Abstract
Jean-Luc Nancy is sufficiently Marxist to suppose that 'all that is solid melts into air'. This talk will look at two ways in which he has shown how classical notions of politics: sovereignty and community, are on their way out. In their place he analyses shared appearings of unprecedented formations (comparution) and a divided inheritance of meanings and identities (partage). The key notions to be explored are the retreating of the political and the supposed deconstruction of Christianity. Both are already in process- the task is to trace out their movements and ascertain their implications.
Politics in an age of
technology: reading Jean-Luc Nancy
Joanna Hodge
‘Ecotechnics damages, weakens and upsets the functioning
of all sovereignties except those that in reality coincide with ecotechnical
power.’ Nancy 1996/2000 p. 135-136
There are three key terms to explore here: politics,
community and world, out of which Jean-Luc Nancy’s distinctive notion of
eco-technics arrives for inspection, as a challenge both to Heidegger’s notion
of technology, and to the more current, more widely discussed notion of
bio-power. Jean-Luc Nancy is an Emeritus Professor at the University of
Strasbourg, France, where he worked for many years in close collaboration with
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940-2007, and see Fynsk 2007). In the nineteen
seventies they wrote together two significant books, delineating a set of
shared concerns, The title of the letter:
reading Lacan (1973) and The Literary
Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1978). In that same
decade Nancy published three books, on Hegel (1973) on Kant (1976) and on
Descartes (1979).
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe organized the
first major conference on the writings of Jacques Derrida, under the title The Ends of Man (1980), with its challenge to the three fold
implication of ends as human purposes, ends as a finality of a perfectibility,
pre-inscribed in a divine or natural teleology, and those ends, as figured in
the writings of amongst others Michel Foucault, which chart a major
modification in the thinking of any human essence. Out of this conference arose
a collective research programme, under the title Centre for philosophical research on the political (1980-1984),which
explored the double senses of politics as institutionally framed practice, and
accompanying techniques, (la politique) and ‘the political’ (le politique), the distributions of
meanings and forces in which order and meaning consist. It also gave rise to
the notion of a withdrawal of politics (le
retrait du politique) giving way to another inauguration of meaning and
order.
In addition to this notion of a withdrawal of politics
there are three further conceptions to introduce. Jean-Luc Nancy charts the
emergence of radical politics out the epoch of competing socialist and
anarchist commitments to notions of community and communism. In their place he
introduces his account of an unworked, or an unworking of community (la communaute desoeuvree). This follows
through an analysis of incompatibilities between the three notions of the ends
of man, as previously outlined. The second notion is that of a sense, or
creation of the world, which breaks with the horizons of a thinking of the
world, fixed as either Kantian Ideal, or Husserlian horizon, and inaugurates a
radically materialist account of meaning and identity. The third notion is that
of a necessary and inevitable deconstruction of Christianity, with which
Jean-Luc Nancy came into conflict with his old friend and colleague, Jacques
Derrida. There are three dimensions to explore: there are the dynamics of
friendship and of collective work in philosophy; there are the technical
questions about the status and purpose of these innovatory terms; but lastly,
and most significantly, there is the challenge to confront what is living and
what is moribund in thought, with respect to a relation between philosophy and
politics, in the two senses given above.
Preliminary Reading:
Marie-Eve Morin: Nancy
(Cambridge: Polity 2014)
Jean-Luc Nancy: Being Singular Plural (1996) translated by
Robert D Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press
2000)
Jean-Luc Nancy: The Creation of the World or Globalization (2002)
translated and introduced by Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany NY:
State University of New York Press 2007)
Daniele Rugo: Jean-Luc Nancy and the thinking of otherness:
philosophy and the powers of existence (London: Bloomsbury 2013)
