Democracy and Community

Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Engelmann, Wieland Hoban

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509535354, 9781509535347
• eBook ISBN: 9781509535361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The concept of community is tainted by the events of the twentieth century, frequently appropriated by totalitarian regimes for the purposes of exclusion and oppression. In this dialogue with Peter Engelmann, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy attempts to reframe community as central to a reconceptualization of politics and democracy.

Observing that all our interactions are in some way shared experiences, Nancy demonstrates that a common sense of life precedes our existence as individuals: we can only truly make sense of life in a plurality. Democracy is typically concerned with establishing political unity, yet its greater task lies in community: creating a space in which sense can realize itself and circulate.

This conversation with one of France's foremost thinkers will be of great interest to all readers of contemporary philosophy and political theory.

III
The Ontology of Communality

Peter Engelmann: Let’s return specifically to Strasbourg. Can you say a little more about your collaboration with Philippe, which was a very special kind of collaboration?

Jean-Luc Nancy: I met Philippe in 1967. And it was during the events of 1968 that everything happened between us too: we decided to stay in Strasbourg, and at the same time we began a chiastic personal history. Ultimately, Philippe got together with my first wife and I had children with Philippe’s wife. At first I was still living in Colmar, but after a very serious car accident in late 1969 – I crashed between Strasbourg and Colmar, breaking my hip – I decided to move to Strasbourg. And with that, an important aspect of the whole thing began: living together.

Peter Engelmann: The four of you all lived together?

Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, the four of us as well as our four children. That was connected to the sexual freedom of the 1968 generation, which my first wife and I had already lived before. And also, of course, to the subject of community: living together. And this communal life was connected to our living and thinking together at the university. By October 1968 everything was more or less over, everything returned to normal, one could say. But in Strasbourg, at least, everything was still in upheaval. So, Philippe and I had started the year very much as usual, but we and the students wanted to deal with completely new content. So, we simultaneously continued with classical topics and also discussed entirely new things – structuralism, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and so forth. And students came who wanted to work on that. So very soon we started organizing something outside the normal courses, together with colleagues from other subjects like literature, history, at times there were a few psychoanalysts too. We called them ‘seminars’, which wasn’t the norm in French universities back then. And we started studying Bataille. I don’t remember exactly why, but Philippe and I could agree on that, we wanted to start with him. Naturally, Bataille’s thought was absent from the university. In the following years we held the seminar more or less every Saturday, each year with a different topic and with several people we had invited. The seminars were always very well attended. We had almost no money, but ultimately we could always scrape together enough to pay for a few trips and the like. Strangely enough, hardly anything from those seminars has been published; although we wrote a lot of texts, they were never made into books. At the same time as holding the seminars on Bataille, we also organized a conference on rhetoric to which we invited Derrida, Lyotard and Genette.

Peter Engelmann: That was in 1969, wasn’t it?

Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, in the autumn. A year earlier we had started doing Bataille and I had written a short, very naive text, a kind of panorama of current philosophy, heavily influenced by epistemology, specifically by Canguilhem, who was an important figure for myself and my generation. In any case, I tried in that text to contrast this interest in science, which was very much in fashion at the time, with a philosophical interest of the kind I had found in Derrida especially. It was also about the question of whether a new form of science was possible. That’s also what Derrida asks in Of Grammatology: is this a new science, is it an -ology, a parody or a metaphor? This text of mine was published in the university newspaper along with various other articles. And I sent it to Derrida, at the École Normale, because I didn’t have his private address. During the course of the year he replied, and I was very moved, because he wrote that he had already read some of my articles that were published in Esprit and thought that we would meet at some point. That’s how it all started. So, then we organized this conference on rhetoric and Derrida came; he gave a lecture that was later published as ‘White Mythology’.¹⁴ Genette also came, as he’d been one of Philippe’s teachers in Le Mans. We had also invited Lyotard, whom Philippe still knew from Socialisme ou barbarie, though we weren’t in contact with him and didn’t know anything about his activities at that time. But his wife, like Philippe’s, was an English teacher at the University of Strasbourg, and that was how we found out that he was also interested in rhetoric. So we invited him too, and he came.

Peter Engelmann: So everyone came together at this conference?

Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, though it was just for two days. The theme of the conference, rhetoric, came from Philippe. It wasn’t really my topic at all, but through Philippe I’d developed an interest in literature in the broadest sense, and also in rhetoric. So we already had an idea of what would later be termed the ‘linguistic turn’. We wanted to occupy ourselves with language, with the sign, and so we founded the Groupe de recherche sur le théorie du signe et du texte.

Peter Engelmann: You hit the bullseye there: that’s been the central subject ever since. Was Derrida also part of it?

Jean-Luc Nancy: No, Philippe and I were in close contact with him, but the Groupe consisted only of colleagues from Strasbourg who wanted to join in. Then we invited speakers, naturally Derrida and Lyotard, but also Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Jean-Joseph Goux and others.

Peter Engelmann: Did you also invite Sarah Kofman?

Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, of course. We had met her through Jacques.

Peter Engelmann: Let’s go back to the events of 1968 and talk about what set off those events.

Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, you’re right, we should look a little more closely at 1968. Because, unlike in Paris, the situation in Strasbourg wasn’t so much a confrontation in the street as a way of gathering at the university. Hundreds of us sat in this beautiful old German imperial university, debating hour after hour. For us it was less about a particular political action than about a way of keeping the entire realm of politics in limbo: a suspension of politics. Naturally political involvement played a part for us too, and we had connections to political movements in other countries. But the main thing was to be together, to have discussions. Obviously, there were people in Strasbourg too who wanted to change something, and for most of them that meant founding a critical university, but that was exactly what we didn’t want. I remember very well the day we went to see a committee for a critical university. After half an hour we decided: we’re not joining in. For us it wasn’t about a new politics, it was about withdrawing and seeing what’s at stake in the current situation. We didn’t see any potential for something new in the political directions of the time, whether communist, far left or Trotskyist. And we felt very soon that the reshaping of the university, which was seemingly the main motive and purpose of the entire movement, was simply an adaptation of the university to something we didn’t have a name for back then, but which was something resembling consumer society. We knew all too well that the reforms enacted by the government would only lead to a co-optation of the movement.

Peter Engelmann: If I understand you correctly, you and the others sensed that both the political demands of the students and the measures subsequently implemented by the government wouldn’t lead to any substantial change, that it was simply a matter of system-immanent adjustments, and that this approach didn’t hold the potential for a real change. And that was why you wanted to question and reflect fundamentally on this system, and based on that you would look for alternatives?

Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. Philippe and I wanted to do work on politics, we held the view that we needed to rethink the political. For myself especially, that increasingly came down to the question of society or community.

Peter Engelmann: So, the question of community or society came about through a reformulation of the concept of politics? Or was it more of a rupture, an abandonment of the concept of politics, a change of terminology?

Jean-Luc Nancy: No, more of a reformulation. This was accompanied firstly by an interest in literature. Not as an interest in fictions; our point of departure was rather the question of how far literature calls philosophy into question as a system, as a conceptual system. What is the relationship between literature and philosophy, how does literature find its way into philosophy? Literature is something that’s given to others to read, and which stands within a horizon of communication from the start. In philosophy, things are seemingly different. Philosophy presents itself as the intimacy of thought; hence the question of how to practise philosophy. What is the question of theatre? What does the question of theatre, especially Greek tragedy, have to do with philosophy? Plato composed tragedies in his youth, and supposedly burned them later in order to write dialogues instead. These things were very much on our minds in those years. As was, naturally, the literature of Romanticism. Philippe and I published The Literary Absolute ¹⁵ on that in 1978. The idea was of an infinite literature as the epitome of a new society, a new form of coexistence. Naturally, the way of life of the Jena Circle, the early Romantics around the Schlegel brothers, was significant for this idea of society. Somebody once said mockingly, ‘those people in Strasbourg are like the ones in Jena, the women knit socks while the men chat’. (Laughs) But, naturally, it was also about reshaping sexual relationships. For a while, some people thought Philippe and I were homosexual. Later we h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• I. Rethinking the Political
• II. History: Between Process and Event
• III. The Ontology of Communality
• IV. The Spirit of Communism
• V. Democracy: Fixation or Circulation of Sense?
• Editor’s Afterword
• End User License Agreement