Nancian virtual doubts about ‘Leformal’ democracy

I

In the writings of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, there is an undeniable tendency to think our liberal democracy, to understand the form out of which politics happens today. This thinking is never an easy one. It is uneasy in more than one meaning of the word. First of all it is not easy to stipulate what Nancy’s thinking is about, also considering many criticisms on that point in Nancy’s work. There is no ‘theory’ of Nancy on contemporary politics, and yet, he does not stop talking about it, albeit in a very fragmentary and non-systematic way. To put it in another way: Nancy offers us no detailed and workable conceptual apparatus to analyse the problem of contemporary politics, but does not stop saying that this is the problem we have to deal with.

Second, his thinking is itself always acting uneasily when it comes to contemporary politics. There is a sort of agitation in his work when it turns to the question of politics. At several places we read an appeal to deal thoroughly with this question and ‘qu’il y a un travail à faire’, that there is still some work to do. From the beginning of the 1980s with the Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur le Politique and the two books resulting out of that (Rejouer le politique and Retrait du politique), until the many, rather short texts he published on this topic during the last years of the century, the question of politics crosses very clearly Nancy’s work.

And third, to Nancy, the worst thing we can do in thinking contemporary politics, is taking it for granted that we know what politics is about today, given the evidence of the global democracy. So to him, we almost have to be at unease when it comes to politics. Contemporary thinking on the contrary is all too comfortable in this. It seems, he says, as if everyone takes for granted that today there is only a liberal democracy left. In that case, there would be no politics left to think about and the only relevant philosophical gesture concerning contemporary politics would be the moral defence of our democratic consensus. This is too easy, argues Nancy. He not only fulminates against this contemporary philosophical contentment with democracy. The moral defence of liberal democracy as a buffer against totalitarianism, is an all too comfortable philosophical stance which he does not want to share. Instead of defending a ‘formless' political regime, he wants to think the form of politics in the most critical and sceptical way.

With this call, Nancy manoeuvres himself into a remarkable position but he is definitely not alone in it. His appeal to think democracy is, for example, very similar to what Alain Badiou calls ‘the anti-totalitarian and democratic consensus'. ¹ With it, he seems to articulate a profound scepticism concerning our (absence of) thinking of democracy today. Also Badiou suggests that today, it is almost forbidden to question democracy, and that those who dare to do so, run the risk of being called totalitarian. ²

So it is to Nancy. In his text ‘La Comparution/The Compearence from the Existence of “Communism” to the Community of “Existence”’, Nancy reflects on the decisive moment that politics have become definitely problematic for our times: the failure of the communist project, having been made definitely clear with the symbolical collapse of the Berlin Wall. ³ During the 1980s and 1990s, it became more and more clear that the communist project – an ‘oeuvre’ in the real sense of the word: the production of an actual ethical, human project: the striving for social justice, happiness and equality of all citizens of the community – had become an inhuman regime. Since then, we are, inevitably it seems, living in a liberal political context. The liberal democracy distances itself away from communism as it would no longer be the production of an oeuvre, a strife for the fulfilment of a work of truth, but the development of a sort of formless framework we simply need for the application of human rights and needs.

The failure of the accomplishment of communist ends was not only a political one, it was also a philosophical disaster. ‘Les intellectuels’ had to recognize that the philosophical idea of the Marxist project they believed so hard to be the right one, had fallen apart. In that respect 1989 was not only the fall of a political regime, but also that of a philosophical idea, or, to be more exact, the fall of politics as an Idea. That is what Nancy still says in 1999:

When it became clear that the end of communism was not simply the end of Stalinism but the end of a manner of taking for granted the idea that somewhere there was an absolute or infinite community toward which history should move, even against real communism, it became clear for me that, in both senses of the term, being-in-common was a question. And it became central not just for me but for all of us. ⁴

In this context, philosophy, instead of thinking the way how politics in general or democracy in particular functions, tends to conserve liberal democracy as it is now. Marxism has fallen apart and therefore it seems that the political problem of today is to know how the liberal democracy has to be managed. It is a way of reflection that tends to think reactively the virtues of parliamentary democracy as the perfectible form. Liberal democracy is here in fact the regime that had to be defended: defence of liberties, defence of human rights … democracy as that of which the philosophical defence must assure the basics. Nancy’s complaint about contemporary philosophy is precisely that it limits itself in defending this political regime and does not think politics.

The above-sketched situation is, if I understand Nancy well, a disaster. As if it is the task of philosophy to defend a sort of politics? Philosophy, he suggests, must not defend but think politics. Unfortunately, the philosophical climate today, where the ‘anti-totalitarian et democratic consensus' is quite dominant, obstructs this thinking. ⁵ Democracy, it seems, is the only political regime left and the main task of our time, and thus also of philosophy, would be to defend it. To Nancy this ‘content of democracy’ is all too comfortable. ⁶ There is something that has to be redone, he repeats often. Everything about politics is unclear: what it is, what we mean by the word, if it still means something. That is what he says, for example, in an interview with Francis Fischer in 1999, and I quote at length:

I think that one of the big problems for philosophers and intellectuals today is that we have nothing more to say on the political level. For example, at the moment the elections in South Africa and the problems in Bosnia are all over our televisions. Of course, we are all happy to see the South African people celebrating. But we also know that we have no political model to offer South Africa beyond the model of the democratic vote, which is very important, but which won’t resolve the problems that the people of South Africa will encounter in a few years' time. And with the problem of Bosnia and Serbia. … What do we have to say? One can say, of course, that what the Serbs are doing in Bosnia is fascist. Fine. But who can answer the question of why these people are struggling for national and cultural identity? Why are there such nationalist forces and needs? These forces and needs for identity exist. But of what are they made? This is a question, I would say, which escapes our political tools. I am ashamed sometimes when, like many other people, I say that politically we must be against this and for that, because I am immediately aware that this doesn’t get us very far. When Socialism was a viable alternative, we had a certain representation of a communitarian way of life. We have nothing like that now. ⁷

Nancy testifies to being ashamed when he thinks about politics. It means he is convinced to be confronted with an ‘aporia’ in the strict meaning of the word: a point at which thinking has come to a dead end, when it is embarrassed and it cannot say anything any more. As Nancy says in the context of nowadays politics: there is no clear form or model left, no tools to analyse them:

When we say politics, we have in mind either something like a destiny of a people, or the idea of a way of managing the life of a people together, with justice, equality. We don’t have anything that is on the level of one or the other meaning of politics. We can’t say community is a big purpose. Purpose for what? For the world-community? There is no politics of the world, so far as I can see. Neither do we have something political that can guarantee politics in the sense of social justice, equality … and so there is something wrong with us. ⁸

(2) We also have to provide again our thinking of politics today with new conceptual or analytical tools. As Nancy says: there is nothing left and that is our problem today. Liberal democracy, or, more exactly, the political and moral defence of human rights, is insufficient as a political model. ¹⁰ To put it in another way: the only model left is the failure of politics as a ‘model’ as such; or: the only political figure is a ‘sans figure’. Just because every figuration of politics runs the risk of totalitarianism, we celebrate today the total lack of any figuration at all, as the victory of ‘global democracy’. Today, it has become problematic to speak of a political configuration as such, in the light of 20^th-century totalitarianism, and Nancy is the first one to be aware of that. But the total lack of political ‘figuration’, he says, means that we have ourselves and others nothing more to offer when it comes to the point of thinking politics.

II

This last remark needs further clarification, not least because the ‘aporia’ Nancy uncovers is a main one in contemporary thinking of politics. At several places in his work, Nancy refers to it, but he is rarely explicit in what he means exactly with it. The philosophical sky will possibly clear up when we confront his statement on this with some thoughts of the political philosopher Claude Lefort. In thinking contemporary democracy, the work of Claude Lefort is undeniably the main reference. Long before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the upsurge of an all-too-easy anti-Marxism, Lefort articulated in a nuanced way the formal differences between totalitarianism and democracy. According to Lefort, the specific ‘form’ of democracy is that it never becomes an accomplished and fulfilled form as such. In a certain sense, the only ‘form’ of democracy is formlessness, a form without form. In a democracy, the place of power becomes literally ‘infigurable’ as Lefort says. Democracy stands for formlessness or the relation to a void. ¹¹

Nancy and Lefort have had several debates on this. In the early 1980s, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe started the Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur le Politique out of the demand to rethink the political and not to rest on the common-sense evidences of our democracy. Lefort was one of their partners in these debates. Over several years there were meetings where philosophers such as Lyotard also gave lectures on this topic.

Further on in his work, Nancy rarely refers to Lefort, but he suggests at least twice in his oeuvre that the philosophical exploration of Lefort is more than worthwhile, albeit insufficient to think contemporary politics. In the chapter ‘Politics II’ of Le sens du monde he writes:

The totalitarian subject turns out to be suicidal, but democracy without identification turns out also to be without any demos or kratein of its own. ¹²

At several other places he repeats this, although he mentions only once the name of Lefort. In an interview of 1994, he explains why he is so occupied with the question of sense, especially as it is linked with the problem of politics, and there is a clear and critical stance away from Lefort. For Nancy, sense is a basic concept to think our existence today. His book The Sense of the World is an exploration of the idea of living in a world which has no sense but is the sense. The world can only be sense (and vice versa) if it has no sense (to lose), Nancy writes. Sense is there just as the world is there: without why. Sense stands for existence itself, for the fact that I am opened to existence and to the world. That we are sense, that there is sense and that we are here, this is the radical demand and consequence of the opened space that the global world has become for us. ¹⁴ Being in the world comprises the sense of our existence. To the extent that the world stands in relation to a creator outside the world, it can have sense. Once this (relation with a) creator falls away, the world no longer has sense: it is sense.

Let us go back to democracy now and quote from the interview in 1994:

I try to reshuffle the word, despite its ambiguities. It is the place of the question. Totalitarianism responded to it with an overcharge of sense, an over-meaning [sur-signification]. On the contrary, when we drain all sense, there is but the truth left. Or truth is given … or truth is pure and simply empty. At the political level, it sounds a bit like the proposition of Claude Lefort: democracy as the relation with a void, with a whole we must be aware of not filling it up again via the imaginary. I don’t say one must dig this hole, certainly not – that’s exactly what totalitarianism is. But we have to think our relation with it, as sense, our existence ‘as this'[comme ça]. ¹⁵

‘Democracy’ cannot content itself with being the affirmation of its own infigurability [infigurabilité], because this affirmation opens simultaneously onto a disidentification and a delocalization of politics where ‘democracy’ itself vacillates and could well go under. If ‘democracy’ still has to have sense, if it has to invent itself, it will be by a (re-)invention of the figural. ¹⁷

The question is of course why must democracy be more than an amorphous pure formal political system? In contrast with Lefort who puts the accent on the formal aspects of democracy, Nancy, against this pure ‘Leformal’ thinking of politics, seems to plead for something else than ‘Leformal’ – Lefort’s formal – democracy; he seems to plead for some ‘virtuality’ in a specific meaning of the word: what something is in essence? ¹⁸ How can or should we understand his ‘virtual remarks'? What exactly is Nancy’s point in his plead for a ‘retracement’ of politics? ¹⁹ Do we have to understand this as a sort of criticism towards the thinking of Lefort or towards democracy as such? What is at stake here?

To get a full grip on Nancy’s movement, we have to go back to the book that made him famous, The Inoperative Community. In it, Nancy searches for a non-immanent politics, a finite politics thought out of a finite thinking of community. Therefore he accentuates the ‘unworking of the immanent horizon of metaphysics', which is finally to him a dialectical or Hegelian horizon: if we want to frame a finite political space where politics is not an oppressive ‘Figure’ any more, we have to take into account how politics is thought. For Nancy, thinking (a finite) politics means ‘unworking’ the immanent horizon of metaphysics in general. With ‘unworking’ I refer here to the French word ‘désoeuvrement’, which Nancy understands as the praxis of rethinking politics in a non-immanent or non-totalitarian way. In other words: the question (of democracy) is how to escape from the immanent, dialectical horizon which catches our thinking of politics in an infinite logic, leading inevitably to a politics of immanentism.

This background makes it already possible to sketch the outlines of Nancy’s ‘virtual remarks'. He objects against a ‘Leformal’ conception of democracy – the empty place, the formless, the ‘infigurable’ or ‘sans figure’, the ever yet to come … This conception of democracy would still be caught in the infinite metaphysical, dialectical horizon of immanentism, while it pretends to have already left that horizon behind it, presenting itself as the finite alternative to the infinite totalitarian politics. Democracy as formlessness is indeed no longer based on a metaphysical Idea, Figure, or Truth. But this kind of thinking, Nancy suggests, is still dwelling upon a sort of negative theology: the Void becomes the infinite counterpart of what it not should be (Figure, Truth, Form), and this Nothing is the (negative) truth of democracy. ²⁰ This is only a further step, a new Figure in the dialectical movement, and not a simple breakthrough of it.

According to Nancy, we can never just leave this dialectical logic ‘behind’ us or oppose ourselves to it, because at that moment, when we are taking the position of the dialectical counterpart of it, we are inevitably affirming the logic itself – that is what Nancy’s remarks concerning the ‘void’ are all about: the void is not the ‘Überwindung’ of the dialectical logic of Truth that reigns over politics, but the blunt affirmation of it. And we can never become a finite politics as long as we keep on wandering around in this infinite logic of immanentism.

For Nancy, it is thus above all the status of the negation, one of the problems since Hegel and certainly in the 20^th century that matters in thinking a finite politics. ²¹ Instead of opposing dialectically ‘Figure’ with ‘sans figure’ or ‘Truth’ with ‘Void’, we have to unwork, interrupt, retrace, or dislocate the immanent logic from within. That is of course what deconstruction is all about: an ongoing dissembling of metaphysics within metaphysics itself, so that metaphysical closure (or Hegelian ‘Aufhebung’) becomes impossible. That is the reason why Nancy always takes the two sides of an opposition together: ‘figure sans figuration’ (figure without figuration), ‘dedans dehors’ (within outside), ‘communauté sans communion’ (community without communion), or comes to terms like ‘aréalité’ (areality), ‘transimmanence’ (transimmanence) or takes Derrida’s concept of ‘différance’ (difference) for granted. He always tries to dislocate the ‘Aufhebung’, to disclose the immanence, to disrupt the figuration of the Form. ²²

In thinking a finite politics, it is thus never a question of a pure negativity, absence, void, or formlessness. This thinking does not stand for an unworking of the metaphysical horizon from within. It pretends all too quickly to have overcome the horizon as such, by taking a dialectical stance away from it. Exactly this movement is what makes it to be caught again in the logic and to be the creation of a new ‘Figure’. ²³

Figure means an originating and founding locus of restless identification, the accomplishment of it, the immanent closure of an identity to itself. If metaphysics is the process of the accomplishment of an identity with itself, it is at the same time a process of mobilizing figures or identity principles to continue the drive of the process towards the completion of it, towards the point at which the Hegelian Geist found itself finally back and presents itself at itself.

Nancy is especially interested in the interruption of this accomplishment. The question is how to think something within the Figure that resists or interrupts the accomplishment or closure of it. The way he develops his oeuvre – in books like Être singulier pluriel, Une pensée finie, Le sens du monde, or La création du monde – exposes an attempt to articulate constantly this moment of interruption: ‘désoeuvrement’ (unworking), ‘retrait’ (retreat), ‘différance’ (difference), ‘désassemblage’ (dissemblance), ‘le mythe interrompu’ (myth interrupted), ‘le communisme littéraire’ (literary communism), ‘l’être-en-commun’ (being-in-common) … It is never a question of a pure and simple negativity, but always an attempt at thinking the two sides of an opposition together. In the tension of figuration and defiguration, of assembling and disassembling, he searches for a new horizon out of which a finite politics could arise.

To finish my text, let me sketch very briefly just a few lines of this horizon. Especially in Heidegger’s footsteps, Nancy states that we are always thrown into sense, and that sense puts us into an opened Being, a Being-to. Sense is always Being-to and this constitutes existence, our Being-to-the-world as such. Every understanding of our existence happens already from the opened horizon, which the world is for us and to which we are always exposed [être exposé]. Hence, the world is always already more than a given immanent facticity. The coming of this facticity is what Nancy calls the origin of sense or of the world. Sense is the fact that the world is, the espacement of taking place as such.

Of course, the question of sense and our coexistence can only arise fully at the moment that the politics which claimed to be the incarnation or the production of a Being-with as a We has been withdrawn. Therefore and once more, we also have to unwork the immanent horizon of our thinking of politics. To deconstruct this horizon means to show that this totality is crossed beforehand by the plural structure and open character of sense, or in other words, by the yet multiplied way we are already in common: ‘être singulier pluriel’ or singular plural being. ²⁴

So although the reasoning about sense or coexistence seems quite abstract, the (political) consequences of it are most concrete. For Nancy, thinking sense and coexistence is a praxis, a resistance to any fusional being-together and at the same time the unworking of the metaphysical horizon in which politics has been thought. Politics is not a question of possessing either a common substance or nothing. What is left over to us of community is what Nancy calls Being-with. Before we can own or possess an immanent identity, we are already thrown into the world, we are already in-common. Just as we cannot signify ourselves totally, we cannot exist as an exhaustively realized common-being. A fusional and thus complete being-together is nothing but the suicidal endpoint of an immanent politics.

Following Nancy, the challenge for a politics of finitude and sense is to think through the bare in of our Being-in-common, this naked relationality of our being together as such. The in as differantial – differential as play on the Jacques Derrida concept of différance – spacing, as the act of sense, of community in which no single singularity exists without being plural. ²⁵ Being-in-common is the irreducible alteration, the movement of exposing, before any subject or community can be produced. The in makes of politics a verb, not a substance as the oeuvre of a pre-existing communal essence. Due to this differantial movement, the in also functions as the ontological unworking of the idea of a fusional being-together. It is only because Being as Being-with withdraws itself in its giving. It is only due to the ‘original’ differantial structure of the in that we can exist. Only due to this movement of withdrawal, as Heidegger described the ontico-ontological difference, there is being. Thanks to the differance of the in, there is in-common.

So much for these few lines on Nancy’s search for a new ontology, an ontology of Being-With. If there is an outcome out of the problem of democracy with his ontological thinking, it is still an open question. There is at least an attempt to think democracy and politics at a moment when we lack almost every category (of our traditional thinking) to do so, and that only makes it already worthwhile to examine. This short examination at least makes it clear that the search for a political form or configuration when every form, as such, seems to have collapsed, is for all of us a tough problem we have to deal with in an ‘uneasy’ way.