P.-P.J.: Our—final?—question is about nihilism and joy. Can one hear in “the possibility of a world,” the expression that seals our interview, an interrogation into the hope of exiting out of nihilism, which would mean being done with this world that’s ending and which has an affective tone of, in the words of Günther Anders, both hopelessness and the desire for revolution?1 Could one consider a world of joy—I’m aware of the Christian connotation of this expression—in the sense in which you write that “there is not much joy in the human of humanism”? Must the “retracing” of the limits of the political leave room for the opening of spheres where joy would be possible?
J.-L.N.: One should think about the appearance of the theme of joy in Christianity. Perhaps one must understand that Christian joy comes in a place left empty, the place of the wise person, and responds to a dissatisfaction, a lack of serenity. The era in which Christianity appeared was profoundly marked by Stoicism, the influence of which is very present at least in Paul. Yet Stoicism or Epicureanism, a bit like its companion or twin, already has in view perhaps like all of philosophy before it—a kind of fulfillment in a wisdom that bears two aspects: both an intellectual dominance or—if one wants to avoid using such a reductive word—a privilege attributed to logos; and a certain disappearance, a certain effacement of erōs. It’s true that in Plato erōs seems consubstantial with logos. Still, whereas it’s very present in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, it makes itself scarce in the rest of Plato’s works. By Aristotle, it has completely disappeared, just as in Stoicism and Epicureanism. Then something else comes—joy?—in the place of what, I would say, had almost been closed off by sophia and theōria, as well as ecstasy and exaltation, which used to accompany the sacrifice that by then had disappeared—recall that the story of Abraham, as well as that of Christ as the last sacrifice, speaks of this disappearance.
P.-P.J.: We could also speak about the loss of “enthusiasm” that’s in question in Adoration.
J.-L.N.: This more or less sacrificial, ecstatic, and mystical enthusiasm was present in all the mystery religions that existed up until Rome, at which time they lost much of their power. The entire history of Antiquity until Christianity is perhaps that of the weakening of these mystery religions, which were still present in Pompeii but didn’t manage to structure society. As for civil religions, they had also declined, if not failed. Christian joy was perhaps the name of what came to that place, of a wisdom or a certain enthusiasm that from then on seemed insufficient or unsatisfactory. Christian joy took up this idea of participating in the divine and this quest for plenitude, but by saying it with the sign or mark most proper to monotheism: the infinite. One may think or consider that wisdom or enthusiasm may reach a peak, a final accomplishment, whereas joy is a continuously renewed eruption, which isn’t simple or self-evident and is extremely complicated, but which gives it its major key. I’d say then that it’s not only a Christian issue because Spinoza wonders about it, too—but perhaps Spinoza wasn’t unaffected by Christian or Judeo-Christian influences … In the last proposition of the Ethics, Spinoza shows how much joy, or “blessedness [béatitude],” participates in a dynamic of constant renewal toward a beyond: “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.”2 It’s vital to understand well that virtue is virtus, which is strength or energy (the same is true for the Greek word aretē). “Blessedness” is a difficult word to employ today because it seems to designate a “state” more than anything, rather than an impetus, and this is the case, first because there’s no semantic group for “joy.” And yet beatus designates the “blessed” Christian, a titled lower than that of saint. Nevertheless, if one mentions the work of Levinas and, perhaps more surprisingly, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s small book, Pasolini, an Improvisation (of a Saintliness),3 it’s hard not to admit that there’s an evident and complex kinship between blessedness, saintliness, and joy. At stake in this web is something that isn’t wisdom or ecstatic or orgiastic enthusiasm—something that takes the place of it—but rather something that opens another dimension.
In our modern world, this takes the name “happiness.” Throughout the eighteenth century, an idea of happiness was developed in the image of a certain bourgeois ideal;4 one can find echoes of it in Rousseau. What about the emergence of this word in revolutionary discourse, notably in Saint-Just? One may recall the famous declaration delivered before the Convention: “Happiness is a new idea in Europe.”5 Does the novelty consist in an already commonly diffused vision of happiness that would have to be provided to the people through the violence that we know about (the context is that of the organization of Terror)? Perhaps the true novelty would be a thought of happiness less as contentment and more as the possibility in the end of affirming a sense of existence that indeed is not fulfilled or ensured either by knowledge or by a revelation or a religious grace, but through existence itself. My wager, a risky one perhaps, is to attribute some idea of this nature to Saint-Just.
P.-P.J.: To speak of the novelty of this idea of happiness is perhaps also related to the fact that, before the Revolution, the good prince had to be concerned about the salvation of his subjects instead of their “happiness.”
J.-L.N.: Yes, completely. Salvation—Christian salvation, actually—may have taken over joy, or taken away from joy, because salvation isn’t joyful by itself. Salvation may be the forgiveness of sins, eternal life, and escaping from hell. Then, evidently, salvation can’t be sad or unhappy, but this still doesn’t mean that it’s joyful. Sure, with law, with good theology, or good Christian spirituality, salvation must tendentially be identical to joy, which means that the saved person is in permanent jubilation to be in the presence of God, etc. But in everyday practice, in ordinary Christianity, Protestantism pushed joy into the background. Then the possibility opens for what you have placed in your expression “nihilism or joy”: I like this question’s position, which I’ve never thought about: Nihilism is perhaps the absence of joy before anything else.
P.-P.J.: In listening to you, once again I’m sensitive to the possibility of saying, provocatively, that jouissance is possible in the sense in which you speak about “fulfillment” in Dis-Enclosure,6 and in the sense in which, as opposed to the idea of a “static” nature of blessedness, one may consider a dynamic, an “energetics” of life. Beyond the well-being that’s indispensable for maintaining life, there is the possible liberation of a vitality.
J.-L.N.: Yes. And I would even add that I’d like to work on this question of the possibility or impossibility of jouissance. What actually allows Lacan to say that “jouissance is impossible”7 is to employ “jouissance” in the legal sense of the word, that is, in the sense of the free disposal of a good that I possess; a “static” approach of sexual jouissance, then, is envisioned here by Lacan. Yet this jouissance is exemplary, and perhaps even more than exemplary, because it’s precisely in this strange place, as Hegel remarked, that procreation is conjoined to pleasure and one does feel that the explanation of pleasure as the drive of the species falls short. Human beings have always “practiced sex” outside of procreation, even if confining sex to pleasure only did not exist perhaps in more archaic cultures in which procreation itself ran the risk of many dangers. But putting this reservation aside, there remains this strange confluence on which I’d like to work later. We’re facing two different situations: Giving birth is not at all the same thing as having an orgasm [jouir], even though one has an orgasm in order to or when one wants to have a child. But at the same time, the two things aren’t completely foreign to one another: The child leaves, so one can consider the child as a good, but a good that one doesn’t possess. And as for jouissance, one doesn’t possess it either; it’s that in which one is dispossessed; this is why Lacan’s linguistic ruse is particularly uncalled for.
P.-P.J.: Sexual jouissance isn’t an end.
J.-L.N.: Exactly, but what one says about sexual jouissance one can say also about aesthetic jouissance in general, and also about gastronomic jouissance, too, for example. All the minor arts from this point of view are interesting because the other arts are perhaps at such a height that one feels jouissance less.
P.-P.J.: Sublimated?
J.-L.N.: Yes, that’s it, sublimated. But what shows itself in gastronomic jouissance? It’s the possibility of making things with food that go well beyond nutrition; but at the same time, one is nourished by it. So I’d want to say that jouissance is how life shows that the desire to live, which is perhaps life itself very simply, goes far beyond the desire to go on living.
P.-P.J.: Perhaps it’s useful here to recall that Freud, in his first theory of drives, which he explains in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,8 gives a central position to the concept of “anaclisis” (Anlehnung): human sexuality develops by “anaclisis” on bodily functions. It’s not a question of saying in a banal way that desire relies on need, but rather a question of considering that need always has the opportunity to be exceeded.
J.-L.N.: Speaking of which, in the case of the human being, one cannot strictly speak about need. Except precisely for those who find themselves stuck “in need.”
P.-P.J.: What’s different from need, and is even opposed to it, is desire …
J.-L.N.: Yes, if we understand desire, as we specified earlier, not as a relationship to a lack but as an impetus of existence, as a “push” of Being.
P.-P.J.: But what does this push push toward?
J.-L.N.: Precisely toward the world. What existence strives toward is the world and Being-in-the-world, that is, toward the possibility of making sense. Sense is the reference of all existences between each other, as we said, whether or not it’s exactly in these terms. Existence desires to be in the world and to make a world [faire monde]. This is done—or at least it must be possible to do so—in each existence, in each instance of existence, by and for each.
P.-P.J.: All the forms of existence.
J.-L.N.: Yes, we discussed this earlier; one must know how to think sense in all its forms, living and non-living. This doesn’t mean reducing the human being to a stone or insect, because the human being remains that by which the question of sense, the demand for sense, is opened. But this sense that the human being carries “as such” (through language, through art) itself has sense only in the reference of everything to everything else. A world, then, doesn’t proceed from a need—from a being’s need or a “creator’s” need. A world is without need, a world is this: that everything is here and demands to be greeted insofar as it’s here.
P.-P.J.: And evil?
J.-L.N.: Evil is precisely refusing the world, wanting to substitute an empire for it—whatever the sovereign may be … This may be the empire of money or “me” or a god, or the empire of technology drunk on itself or piety drunk on itself. One always finds this: the centripetal forces, the self-sufficiencies. The world is centrifugal, erratic, open.
1. Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (München: Beck, 1956).
2. Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, in The Ethics: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect; Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Seymour Feldman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 223.
3. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Pasolini, an Improvisation (of a Saintliness),” trans. Steven Miller, in Umbr(a): The Dark God 1 (2005): 87–92.
4. Cf. Robert Mauzi, L’idée du bonheur dans la littérature et la pensée française au XVIIIè siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960).
5. A sentence that ends Saint-Just’s speech before the Convention on le 15 ventôse an II (March 3, 1794).
6. Jean-Luc Nancy, “An Exempting from Sense,” in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Melenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 121–28.
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The ‘There Is’ of the Sexual Relation,” in Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality, trans. Anne O’Byrne (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
8. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (London: Imago, 1949).