Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy

B.C. Hutchens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315478876
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The work of the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has impacted across a range of disciplines. His writings on psychoanalysis, theology, art, culture and, of course, philosophy are now widely translated and much discussed. His L'Experience de la Liberte (1988) is considered to be one of the landmarks of contemporary continental philosophy. Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy is the first genuine introduction to Nancy's ideas and a clear and succinct appraisal of a burgeoning reputation. The book summarises topically the primary conceptual areas of Nancy's thought and explores its relevance for contemporary issues like nationalism, racism and media rights. Nancy's indebtedness to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Bataille is examined as well as how his ideas compare to those of his contemporary continental thinkers. Three major areas of Nancy's work are emphasised: freedom and morality; community and politics; and arts and the media. The reader is guided through a chosen theme without being lost in a welter of allusive language, jargon is avoided where possible and when unavoidable it is clearly explained. The book concludes with a new interview with Nancy, which discusses the future of philosophy. The book will be an important addition to the readings lists for courses on contemporary continental thought and political philosophy.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

What will become of our world is something we cannot know, and we can no longer believe in being able to predict or command it. But we can act in such a way that this world is a world able to open itself up to its own uncertainty as such.

(RP: 158)

All that we transmit to ourselves … has begun to transmit itself in front of us, toward or coming from a “we” that we have not yet appropriated, and which has not yet received its name, if ever it should have one.

(C: 384)

Our time is the time that, as it were, exposes exposure itself: the time for which all identifiable figures have become inconsistent (the gods, the logoi, the wise, knowledge), and which therefore works toward (or which gives itself over to) the coming of a figure of the unidentifiable, the figures of opacity and of resistant consistency as such. “Man” thus becomes opaque to himself, he grows thick and heavy with the weight of an excessive thought of his humanity: eight billions bodies in an ecotechnical whirlwind that no longer has any other end than the infinity of an inappropriable meaning.

(GT: 83–4)

Jean-Luc Nancy is a contemporary philosopher fixated by the parlous future of community and its spontaneous freedoms in a globalizing West. His core commitment is to an alternative view of community dissimilar to those normally offered today. In particular, he regards social relations as an insubstantial sharing in an “impalpable reticulation of contiguous and tangential contacts”, not as a substantial cluster of “individuals” determined by common social means and focused on common political ends that produce a controllable future. In addressing this possibility, he proposes a “community of being” (the irreducible plurality of singular “ones”) that replaces the intractably traditional question of the “being of community” (the “being” that brings predetermined “individuals” into communion) (SW: 61; BC: 1). With undeniable sincerity, he addresses the possibility of the West’s future being determined by the feral interplay between, on the one hand, a democracy of individualism rendered impotent by its “cynical” liberal values and, on the other, an “ecotechnics” of capital (expansively formative of community and sovereignty). He insists vehemently that, despite the political and technological progress of our contemporary “market democracy”, we remain unwittingly improvident, closed to an uncertain future and the undecidability of the consequences of agency. Nevertheless, for Nancy, whatever form modern life may assume, each of “us” is a finite being whose radical singularity has been neither eradicated by the demands of political and social reality nor entirely deracinated from community life. It is in our freedom and community that we are open to a future that is always a surprise or shock to our traditional sensibilities. To realize this, however, we must think differently of what freedom and community have conventionally come to mean.

In the main, he is intrigued by the thought that the Westernization of the globe has redounded to become the globalization of the West, leading to a suspended “end” torn between the incompatible options of a reductive Enlightenment and a lyric Romanticism (MMT: 94; BSP: 63). Singularly devoid of the bromides and vatic pronouncements so common in “Continental” philosophy, his work soberly attests a fascination with the West’s panoply of immanence: its suspended history and the resulting “crisis of sense”; its exclusionary and appropriative politics (in which “everything is political”); its yearning fascination with exteriority (God, Law, Value); its debilitating nostalgia for lost community, myth and rituals of spiritual sacrifice (already a minatory totalitarianism); the precariousness of its rational and libertarian efforts to establish the self-evidence of “freedom”; its self-deceiving presumption of evil’s essential negativity; the intrusion of its ecotechnical values into health and life; its determination of the market value of “being-human” reflected in the media’s opinion polling, market research, and human interest stories; and above all, perhaps, its horror vacui.

This is certainly not to imply that Nancy is a “revolutionary” philosopher in any traditional sense of the term. Although he calls for a “revolutionary politics”, he understands this to mean resistance to the political establishment of formal freedom and community, or alternatively, a spacing within which freedom disrupts the market democratic effort to bestow it with a meaning and put it to a political task. What liberal, libertarian and communitarian philosophies of democracy cannot grasp, he enjoins us to realize, is freedom as the inaugural act itself, the surprising burst of freedom exercised in the social effort to take freedom back from any political cause that has allegedly granted “liberty” as a “right” and then attempted to recover it for political reasons. In other words, he is interested in the revolutionary politics of the “an-archy” of freedom itself, the irreducible and inappropriable surprise that opens singular beings to their own future (a future, it must be said, that political views of freedom and community cannot anticipate) (EF: 76–8).

Ultimately, the focus of his attacks on contemporary views of freedom, community and politics is their implication of “substantialist” and “immanentist” metaphysics, which neglects the futural spacings of modern social relations. (By “substantialist” I mean any commitment to the predetermined existence of beings and the self-evidence of their essence; by “immanentist” I mean the activity of determining such beings’ identities through the reflection and playing back of ideals conceived for this purpose.) In this respect, he is not merely another thinker of the “end” of the West’s intellectual projects and political missions, but a Nietzschean Versucher who wonders at futural possibilities of precisely the intense debilities of that “end”. The West is not mistaken in its view of the end of the meaning of community, yet the openness to the uncertainty of its destiny provides the very conditions of that meaning (C: 374). His writings explore the sense of the world, in particular its circulations, relations, singularities, inoperable implications, and certainly the polymorphy and polyphony of the banalities of common life. Aversion to the singular things of such life and inordinate passion for mediation, he proposes, place Western subjectivity at once “in” the world transcendentally but not immanent to it as a finite existent amongst singularities. Celebrating the capricious behaviour of concepts, he shares with many post-structuralist philosophers a determination to discover untapped “an-archic” conceptual possibilities of experience, especially those involving intense disruptions, interruptions and fragmentations of existence and its discourses. Perhaps Nancy’s work is a response to the intensities of finitude, the ecstasy of freedom (better: the ecstasy that freedom is), and the rapture of sharing in loving, giving, dying and writing – in other words, the perturbations of philosophical thought. And it must be said that, despite the enriching presence of many influences on his thinking, Nancy is inexorably original in his pursuit of the conditions of another, futural philosophical scene of openness to uncertainty, the undecidability of philosophical discourse (that is, its openness to a futural resolution that always “is coming” but never arrives).

From the outset, what is meant by the statement that Nancy is a philosopher of “the future” should be clarified. Of course, Nancy’s argumentation has not yet been thoroughly raked through and continues to yield many fecund ideas. However, it might be said with some temerity that Nancy’s “future” is not merely the post-Enlightenment’s field of opportunity for the deployment of rationality into a progressive scheme; nor is it the fashionable post-secular eschatological “not-yet” or “to-come” in Heidegger, Bloch and Levinas; nor is it even the ecotechnical reticulations of the indefinite power of capital so dominant in the shopping malls and entertainment circles of the market democratic world. Rather, following the thought of “the end” to its end, Nancy is interested in the intrinsic limits transgressed in this culmination of thought, the interstitial boundaries leaped on the way to the end. His self-engendered discourse straddles such internal divisions and strives to nullify each of the terms of their dichotomies. Existential conditions are espoused in the “extensive/intensive dynamic” of singularities exposed to one another, at once “in” and “not in” existence but exposed to it and having a share in it nonetheless. In this way, he is, as Christopher Fynsk has remarked, a “laborer of thought”¹ (BC: 4–8) undaunted by the thinking of the uncertain future of a plurality of singular “ones” and the undecidability of the vectoral relations among them.

Despite being subjected to a modest but respectable degree of commentary, Nancy’s work has not yet yielded its primary focus. After all, his erudition encompasses Romanticism and techno music, phenomenology and communitarianism, Hegelian logic and contemporary cinema. Commentators have proposed a number of significant nodal concepts that might provide insights into this focus. For Howard Caygill (who contrasts Nancy with the political scientist Hannah Arendt), Fred Dallmayr (who intersects his work with that of historians Samuel Huntington and Immanuel Wallerstein), Christopher Fynsk (who reads him in conjunction with Rorty) and Simon Critchley,² among others, it is the concept of an open community of sharing that is irreducible to political appropriation. Wilhelm Wurzer and Krzysztof Ziarek explore the provocative notions of ecotechnics and globalization in the context of a more general discussion of technology.³ Alternatively, for Gary Shapiro and Anne O’Byrne,⁴ it is the horizons of the body’s elliptical contact with others addressed at the very edge of philosophical discourse. Michael Naas hears in Nancy “perhaps the greatest thinker of worklessness and the interruption of the practical on the contemporary scene”, that is, one who daringly explores the resistances of meaning to sheer production and appropriation.⁵ John T. Lysaker emphasizes that Nancy is the composer of “literary communism”, the counter praxis posed against the totalizing practices of theory itself.⁶ Finally, Peter Fenves⁷ proposes that Nancy’s primary intent is an empirical exploration of the burst of freedom exhibited most poignantly in the positivity of wickedness. This diversity of perspectives attests to the rich conceptual possibilities Nancy’s work advertently offers.

However, all commentators agree that, despite the many possible gleanings of Nancy’s profoundly endowed texts, the task of his philosophy is to enquire into the sense of the world. (By “sense” one might understand preliminarily the condition of truth and meaning that precedes their partial disclosure and that is incommensurate with, yet enabling of, conventional views of both.) Indeed, there is nothing but the world, he avers, and any appeal to a transcendental reserve of meaning from which the sense of the world could be drawn is strictly unjustifiable. Refreshingly, Nancy will not temporize any “alterity” that would be “exterior” and “irreducible” to immanence, a transcendentality that, in contemporary post-secular theories, invariably provides an “opening” anticipating religious discourse. Strictly speaking, Nancy is not another philosopher of “the Other”. Christianity, he reiterates adroitly throughout his work, deserves deconstruction even if it is Christianity itself that enables deconstructive possibilities, although the danger remains that spiritual “alterities” will serve as foils for a self-fulfilling interpretative scheme that would preclude or “exscribe” the thought of the insubstantial “community of being”. Christianity, he remarks, is not a religion but the “self-deconstruction of religion”; it is an “exit from all religion” in so far as it is necessary “from the inside” to ask: “What does this mean?” (SDC: 3). Along with another stellar contemporary thinker who will have no truck with the theological excrescence of “alterities”, Alain Badiou, he insists that the world attests to itself and requires no external foundations. He demands that contemporary critical philosophy rid itself of the foundational “ontology of the Other and the Same” and emphasize enquiry into the ontology of a world of unmediated multiplicities of singular “ones”, of a community of others co-appearing in irreducible plurality (BSP: 53, 67).⁸ That is to say, there is no closed immanential “inside” of the world, because there could be no “outside” of any diversity of singular “ones”. This world is not merely a collection of entities whose meanings could be substantiated through exterior factors (such as God, creation, etc.). The sense of the world, he avers relentlessly against Hegel, should not be sublated into any greater synthesis of the significations of such entities. On the contrary, in order to “think” such sense at all, one would need to examine the question of relations among singularities, especially their trajectories and intersections. In his desire to “let oneself be led to concrete thinking” (BSP: 19, 45, 77, 199; BP: 188), Nancy is fascinated by the behaviours of such “corpuscular” vectors and relations, not merely with the substances and entities they relate (although he regards “sense” to be the material totality, not merely some truant ideality that divagates through tangible reality) (R: 8). And, in a phrase that recurs less frequently than its sentiment, “nothing more can be said”. The world is what it is – sense. The task of philosophy is to offer a “finite thinking” (the singular thought of singular beings, double genitive) through the variegations of the disclosure of sense.

Despite the stress on the singularity of sense, it is most obviously discernible on the surfaces or contours of entities, where such relations have an empirical presence, or in particular, where the world can be seen to “come to presence”. If one were to imagine erasing the entities of such immanential relations, then the result would be a denuded reality, a nothingness that would still have sense despite the nullification of its entities. In spite of our horror vacui, such a world does not “have” a sense (which would imply a transcendental reserve from which it receives it). Rather it “is” sense on the grounds that there could be nothing else. Sense and world are coextensive, perfectly commensurate, with no superfluous meanings overhanging this coextensivity. Of course, relations are a plurality of singular events, at once fissile and feral, which circulate through human experience and are grasped in figments of meaning. In order to “think” the sense of the world, it would be necessary to be sensitive to the nuances of such circulations.

Nevertheless, there are many aspects of Nancy’s thought that defy binary reasoning and its constraining dichotomies. For example, we shall hear Nancy say that the sense of the world is that the world “is” sense, that “we” are sense, and that evil is a positive presence or “constitutive decay” in the ground of freedom. Often, as if echoing Samuel Butler, he suggests that s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Nancy’s influences
• 3 Immanentism
• 4 Libertarianism
• 5 Post-secular theology
• 6 Communitarianism
• 7 Social contractarianism
• 8 Ecotechnics
• Conclusion: The future as openness to uncertainty
• Interview: The future of philosophy
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index