a “case” or go to “trial” against the errors and political temptations of these two thinkers in the 30s without having first analyzed communion as it’s put forward by Christianity.
J.-L.N.: Certainly. And this difficulty is also at work in another text by Blanchot, The Unavowable Community.17 It’s quite remarkable that in the first part (“The Negative Community”) there’s a passage in which Blanchot dismisses the communion with scorn, saying that all communion aims at fusion. On this point, then, he agrees with what I’d suggested. Yet in the second part (“The Community of Lovers”), he suddenly speaks out of the blue about the “eucharistic body” and, a few lines further, he mentions “the disciples of Emmaus.” I noticed on several occasions that attentive and competent readers overlooked this moment in the text, as though this passage stunned its readers or was perceived to be banal even though it’s not. Blanchot, then, somewhere in between the beginning and the end of his work, moves from rejecting the communion to affirming the gift and the sharing of the body of Christ (even if this name doesn’t appear in the text), and it’s put in the indicative as if it were a real fact: “was given to us.” Thus Blanchot calls at the same time for the rejection of what has been called “fusion,” the affirmation of what has been called gift and sharing, and the disappearance—absence, death, passage elsewhere—of the body, which has been given and shared. Blanchot tends to give “community” over to the experience of a relationship that’s recounted in a novel by Duras,18 a “disaffected” love in both senses of the word. This relationship is both symbolic (like Duras’s literary account) and actual (like the Christ-like gesture, put in the indicative). So there’s something like an appeal to a mythical foundation for the community, which remains “unavowable” because it has to do with the secret of sexual intercourse and refers to the mystery of a “gift of the body.” One can’t help but ask oneself whether this is a kind of extremely complex transformation of the relationship to myth, the need for which has been felt since Romanticism and which fascisms believed they were able to take hold of, even though the convergence of sex and Christianity is doubly qualified for keeping the fascist temptation at bay. Still this is a singular operation that remains strange; I’d have to go further into its analysis …
P.-P.J.: Does Blanchot’s onerous position on this question recall what you were saying earlier about the effort to think something beneath the level of “bond”? You were speaking about “adherence,” something “inherent,” and you were indicating that these notions are close to the notion of “immanence.” This closeness seems to be at the heart of the difficulty. In another context, in your effort to think about what’s outside the world from within the world, you “invented” the word “transimmanence.” It’s this “almost immanent”—if we venture to formulate it this way—which is at the crux of the problem.
J.-L.N.: Yes, absolutely, because immanence, to quote Bataille once again, is “water in water,” the absence of all distance between the thing and itself. One could say that in a sense, there’s never any immanence because as soon as there’s a world, there are things. As I like to say, there’s not “something rather than nothing,” there are “some things” in plural, “several things.” It’s perhaps in this way that one can point out a weakness in the foundation of Lacan’s thought when he speaks about “the thing” as being the singular, unique, absolutely unique real, which at the same time is the object or impossible term of desire. But isn’t the error actually the attempt to name “the thing” in the singular?
Immanence would be the pure and simple unity, which is its “simple negation,” as Hegel analyzes it.19 The fact that the one is its own negation implies that there is never only “the several.” Perhaps one could say that “the several” is the fate of the totality of the existent, and that man, as a being that speaks, is the being who must posit the existence of things. It’s the existent who says existence, both for itself and all the rest of the world. This situation is our problem because in a “holistic” society, it’s not only the people, the social or community group, which is gathered, but it’s gathered with the nature that surrounds it; these are worlds that are populated with sacred animals and trees, with which human life is completely enmeshed, interwoven. Wittgenstein wrote very well in his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough that Frazer understood nothing about the people whose thought he deemed irrational or bizarre. If we place the idea of politics at a level beneath the Greek polis, one encounters worlds in which there is almost no separation between human society and a larger society where humanity makes up society—to retain this word—along with living and even inanimate nature. There is a co-herence or co-belonging of all the existents.
Regarding the question of a co-belonging that’s “close to” immanence, once again we find a law that applies to all instances of proximity: Regardless of how close this proximity may be, there needs to be a distance in order for proximity to be proximity. Besides, this law is also the law of touching, and, in fact, “contact” is a word that expresses it very well. This is probably the reason why touching, as Freud says, is the greatest and most universal of taboos, because touching borders upon what could be an interpenetration. And, in fact, as soon as there is penetration, there’s no longer touching. This is why I like to say that, when one is talking about sexual penetration, one is twisting the sense of the words, because this kind of penetration is much more complex than the penetration of a knife into flesh.
P.-P.J.: An invasion.
J.-L.N.: Yes, an invasion.
P.-P.J.: This reminds me of a passage by Levinas where Levinas speaks about caress and sexuality, of an “ ‘excess’ of tangency—as though tangency admitted a gradation—up to contact with the entrails, a skin going under another skin.”20
J.-L.N.: Yes, but a skin that goes under another skin that’s not penetration. In the case of sexual penetration, skin is replaced by a mucous membrane, which itself is a tissue that’s similar to skin, which is a surface element and pertains to a relationship with the external. In any case, touching displays proximity as such, which is not immanence. Here one could grasp the implication of this difference on the basis of certain psychoanalytic representations. What really irritates me, what I profoundly disagree with, is the representation in which one must learn to renounce a primordial unity, leave one’s mother’s womb, accept castration as the deprivation of a sort of omnipotence. If one can only think in terms of the necessity of renouncing an always prior immanence, it’s because of a sort of incapacity at the heart of our culture to start thinking in terms of separation, that is, in terms of relationship too.
The question of community emerges in that humanity which has left a prior state behind, which still remains in some places, in parts of Indian, Japanese, and African societies, as one might think. But at the same time, all of this is contaminated by contact with our own society, which has left behind a world in which there was a sort of given co-belonging, without this gift being a reference to an illusion of immanence; it referred to a co-belonging. We, who came later, say it’s an illusion. It’s the same gesture as that of the philosopher condemning myths because they lie. Much later, psychoanalysis established that the individual lies to him- or herself because they tell themselves their own myth. The difficulty truly lies here, which brings us back to the two previously mentioned values of the word “politique” and the two possible destinies of this word: On the one hand, the organization of common existence, the reduction of “the unsocial sociability of man” (according to Kant’s well-known phrase),21 conjoining antagonistic interests, and, on the other hand, assuming a sense or truth about this existence.
1. Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
4. Matthew 22:21, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, ed. Wayne A. Meeks (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
5. Claude Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2012).
6. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
7. Romans 13:1.
8. Published in 1680 after the author’s death in 1653.
9. [A French expression used to describe an array of non-governmental representatives from community organizations, NGOs, media, trade unions, universities, and religious groups.—Trans.]
10. Paul Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312–94, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
11. “Let them hate, provided that they fear,” Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, trans. Catharine Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 152. 2nd century AD.
12. Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. Charles Cocks (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1847). See, in particular: the 1847 “Preface,” 3–4; Book III, Chapter 11, “The New Religion—Federations (July 1798 to July 1790), 440; Book IV, Chapter 1 (July 1790 to July 1791), “Pourquoi la religion nouvelle ne pût-elle se former—obstacles intérieurs,” in Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1939), 425, 432. [Book IV of Michelet’s History of the French Revolution is not included in Cocks’s English translation.—Trans.]
13. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Penguin Books, 1992). [Nancy is paraphrasing the text orally.—Trans.]
14. Intus, interior, intimus: inner, more inner, innermost. Cf. Saint Augustine, Confessions, 3.6.11, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford, 1991), 43.
15. La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin, 1959), 65.
16. Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, passion politique: lettre-récit de 1984, followed by a Lettre de Dyonis Mascolo (Paris: Galilée, 2001).
17. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988).
18. Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 1986).
19. G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). [Nancy is paraphrasing the text orally. Cf. 98–99.—Trans.]
20. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 187.
21. Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, 1784.