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WE KNOW, INDEED, THAT IT IS THE END OF THE WORLD
THE SENSE OF THE WORLD
NANCY
nancy intro
Trans intro:
[…] The Sense of the World will be a book about neither the positive presence of sense and world nor their twin absence. Rather, it will be a book about the twilight border between the presence and absence of both sense and world. But in what sense is there no longer any sense or any world? [xi]
When Nancy says that there is no more sense left in the world, one is to understand the sense hereby negated principally (but only provisionally) as ‘supersensuous sense’, transcendent ‘meaning’, any essential summation of existence that would somehow provide a teleological orientation in terms of absolute values. [ix]
In his brief chapter, titled ‘The End of the World’, Nancy goes on to argue that, as a result of the absence of meaning or sense, no more world remains. Here, we are to understand world initially (and again only provisionally, for the book means to displace the senses of both sense and world) as the ‘sensuous’, referential, or factual reality – traditionally the sphere of merely relative values – in which this (no longer extant) meaning would normally be taken to be concretised.
As Nancy goes on to point out, however, the fact that both meaning and world (knowledge and its object, or ‘ought’ and ‘is’) have disappeared is itself a kind of fact, and experience whose reality cannot be denied. The lack of meaning and world indeed make up our world and, in turn, as the world in which we live, they must have some kind of meaning, although this meaning must be pursued as the ever-indeterminate meaning of a meaningless worldlessness. ‘It is this loss that is happening to us’ [x]
By constating the disappearance of ideal meaning, a disappearance that leaves as its residue a material world devoid of meaning, Nancy simply reduces ideal meaning to the material world. The meaning of the world – the supersensuous sense of the sensuous, or the absolute essence of relative appearance – appears as nothing other than the world of mere sensuous appearances. [xi]
In his attempt to elucidate the tautology of world-sense (or value), Nancy means to avoid both ‘nihilism’ – the doctrine of a pure lack of absolute meaning and value – and the deluded proposal of a ‘solution’, which he elsewhere calls ‘myth’ – the proposal of a pure fulfillment of the desire for such absolute meaning and value. Instead, between nihilistic lack and mythical fullness, which are the twin ideological summations of the relativity of (self-)difference and the absoluteness of (self-)sameness, respectively, he will trace out ‘the difference of the same, through which sense would make world and world would make sense.’ [xii]
THE AUTONOMY OF THE ARTWORK
[…] the becoming autonomous of art in the modern period has meant also the emancipation of art from its subordination to any religion […] it has meant the tendentially nihilistic affirmation of a relativity no longer directly attached to or dependent on a mythical absolute. From this point of view, the autonomous artwork has been a mere fragment since the inception of autonomous art, a fragment of the absolute totality from which it broke away. IN turn, however, the fact that the fragmentary artwork declares its autonomy entails that the fragment takes on in one way or another a wholeness, a completeness, and hence and absoluteness that cancels the relativity it was the purpose of the autonomy of art to affirm. The fragmentary work of art falls short of its idea by becoming an alternative absolute. […] The nihilistic desire of autonomous art, in short, reverses itself into myth.
Beyond the absolutisation of the relative, in the sense of the totalisation of the fragment, or the reifying reinscription of nihilism as myth, Nancy attempts to develop a discourse of the event of fragmentation that entails a fragmentation of that very event, the endless dispersal of its occurrence.
This fragmentation of the aesthetic takes the form of an attempt to stop construing the fragments as dependent on a prior model of the whole, and instead to insist that the whole depends constitutively on its own strewn fragmentation. [xviii]
POLITICS
THE CITIZEN
‘The citizen is […] the one who is defined by […] the sharing of [the] exteriority [of the city]. Citizenship is one or more roles, one or more procedures, a way of carrying oneself, a gait […] the citizen is a mobile complex of rights, obligations, dignities, and virtues. These do not relate to the realisation of any foundation or end other than the mere institution of the city […] the citizen does nothing other than share with his/her fellow citizens the functions and signs of citizenship, and in this ‘sharing’ his/her being is entirely expressed […] the city has no deeper sense: it is related to no signified other than its own institution, the minimal signified of the city’s mere contour, without other ‘identity’, ‘mission’, or ‘destiny’ to conquer or to expand.’ [xix]
But the city always turns out to be incapable of doing without its dialectical other, the inwardness of subjecthood, which it needs in order to ensure the city’s identity as one city.
While the politics of the citizen is the politics of relative values (and ultimately of nihilism or valuelessness), the politics of the subject is the politics of absolute values (or myth). And as the nihilism of citizenship ends up turning to the myth of the subject in order to preserve itself from dissolution, so the myth of the subject requires the annihilation and/or internalisation of all that is outside of itself in order to prove its absolute autonomy. Either way, the subject undoes itself: ‘The totalitarian subject turns out to be suicidal’.
Nancy’s response to the impossible alternative of this dialectics of the politics of self-sufficiency is to propose in its place a praxis of non-selfsufficiency. He understands this praxis as the process of the infinite tying, untying and retying of the social bond. [xxi]
The exteriority, the being-in-relation, of citizenship becomes here so excessive that the phrase ‘citizenship of the world’ no longer even covers its sense, except insofar as one understands world with Nancy as the endless deferral of the place of identity, that is, as endless heteronomy, heteronomy that has no final limit in any governing or central autonomy whatsoever. [is therefore beyond sovereignty]
The choice, in sum, within both aesthetics and politics is the choice between the perpetuation of this dialectical oscillation of absolutisation and relativisation (under the domination of the absolutisation of the relative), on the one hand, and its deconstructive, liminal interruption, on the other hand.
The women and men of our time have, indeed, a rather sovereign way of losing their footing without anxiety, of walking on the waters of the drowning of sense. A way of knowing precisely what sovereignty is nothing, that it is this nothing in which sense exceeds itself.
There is no longer any world: no longer a mundus, a cosmos, a composed and complete order (from) within which one might find a place, a dwelling, and the elements of an orientation. Or, again, there is no longer the ‘down here’ of a world one could pass through toward a beyond or outside of this world. There is no longer any Spirit of the world, nor is there any history before whose tribunal one could stand. In other words, there is no longer any sense of the world. [4]
We know, indeed, that it is the end of the world, and there is nothing illusory (nor ‘fin de siècle’ nor ‘millenarian’) about this knowledge. Those who strive to denounce the supposed illusion of the thought of an ‘end’ are correct, as opposed to those who present the ‘end’ as a cataclysm or as the apocalypse of an annihilation. Such thought is still entirely caught up in the regime of a signifying sense, whether it proposes itself in the final analysis as ‘nonsense’ or as ‘revelation’. But the same adversaries of the thought of the ‘end’ are incorrect in that they do not see that the words with which one designates that which is coming to an end (history, philosophy, politics, art, world…) are not the names of subsistent realities in themselves, but the names of concepts or ideas, entirely determined within a regime of sense that is coming full circle and completing itself before our (thereby blinded) eyes.
[…] when I say that the end of the world is the end of the mundus, this cannot mean that we are confronted merely with the end of a certain ‘conception’ of the world, and that we would have to go off in search of another one or to restore another one (or the same). It means, rather, that there is no longer any assignable signification of ‘world’, or that the ‘world’ is subtracting itself, bit by bit, from the entire regime of signification available to us – except its ‘cosmic’ signification as universe, a term that for us, precisely, no longer has (or does not yet have) any assured signification, save that of a pure infinite expansion. [5]
We must therefore think this: it is the ‘end of the world’, but we do not know in what sense. It is not merely the end of an epoch of the world or the end of an epoch of sense because it is the end of an epoch – an epoch as long as the ‘Occident’ and as long as ‘history’ itself – that has entirely determined both ‘world’ and ‘sense’, and that has extended this determination over the entire world. [6]
It is this loss that is happening to us. There is no longer any sense in a ‘sense of the world’: the significations of each of these words, as well as the signification of their syntagma, is caught up in the circling back of ‘occidental’ significations, a circling back that coincides with a ‘becoming-worldwide’ that no longer leaves any ‘outside’ and consequently no longer leaves any ‘inside’ – neither on this earth nor beyond it, neither in this universe nor beyond it – with relation to which a sense could be determined. [7]
There is no longer this ‘to’ of sense: this ‘to’ of the signifying relay or directional sending, the index of this final and/or referential ideality that is at once the signified term and the ultimate goal of an operation of sense. And thus we are deprived of sense in both senses, in all senses.
One can also put it like this: for as long as the world was essentially in relation to some other (that is, another world or an author of the world), it could have a sense. But the end of the world is that there is no longer this essential relation, and that there is no longer (that is, existentially) anything but the world ‘itself’. Thus, the world no longer has a sense, but it is sense. [8]
Henceforth, ‘to transform’ should mean ‘to change the sense of sense’, that is, once again, to pass from having to being. Which means also that transformation is a praxis, not a poiesis, an action that affects the agent, not the work. [9]
This, too – and singularly since Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche – is the ‘end of philosophy’: how the end of the world of sense opens the praxis of the sense of the world. [9]
Truth punctuates, sense enchains. Punctuation is a presentation, full or empty, full of emptiness, a point or a hole, an awl, and perhaps always the hole that is pierced by the sharp point of an accomplished present. It is always without spatial or temporal dimensions. Enchaining, on the contrary, opens up the dimensional, spaces out punctuations. There is thus an originary spatiality of sense that is a spatiality or spaciousness before any distinction between space and time: and this archi-spatiality is the matricial or transcendental form of a world. [14] Sense and Truth
[see Schmitt Nomos of the Earth] spatiality.
Once the possibility of signifying truth is a thing of the past, another style is necessary. The end of philosophy is, without a doubt, first of all a question of style in this sense. It is not a matter of stylistic effects or ornamentation of discourse, but of what sense does to discourse if sense exceeds significations. It is a matter of the praxis of thought, its writing in the sense of the assumption of a responsibility for and to this excess. […] between a constitutive science and an evocative poetry, beyond the face-to-face encounter between a presentation of truth and its identical double, the stake of style or writing configures the space of a tracing [frayage] of sense. A space itself traced out by the passage to the limit of significations, the exscription of thought into the world. [19]
What is not foreseeable but already present, it seems, is that there will no longer be any ‘reason in history’ or ‘salvation of the human race’. No more Parousia, in short, no more present, attested sense (if there ever was such a thing), but a completely different eschatology, another extremity, another excess of sense. [24]
[…] the movement of this reduction is in the final analysis nothing other than the movement of the occidental history of sense as the movement of an ontotheology in principle involved with its own deconstruction, the end of which, in all senses, is precisely ‘this world here’, this world that is to such an extent here’ that it is definitively beyond all gods and all signifying or signified instances of sense: itself alone all in-significant sense.
If the end of this (hi)story – this end that is our event – is an end in all senses, it is also the case that its two senses affect each other and disseminate each other. [25]
In Spinoza, this is called conatus, in Kant, a being of ends (‘man’), in Hegel, the work of the negative, in Heidegger, Ereignis. In each case, and taking all differences into account, it signifies at least this: that sense does not add itself to being, does not supervene upon being, but is the opening of its very supervenience, of being-toward-the-world. [28]
INFINITE FINITUDE
Finitude is not the being-finished-off of an existent deprived within itself of the property of completion, butting up against and stumbling over its own limit (its contingency error, imperfection, or fault). Finitude is not privation. There is perhaps no proposition it is more necessary to articulate today, to scrutinise and test in all ways. Everything at stake at the end of philosophy comes together there: in the need of having to open the thought of finitude, that is, to open to itself this thought, which haunts and mesmerises our entire tradition. [29]
In one way or another, privation annuls itself, essentially. In turn, and this is what we have to think through, finitude affirms itself. [30]
Being-finite as being-deprived or being-private has no consistency. Being-deprived and being-private has no consistency except insofar as it is reappropriated – deprivatised – in an infinite being, its reason, ground, truth. But this infinite being is in turn posited as pure, absolute, consistency-in-itself, as the pure immanence of a pure transcendence that, itself deprived of esse, does not even go so far as to take place. At bottom, this is the summary of the history of God or of Being as supreme being. [31]
‘Finitude’ names the essential affection that ek-sists the essence: the essence is deprived here of its essentiality, but this privation is privation of nothing. Rather, it is the privilege of existence, the reserved law of existence, the proper law of its singular property of being – each time – singularly exposed to this trance that is the esse of being.
Being-essentia that has its end in itself – and that, in this sense, is finished, achieved, accomplished, and perfect – is at most pure truth, but truth deprived of sense: and it is exactly due to this that God, as such a being, is dead. [32]
DIFFERANCE
[…] being takes place, but its place spaces it out. In every instance of its occurrence, being is an area, and its reality gives itself in areality. It is thus that being is body. Not ‘embodied’, nor ‘incartnated’, not even in a ‘body of its own’: but body, hence possessing its own outside, differing and deferring. [35]
Differance is not a temporising, and if it designates also a spacing out of time, such spacing is not – or not only, not merely – the spacing out of successive moments into a distension of linear time. It would be, rather, the interior spacing of the very line of time. […] But that which takes place ‘in the instant’ – in this distancing of time ‘within’ itself – is neither the stasis nor the stance of the present instant, but its instability, the inconclusiveness of its coming – and of the ‘going’ that corresponds to that coming. The coming into presence of being takes place precisely as nonarrival of presence. [35]
SPACE: CONSTELLATIONS
Hence, the history of disaster – from Hugo’s ‘frightful black sun’ to Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘obsucre disaster’ and Maurice Blanchot’s ‘writing of the disaster’. (But this history began in Plato’s cave). The disaster is the disaster of sense: unanchored from the stars, the stars themselves unanchored from the vault and its riveting, its scintillating punctuation of truth(s), sense escapes in order to make acosmic sense.
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Before the symbolic, there is this spacing out without which no symbol could symbolise: there is being-in-common, the world.
Being-in-common is very much the concern of psychoanalysis (it is the ‘unconscious’), and this is why psychoanalysis is a privileged witness or symptom of the end of the world-cosmos and the birth of the world. The world is not the ‘Other’, and it is not the ‘Law’. It is an alteration older than the Other and a legislation older than the Law, even if it does not become a ‘world’ without the Other and the Law. It arises out of an invention more archaic than these, the invention of sense – which is the name of the symbolic in its inaugural deflagration. For what Lacan called ‘the symbolic’ is obviously not first of all a structure in the sense of a construction, but at most in the sense of a differential spacing and play. [48]
GIFT. DESIRE. ‘AGATHON’
Sense always already given, deposited there as comprehensive unity (or trap), or sense not yet attained, fleeting, like spelled blood. In both cases, it is a pure side ration of truth: either disposed in accordance with the power of myth or thrown frozen into the bottom of the abyss.
Myth and the abyss are the two postulations or figurations inscribed by philosophy, from the very beginning, as its own limits.
Just as, to those who devote themselves to the abyss (that is, to nihilism), ‘sense’ makes no sense, so to those who live in myth ‘sense’ would doubtless appear to be deprived of sense. Sense makes sense only in the space of philosophy as it ends by opening up the world.
But if sense is conteimporaneous with philosophy, if sense constitutes what is essentially at stake there, one ought to ask oneself hoe it offers itself at the birth of philosophy. There it bears the name of agathon: Plato’s ‘Good’, the good or excellences the is to be sought (desired? Appropriated?) epeikeina tes ousias, beyond being or essence. [50]
The agathon is neither any specific ‘good’ nor a ‘good’ in the sense of a ‘possession’. After all, it’s name is not attached to a semantics of ‘goodness’ but to a semantics of greatness (cf. mega, great, agan, much, too much), intensity, and excess. Being touched by and touching the excessive of excellence. [51]
It is quite precisely here that disaster strikes. For in order to be sense – in order to be being-toward, that is to say, in Plato’s terms, the excellence that is qualified by nothing if not by the tension of the mutual apt mess of desire and gift – sense cannot be determined as the effectuation of this aptness, as its fulfilment or discharge. A satisfaction that accomplishes and saturates both desire and gift denatures at once both gift and desire.
Sense as ‘good’ annuals sense as being-unto-the-other of desire and gift.
To think sense as the in-appropriatative encounter of desire and gift, as the excellence of the coming of the one toward the other, this is the task. Thus, neither desire nor gift but, rather, the following: that the desire of the gift should desire essentially not to appropriate its ‘object’, and that the gift of desire should give that which cannot be given and should give no ‘subject’ of an ‘object’. [52].
SENSE,WORLD, MATTER.
TRANSIMMANENCE
‘The sense of the world’ does not designate the world as a factual given on which one would come to confer a sense. If that were the case, the sense of the world would indeed be beyond the world, as Ludwig Wittgenstein thinks in the Tractatus. The ‘beyond of the world’ was occupied not long ago by the God of ontotheology. This God, whom Wittgenstein is still capable of naming in his way, is the concept of a place without place, if the ‘beyond of the world’ cannot but be beyond the totality of places. It it could not therefore take place ‘outside’. Only the God of Spinoza, through his strict equivalence to ‘Nature’, escapes this contradiction (before Kant ruins its very possibility). Deus sive natura does not simply say, through the sive, two names for one thing but, rather, this, that this very thing has its outside on the inside. In saying this, Spinoza becomes the first thinker of the world.
[…] sense – if it is still or finally necessary to do justice to the obstinate request of this word – can proceed only from a deconstruction of Christianity (note: which signifies, to be precise, something other than a critique or a demolition: the bringing to light of that which will have been the agent of Christianity as the very form of the West, much more deeply than all religion and even as the self-deconstruction of religion, that is, the accomplishment of philosophy by Judeo-Platonism and Latinity, ontotheology as its own end, the ‘death of God’ and the birth of the sense of the world as the abandonment without return and without Aufhebung of all ‘christ’, that is, of all hypostasis of sense.) [55]
As soon as the appearance of a beyond of the world has been dissipated, the out-of-place instance of sense opens itself up within the world (to the extent that it is would still make sense to speak of a ‘within’).
Here is the greatest difficulty: the difficulty of the ‘transimmanence’ of sense. Quite simple, that the sense of the world it this world here as the place of existence. This ‘quite simply’ contains the most formidable stake, the one that requires of us, in order to say this absolutely simple thing, a completely different style or, rather, an interminable alteration of style.) [56].
If Dasein must be characterised by its Jemeinigkeit (the ‘being-each-time-my-own’ of its even), by the singularity of a someone having or making sense of ‘mineness’ (or ipseity), this someone would be unthinkable without the material-transcendent (existential) resourse of some oneness of the thing in general, without the reality of the res as material difference. Matter means here: the reality of the difference – and differance – that is necessary in order for there to be something and some things and not merely the identity of a pure inherence (which to tell the truth – neither differing from anything other than itself nor even differing from and within itself – could not even be characterised as identical…).
SPANNE [64-67]
‘Time is intrinsically spanned and stretched… No now, no time-moment can be punctualised. Every time-moment is spanned intrinsically, the span’s breadth being variable.’ Heidegger The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
If there were, in fact, a punctuality of the now or the present, then the void dimensions of the point would not permit the time of this present to be filled with its own temporal quality, in other words, to take place.
Thus, there is separation, space. Spanne, Heidegger says.
There is no outside of the outside where every present spaces itself out. There is no return into itself of time, no cyclical or sempiternal annulment. There is only eternity as the spacing out of every present of time. The very gesture of the present, the gesture of presenting, the place of the diffraction of the present.
SOMEONE
What then is someone? This is precisely what one cannot ask – even though this is the whole question – because if there is someone, there has already been a response to the question (s/he has already responded). But there is someone, there are numerous someones, indeed, there is nothing else. They are unto the world. This is what ‘makes’ up the world and ‘makes sense’. Someone, some ones, the numerous one, that is to say, the plural singular ‘is’ the response that answers the question of the ‘sense of the world’.
Unique/Whatever/Exposed
Unique: the unicity of the singular consists quite exactly in its multiplicity. This is the essential determination – that is, the existentiell and existential determination – that ought to open any consideration of any type of ‘individuality’ or ‘autonomy’. [71]
The unconditioned existentiality of each one is this: it cannot exist through consisting by itself and in itself alone. Pure auto-nomy destroys itself of itself. But this must be understood in an absolutely originary mode. It is not a matter of adding to a postulation of individuality or autonomy a certain number of relations and interdependencies, no matter what importance one may accord to such an agenda. The ‘someone’ odes not enter into a relation with other ‘someones’, nor is there a ‘community’ that precedes interrelated individuals: the singular is not the particular, not a part of a group (species, gender, class, order). The relation is contemporaneous with the singularities. ‘One’ means: some ones and some other ones, or some ones with other ones. [71]
What this ‘and’ and this ‘with’ are about involves nothing less than the very texture of the world, the world as the being-exposed-of-the-ones-to-the-others, Paul Celan’s ‘auseinandergeschrieben’: being inscribes/excribes the one of/in the other as the unique being of every one. All of sense passes this way –and this is still saying too little – : all of sense is along the edge of the being ‘with’. For the one-alone, there is no sense, but merely truth.
[…] it does not constitute its singularity in the basis of its own resources – on the contrary, it does so on the basis of the most common resource. [72]
Exposed: each one is presence itself – final, achieved, eschatological. Each is Parousia, the end of the world as exteriority, as rendering extraneous or alienation of presence. Along with each one, the whole is exposed. But what is exposed is exposition itself. What is presented is coming-into-presence, and thus, the differance of its being-present.
THE ‘SENSE’ OF THE ‘WORLD’
The word world has no unity of sense other than this one: a world (the world, my world, the business world, the Moslem world, and so on) is always a differential articulation of singularities that make sense in articulating themselves, along the edges of their articulation. […] A world joins, plays, speaks, and shares: this is its sense, which is not different from the sense of ‘making sense’.
POLITICS I
All space of sense is common space (hence all space is common space…). Sense does not take place for one alone. […] Space is a tensor of multiplicity.
The political is the place of the in-common as such. Or again, the political is the place of being-together.
What one calls ‘totalitarianism’ is the complete presentation of a sense in truth: myth, that is, but myth as reality, without the differance of its narrative. It is the immediate being there or immanence of myth. [89]
There is nothing astonishing about the fact that the ‘crisis of sense’ is, first of all and most visibly, a crisis of an in ‘democracy’ (this is precisely what ‘the thirties’ meant).
The political question is therefore not how to reconstitute the conditions of sacrifice, but how to induce the group comprised of indeterminate ties – ties that have come untied or are not yet tied – to configure itself as a space of sense that would not be reabsorbed into its own truth. [90]
But how? This question forms the contour, if not of the aporia, at least of the paradox of political sense today: without figuration or configuration, is there still any sense? But as soon as it takes on a figure, is it not ‘totalitarian’ truth? What outline would retain the unexpectedness of sense, its way of continuing to come and to be on its way, without confounding them with an indeterminacy that lacks all consistency?
What name could open up an access for the anonymity of being-in-common? [90]
There can be no doubt that Sovereignty, as an identification of the ‘common’ with the decision of being in common, has exhausted its resource of sense to become pure effect of truth […] But this does not suffice simply to annul all indications and questions of ‘sovereignty’ – that is to say, of a being-in-action of being-together such that nothing precedes or exceeds it. Sovereignty has no doubt lost the sense it had, reducing itself to a kind of ‘black hole’ of the political. But this does not mean that the sense of being-in-common, inasmuch as sense itself is common, does not have to make itself sovereign in a new way. [91]
In order to begin to get one’s bearings within the dis-orientation of the political, it is necessary, first of all, to be clear about what has been called, since Carl Schmitt, the ‘theologicopolitical’.
We have too facilely repeated […] that Sovereignty, having (sacrificially) deprived itself of theologicopolitical transcendence, wandered off on search of a ‘secular’ substitute.
First of all, one must ask oneself how and up to what point there was politics, for the greater number of people, in the epoch of the theologicopolitical. […] the ‘end of the political’ is tus, like the ‘end of art’, only the end of religion: the end of an order of given, tied-up sense.
[…] the coming of all to the public relation – ‘citizenship’ – is what constitutes the political as a sense to come but, consequently, also as a sense that cannot be subsumed under the signification of a ‘State’, at least not without implying at the same time the multiplicity and plurilocality of relations within ‘the’ relation that is not ‘one’. [92]
The ‘secularisation’ of the theologicopolitical of which one has spoken in the wake of Carl Schmitt is a deceptive motif. For if it is exact that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’, it is not less exact that it is also, at the same time, in order to exit from the State, and in any case from the State according to its merely secularised theory, that, in principle, the exit from the theologicalpolitcal has been employed. Once again, this exit is nothing other than the ‘end of philosophy’, qua end – completion and step beyond itself – of the assignation of being in the truth of essence. If Schmitt was right to affirm that ‘the metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organisation… metaphysics is the most intensive and clearest expression of an epoch’, nonetheless, he was not in a position to appreciate the extent to which the metaphysics of our age, that is, the beginning of the twenty-first century – at least if we actually deal with it rather than replaying ‘the thirties’ – is what one can call the metaphysics of the deconstruction of the essence, and of existence qua sense. [92]
[…] so the ‘end’ of the ‘theologicopolitical’ comes to it from out of its own interior and from out of its own past, beginning with that which deconstructs itself of itself in Christian theology.
ROUSSEAU: The model of the contract remains insufficient – that is, impoverished – in this respect, in that is presupposes subject-parties who enter into the contract. Meanwhile, its only sense is to constitute these ‘parties’ themselves. Its only sense is to think the (k)not to be tied, and not already tied. In other words, to think the sense of the in-common neither as the truth of a common subject nor as a ‘general’ sense superimposed on ‘particular’ senses, but, to the contrary, as the absence of any ‘general’ sense outside of the internally numerous singularity of each of the ‘subjects of sense.’
As much as Rousseau ‘secularises’ Sovereignty, he gears down its truth by deferring its sense, by opening up for it an unheard-of history that is still our own. This is no longer ‘becoming-secular’ but ‘becoming-wordly’, that is to say, the resituation of sovereignty within existence, naked existence. [93]
POLITICS II
How to attempt to discern at least the terms of the political necessities of today? In a first step, I will say how the combination of four terms – SUBJECT, CITIZEN, SOVEREIGNTY, COMMUNITY – organises, saturates, and exhausts the political space closing itself today, a space I will characterise as the space of self-sufficient sense. [103]
SUBJECT, CITIZEN, SOVEREIGNTY, COMMUNITY
The subject is no the citizen (if at least one understands ‘subject’ according to its philosophical or metaphysical concept). Subject and citizen represent two postures of the claim to sovereignty and the institution of community.
These two terms, in turn, considered as pure formal notions propose nothing other, together or separately, than an absolute emergence or constitution of sense. In what way is sense postulate when it is viewed from the standpoint of the subject or the citizen, which forms the double polarity of our entire political space?
The citizen is, above all, the one who occupies and traverses this space, the one who is defined by it, by the sharing of its exteriority. […] a citizen is a mobile complex of rights, obligations, dignities and virtues. These do not relate to the realisation of any foundation or end other than the mere institution of the city.
The in-common of the city has no identity other than the space in which the citizens cross each other’s paths, and it has no unity other than the exteriority of their relations. In a certain sense, citizenship in accordance with its pure concept is always virtually citizenship of the ‘world’.
[…] a politics of the subject is always a religious politics. This is why one must be very precise when one makes of 1789 the break with the ‘theologicopolitical’. For there are in fact, two breaks that are intertwined here (and perhaps inextricably so): the one that leads to the city (to democracy) as to a space that would no longer be theological at all(given a supplementary condition I will discuss below), and the one that leads to the politics of the modern subject (to the Nation-State), where a laicised theology, or if one prefers, a romanticised theology, of the #people’, ‘history’, and ‘humanity’ substitutes itself for ‘sacred’ theology. [105]
[…] the political subject – or politics in accordance with the Subject – consists in the appropriation of the constitutive exteriority of the city (just as, doubtless, reciprocally the city consists in the projection partes extra partes of the interiority of the subject). For the space of the city an identity and substantiality are pre- or postsupposed as its principle or end. This identity and substantiality can take the form of the ‘people’ in an organic configuration, or the form of the ‘nation’, or those of property or production. And this pre-supposition of the self (one ought to say: this presupposition that constitutes the self) comes to crystallise identity in a figure, name, or myth. Politics becomes the conduct of the history of this subject, its destiny, and its mission. It becomes the revelation or the proclamation of a sense and of an absolute sense. From then on, there is religion, the assignation of sense as appropriable knowledge. [106]
SOVEREIGNTY COMMUNITY
The citizen becomes subject at the point where community gives itself (as) an interiority, and at the point where sovereignty no longer contents itself with residing in the formal autoteleology of a ‘contract’, or in its autojurisdiction, but expresses also an essence (and it is indeed thus that, in the context of theologicopolitical essentiality, history has produced the concept of sovereignty).
Community and sovereignty are thus at the crossroads that is also doubtless the cross of all forms of Western politics […]. In this crucial position, these two terms, sovereignty and community, doubtless represent quite well all that is at stake in the West with regard to sense between appropriative interiority and inappropriable exteriority. [107]
On the one hand, community can be the division of the very spacing in accordance with which there are singularities, where this division itself, as such, is not appropriable. As division or spacing it is itself the origin or the principle. On the other hand, community can be the interiority in which division appropriates its negativity, becomes the subject that founds and subsumes within itself this division, endowing it thus with a substance of its own (let us say, to put it quickly, the substance of father and mother or the substance of brothers […]) [107]
Accordingly, sovereignty can either be nothing other than the empericotranscendent (or aleatory-necessary) circumscription that determines the law of such and such a city as the ne plus ultra of the ‘civity’ of this city, the first and last point of its institution and decision, or else this ne plus ultra can appropriate to itself the negativity that constitutes it, and it can thus present itself as the self-engendered substance of the supremacy it states. [107]
In other words, sovereignty and community can be the mere outlines of an area of shared jurisdiction, or else they can identify themselves as the subject of a fundamental legitimacy. In the first case, sovereignty and community tend to be nothing – to repeat once again the formula that Georges Bataille exhausted himself in thinking through, ‘Sovereignty is NOTHING’. They are and have the being of the res publica as the absolute ‘nothing-properly-speaking’. In the second case, they are not merely something but the res cogitans of a subject effecting in person the autoteleology of its substance (whether this person be the people, the leader, the fatherland, the class, or the individual, as long as it is ‘consciousness’ or ‘spirit’).
But it is not certain that political decision is a choice between this ‘nothing’ and this ‘everything’: rather, one has good reason to ask oneself if these two options are not in an intimate solidarity or connivance.
Indeed, can one avoid identifying the ‘pure’ outline of the city? Consequently, can one actually avoid turning the citizen into a subject […]. And can one avoid making of the res publica the ‘thing’, the identificatory substance of a community? Our entire history seems to answer that this is not possible – or that to attempt to maintain in its purity either one demand or the other is immediately to precipitate oneself into the inverse purity […]. [108]
At this very moment, when political subjectivity is doubtless to a great degree coming undone, and when substantial sovereignty is splitting up, are we not in the process of learning that the virtual advent, or in any case the almost universally desired advent, of a world citizenship (beginning with that of Europe) nonetheless risks corresponding to the triumph (itself without sharing or division) of what has been called ‘market democracy’. [108]
In all the emptiness of its autoteleology, the absence of appropriation of a ‘law’ [droit] admitted to be without foundation (without subject) opens on the infinite appropriation or devouring of a ‘capital’ that is, moreover, no more a subject than is the law, and would be the empty subject of the pure appropriation of pure negativity (the dialectical process become a butcher’s shop: the so called ‘end of history’).
Still, it is not that one must simply abandon the quadruple instance ‘subject/citizen/sovereignty/community’. Rather, one must displace its play by making apparent another determination that would play across the combinations of the others, not suppressing their tensions but changing the stakes […].
[…] along the surface of this world […] the specific determination of the link, the in-common through which there is sense that circulates and that ties and enchains itself, perhaps without having any global or final signification (not knowing, moreover, any global or final state), and without having any ‘sense’ other than tying itself, which is not a signification.
Politics of (k)nots, of singular interlacings, of every one as the interlacing, relaying, and recasting of a (k)not, and of every (k)not as a one (one people, country, person, and so on), but as a one that is one only by virtue of concatenation: neither the ‘one’ of a substance nor the ‘one’ of a pure distributive count. […] What would happen if, in the Platonic comparison of the art of politics with the art of the weaver, one no longer considered weaving to be the second and as arriving after a given material, but as primary and as itself comprising the res? Or again, and in order to take up again a term I have already used, what if one considered that our coappearing {comparution] precedes all ‘appearing’?
Not politics as a desire and quest for sense, but as an infinite tying up of sense from the one to the one, or as a tying up of this infinity that sense is – abandoning consequently all self-sufficiency of subject or city, allowing neither subject nor city to appropriate a sovereignty and a community that can only be those of this infinite tying.
Every one displaces or disarranges sovereignty and community. [114]
[…] this something more that would come into the place of pure space or pure sense as into the very place of sovereignty and community, would be nothing other than the act of tying, the act of the enchainment of singular sense to every other singular sense, the act of apportioning and interweaving that, as such, has no sense but gives place to every event of sense (once again, people, country, person, and so forth). [115]
POLITICAL WRITING
It is not merely through freedom of thought and expression that all forms of ‘writing’ find themselves regularly confronted with the powers that be. It is, first of all, and more fundamentally, through the resistance of significance to being captured or subsumed by signification. Which is nothing other than the resistance of the ‘community’ to its hypostasis, whether this hypostasis takes on the substantial appearance of a ‘communion’ or the reasonable appearance of a generalised ‘communication’. This resistance has the dimensions of the world – that is, it touches ceaselessly on the confines of the world [119]
The writing of the sense of the world, or better, the sense of the world as writing, does not reside, first of all, in a worldliness of cultural variegation and ‘hybridity’ as new identity – no more than it can reside in the uniformity of a world ‘order’. It resides in what maintains the world as existentiale of wordliness: resistance to the closure of worlds within the world as well as resistance to the closure of the worlds-beyond-the-world: the tracing out [frayage], in each instant of this world here.
FRAGMENTATION/ART
The ‘fractality’ with which we will have to do from now on […] is quite different [from the autonomous self-sufficient fragment]. Instead of the ambiguous end of the fragment, it is a matter of the frayed access to a presentation to a coming into presence – and by way of this coming into presence. […] What makes up the ‘world’ and ‘sense’ can no longer be determined as the given, accomplished, ‘finished’ presence but is intermingled with the coming, the in-finity of a coming into presence, or of an e-venire. [126]
The exhaustion of cosmos and mundus, the end of the ‘presentable’ world, opens onto the wordliness of being.
[…] is art necessary to the articulation of sense in its ‘absence’, in its ‘surprise’? Is it necessary to the thought of the sense of the world? And how does this involve fragmentation?
The five senses are not the fragments of a transcendent or immanent sense. They are the fragmentation or the fractility of the sense that is sense only as fragment. [129]
[…] when Hegel announces that art ‘is henceforth for us a thing of the past’, he is announcing nothing other than the end of the beautiful (re)presentation of intelligible Sense – that is, of what he also calls ‘the religion of art’ – and the sublimation of this presentation in its modern mode of truth, the mode of the concept, philosophical ‘gray’, the achieved immanence (without sensible difference) of a transcendent that has wholly come back to itself. [130]
But at the same time, with exactly the same gesture, Hegel delivers art for itself: he delivers it from service to transcendence in immanence, and he delivers it to detached, fragmentary truth. Hegel, volens nolens, registers and salutes in fact the birth of art, the detachment of this ‘concept’ that will henceforth be autonomous, exposed as the very detachment, separation and fragmentation of sense.
The sense that can expose itself only along the edges of the fragment is not an absent sense that would be comparable to the absence – itself full of sense – of God, who, precisely as God, does not cease to absent himself: it is a sense the absence of which makes no sense, that is, does not convert itself into an absent presence but consists entirely, if one can say it this way, in absence as presentation, or in the fragmentation of pres-ence. [131]
The power of technics may indeed go on and grow in an exponential manner. It does not produce the assumption of a sovereignty: it does not dispose over the instance of an End or a Sense. It is no astonishing, therefore, that the era of ‘technics’ is also the era of the ‘end of art’. The latter, in fact, has finished serving the finish of an end. It has finished being religious or philosophical art, as it has finished being (theologico)political art. Thus, art is open to this fragmentation of sense that existence is. It was always open to this. [139]
(In a sense, of course, our own moment does resemble the end of Rome, and yet nothing repeats itself: it is not an empire that is currently becoming dislocated, but a world that is being articulated; the cracking of joints in each case sounds somewhat the same, but we are well aware that there is no cause for nostalgia, certainly not for empire […])
The entire logic of the world is concentrated here, and it is concentrated as the logic of art: the world is neither maned not to be made, but the aesthetic ‘making’, the multiplicitious tracing [frayage] of places in accordance with which all things take place: the ‘making’ of the ‘there is’. [141]
Occidental tragedy will have arrived at its most extreme limit in the heroic ambiguity of the twilights of the gods: either the (ecstatic?) exposition to the abyss or the appropriation of the divine in order to recreate, refashion a world […]. What opens up beyond this point – but also as this point of departure – is something else: the world that will point neither to an abyss without foundation or form nor to a plastic (re)creation. [146]
It is not possible […] to give up thinking that something is happening, that something here called ‘world’ is happening to us, and that it is here and now that this is coming to pass and that the here and now takes place in accordance with what it transmits to itself of what it represents as being where it comes from.
WORLD
If the world is not the work of a God, this is not because there is no God, as if this were an annoying circumstance, a privative condition to which one had to accommodate oneself as best one could. […] But there is no God because there is the world, and because the world is neither a work nor an operation but the space of the ‘there is’, its configuration without a face. [156]
‘World’ says the there of the ‘there is’.