Continental Perspectives on Community

Human Coexistence from Unity to Plurality

Chantal Bax, Gert-Jan van der Heiden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000727913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

This volume explores the issues at the center of many historical and contemporary reflections on community and sociality in Continental philosophy. The essays reflect on the thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Arendt, Derrida, Badiou, Fanon, Baldwin, Nancy, Agamben and Laruelle.

Continental Perspectives on Community brings the different approaches of these thinkers into conversation with each other. It discusses the possibility of how the concept of community can extend beyond the one and beyond any sense of unity and totality. Additionally, the book shows how notion of community in plurality is at the heart of ethical and political reflections on alterity and race, of political philosophical reflections on the exception, and of ontological reflections on what it means for humans to be social. In this way, it offers an important contribution to the examination of how a community can be thought today.

This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on social, political, and cultural issues in Continental philosophy.

Part I
Community Beyond Unity

1
On Open Community

Nancy, Laruelle, and the Un-Determination of the Real

Ian James

Jean-Luc Nancy is one of the most important and indispensable contemporary thinkers of community and without a doubt one of the most important thinkers of human coexistence after Heidegger. His collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe around the relation of the philosophical to the political in the early 1980s is decisive, as is the work that emerged from this collaboration in 1986: La Communauté désœuvrée, translated into English in 1991 as The Inoperative Community.¹ Of all Nancy’s books this work has perhaps proved to be one of his most influential and controversial texts and has enjoyed a rich afterlife, most notably in the context of the response given by Maurice Blanchot in 1983 in The Unavowable Community and two subsequent texts by Nancy that, in turn, respond to Blanchot, The Confronted Community from 2001 and The Disavowed Community from 2014. The debate opened up between Nancy and Blanchot is at once highly subtle or nuanced and highly specific to the intellectual and political trajectories of both Blanchot himself and of their shared interlocutor, Georges Bataille, in the years before and after the Second World War.

The detailed ins and outs of the Blanchot–Nancy debate are beyond the scope of this discussion and have been the subject of quite extensive debate amongst the readers and scholars of both thinkers.² Yet Nancy’s reflections on this debate in 2014 in The Disavowed Community offer a very clear schematic outline of what is at stake philosophically and politically in his thinking of community. At the very center of his formulations on human coexistence “after Heidegger” is the fairly straightforward recognition of “the common character of our existence in which we are not distinct atoms but rather exist in accordance with the relation, ensemble and sharing, in which discrete entities (individuals, persons) are only as facets or punctuations.”³ Put simply: relational, shared existence precedes any separation or individuation into discrete entities or identities on the level of either the individual or the collective. This thought is derived primarily from Nancy’s radicalization of Heideggerian Mitsein and his engagement with the Bataillian thinking of shared finitude that was presented in The Inoperative Community in 1986. However, it also has its roots in the anti-foundationalist readings of Kant and of Kantian reason that are developed in his deconstructive commentaries of the 1970s and most preeminently in his pivotal work published in 1988, The Experience of Freedom, a work which opens the way for the mature thinking of being-with, coexistence, and ontological sharing which is developed in the 1990s in texts such as The Compearance, The Sense of the World, and Being Singular Plural.

So what we have here in Nancy’s philosophy of coexistence is a relational ontology or thinking of being-with which arises out of his deconstruction of traditional forms of metaphysics, the metaphysics of reason, of substance and of presence, and which arises also out of the specific articulation of the limits of philosophy that accompanies this deconstruction. In Nancy’s thinking we have a fundamental experience of ontological groundlessness and of a singular plural existence which lies in excess of philosophical and ontological disclosure or foundation. To this extent his ontology must always be seen as a quasi-ontology of excess and not as a philosophical discourse which is able to circumscribe being or secure any foundation or ground for being as such. And as such the question of being-with or of finite coexistence in Nancy also by definition exceeds “all politics, ecclesiology, nationalism, or communitarianism, as well as all types of solidarity, mutual assistance, or collective care.”⁴

It is in this sense that we need to understand the conceptual force of “unworking” or “inoperativity” [désœuvrement] in Nancy’s discourse on community. For, as an excess over philosophical disclosure or grounding, being-with, coexistence, or ontological community cannot be “put to work” or be made operative as the founding principle of a political project, of any ecclesiology as Nancy says, or any nationalism, communalism, or any ethics or politics of solidarity. In a manner which engages all of his thinking in the wake of transcendentalism, speculative idealism, and phenomenology, and his deconstructive readings of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger in particular, Nancy affirms that finite shared existence, as unworked and unworkable in philosophical conceptuality, cannot be put in the service of, or assimilated as a founding principle for, a determinate politics or political project. “Unworking,” “inoperativity,” or “désœuvrement” designates, Nancy writes,

the movement of the work which opens it beyond itself, which does not leave it to accomplish itself in the sense of completion but which opens it to the absenting of its sense or of sense in general. Unworking is that through which the work does not belong to the order of the achieved or the unachieved; it lacks nothing while being nothing accomplished.⁵

This understanding of unworking is consistent with Nancy’s thinking of finite shared existence as always fragmentary and disseminated in the singular plural sharing of that existence itself. Shared, finite existence therefore always radically exceeds the logic of accomplishment or fulfilled sense and meaning that political activity, projects, and programs will necessarily seek to attain. One of the conclusions Nancy comes to in The Disavowed Community, at the end of his long debate with Blanchot, is that “‘Politics’ for us has become a much less graspable term and motif than we have been led to believe.”⁶ Given the difficulty of transition between philosophy and politics that has been one of Nancy’s central preoccupations of his writing since the early 1980s, the very sense or meaning of the term politics itself has become refractory and opaque. This is because, since Plato perhaps, and more predominantly throughout the modern period, politics has arguably always in one way or another appealed to philosophy in order to acquire legitimation, direction, and determinate meaning. Nancy’s thinking of being-with, of relational ontology, or of finite shared coexistence leads him to conclude in 2014: “Any ontology that cannot be traced back to relation prior to being is too limited. And all politics that seeks to found itself ontologically is too much.”⁷

*

So Nancy offers a powerful thinking of ontological community or of finite coexistence. It describes a fundamental but irreducibly excessive order of relationality which articulates all being or existence as interdependent, interconnected, and co-implicated prior to its constitution in individual entities or identities. This is in no way to deny the specificities of individuation or identity, but rather to indicate that identity is never self-sufficient, autonomously self-creating, substantial, or essential. Rather it is without foundation or ontological ground, and only co-constituted in and through relationality and through the multiple connectivity or contact of singularities exposed each to the other in their most fundamental existence as singularities. One might think that such a philosophically cogent idea would be a powerful resource for the renewal of politics in the wake of a certain historical failure of Marxism, say, and in the face of what appears to be an ongoing crisis or possible collapse of political, economic, and social liberalism, with all its philosophical underpinning in an, arguably delusional, metaphysics of the individual rational subject and in the figure of the self-interestedly calculative homo economicus. This cogent philosophical idea of coexistence should be a powerful resource also in combatting the resurgence of post-secular political identities, of nationalism, nativism, or exclusive and exclusionary communalism. Yet with this opportunity of renewing, politics in its most fundamental conception also comes up against a fundamental problem: such a thinking, however powerful, cannot, for Nancy, be made into, or put in the service of, a specific politics or political program. In terms of political effectivity, it appears to be entirely powerless.

That this is necessarily the case is open to question of course. Despite Nancy’s comments, his ontology of shared finite existence might appear easily to yield, or perhaps even to demand, a politics and a political project which would speak and act in the name of unworked community. A return to the text which opens this debate, The Inoperative Community, and specifically a return to the question of immanence such as it is posed there, reveals that the passage from ontology to politics in Nancy is, as he so often insists, far from straightforward.

Nancy’s argument in The Inoperative Community turns around the idea that in both the concept and the experience of community itself, what is traditionally at stake is the immanence, or indwelling, of the human with the human, that is to say the sharing of an identity or essence in a communal fusion. It is the real or total instantiation of that essence or identity in a fusional existence which leaves no remainder or vestige of otherness and alterity. Thus Nancy writes that it is “precisely the immanence of man to man, taken absolutely, considered as the immanent being par excellence, that constitutes the stumbling block to a thinking of community.”⁸ Whenever we think of a particular community it is on the basis of the way in which the humans that make it up can be said to be immanent to each other, and, in this, accomplishing a figure or identity of the human per se. This conception or experience of community is brought to its apotheosis when, in humanism, we come to think of all of humanity as forming a community on a universal level. And, Nancy argues, the idea of community has been brought to an apotheosis more concretely when in modern history societies have attempted to articulate themselves either as a universalist gathering of humans supposedly transcending their particularities, as has been the case with the various historical forms of communism, republicanism and liberalism, or, conversely, as a gathering of a particular national identity which is then elevated into an idealized universal, as is the case with fascism, National Socialism, and any other form of absolutized communalist politics.

So, put simply, the attempt to build a political project which would instantiate a community of humans, whether this be a project on the revolutionary left or right, is always bound up with a logic of effectuation; the effectuation, or making effective, of an essence or identity and with this the fulfillment of human essence. On this Nancy is very explicit. The community of humans, he writes, “presupposes that it effects, or that it must effect, as such and integrally, its own essence, which is itself the accomplishment of the essence of humanness.”⁹ Herein lies the risk of any politics of community per se, namely that in the effectuation of an identity or essence such a politics becomes a gesture of totalization, one in which, as a community tries to gather itself in the production of an immanent identity, it seeks to achieve a seamless and homogeneous whole in which all that is other to that identity must be canceled, expelled, or otherwise negated.

This logic of effectuation is understood by Nancy in Hegelian terms as dialectical labor or work, a process of negation and synthesis which seeks to produce a unity, totality, or absolute. In historical attempts to produce an “immanentist community,” Nancy suggests, “The presupposition remained that of a community effectuating itself in the absolute of the work, or effectuating itself as work.”¹⁰ So the language of working and unworking in Nancy, translated alternatively as operativity and inoperativity, although more immediately borrowed from Blanchot’s formulations around literature and “désœuvrement,” is ultimately derived from the language of Hegelian dialectical thought. And it is in the context of this critique of political communitarian projects in the twentieth century on the one hand and his critical assimilation of Hegelian conceptuality on the other that Nancy diagnoses the risk and danger of the politics of community. Rightly or wrongly many French intellectuals working in the postwar period in the wake of Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger came to associate Hegelian dialectics with the inner logic of totalitarianism. Hegel, as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Thinking Community Today
• PART I Community Beyond Unity
• PART II Community in Plurality
• List of Contributors
• Index