ON IMMANENCE (NANCY)

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THE CREATION OF THE WORLD OR GLOBALISATION, NANCY

[an essay on the immanence of the world]

TRANS’ INTRO

The thinking of the world developed in The Creation of the World or Globablisation unfolds in a play between two terms that are apparently synonymous or used interchangeably, globalisation and mondialisation. […] These two terms are rendered here as globalisation and world-forming respectively. [1]

At stake in this distinction is nothing less than two possible destinies of our humanity, our time.

On the one hand, there is the uniformity produced by a global economical and technological logic – Nancy specifies, ‘a global injustice against the background of general equivalence’ – leading towards the opposite of an inhabitable world, to ‘the un-world’ [immonde].

And, on the other hand, there is the possibility of an authentic world-forming, that is, of a making of the world and of a making sense that Nancy will call […] a ‘creation’ of the world. [1]

In the final analysis, what interests Nancy, in this distinction between ‘world-forming’ and ‘globalisation’, is that world-forming maintains a crucial reference to the world’s horizon, as a space of significations or of possible significance. ON the other hand, globalisation is a process that indicates an ‘enclosure in the indifferentiated sphere of a unitotality’. That is perfectly accessible and transparent for a mastery without remainder.

In effect, it is ‘thanks to’ the event of globalisation – for Nancy, the suppression of the world – that the world is in the position to appear as such.

Globalisation destroys the world and thus makes possible the emergence of the question relating to its being. [2]

The orb of the world dissolves in the non-place of global multiplicity.

The access to totality, in the sense of the global and of the planetary, is at the same time the disappearing of the world. It is also, Nancy emphasises, the end of the orientation and of the sense (of the world) [see above]. [3]

Thus what appears […] is, on the one hand, the antinomy between the global and the worldly […], but also, above all, the role that the appearance of the nothing that plays in the world, in its event as in its destruction or in its destruction as event. It is therefore a question for us of bringing forth this ‘nothing of the world’, whose characteristics Nancy reveals, for one senses that it is in this nothing that the cross-destinies of globablisation and world-forming are at stake, as well as the question of contemporary nihilism […]. [4] [see below, Heidegger on FN]

At first, Nancy begins to reconstruct the historic emergence of the question of the world, that is, the way in which the world is becoming a proper philosophical question, through a process that he calls  the ‘becoming-world of the world’ (CW 41). The world as problem and as the proper site of human existence was covered, obscured, by the classical figures of onto-theology and representational thinking, all the while, paradoxically and silently, undermining onto-theology from within. The world, writes Nancy […] was or has formed ‘the self-deconstruction that undermines from within onto-theology’.

[…] Nancy insists that the world emerges as world against the background of a historical withdrawal of the representation of the world. Such a representation supposes a cosmotheoros, that is to say, a subject-of-the-world representing the world in front of itself as an object. It supposes, on the other hand, the representation of a principle and of an end of the world, the world ending in such a view […].

Positioning itself outside the world, it gains, so to speak, a theological status. Here one can see the dependency of the representation of the world on onto-theology.

Nancy would even identify ‘world-forming’, that is, the immanent structure of the world – the fact that the world only refers to itself and never to another world (postulate of onto-theology) – as a ‘detheologisation’. This will be, in effect, a leitmotif in Nancy’s thought of the world: the world is an absolute immanence. [5]

For Nancy, the world emerges as a proper philosophical problem against the background of a withdrawal of onto-theology, and its putting into play as an absolute existence is correlative to the disappearance of God.

Becoming-world is thus the inverse of ‘theologisation’.

In effect, what used to stand in the way of, or obstruct, a thought of the world (as immanence and value) was the division of the totality of being according to the tripartite nature-man-god. God, for Nancy, amounts to this: another world placed next to this world, other than this world. ‘[F]or a God distinct form the world would be another world’. God is what is outside the world. It is to that extent that the subject of representation was bound to theism.

Now, the first proposition of an authentic thought of the world is that the world never refers to another world. [5] [SEE HEIDEGGER ON NIETZSCHE BELOW]

This is why the expression ‘the sense or meaning of the world [le sens du monde]’, the title of one of Nancy’s major works, cannot signify the sense of the world as an objective genitive, an encompassing of the world as totality on the basis of an external overview […] but, rather, a subjective genitive, produced from the internal reference of the world. […] The world only refers to itself, and its meaning does not come from outside it, it ’circulates’, Nancy tells us, ‘between all those who stand in it, each time singular and singularly sharing the same possibility that none of them, any place or any God outside of this world, accomplishes.’ [6]

Thus, let us specify that when Nancy speaks of meaning, he does not intend by this term the same thing as ‘signification’, in the sense of an accomplished given meaning, but rather the opening of the possibility of the production of significance. Meaning is not given, it is to be invented, to be created, that is to say, […] out of nothing, ex nihilo… [6]

IMMANENCE

As we can see, Nancy’s thought with respect to the world is a thought of an absolute immanence in opposition to the tradition of transcendence […]. And nevertheless, Nancy shows that the world, the question of the being-world of the world, operates within onto-theology; he shows that such onto-theology self-deconstructs and confirms, in spite of itself, the unity of the world and its radical immanence.  [6]

The passage to immanence is the passage to modernity, and the fist gesture of globalisation. It is the death of God that FN discovered. This is why he can proclaim his message to people who are already ‘atheists’ without them being able to understand. Death of God as something programmed in Christianity. Passage to the Absolute in Hegel/Mallarme. Internalisation of the measure of value – coordinate with the becoming world of the world. Passage to autonomy. Spacing of the world. (Sharing? J-LN). International law as anarchic – its essential characteristic.

It is to this extent that the question of the world will have formed the self-deconstruction that undermines onto-theology and that the god of metaphysics has merged with the world, indeed has become the world.

This god of metaphysics has become the world in the sense that the God of onto-theology has been ‘progressively stripped of the divine attributes of an independent existence, and only retained those of the existence of the world considered in its immanence’ (CW 44), which amounts to saying that the subject of the world (God) disappears in order for the world to appear as subject.

Henceforth, there is nothing but the (immanent) world as subject of itself. That is to say, for Nancy, the world is always a relation to itself.

God thus disappears, but He disappears in the world […] [7]

This shift from ‘within’ to ‘in’ indicates the radical immanence of the world: everything now takes place in the world, that is to say, right at the world, à même the world, as Nancy often writes. It is a matter for us of advancing in this proper thought of the world that deploys itself from […] detheologisation […].

THE WORLD IS AN ABSOLUTE

The first characteristic of the world is thus its radical immanence. The world no longer refers to a transcendence, to a beyond, to a god outside the world and distinct from the world.

Nancy writes: ‘Whoever speaks of ‘the world’ renounces any appeal to ‘another world’ or a ‘beyond-the-world’ [outre monde].’ (CW 37) [8]

Without an exterior principle, it therefore can only refer to itself, and its meaning only arises from itself. It is absolutely free from all reference to an exterior: this is why the world’s immanence is ab-solute, detached, without connection.

The world is an absolute, since it is no longer relative to another world. The sense of the world manifests this immanence, because the sense of the world is referred to a making-sense, which is the world as such: the world makes sense of itself and by itself.

‘On could say that worldhood is the symbolisation of the world, the way in which the world symbolises in itself with itself, in which it articulates itself by making a circulation of meaning possible without reference to another world.’ (CW 53) [8]

The world manifests therefore an absolute immanence. The world is absolute but nonetheless finite. It is finite because […] it comes from nothing in order to return to nothing, and it is only itself a growth of/from nothing. [8]

The immanence of the world is therefore the conjunction of a finitude and of an absolute; it is an absolute finitude. This absolute finitude takes the form of an excess. [8]

CREATION EX NIHILO

This making (sense) from nothing given is a creation ex nihilo, coming from nothing, an meaning, emerging from nothing, allows the world to appear as a nothing-of-given and as without-reason.

The creation of which Nancy speaks, that is, the creation of the world (which is a subjective genitive), ought to be understood in a radical nontheological sense. It would even be, in its content and its logic, a nontheological notion, if it is the case that creating can only be ex nihilo, emergence from nothing and not from God […]

God is absent in the creation of the world and disappears in the world. Creation is no longer referred to theology, but to the ex nihilo, which for its part is referred to a veritable materialism, if it is the case that ‘ex nihilo is the genuine formulation of a radical materialism, that is to say, precisely without roots’ (CW 51)

[…] Nancy expresses that creation in his thought is ‘the exact opposite’ of production, which supposes a given, a project, and a producer. Creation is without a transcendent creator […] a creation immanent to itself, a creation of itself, and from itself […]

DENATURATION [Hobbes]

On Nancy’s account, philosophy begins from itself and evolves as a ‘technology of logos.’ With this self-beginning, Nancy suggests that there is a ‘denaturation’ of history. [13]

The use of the term denaturation would imply, it seems, an originary state of nature that would have been de-natured; an original state to which one would have to return in order to restore one’s proper nature.

As a self-beginning that conceives of its own ends, philosophy corrupts the natural history of the world and natural history must be excluded from its account. [14]

SOVEREIGNTY

Nancy’s problematic with respect to the question of sovereignty is developed in the section of the text entitled ‘Ex Nihilo Summum (Of Sovereignty)’. [17]

In that chapter, Nancy endeavours to draw the contours of sovereignty, contours that are, as he puts it, outlined ‘around a hollow’. Such a sovereignty, which he contrasts with domination and mastery, would be an ‘anti-sovereignty’, a kind of ‘negative sovereignty’, or a ‘sovereignty without sovereignty’. That negative sovereignty is indeed marked by a hollow, a hollow that marks the absence of any theological foundation, the withdrawal of substantiality and subjectivity […] in the very institution of sovereignty. [17]

It also marks the nothing from which ex nihilo, sovereignty is exercised, as it is no longer founded on anything but itself and its own creation, its own self-institution. [18]

The sovereign, thus, ‘is the existent who depends on nothing’.

Indeed Nancy contrasts an atheological sovereignty from traditional theological-political sovereignty, stressing that the sovereign has no substantiality whatsoever, that it is based on nothing.

‘Sovereignty is the end of any political theology’.

It is the exceptional position of sovereignty as a source of law, control, and power – itself outside the law, ‘prior to or in excess of any law’ – that holds Nancy’s attention. [18]

He seeks to interrogate the non-substantial souce from which the sovereign operates, whether a medieval suzerain, an early modern sovereign, or a singular existence, as a site from which the creation of a world could ensue. [18]

The sovereign, on Nancy’s account, is detached, free to create the law and free to rule from above. It is absolute in the sense that it has no relation, no measure and no equivalence to anything or anyone. [AUTONOMOUS] [18]

Agamben [Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life] […] reminds us of the crucial link between the concept of the state of exception and the political theory of the noted German jurist Carl Schmitt.

The state of exception of which Schmitt spoke, and that the Nazis wielded, was provided and legitimised by Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. Article 48 (Measures during the disturbance of security and order) provides that

the President can utilise the necessary measures to restore public security and order, if necessary with the aid of armed forces. For this purpose he may provisionally suspend, in whole or in part, the basic rights established in 114, 115 […]

The ‘basic rights’ established by articles 114, 115 […] included such matters as personal freedoms, domicilic sovereignty, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and others. Schmitt’s theoretical reservations about the viability of parliamentary democracy and emphatic legitimation of the state of exception played all too well into the hands of Adolph Hitler. [20]

[…] through legal means and parliamentary procedures Hitler manoeuvred himself into a ‘state of exception’ provided by Article 48 […]

For Hitler – did the absence of a higher legitimation open the possibility of a merciless expansion based on race? Zoological anarchy – Timothy Snyder.

He [Nancy] writes, ‘The sovereign does not find a sovereignty that is given: it must constitute it and thus constitute itself as sovereign’ [AUTONOMY] [20]

Through his analysis, Nancy seeks to approach the very possibility of sovereignty as the nonsubstantial place from which another beginning, another creation, another world (or a world anew) could ensue.

In The Creation of the World, Nancy advances on his proposition in The Sense of the World [see above] that the loss of the theological sovereign opens the possibility of a new sense of politics, and raises the question of how the sense of being-in-common can make itself ‘sovereign in a new way’

SOVEREIGNTY IS NOTHING

The sovereign is based on nothing: ‘no finality, no order of production or subjection, whether it concerns the agent or the patient or the cause or the effect. Dependent on nothing, it is entirely delivered over to itself, insofar as precisely, the ‘itself’ neither precedes nor founds it but is the nothing, the very thing from which it is suspended.’ [21]

Nancy insists that the world is subject to no authority, arising ex nihilo. He also marks that the unity of the world remains diverse, multiple. In this respect, he is able to claim that, ‘The sharing [partage] of the world is the law of the world. The world does not have any other law, it is not submitted to any authority, it does not have any sovereign.’ (CW 109) [21]

The law of the world is thus sharing, and this distribution, repartition, or attribution inherent in sharing opens up the question and space of justice, the proper or appropriate attribution to each.

[SCHMITT. THE NOMOS OF THE EARTH – TRY TO THINK OF THIS TOGETHER WITH AUTO-NOMY. SEE REFS IN CAPS ABOVE. THE OTHER BEGINNING IS AN ORIGINARY SHARING OF THE WORLD (SPACING)]

The sovereignty that opens with the deconstruction of monotheism (of Christianity). A displacement of the onto-theological concept of sovereignty. Globablisation [for Nancy ‘mondialisation’] is the name of the process by which this sovereignty deconstructs itself. The opening of another space. Another spacing [nomos] of the earth. This is the meaning of auto-nomy. Nothing beyond the world gives it its law. The spacing, division of the world happens within it as its own movement. Implies a rethinking of Justice.

‘Territorial place, nourishment, a delimitation of rights and duties: to each an each time as appropriate.’ Justice is co-extensive with the sharing of the world and the appropriate part of each singularity (justice designates what must be rendered, restituted, returned, given in return to each singular exixtent).

Nancy had already emphasised in The Inoperative Community that meaning is and can only be as shared out. [21]

For Nancy, what being-with and being-towards-death reveal is a sharing [partage] of singular existences. ‘The sharing itself is not a communion… nor even a communication as this is understood to exist between subjects. But these singular beings are themselves constituted by sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others.’ (IC 25) [SPACING]

JUSTICE/INJUSTICE

‘To create the world means: immediately, without delay, reopening each possible struggle for a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of a global injustice against the background of general equivalence. But this means to conduct this struggle precisely in the name of the fact that this world is coming out of nothing, that there is nothing before it and that it is without models, without principle and without given end, and that it is precisely what forms the justice and meaning of a world’

The suppression of such a creation of meaning, of ’each possible struggle for a world’, would constitute injustice.

Nancy thematises a world that is always already under formation and concludes that justice would be a world that is constituted by this inexhaustible creation of meaning. [22]

Nancy suggests that the sovereignty of the world – Cosmos Basileus – reveals the excess of life with respect to controlled management. But what is ultimately at stake with this sovereign world in opposition to the control of bio-power is justice. [23]

For Nancy, the creation of the world (as subjective genitive) is literally the work of justice.

As world-forming, the world is justice-in-act.

Justice would be a world constituted by this inexhaustible creation of meaning.

In his essay ‘The Force of Law’, Derrida suggested that deconstruction responds to a sense of responsibility without limits and is always ‘already engaged by this infinite demand of justice…’.

[…] we are in a time in which ends have been exhausted, and it is up to us to decide, to begin again.

I URBI ET ORBI

Glomus: In such a glomus, we see the conjunction of an indefinite growth of techno-science, of a correlative exponential growth of populations, of a worsening of inequalities of all sorts within these populations – economic, biological, cultural – and of a dissipation of the certainties, images, and identities of what the world was with its parts and humanity with its characteristics. [34]

The West has come to encompass the world, and in this movement it disappears as what was supposed to orient the course of the world.

The world has lost its capacity to ‘form a world’ […]

In the end, everything takes place as if the world affected and permeated itself with a death drive that soon would have nothing else to destroy than the world itself. [34]

The fact that the world is destroying itself is not a hypothesis: it is in a sense the fact from which any thinking of the world follows […] Perhaps only one thing remains, that is to say, one thought with some certainty: what is taking place is really happening, which means that it happens and happens to us in this way more than a history, even more than an event.

After a citation from The German Ideology:

[…] he [Marx] […] formulates what was his conviction to the end according to which ‘communism’ is nothing other than the actual movement of world history insofar as it becomes global and thus renders possible, and perhaps necessary, the passage to consciousness and enjoyment of human creation in its entirety by all human beings.

This for Marx is the world: that of the market metamorphosing itself or revolutionising itself in reciprocal and mutual creation. [36]

[…] the experience undergone since Marx has increasingly been the experience that the place of meaning, of value, and of truth is the world. Whoever speaks of ‘the world’ renounces any appeal to ‘another world’ or a ‘beyond-the-world’ [outre monde]. ‘World-forming’ also means, as it does in this text from Marx, that it is in ‘this’ world, or as ‘this’ world – and thus as the world, absolutely – that what Marx calls production and/or the creation of humanity, is being played out. [37]

Our difference with him nonetheless reappears on this very point: with him, ‘human’ implicitly remains a teleological or eschatological term, if we understand by that a logic where the telos and/or the eschaton take the position and the role of an accomplishment without remainder. For Marx, the human being, as source and accomplishment of value in itself, comes at the end of history when it produces itself: the source must therefore end entirely spread out and accomplished.

For us on the contrary, ‘the human being’ is reduced to a given principle, relatively abstract (‘person’ ‘dignity’) and as such distinct from an actual creation. [38]

WORLDVIEW A world ‘viewed’, a represented world, is a world dependent on the gaze of a subject of the world [sujet du monde]. A subject of the world (that is to say as well a subject of history) cannot itself be within the world [etre dans le monde]. Even without a religious representation, such a subject, implicit or explicit, perpetuates the position of the creating, organising, and addressing God (if not the addressee) of the world.

Nevertheless […] it is legitimate to say that the great transcendent accounts of rationalism elaborated nothing else than the immanent relation of the world to itself […] [41]

It would not be inaccurate to say that the question of the world – that is to say, the question of the necessity and meaning of the world – will have formed the self-deconstruction that undermines from within onto-theology.

Marx’s insistence on the world – an insistence that emphasises both the ‘worldwide’ (coexistence) and the ‘worldly’ (immanence) – is itself a decisive advance of the self-deconstructive gesture. (In this respect, and however paradoxical it may seem, it is indeed in Husserl and Heidegger that it continued, and as well as, albeit differently, in Bergson and Wittgenstein).

[…] the decisive feature of the becoming-world of the world, as it were […] is the feature through which the world resolutely and absolutely distances itself from any status as object in order to tend toward being itself the ‘subject’ of its own ‘worldhood’ – or ‘world-forming’. [41]

What is a world? Or what does ‘world’ mean?

A world is precisely that in which there is room for everyone: but a genuine place, one in which things can genuinely take place (in this world). Otherwise it is not a ‘world’: it is a ‘globe’ or a ‘golme’, it is a ‘land of exile’ and a ‘vale of tears’. [42]

A world is a space in which a certain tonality resonates. [SIMONDON. THE TRANSINDIVIDUAL COMMUNITY. RESONANCE.]

The world does not presuppose itself: it is only coextensive to its extension as world, to the spacing of its places between which its resonances reverberate. [43]

Thus the meaning of the world does not occur as a reference to something external to the world. [43]

[…] as I indicated, the God of metaphysics merged into a world. More precisely, the God of onto-theology was progressively stripped of the divine attributes of an independent existence and only retained those of the existence of the world considered in its immanence […]

The God of onto-theology has produced itself (or deconstructed itself) as subject of the world, that is, as world-subject. [44]

In so doing, it suppressed itself as God-Supreme-Being and transformed itself, losing itself therein, in the existence for-itself of the world without an outside.

[…] the ‘world’, in our philosophical tradition, has come to be identified firstly with the totality of beings that no longer refers logically to any other being (to no other world: for a God distinct from the world would be another world), and secondly, identified with the question, enigma or the mystery of the raison d’etre of such a totality. [44-45]

If the world, essentially, is not the representation of a universe (cosmos) nor that of a here below (a humiliated world, if not condemned by Christianity), but the excess –beyond any representation of an ethos or of a habitus – of a stance by which the world stands by itself, configures itself, and exposes itself in itself, relates to itself without referring to any given principle or to any determined end, then one must address the principle of such an absence of principle directly. [47]

This must be named the ‘without-reason’ of the world, or its absence of ground. It is not a new idea to say that the world is ‘without reason’ or that it is exclusively and entirely its own reason. We know quite well that it is found in Angelus Silesius (‘THE ROSE GROWS WITHOUT REASON’), but one does not always notice how it works within all the great formulations of the most classical rationalism […]

[…] in order to distance such thinking of the world from representation, there is no better way than this one: to grasp the ‘world’ once more according to one of its constant motifs in the Western tradition – to the extent that it is also the tradition of monotheism – namely, the motif of creation. [50]

‘Creation’ is a motif, or a concept, that we must grasp outside of its theological context.

As I have previously suggested, it is theology itself that has stripped itself of a God distinct from the world. At the end of monotheism, there is a world without God, that is to say, without another world […]. [51]

If ‘creation’ means anything, it is the exact opposite of any form of production in the sense of a fabrication that supposes a given, a project, and a producer.

The world is created from nothing.

Thus we can clarify what we said earlier: if the world-becoming (detheologisation) displaces value – makes it immanent – before world-forming displaces the production of value – making it universal – the two together displace ‘creation’ into the ‘without-reason’ of the world. And this displacement is not a transposition, a ‘secularisation’ of the onto-theological or metaphysical-Christian scheme: it is rather, its deconstruction and emptying out, and it opens onto another space – of place and of risk – which we have just begun to enter. [51]

One could say that worldhood is the symbolisation of the world, the way in which the world symbolises in itself, in which it articulates itself by making a circulation of meaning possible without reference to another world. [53]

Our task today is nothing less than the task of creating a form or a symbolisation of the world.

II OF CREATION

[…] to encounter the inconstructible in the Kantian sense, this is also and at the very least is what ‘to deonctruct’ means, a word that is now too often used by the doxa to mean demolition and nihilism. Yet, through Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida, this word – originally Abbau and not Zerstorung – would have rather led us toward what is neither constructed nor constructible, but is set back from the structure, its empty space, and which makes it work, or even that which pervades it. [61]

To do justice to the multiplicity and to the coexistence of singularities, to multiply thus, and infinitely singularise the ends, such is one of the concerns left to us by that time which as ‘post’ could well be a first time, a time suspended in the pre-existence of another time, another beginning and another end. [61]

The question of nature has thus indeed become that of a universe no longer sustained by the creative and organising action of a Providence, and, consequently, that of a finality no longer guided by the agency or index of an end: neither of one end nor of an end in general…)

[…] our question is through and through the question of the Good in a world without end or without singular ends… [64]

The thinking that inaugurates the plural monadic singularity is the one that transforms (but with Descartes and Spinoza) the regime of thought of the provenance-and-end of the world: from creation as a result of an accomplished divine action, one shifts to creation as, in sum, an unceasing activity and actuality of this world in its singularity (singularity of singularities). [65]

One sense of the word (creation as a state of affairs of the given world) yields to another (creation as bringing forth [mise au monde] a world – an active sense […]

But the very fact, that there is in the world either the agency or the power or at least the question and/or experience of its own creation, is henceforth given with the world and as its very worldliness – which from created, becomes creative – even in the end as its worldhood.

The judgement about the ‘ends of all things’ must be concerned with a condition of being that would not depend on causality or finality, nor consequently on mechanical consecution or subjective intention. By destituting the creating God and the ens summum – sufficient reason of the world – Kant also makes clear that the reason of the world pertains to a productive causality. He opens implicitly and outside of theology a new question of ‘creation’… [66]

Now in this grand tradition, which is also, if one considers its full scope, a thinking of Being (of the Being of beings as a whole) on the basis of a monotheism in all of its forms and ultimate consequences […], one will find a twofold simultaneous movement:

• On the one hand, the creator necessarily disappears in the very midst of its act, and with this disappearance a decisive episode of the entire movement that I have sometimes named the ‘deconstruction of Christianity’ occurs, a movement that is nothing but the most intricate and proper movement of monotheism as the integral absenting of God in the unity that reduces it in and where it dissolves;
• On the other hand, and correlatively, Being falls completely outside of any presupposed position and integrally displaces itself into a transitivity by which it is, and is only, in any existence, the infinitive of a ‘to exist’, and the conjugation of this verb (Being is not the basis of the existent, or its cause, but it ‘is’ it or it ‘exists’ it).

Being without given can only be understood with the active sense of the verb ‘to be’, indeed, a transitive sense: ‘to be’, not as a substance or as a substrate, even less as a result or product, not as a state, not as a property, even less, if it is possible, with a simple function of a copula.

This is the case because ‘the world is’ forms a complete proposition without the attribute of its subject, but as an act, and thus equivalent to ‘a doing’. [69]

God annihilates itself as a ‘self’ or as a distinct being in order to ‘withdraw’ in its act – which makes the opening of the world. [70]

Creation forms, then, a nodal point in a ‘deconstruction of monotheism’, insofar as such a deconstruction proceeds from monotheism itself, and perhaps is its most active resource. The unique God, whose unicity is the correlate of the creating act, cannot precede its creation any more than it can subsist above or apart from it in some way. It merges with it: merging with it, it withdraws in it, and withdrawing there it empties itself there, emptying itself it is nothing other than the opening of this void. Only the opening is divine, but the divine is nothing more than the opening. [70]

THE OPENING

The opening is neither the foundation nor the origin. Nor is the opening any longer a sort of receptacle or an extension prior to things of the world. The opening of the world is what opens along such things and among them, that which separates them in their profuse singularity and which relates them to each other in their coexistence.

The open of the ‘nothing’ weaves the co-appearance of existences without referring them to some other originary or foundational unity. [70]

Derrida’s differance is the articulation of the nullity of the ontological defference: it attempts to think that ‘being’ is nothing other than the ‘ex’ of existence. This articulation is thought as that of a self-presence that differs itself.

One should not understand differance as a sort of permanent flight of an asymptotic and unattainable self (a representation too frequent and too linked to a sort of desire exhausting itself in the infinite) but rather as the generating structure proper to the ex nihilo. [72]

The present does not present itself, and it is no less exposed. It is nothing other than that, and that is what it falls to us to think henceforth. [72]

The infinite is finite: it does not come out of itself ad extra it is rather hollowed ‘in itself’ (in nothing) from its own withdrawal which also constitutes its opening in which finite singularities dispose themselves. This opening as nothing, which neither presents nor gives itself is opened right at the same level [à même] the finite singularities as their being together or their being-with, and constitutes the disposition of the world. [72-3]

[SPACING/EXPOSURE/OPENING]

According to this archi-spatiality of disposition, which is also the spaciousness of the opening, what is at stake is not a provenance of Being (nor a being of provenance or of origin), but a spacing of presences. These presences are necessarily plural. They do not come from the dispersion of a presence: they are existing, but less in the sense of an ekstasis from an immanent ‘self’ (emanation, generation, expression, etc.) than as disposed together and exposed to each other. Their coexistence is an essential dimension of their presences at the edges of which the opening opens.

The first feature of the creation of the world is that it creates the with of all things: that is to say the world, namely, the nihil as that which opens [ouvre] and forms [oeuvre] the world. [73]

Coexistence is that which coheres without being ‘one’.

This means both that the world is simply there (it is or it permeates its ‘there’, its spacing) and that it is the coexistence that it does not contain but that on the contrary ‘makes’ it.

That the world is there means that it is nowhere since it is the opening of space-time.

III CREATION AS DENATURATION: METAPHYSICAL TECHNOLOGY

History is the infinite deferral of any nature, and this is why, from now on, the following question occurs to us: Was there ever ‘nature’, since there was history, and thus an infinite deferral of any nature? Was there eve a ‘prehistory’, not only in the sense of a human prehistory, anterior to a history conceived and achieved as such (the history contemporaneous with philosophy), but in the sense of a nonhuman prehistory, and even prior to life, a history of the world of the Universe that had not already been always already historical in some way?

Is this a point to turn to questions of a state of nature preceding sovereignty (and history)? Does everything get going in the same movement? Below, denaturation is the end of philosophy. Its inaugural denaturation is nevertheless the constitution of a natural history. Can this be found in Nancy’s text here? (reread).

The question leads to at least two others: that of knowing whether there can be some ‘posthistory’, in whatever sense, and second, that of knowing whether it is possible, in a parallel and basically coessential or codetermined manner of designating a pre- and/or a post philosophy…

Without claiming to confront these questions as such, here and now, we will agree perhaps that there cannot not be in some fashion a ‘history of the world’, if the world turns out not to have in itself its origin and its end, and that even if, and especially if, any ‘outside’ of the world must be thought as nothing, and even if, and especially if, the meaning of the world is nothing other than the world itself in its originary and final relation with an infinite deferral of the origin and the end of that nothing of which it would be the expansion – that is to say, the growth or the creation (it is the same word) or even…. the history.

A remarkable chiasm occurs in which the ‘auto’ and the ‘allo’, the ‘by itself’ and the ‘by the other’, continuously exchange their places. This chiasm is the very emergence of philosophy, of the West, and of history. Instantaneously, and at the same time, two times are inaugurated: the chronical or chronological time of history and the achronical or anachronical time of an outside of history. But the first, the time of autochronic, in sum, is the time of difference or as difference, while the second as heterochronic (its time outside of time) will be the time (or the space) of given nondeferred time. Philosophy constitutes this space-time as that of muthos. [80]

The question opened by philosophy in its history and as history, the question opened by philosophical historicity as an essentially auto-constitutive dimension of philosophy, is the following: Is it or is it not possible to assume the nonfoundation of the beginning as the reason – thus as the ground – of the historical process itself? But this question is obviously nothing other than the following: Is it possible or not to assume the nonfoundaton of the West as the reason for its own history? And since this history becomes the history of the world: is it possible or not to assume the nonfoundation of the history of the world?

This means: Is it possible to make history, to begin again a history – or History itself – on the basis of its nonfoundation? Is it possible to assume both the absence of the auto-constitution (thus a relation to a prephilosophical other than the entirely problematic relation to the lost and desired exteriority of phusis and muthos) and the absence of auto-completion (thus the end of teleologies, theologies, and messianisms)?

The end of sovereignty as the end of history. The auto-completion of philosophy in the passage to globalisation. This all taking place as a passage to immanence (the death of God). The becoming world of the world. The becoming AUTONOMOUS of the world. A new understanding of the spacing of the world.

What would a truly international zone look like? Administered by an international ‘body’ with no underlying sovereign state. A stateless zone. But not for all that a lawless zone. A sovereignty without sovereignty. Beyond sovereignty. Inter-national. Arising out of the spacing between nations. The Law of the Sea. Outer space. The Law of the Land. A new nomos.

The New International/Sovereignty/Statelessness/Zone

EXHAUSTION/COMPLETION/TERMINATION/END OF THE HISTORICAL PROCESS/DENATURATION

The completion of metaphysics – its end and its plenitude – happened in history insofar as it is precisely the accomplishment of the historical possibility itself, or the accomplishment of the ‘meaning of history’ as it has been recognised at least since Nietzsche, but perhaps also, in a more complex manner, since Hegel himself, and in the way in which Husserl and Heidegger have tried to grasp is as problem and resource at the same time. [81]

The historical possibility, properly speaking, as it was produced in its course by philosophy (or metaphysics: the possibility of a metaphysical history and a metaphysics of history) is the possibility that a process would complete the realisation of a reason, of a ground, and of a rationality. It is thus the possibility that the historical process functions as a natural process. Metaphysical history is history thought as physics: as ‘natural history’, to use this old expression in which precisely ‘history’ did not yet have the meaning of a process, but of a ‘collection’. The truth of this history was that in the end, it denied itself as history by becoming nature (again).

In this elaboration, that which is exhausted is the bringing to completion. Whether the term is names presence, subject, Supreme Being, or total humanity, in each case the capacity of assumption and absorption of a terminus ad quem is exhausted. [81]

Very precisely, what is exhausted is nothing other than the exhausting itself in an end (teleology).

Now, it is this exhaustion (accomplishment, maturation) that philosophy had constituted as a history after having remodelled according to Christian salvation, itself understood as a temporal process, the anamnesic movement of the Platonic u-topia or of the ec-topia.

What is exhausted is thus the presence of a terminal present of history, a presence that would no longer be praesentia, being-ahead-of-itself, but only be equal to itself, in its indifferent.

That the exhaustion is exhausted – that natural history breaks down and is denatured – is what is shown by the rupture that philosophy carries out by, in, and on itself: a historical rupture of its history, which Heidegger called the ‘end of philosophy’ to indicate the depth and seriousness of that which in history thus happens to History, and by virtue of which a ‘history of being’ or a ‘destinality’ of its ‘sendings’, perhaps even the end of these sendings themselves, can only, at least, be denatured.

But this denaturation is what requires us to consider the extent to which, at what depth – properly without ground – history is not and cannot be auto-generating or autotelic, the extent to which, then, it cannot return to itself or in itself, or reabsorb itself in any ‘end of history’.

Philosophy [Nancy argues] is nature. The history of philosophy is natural history in that it is the process of reason understanding itself (as natural phenomenon?? The Phenomenology of Spirit as a natural process). What happens at the end of philosophy, is, then a denaturation. The historical possibility, properly speaking, as it was produced in its course by philosophy (or metaphysics: the possibility of a metaphysical history and a metaphysics of history) is the possibility that a process would complete the realisation of a reason, of a ground, and of a rationality. It is thus the possibility that the historical process functions as a natural process. Metaphysical history is history thought as physics: as ‘natural history’, to use this old expression in which precisely ‘history’ did not yet have the meaning of a process, but of a ‘collection’. The truth of this history was that in the end, it denied itself as history by becoming nature (again). [above].

It requires us, on the contrary, to see finally, as if before us, the difference and the alteration of the auto that metaphysics, while producing it, first endeavoured to cover or deny. [82]

[…] ‘denaturation’ must itself be postulated as the ‘reason’ of the process, of that history whose form is also that of an errancy.

In this sense, truth empties itself of all presentable contents (whether one thinks of it in a sacral mode or in mode of positive knowledge). But this void is the void of the exhaustion of any ‘content’, of the plethora or the saturation of a completion, emptied of the plethora and therefore open in itself and on itself. [82]

This means above all that it is open on the question of its own historicity. Truth – the truth of philosophy and of history – can do nothing else, henceforth, than open onto the abyss of its own beginning, or of its own absence of beginning, end and ground.

THE NECESSITY OF DECONSTRUCTION

This historical gesture – that is, both the theoretical gesture with respect to ‘history’, of its concept, and the practical, active gesture in our own time, in order to appropriate this time, in order to ereigen another story [chronique] of the world – this gesture becomes then necessarily ‘deconstruction’.

To ‘deconstruct’ means to disassemble what has been built upon the beginnings in order to expose that which burrows beneath them. It is therefore the same thing to destabalise (not destroy) the structure of the philosophical (or metaphysical) tradition and to destabalise the historical auto-positioning of that tradition.

What was built, from what beginnings and how these beginnings are determined as such – and still and perhaps above all, as I would like to show, what is the provenance of these beginnings? [83]

‘Deconstruction’ perhaps means nothing other, ultimately, than the following: it happens henceforth that philosophy cannot understand itself apart from the question of its proper historicity – and no longer only in the sense of its internal historicity, but also in the sense of its external provenance, but also in such a way that the external provenance and internal production are inextricably tied.

(This is why it can only involve edges, extremities, ends, or limits of philosophy without, clearly, any accomplishment or completion. What else, ultimately, is at issue with Heidegger and with Derrida [who, in part despite Heidegger, opens again this dimension of deconstruction] if not the following: that philosophy cannot return to itself as its autology requires, except by exceeding its autonomy and thus its own history in ever respect).

So philosophy has to exceed its own AUTONOMY. Why? Its autonomy here is associated with its naturality. Denaturation is the word Nancy uses for the end of history (end of natural history, etc. cf. note above). Autonomy is the law of philosophy. Because it cannot reabsorb itself in its end, it reveals itself as an unnatural construction. This is the excess of its autonomy. See quote below: And which is what we may call, feigning to believe that there would have been first a pure and stable ‘nature’: denaturation. And one could then say that ‘humanity’ is the indexical name of the indefinite and infinite term of the human denaturation. [87] So there is an initial denaturation (does this have the effect of setting up what looks like a natural history?)

The double postulate of a return to the immemorial and an advance to what does not come designates what we call ‘metaphysics’: a metaphysics that is said to be ‘ended’, only in order to say that it exhausts that which claims to complete both its retrospection and prospection. Both must be incapable of ending: they must be the very incompletion conforming to the essence of philosophy, which turns out to be indissociable from its history, its extended immobility (metaphysics) into the absenting of tis origin and its end.

FLIGHT OF THE GODS/BEGINNING OF PHILOSOPHY

[…] it happened, it appeared as a flight, a departure: namely, the flight of the Gods (a flight for which in the West monotheism is the first name, in itself already pregnant with the ‘death of God’ – and one could add, what did Plato do if not weave together tragedy and monotheism just before Hellenistic Judaism, and then Christianity completed the work?).

[…] the flight of the Gods traces or initiates an opening of an unprecedented meaning: in the same gesture, meaning is in flight as past and to come – but in the same stroke, ‘meaning’, is precisely and absolutely, the idea or the question of meaning (and of a truth that responds to it). [85]

TECHNOLOGY

This force [that constitutes philosophy from somewhere] is in all respects, that of technology.

This movement, which will always already have begun with ‘humans’ and which consequently through humans, in humans, and before humans comes from ‘nature’ itself, this very movement takes on another form: instead of ensuring subsistence, it creates new conditions for humans, or even produces a strange ‘surplus-subsistence’ [sursistance] in nature or outside of it. [86]

[…] now – between the tenth and seventh century before our era on the arc of Asia Minor – one could say that a production of ends appears as such.

With this becoming human, this movement appears to itself as its own principle and its own end. That is to say, properly without principle and without end since it proceeds from an initial detachment, which one can name ‘human condition’ and whose permanence involves extreme instability and mutability of what has been thus detached (contingency forms thus the necessity of this ‘history’). And which is what we may call, feigning to believe that there would have been first a pure and stable ‘nature’: denaturation. And one could then say that ‘humanity’ is the indexical name of the indefinite and infinite term of the human denaturation. [87]

It is in denaturation  that something like the representation of a ‘nature’ can be produced or of an autotelic order and thus nontechnological order that poses then the at the same time the extreme difficulty of conceiving how denaturation arises from nature and in nature […].

The name of metaphysics, which appears then by accident, is in no way, in the end, accidental. It was already announced in the technological apparatus that produced ‘nature’ as an object of both theoretical and practical manipulation, while seeing to it that ‘technology’ clearly becomes a principle and an end for itself – […].

But this is […] why philosophy as such begins: it begins as a technology of meaning and/or of truth. In this sense, it is not at all a prolongation of the mytho-religious world, nor its overcoming by progress, nor its Aufhebung, nor its decline or its loss: it is the technological reinscription of ‘nature’ and of the ‘gods’. When meaning is denatured – or demythified – truth emerges as such: it is a matter of constructing meaning (the principle and end of Being as such) or else punctuating absence [absens] and, finally, with the two always implicated in any metaphysical construction and deconstruction worthy of the name.

It is in this sense that I therefore name metaphysics a techno-logy: the flight into a verifying autonomy of technology, or of ‘denaturation’. But this AUTONOMY repeats in an infinite abyss, all of the constitutive aporias if the auto- in general.

[…] referring to the sovereign the constitutive problematic of the relation to self or of auto position in general: the self of a relation to self cannot be given prior to this relation itself, since it is the relation that makes the self (self means relation to self and there is no case in which there is a subject of self). The sovereign does not find a sovereignty that is given: it must constitute it and thus itself as sovereign. [pp.99-100]

COMPLEMENTS

BIOPOLITICS and ECOTECHNICS

I believe it necessary, however, to ask if ‘life’ truly constitutes the object (real or imaginary, is not the issue now) of these powers, or if it is not rather a destinal figure (‘race’ or ‘the human worker’) that comes to substitute for the classical figures of SOVEREIGNTY. [94]

[…] it is clear that so called ‘natural life’, from its production to its conservation, its needs, and its representations, whether human, animal, vegetal, or viral, is henceforth inseparable from a set of conditions that are referred to as ‘technological’, and which constitute what must rather be named ecotechnology where any kind of ‘nature’ develops for us (and by us). That life is no longer simply ‘life’ if one understands it as auto-maintaining an auto-affecting. [94]

What is revealed […] with ecotechnology is the infinitely problematic character of any ‘auto’ in general.

It is in this context that a ‘biopolitics’ is possible since it is defined by a technological management of life.

Point of convergence with Naess. Deep ecology, etc.

Politics is thus implicitly nothing other than the auto-management of ecotechnology, the only form of possible ‘auto’-nomy that precisely no longer has recourse to any heretofore possible forms of a politics: neither the self-founding ‘sovereignty’, since it is no longer a matter of founding, nor the ‘discussion concerning the justice’ of an Aristotelian polis, since there is no longer a polis […]

The term biopolitics on fact designates neither life (as the form of life) nor politics (as a form of coexistence). And we can certainly admit that in fact we are no longer in a position to use either of these terms in any of their ordinary senses. Both are, rather, henceforth subject to what carries them together into ecotechnology. [94]

EX NIHILO SUMMUM (OF SOVEREIGNTY)

Sovereignty designates first the summit.

The summit towers over and dominates.

The fate of the word in language pertains to the attribution of domination to the summit and, consequently, to the analogical parallel between height and power.

It follows […] that sovereignty is not first of all the quality of being at the summit but the summit itself […] the summit, the sovereign: it does not have the sense of an attribute but that of the substance of a subject whose being consists in height. [96]

[…] the sovereign is more than a chief: the chief extends and completes a body; the sovereign rises above the body. [96]

The sovereign is elevated because height separates.

As summit (summum, supremus), the sovereign is not only elevated: it is the highest. Its name is a superlative: literally what raises itself above from below, and what is no longer comparable or relative. It is no longer in relation, it is absolutum.

The Most High is the one whose height is no longer relative, an even not relative to lesser heights.

The Most High can only produce one thing: vertigo.

The vertigo is that which takes hold at the summit.

Vertex is another name for the summit. It is the point where the vertical is at its peak: it returns there (vertere) on itself, no longer having room to go higher since it is the highest possible elevation.

Vertigo is the affect of the summit. It is the apprehension of the incommensurability between the horizontal and the vertical, between the base and the summit. [97] It is the vertigo of the absolute insofar as it is without any relations […]

In the case of sovereignty […] it is power that founds and forms the bond. The bond is not one of loyalty but authority, in the precise sense that the sovereign is the author of the law, whereas loyalty supposes a law that precedes it.

No doubt, historically, the feudal order was nevertheless the source of the conditions of a duality of powers – temporal and spiritual – which opens the way to an AUTONOMY of the first.

But the feudal order only becomes properly autonomous with the principle (this is indeed the right term: it is the province of the Prince) of sovereignty.

The subject of the sovereign can be understood in two ways: as the one who is subjected to the authority of the sovereign, or as the one who creates and authorises this authority. This amphibology leads in a continuous manner from monarchy to democracy. The sovereign people possess nothing less and nothing more than the absolute monarch: namely, the vey exercise of sovereignty.

This authority is nothing other than the establishment of the State and of the law, or of the law that makes a State.

It supposes that nothing either precedes it or supersedes it, that no authority or instituting force has been exercised before it.

Sovereignty is the end of any political theology: if it borrows the figure of divine law it does so precisely to model this figure on the features of the sovereign.

Whatever its concrete determination may be (republic of a prince, of a council, or a people), sovereignty must be identical to itself in its institution and its exercise. It has no outside to precede, found, or duplicate. [99]

The sovereign is a relation to itself (to itself as to the law), and it is only that (while the creator is essentially only a relation to the other […]) […] [AUTONOMY of the SOVEREIGN]

2 consequences:

• Modern sovereignty is not the secularisation of a divine sovereignty, precisely because divine sovereignty contains, by definition, the supreme reason and power that modern sovereignty is assigned with giving;
• The second consequence consists in referring to the sovereign the constitutive problematic of the relation to self or of auto position in general: the self of a relation to self cannot be given prior to this relation itself, since it is the relation that makes the self (self means relation to self and there is no case in which there is a subject of self). The sovereign does not find a sovereignty that is given: it must constitute it and thus itself as sovereign.

Corollaries:

• From the first, it is necessary to conclude that God, or the divine, in general, can in no way be ‘secularised’, since ‘secularity’ designates the order external to divinity, which can only be understood in a regime of distinction (either mortal/immortal, or century/eternity, or world/kingdom of God) […]

[…]

• From the second implication, one will conclude that sovereignty can only be defined as an institution, one will conclude that sovereignty can only be defined as an institution (in the active and transitive sense of the term, and here precisely as an institution of self) – an infinite institution that nevertheless includes within it the imperious necessity of the finite moment of its institution […] there is thus an intimate contradiction of sovereignty and, through it, of modern politics, (that is, atheological), which is perhaps also […] politics pure and simple. [100]

The sovereignty of the people designates very clearly, in Rousseau’s work, the most radical state of the sovereign contradiction: in distinction from the monarch who could hide behind a divine reference, however formal it may be, as sovereign the people must be understood as the subject or the body that forms itself: such is the object of the contract that becomes, in Rousseau, in addition to a pact of security, the very institution of the contractors and their body, in other words, humanity itself as it is stated in The Social Contract. The sovereign people are a people who constitute themselves as subjects in all senses of the word: namely, as the self-relation of each in the relations of all to the others and as the subjection of al to this relation. But since the relation to self is infinite, the people is also infinitely lacking to, or in excess of itself. [101]

In this sense, the modern political question could be reduced to the question of sovereignty: Doesn’t it define the political impasse par excellence as the impasse of subjectivity? And, if that is the case, can we either conceive of a non-subjective sovereignty or conceive of a nonsovereign politics? Or rather, must we think the two things together?

Sovereignty itself, as a summit, poses the problem of the nature of the summit. What is its relation to the base and what results from it for its proper constitution? Does the summit rest on the base, does it lean on it, or does it detach from it and accede to another ontological sphere?

• Is the summit the region, tangential to the sky, where elevation takes place, reverses the ascent into a descent and, thus returning upon itself, attaches its height to the soil, giving it thus both its equilibrium and its dimension?
• Or is it the point where the elevation becomes absolute, cutting itself from the soil and from the base and indicating a completely different agency that relates less to what it overhangs than to the fact that nothing hangs over it? [101]

In the first hypothesis, the summit subsumes and assumes the base that, after all, is its base, the foundation and the seat of its own being. But in this sense, the highest is never the Most High, never the absolute height. It is always situated at a relative altitude, and, finally, no doubt it is always, at bottom, primus inter partes. This also implies that this summit is in an essential relation with a bottom, which is also a ground, a seat, a place, and an assurance that is also a resource and a capital of authority, of legitimacy, and of the power of execution.

To what extent is capital – which I understand clearly here in the Marxist sense – linked to sovereignty? To what extent is the nontheological autonomy of the State substantially linked to the accumulation – also nontheological – of wealth, that is to say, of the riches that no longer shine for a sacred glory but for itself and its own production?

In the second hypothesis […] the sovereign does not weigh or calculate mastery according to some scale of values. It stands exclusively and straightaway at the height of absolute value. […] IN truth it cannot even be a question of ascending to the summit. It is a detached summit, without any contact with the outside of the whole structure built upon a base: and since this outside is nothing, and there can be no question of access, or an access that can be immediately experienced as a penetration into nothing, sovereignty turns out strictly to be that nothing itself. (As we know, Bataille was given to write, ‘sovereignty is NOTHING’, where the capital letters are meant to raise an infinite irony in the face of any effort to capitalise the absolute sovereign).

Not being anything [rien] or, even more precisely, being nothing, sovereignty is nonetheless some thing: it is that very particular thing that nothing [rien] is. Not ‘the nothing’, as if it was an entity, and specifically, the entity of a negation of being. That is what is called, ‘nothingness’ [le neant]. Nothingness is nothing[rien]: it is that which being turns into as soon as it is posited for itself and as unilateral. Whether one considers, with Hegel, that being pure and simple is pure abstraction, or one thinks with Heidegger that being, or to be, cannot be something that is an entity, one must resolve to think of being as its own effacement that negates it and, while negating it, allows for the spacing of the concrete […].

The sovereign is the existent who depends on nothing – no finality, no order of production or subjection, whether it concerns the agent or the patient or the cause or the effect. Depending on nothing, it is entirely delivered over to itself, insofar as precisely, the ‘itself’ neither precedes not founds it but is the nothing, the very thing from which ti is suspended.

Nothing as a summit, acme, or height of existence: separated from existence itself.

Sovereignty essentially eludes the sovereign.

If sovereignty did not elude it, the sovereign would in no way [en rien] be sovereign.

The same condition that ensures that sovereignty receives its concept also deprives it of its power: that is, the absence of superior or foundational authority. For the sovereign authority must essentially be occupied with founding itself or with overcoming itself in order to legalise prior to or in excess of any law. In a rigorous sense, the sovereign foundation is infinite, or rather, sovereignty is never founded. It would rather be defined by the absence of foundation or presupposition […]. [103]

[The reversal of the nostalgia for a lost community into the consciousness of an ‘immense failure’ of the history of communities was linked for Bataille to the ‘inner experience’, whose content, truth, or ultimate lesson is articulated thus: ‘Sovereignty is NOTHING’. Which is to say that sovereignty is the sovereign exposure to an excess (to a transcendence) that does not present itself and does not let itself be appropriated (or simulated), that does not even give itself – but rather to which being is abandoned. The excess to which sovereignty is exposed and exposes us is not […].

Thus, the exposure to the NOTHING of sovereignty is the opposite of the movement of a subject who would reach the limit of nothingness […]. ‘In’ the ‘NOTHING’ or in nothing – in sovereignty – being is ‘outside itself’; it is in an exteriority that is impossible to recapture, or perhaps we should say that it is of this exteriority, that it is of an outside that it cannot relate to itself, but with which it entertains an essential and incommensurable relation. [THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY, P.19]]

On that basis, if the sovereign exercises its power, it is entirely on the condition of the ‘state of exception’ where laws are suspended. The fundamental illegitimacy that is in this case the condition of legitimacy must legitimise itself. That can be understood in terms of what Carl Schmitt calls ‘political theology’, given that this theology, nevertheless, is in no way theological, or it only retains from theology an atheological idea of all-powerfulness. One encounters again the debate on secularisation, where we could say that Schmitt conserves the attributes of God without its person, while Blumenberg proposes to think that without the person the attributes also change. [103-4]

What then is the all-powerfulness of the people? This is the question. And perhaps it is absolutely necessary for democracy to be able to envisage this question while maintaining the principle of the nothing of sovereignty. Being nothing, or being founded on nothing, does not mean being powerless: it means to found and measure power by that nothing which is the very thing of the reality of the people: its nature as nonfoundational, nontranscendent (at least in the usual sense), nonsacred, non-natural, etc. Res publica, summa res – nihil.

If sovereignty is not a substance that is given, it is because it is the reality that the people must give themselves, insofar as it is not, itself, a substance or a given subject.

A people are always their own invention.

Constituting sovereignty, alienating sovereignty, revolutionary sovereignty. It is always a matter of the combinatory, of the intersection or the disjunction of these agencies: and, consequently, of what remains between them as the empty space of sovereignty ‘itself’. [104]

Capital no longer has need of the State (or in a limited way), and the State no longer knows on what to found itself or what it founds.

In a parallel way, capital no longer needs borders – at least many of them, and that which replaces the borders is of the order of a delimitation of ‘zones’, which are of a different order. [105]

There is no world summit: or would it be necessary, rather, to conceive of the world itself, not according to a renewed sovereignty but in place of any sovereignty? [105]

Posed in Marxian terms, the question is of knowing if, how, and when the process of capital makes necessary and possible, not the restoration of state-based sovereignty, but the reclamation of sovereignty at its roots, which is precisely not a root but the summit, the inverted radicality of the uncompromising, inconsistent, and absolutely resistant summit: the summit as ex nihilo, whence a world can emerge – or its contrary. [105]

ON SUBJECTLESS POLITICS

Or perhaps it is a question – on other terms or by slightly shifting the problem – of separating politics from sovereignty.

That is to say that it would be a question then of assuming that ‘politics’ no longer designates the assumption of a subject or in a subject (whether individual or collective, whether conceived as a natural organic unity, or as a spiritual entity, as an Idea, or as a Destiny), but designates the order of the subjectless regulation of the relation between subjects: a individual as collective or communitarian subjects, groups of different kinds, families of different sorts, interest groups, whether labour or leisure, local or moral affinities, etc. […]

The political order would define its regulation by an equality and by a justice that would not postulate an assumption of a subject. In that sense politics would be subjectless: not that it does not require agents, but it would not claim to form by itself a place of identity or a return to the self. It would, on the contrary, define a space without return to the identical. [106]

One needs to consider the following

• The invention of sovereignty has decidedly not been the secularised transcription of a political theology but the creation of an atheological assumption […]: this assumption postulated both, without knowing it, the institution of the State (self-stability) and the dissolution of that State (or apparatus) in a community – a contradictory postulation whose dissolution we are dealing with; [THE INSITUTION AND DISSOLUTION OF ONE AUTONOMY AND THE CONSEQUENT OPENING OF ANOTHER].
• The current situation is that of having to reinvent politics otherwise, by reconsidering it on the basis of its double withdrawal, in the management of ‘civil society’ (itself issued from a dehiscence of the civitas) and/or in the assumption of a common being (destinal and ontological sense of ‘politics’).

It follows that the twofold withdrawal traces the contours of what remains to be: an agency that regulates the organisation of the common without the assumption of a common substance or subjectivity.

The difficulty is of conceiving of politics without a subject: not without authority or decision-making power – but without a self that reaps, in the end, the benefits of its action.

At this point the perspective is reversed: the ‘person of the nothing’ (who cannot then be either a pure nothingness or ‘no one’) or the ‘nonsubjective agency’ (which nevertheless cannot be an object). This is what outlines exactly, around a hollow, the contours of sovereignty.

To separate politics from sovereignty poses a problem, a problem whose schema is that of an antisovereingty, of a negative sovereignty, of a sovereignty without sovereignty: in sum, the schema of sovereignty itself, or the schema of the ‘very high’ without altitude nor vantage point.

COSMOS BASILEUS

The unity of the world is not one: it is made of diversity, including disparity and opposition. It is made of it, which is to say that it is not added to it and does not reduce to it. The unity of the world is nothing other than its diversity, and its diversity is, in turn, a diversity of worlds. A world is a multiplicity of worlds, and its unity is the sharing out [partage] and the mutual exposure in this world of all its worlds.

The sharing out of the world is the law of the world. The world does not have any other law, it is not submitted to any authority, it does not have any sovereign [AUTONOMOUS ACCORDING TO THE SECOND OPENING. THE SHARING OF THE WORLD IS THE LAW OF THE WORLD]. Cosmos/Nomos. Its supreme law is as the multiple and mobile line of the sharing out that it is. Nomos is the distribution, the repartition, and the attribution of the parts. Territorial place, nourishment, a delimitation of rights and duties: to each and each time as appropriate.

But appropriate in what sense? The determination of appropriateness – the law of the law, absolute justice – is nowhere but in the sharing itself and in the exceptional singularity of each, of each case, according to this sharing. [109]

The world is its own creation (this is what ‘creation’ means).

Its sharing is at every moment put into play […]

Justice must be restituted, returned, given in return to each singular existent: that which must be accorded to it in return of the gift that it itself is.

[Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) contains a classic passage: ‘Seeing therefore the introduction of propriety is an effect of commonwealth, which can do nothing but by the person that represents it, it is the act only of the sovereign; and consisteth in the laws, which none can make that have not the sovereign power. And this they well knew of old, who called that nomos, that is to say, distribution, which we call law; and defined justice, by distributing to every man his own.’ [part II ‘Of Comonwealth’ ch.xxiv]][Hobbes on Justice/Nomos, quoted in Schmitt].

What is appropriate is thus defined by the measure proper to each existent and to the infinite, indefinitely open, circulating and transforming community (or communication, contagion, contact) of all existences between them. [110]

This is not a twofold appropriateness. It is the same, for community is not added to the existent. The existent does not have its own consistency and subsistence by itself: but is has it as the sharing of community. Community […] is cosubstantial with the existent: to each and to all, to each as to all, to each insofar as all. [110]

This is, to translate in a certain language, the ‘mystical body of the world’, or in another language, the reciprocal action of the parts of the world.

But in all the cases, it is coexistence by which existence itself and a world itself are defined.

Coexistence does not happen to existence from without, it does not add itself to it and one cannot simply subtract from it: it is existence.

[…] existence is nothing other than being exposed: expulsed from its simple self-identity and from its pure position, exposed to the event, to creation, thus to the outside, to exteriority, to multiplicity, to alterity, and to alteration. [THE DISPLACEMENT OF THE FIRST AUTONOMY, THE OPENING OF THE SECOND, WHICH IS EXPOSURE TO THE OTHER, THE AUTONOMY OF THE WORLD]

Justice is thus the return to each existent its due according to its unique creation, singular in its coexistence with all other creations.

What distinguishes is what connects ‘with’ and ‘together’.

There is then no ground: there is only the ‘with’, proximity and its spacing, the strange familiarity of all the worlds in the world.