On extension. Jean-Luc Nancy in the Wake of Hannah Arendt 9788855291071, 9788855290470

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Massimo Villani On Extension. Jean-Luc Nancy in the Wake of Hannah Arendt

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Zeugma | Lineamenti di Filosofia italiana 29 - Proposte

Massimo Villani

On Extension Jean-Luc Nancy in the Wake of Hannah Arendt

Pubblicazioni del Centro di ricerca di Metafisica e Filosofia delle Arti dell’Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele di Milano DIAPOREIN

Pubblicato con il contributo del Dipartimento di Scienze Umane, Filosofiche e della Formazione dell’Università degli Studi di Salerno

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Narrow Passages

Jean-Luc Nancy’s most recent book insists strikingly on the theme of drive or, better, pulsion, and he does so right from the title, which, through the Latin word cruor, refers to spilled blood, that which has been pushed out of the body1. In fact, the themes of momentum, desire, drive have always been the veining of his philosophical exercise. To ek-sist means to thrust out: Nancy’s entire legacy is an inexhaustible attempt to focus on the meaning and modes of this thrust that is existence. However, in his more recent work since the late 1990s, the Strasbourg philosopher has increasingly emphasized the theme of conatus. One detail in Cruor seems very significant: while Hegel – to whom Nancy has devoted very intense pages scattered throughout several volumes and, in particular, two important monographs2 – is mentioned only occasionally, Freud’s presence is instead pervasive. This is not a casual circumstance, but a real programmatic shift. Indeed, Nancy, like many authors of his generation, distances himself from any dialectical

1.  J.-L. Nancy, Cruor, Hachette, Paris 2022. 2.  See J.-L. Nancy, La remarque spéculative (un bon mot de Hegel), Galilée, Paris 1973; and Id., Hegel. L’inquiétude du negatif, Hachette, Paris 1997.

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device that intends to derive meaning from the annihilation of meaning: the work of the negative is, for Nancy, désœuvré, inoperative. However, far from theorizing a form of abandonment, passivity, and exauthorization of praxis, Nancy conceives existence itself as the actuality of a doing; certainly not a production according to already given patterns and models: to exist means to expose oneself, in the sense that this term has in common parlance, that is, to venture, to take a risk, to put oneself at stake, to experiment. So inoperosity is not impassive Gelassenheit, but continuous relaunching of existence. It designates a praxis that, rather than unloading onto an object, transforms the agent, determining a new configuration of meaning (or world). In each case it is effectivity, producing practical and worldly effects: c’est alors d’une praxis qu’il s’agit, et la production, l’œuvre ne valent que pour autant qu’elles manifestent cette praxis, c’est-à-dire ce faire non transitif qui en faisant se fait plutôt qu’il fait quelque chose.3

The continued reference to Freud, then, serves to account for this dynamis that runs through being and that never takes refuge in a synthesis, or a work. The dynamis by which being is given is, for Nancy, always uneconomical, dissipative, self-­deconstructive. Being comes, but also goes, and in this coming and going it exposes itself, puts itself at risk and even resets itself to zero in order to begin again. In order to focus on this movement in which being is intensified, Nancy, in the most recent phase of his reflection, replaces the work of the negative with that of a pulsation that incessantly repeats itself; but in repeating itself it is not preserved, for it is erased and relaunched: the Aufhebung is succeeded by the fort/da.

3.  J.-L. Nancy, Que faire?, Galilée, Paris 2016, p. 77.

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This emphasis on push, drive, pulsation gives Nancy’s reflection an eminently spatial tone. History itself, Nancy asserts, “does not belong to time, requires a quite different thinking of time – a thinking of its spacing”.4 It is necessary to think time through différance: with it, Nancy writes, “il s’écarte en lui-même de luimême. On peut dire qu’il devient espace-temps”5. So time, in this perspective, loses all linearity (and causality), and becomes pure spacing, “amplitude […]. C’est un corps, c’est-à-dire une expansion – comme on dit aujourd’hui que l’univers est en expansion”6. The centrality of the body in Nancy’s reflection by no means indicates a focus on something that by virtue of its concreteness allows itself to be touched and fills a space: it is, rather, “l’obsession”7 toward that which does not allow itself to be grasped. The body is, in fact, the outline of a pulsation that continually tends to space itself, or, as Nancy says to become areal: le réel en tant qu’aréal reunit l’infini du maximum d’existence (‘quo magis cogitari non potest’) à l’absolu fini de l’horizon areal. Cette ‘réunion’ n’est pas une médiation: et ce que veut dire corps, ce que veut dire ou ce que donne à penser corps, c’est précisément ça, qu’il n’y a pas ici de médiation. Le fini et l’infini ne passent pas l’un en l’autre, ils ne se dialectisent pas, ils ne subliment pas le lieu en point, ils ne concentrent pas l’arealité en substrat. C’est ce que veut dire corps, mais d’un vouloir-dire qu’il faut dès lors retirer lui-même à la dialectique signifiante: corps ne peut vouloir dire un sens réel du corps hors de son horizon real. ‘Corps’ doit donc avoir sens à même l’étendue.8

4.  J.-L. Nancy, Finite History, in Id., The Birth to Presence, Stanford University Press, Stanford (California) 1993, pp. 143-166: p. 160. 5.  J.-L. Nancy, Cruor, cit., p. 33. 6.  Ibidem. 7.  J.-L. Nancy, Corpus, Métailié, Paris 1992, p. 7. 8.  Ivi, p. 39-40.

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Extension, not as a given geometric space in which bodies assume a position; but extension in the dynamic, incoactive sense of the term: bodies as conatus that open space, extension as spacing. Triggering Nancy’s thought is this movement of continuous surpassing in which being posits itself, ex-poses itself: posits itself outside itself. Exposition – a concept for which he forges the neologism expeausition, or skin-show9 –, creation10, struction11: these are the operators through which Nancy seeks to think being as Trieb. The nexus that allows the French philosopher’s thought to be articulated with that of Hannah Arendt is not, however, only in the centrality of space. Certainly, for the German philosopher, too, politics has to do with phenomenality, appearance (which she, as will be seen in the following pages, does not distinguish from being), with the tangibility of bodies, their “stubborness”12 that resists ideological narratives of power13. For Arendt, politics – which in its purity coincides with men acting in common – needs a “space of appearances where freedom can unfold its charms and become a visible, tangible reality”14. The point of intersection between the theoretical paths of the two authors lies, however, in another theme, which is precisely 9.  Ivi, pp. 31-34. 10.  J.-L. Nancy, La création du monde ou la mondialisation, Galilée, Paris 2002. 11.  J.-L. Nancy, De la struction, in A. Barrau, J.-L. Nancy, Dans quels mondes vivons-nous?, Galilée, Paris 2011, pp. 79-104. 12.  H. Arendt, Truth and Politics (1967), in Ead., Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Penguin Books, London 2006, pp. 227264: p. 259. 13.  See H. Arendt, Ideology and Terror, in Ead., The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego-New York-London 1979, pp. 460-482. 14.  H. Arendt, On Revolution (1963), Penguin Books, London 2006, p. 33.

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the most difficult problem they bequeath to us. Both, in fact, think of being in terms of a drive to appear, a movement that tends to be infinite and, for that very reason dangerous15, and yet one that must be indulged and even urged. Thought must, so to speak, stay close to this original dimension in which extension spaces itself: it is in this proximity that existence experiences a thrill, a fervor. It is what Arendt calls “public happiness”16 and Nancy calls “ferveur”17 or “ivresse”18 or “extase”19. However, this push toward externality, by no means leads to a form of fullness. This happens even in Arendt’s reflection: although this reflection is strongly influenced by phenomenology and therefore the philosopher tries to think of an Erlebnis in which men finally meet face to face, outside of any mediation, nevertheless it is fundamental that this encounter remains non-fusion: “the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time”20. Human beings must be worldly, earthly, adhering to their condition rather than escaping from it. At the same time, however, in order to avoid merging into a higher Humanity that erases their plurality and differences, they must not “nail themselves”21 to this fatality. In short, for Arendt, the

15.  Arendt deals extensively with the issue of the impossibility for human action to provide itself with a stable framework that can contain its outcomes: see H. Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London 1958, pp. 188-199. As for Nancy, the theme of adoration is always addressed in the reverse of its negative: addiction. See J.-L. Nancy, L’Adoration (Déconstruction du christianisme, 2), Galilée, Paris 2010. 16.  See H. Arendt, On Revolution, cit., pp. 115-140. 17.  See J.-L. Nancy, Que faire?, cit., pp. 55-56. 18.  See J.-L. Nancy, Ivresse, Rivages, Paris 2013. 19.  See J.-L. Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée, Bourgois, Paris 1990 (19861). 20.  H. Arendt, The Human Condition, cit., p. 52. 21.  See E. Lévinas, De l’évasion (1935), Le Livre de poche, Paris 1998, and the concept of “être rivé” which is central to this text.

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task of thought is to familiarize oneself with the world, but, at the same time and above all, to open a narrow passage between the necessities – biological and culutural – that this world imposes and a space of self-determination that, however, cannot be located outside or above this world itself.22 Thought, then, must open the narrow space – a Zwischen-sein – between harmful and deceitful manipulation of facts, and the generative shaping of truth: the very narrow path between the risk of considering them the result of some kind of necessary development men could not prevent, and hence can’t do anything against it, and the risk of denying them, of trying and manipulating them away from the world.23

The stakes of Nancy’s philosophical exercise are very similar. For him, too, it is a matter of identifying with extreme accuracy24 and within a much broader ontological drive, the narrow space between an intensification of existence comparable to fascist and fusional ardor, and an exposition that remains at a suspended step. It is a matter of taking the narrow path between mystical ecstasy, and an inoperative ecstasy, that is, a projection towards the outside that does not access any surreality, but merely spaces – continually putting back into play – immanence in which we are. This is why, as will be seen, the authors with whom Nancy engages in his hardest hand-­to-hand combat are those from whom he must distinguish himself without being able to abandon them: the critical

22.  See Arendt’s considerations about love, understood as an unworldly and antipolitical feeling, in a word catastrophic: H. Arendt, The Human Condition, cit., pp. 236-242. 23.  H. Arendt, Truth and Politics, cit., p. 259. 24.  On the topic of exactitude in Nancy, see J. Lèbre, Point de fuite. Art et politique chez Jean-Luc Nancy, in “B@belonline/print”, n. 10-11, 2011, pp. 139-149.

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dialogue with Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot has spanned the whole arc of his reflection. Unlike what they did, Nancy must open up existence, but without assigning it a dimension of its own. To exist means not to belong to a place, but only to dislocate the places themselves. Of course, the task that Nancy leaves us with – to distinguish one outside from the other, to identify a way of excess that is not ecstatic – is very difficult: indeed, the separation he posits between the “ferveur” of an intensified existence and a “ferveur fourvoyée”25 often turns out to be very smoky. The challenge of this research is, however, precisely to open, through the legacy of these two authors, a gateway toward understanding our time. Which is characterized, first and foremost, by the closure of any separate space: globalization is not only the triumph on a global scale of capitalism, but also the erasure of any possible separation of an autonomous political space. Everything is here, in a saturated immanence: it is within it that we must learn to orient ourselves, rather than trying to erect detached and soaring values again. We need to find in existence itself, in its escape routes, immanent criteria of conduct, ethics, theoretics and politics. Hence, the attempt that this research makes is the admittedly very problematic one of subtracting Nancy from the Heideggerian cone of shadow. While the Meßkirch philosopher disconsolately concluded that now only a god can save us,26 for Nancy it is, on the contrary, a matter of recognizing in the ek- of existence, not only a situation of destitution and helplessness: this projecting outward is instead a renewed and revived creation of the world.

25.  J.-L. Nancy, Que faire?, cit., p. 55. Emphasis added. 26.  See M. Heidegger, Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten, in “Der Spiegel”, n. 23, 1976, pp. 193-219.

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I

The Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique

The first directly political explication in the work that Nancy carries out at the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique, launched in 1981 at the École Normale Supérieure and directed by Nancy himself, together with Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe. The Centre concluded its activities in 1984; the two short volumes Rejouer le politique1 and Le retrait du politique2 preserve the fruits of this short experience.  The title that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe choose for the book that would launch and steer the Centre’s course is clearly programmatic. The formula “rejouer le politique” expresses first and foremost the awareness of a fulfillment or a closure of the political. More precisely, as will be seen, it is about the end 1.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy (dir.), Rejouer le politique. Cahiers du Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique, Galilée, Paris 1981. With contributions from Luc Ferry, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-François Lyotard, Étienne Balibar, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.  2.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy (dir.), Le retrait du politique. Cahiers du Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique, Galilée, Paris 1983. With contributions from Jacob Rogozinski, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière, Denis Kambouchner, Philippe Soulez, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy.

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of politics as a separate instance, and thus about it confusing government devices with techno-economic processes. Bringing politics into play means shaking this immanence in order for the politics to gain transcendence in comparison with the social. However, the theme of playing says that this relaunching of the political isn’t subjected to any scientific or foundational perspective. Conceived in its separateness, politics is untied from the social as much as from the calculating and predictive exercise of a ‘political science’. It’s instead gamble, risk, experimentation, unpredictability. This ludic concept of politics takes away from it any rational or project-oriented connotation, and leaves it with a knack for dynamizing a context and opening a space in it for the emergence of something new. Playing here is meant in the mechanical sense of small space between surfaces overlapping each other, a space that allows them to move and function: bringing into play means (dis) placing, opening a space of potential realization3. 

3.  This ludic conception of politics is not devoid of references to H. Arendt’s reflections in The Human Condition (1958). Arendt develops a concept of action as something whose characteristics are consubstantial to those pertaining to playing: the beginning, the plurality of actors, the separation of the ludic “reality” from the ordinary one. About this, see A. Dal Lago, La città perduta, in H. Arendt, Vita activa. La condizione umana, Bompiani, Milano 1988, pp. XVI-XIX. The theme of playing is, however, mainly inspired by Bataille’s work, see L’ambiguïté du plaisir et du jeu, in “Les Temps Modernes”, n. 629, 2005, pp. 7-28. For a broader perspective on the theme of playing, it’s essential to refer to J. Huizinga, Proeve eener bepaling van het spel-­element der cultuur (1938), Erven J. Huizinga-­Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2008. On the theme of plating as an effraction of immanence see F. Giacchetta, Gioco e trascendenza, Cittadella Editrice, Assisi 2005.

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1. The Philosophical Interrogation of the Political In the preface to the volume, written by Nancy and Lacoue-­ Labarthe, the two authors claim to want to revise the traditionally assigned relationship between philosophy and politics, and to focus on a new object to interrogate (temporarily defined “essence du politique”. There must be a twofold movement to activate. On one side, “l’interrogation philosophique du politique”, on the other “l’interrogation du philosophique lui-même quant au politique, ou plus exactement sur le politique”4. Apparently the object of such an approach can no longer be politics in its empiric positivity: “c’est à cause de cette double visée que nous parlons d’interroger l’essence du politique”5. Here’s Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s project:  rapporter en effet le type de travail que nous envisageons ici au questionnement ou à l’interrogation philosophique (faire ce geste d’exclusion à l’égard d’autres approches, toujours assurément possibles et peut-être dans certains cas souhaitables, du politique), cela ne signifie pas pour nous un repli sur la position philosophique […]. Cela ne signifie donc ni la revendication un peu hautaine d’on ne sait quel privilège philosophique (ou de la philosophie) ni, encore moins, la reconduction pure et simple de la classique appropriation du politique par la philosophie. Mais cela signifie avant tout que nous n’avons aucune prétention à la théorie politique, c’està-dire à tout ce qui pourrait se réclamer d’une ‘science politique’ ou d’une ‘politologie’.6

For Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, the political is different from the practices of government. Because of this “l’abord direct (c’est-a-dire aussi bien, même si la qualification est un 4.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, in Iid. (dir.), Rejouer le politique, cit., pp. 11-28: p. 12. 5.  Ibidem. 6.  Ivi, p. 13. 

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peu rapide, l’abord empirique) du politique ne nous intéresse pas – et c’est pour cette raison très simple que nous ne croyons plus, au fond, qu’un tel abord soit encore possible”7. That’s why caution is necessary towards any “discours positif, c’est-à-dire à l’égard de tout discours formé d’une prétention à saisir le fait social et politique sur le mode d’une simple positivité”8. As much as the philosophical approach doesn’t constitute the claim for an alleged privilege of philosophy, it nonetheless proves some kind of complicity or co-implication between philosophy and politics: only the philosophical thought – as described in the previous paragraphs – can dissolve the positivity of the political, can deny it the status of empirical object, and can guarantee an orientation that goes beyond any form of political science or politology. From this perspective, ce qui nous paraît aujourd’hui nécessaire, et donc urgent, c’est de prendre en compte de façon rigoureuse ce que nous appellerons la co-appartenance essentielle (et non accidentelle ou simplement historique) du philosophique et du politique. C’est, autrement dit, de prendre en compte le politique comme une détermination philosophique – et inversement.9

7.  Ibidem.  8.  Ivi, p. 14. The empirical investigation of the political is excluded since it ignores the fact that “discourses claiming not be independent of the philosophical, whether by treating the political itself as an autonomous positive domain or by subordinating it to some other autonomous positive domain (e.g., the economic or the psychoanalytic), are not in fact independent. Rather, they have philosophical presuppositions – and not for reason which are merely accidental”, N. Fraser, French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?, in “New German Critique”, n. 33, 1984, pp. 127-154: p. 138. 9.  Ibidem.

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This is the point of intersection that the authors intend to interrogate. As a starting point for the analysis of this relationship, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe propose a genealogy in which “l’interrogation sur le politique ou sur l’essence du politique doit pour nous faire retour jusqu’au présupposé politique lui-même de la philosophie (ou si l’on préfère: de la métaphysique), c’est-à-dire jusqu’à une détermination politique de l’essence”10. Bringing the political back into play aims to find the immediately political determination of the notion of essence itself, the determination in virtue of which this notion defines, since its Greek origin, “l’effectuation et l’installation du philosophique comme le politique, la généralisation (la mondialisation) du philosophique comme le politique et par là même le règne absolu ou la ‘domination totale’ du politique”11. The notion of essence per se defines a political rationale. The assignment of the world to an essence (eìdos, ousìa, substantia, foundation, subject) determines an exact configuration of the Western world. Or rather: it determines the Western world as this exact configuration. A place that finds support and bond in the essence, a landmark and a horizon. It’s exactly these 10.  Ivi, p. 15. 11.  Ibidem. It should be noted that the essential co-belonging of the philosophical and the political mentioned by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe is not a congruence/sameness: “the political is not the philosophical, nor a moment within it. The one is not another name for or another manifestation of the other, even if the political will remain unthinkable except in terms of philosophy as onto-theology, except, that is, in terms of the contemporary après coup of the inaugural (but nonetheless abyssal) Platonic moment […]. The political marks the place where the distinction between philosophy and non-philosophy, between philosophy and its unthought, becomes blurred. This place, the place of the political, would always have the character of a limit. But this limit, as should by now be apparent, is not simply restrictive: it marks both an inside and an outside”, S. Sparks, Politica ficta, in P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Retreating the Political, Routledge, London-New York, 1997, pp. XIV-XVIII: pp. XVI-XVII.

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words (support, bond, landmark, horizon) that Nancy works on dismantling. What he seeks is a disorientation of the Western world12. Once every chance of signification has been exhausted, once every ability to hook this word onto something that transcends it, the political must be rethought starting from the acknowledgment of a determination of the essence that is immediately, but covertly, political. This determination obviously doesn’t lay the foundations for a specific political position, but “la position même du politique, de la polis grecque à ce qui s’est deployé dans l’âge moderne comme la qualification du politique par le sujet (et du sujet par le politique)”13. Nancy’s thought, then, doesn’t aim towards a new and different foundation of the political and the philosophical. That’s why “ce qui nous reste à penser, autrement dit, ce n’est pas une nouvelle institution (ou instruction) de la politique par

12.  There is in Nancy the “doubly tracing a certain line or limit of contemporary philosophical discourse caught between the poetic evocation of a necessarily inchoate outside of philosophy and the philosophically eloquent pronouncement of the end of philosophy. The tracing of this line between these alternatives (if that is even what they are) is perhaps the practice of a certain exscription in Nancy’s work: a writing that is not so much on the limit between a supposed inside and outside of philosophy, but one that exposes philosophical thought to its unheard-of outside in the very act of speaking the end of philosophical thought as the internal limit to its sense. The contemporary event of sense that is the absencing of sense is the unheard-of that philosophy tries to let speak within it as what speaks the end of philosophy […]. Such a practice of exscription does not simply define a new horizon of philosophy. The line Nancy’s texts trace in and out of philosophy does not open up some new vista or territory for philosophical exploitation, but exposes philosophy to the contemporary absencing of sense, that is, to the threshold of its being”, G. Van Den Abbeele, Lost horizons and uncommon grounds: for a poetics of finitude in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, in D. Sheppard, S. Sparks, C. Thomas (eds.), On Jean-Luc Nancy. The Sense of Philosophy, Routledge, London-New York 1997, pp. 15-21: pp. 16-17.  13.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, cit., p. 15. 

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la pensée, mais c’est l’institution politique de la pensée dite occidentale”14. Inevitably, that’s where the second duty of the Centre comes from: the interrogation of the philosophical as much as the political, or as the political, is complementary and simultaneous to the philosophical interrogation of the political. It’s necessary to be aware of two premises. First and foremost, it’s necessary “que soit reconnu un certain accomplissement du politique ou, pour user d’un autre lexique, qu’on prenne acte (mais ni par résignation ni par dépit) de la clôture du politique”15. It’s about something, the authors explain, that isn’t far from what Heidegger thought as a matter of technique: just like metaphysics – for a written destiny – fulfilled itself in modern technique, so the philosophical fulfilled (accomplished, realized) itself within the political16. Secondarily, and subsequently, it’s necessary to make a lexical and conceptual distinction. It’s necessary that “Nous distinguions le philosophique, ici, du discours métaphysique en général, consacré à fonder l’essence de la politique (ou l’essence politique) et à instituer ou programmer une existence qui en soit le corrélat”17. It’s essential to distinguish the “philosophical” from any kind of founding discourse: that from a theory comes a praxis, that there is a ‘first’ philosophy that is the origin of the praxis and the politics, that’s the premise that needs to be taken apart. There’s no original knowledge, neither for

14.  Ibidem. 15.  Ibidem. 16.  Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe are specifically referring to paragraphs XIX-XXVIII of M. Heidegger, Überwindung der Metaphysik (1946), in Id., Gesamtausgabe VII. Vorträge und Aufsätze, Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 2000, pp. 67-98. 17.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, cit., p. 17.

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order nor for rank, that is capable of shaping an existence as its derivative: “la philosophie se trouve impliquée d’emblée comme une pratique destituante de sa propre autorité: non simplement de son éventuel pouvoir social ou politique, mais de l’autorité du theorique ou du philosophique comme tel”18. There is a complete lack of an arché, origin and foundation of a rational discourse that would establish a praxis. This is the context where the first definition of the retreat of the political makes its appearance: “c’est cette double exigence – reconnaissance de la clôture du politique et pratique destituante de la philosophie a l’égard d’elle-même et de sa propre autorité qui nous entraine à penser en termes de retrait du politique”19. The re-treat has a double meaning: a) the political retreating or leaving the scene as a positive object, unfolding itself everywhere, to the point of legitimizing the postulate “everything is political”; b) repetition, re-opening of a matter, retracing of the political that would pose the question again20. From this perspective, the re-treat is a necessary movement in order to “remonter à la constitution la plus archaïque du politique et d’explorer l’essence de l’essence politiquement assignée, c’est-à-dire de mettre en cause Le concept et la valeur de l’archaïque en général: origine et primitivité, autorité, principe, etc.”21. 18.  Ibidem.  19.  Ivi, p. 18.  20.  “That recognition of the closure of the political and of the self-deinstitution of philosophy requires us to think the re-trait du politique in two senses: first, as a withdrawal on our part from the blinding self-evidence of the political which marks our confinement in its closure; and second, as a re-tracing of the political from the standpoint of its essence”, N. Fraser, French Derrideans, cit., p. 139. 21.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, cit., p. 18. 

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It’s obvious, then, that the gesture of the retreat is itself political. It’s not about the political leaving the scene, perhaps towards a (religious, ethical, aesthetic) form that would simply substitute the primacy of the political, confirming it from the outside. Starting from an understanding of the political “as the will – and that is also to say the imperative – to realise an essence-in-common (a community, even) on the basis of a figure of that in-common”22, the stakes of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s research are exactly thinking politics beyond the cogency of figuration: it is precisely this imperative force of the figure – an imperative which is never received as such (no injunction will ever be pronounced: for example, of the type ‘always use figures’), and which is more of the order of a historical de jure and de facto necessity – for the political which, from the very beginning, delimits its a priori relationship to the philosophical.23

The previously mentioned closure is, in fact, the effect of this “figurative impulse which effaces transcendence and generates the essentially totalitarian impulse of the, specifically Western, political”24.  Exactly because retrait means avoiding a form, but not towards another form, and thus in a sense means avoiding the form, the matter at hand is finding the “spécificité du politique”25, once politics itself, having exhausted any possibility of political realization of philosophy, starts to appear as (or retreat) a would-be, ineffective, failed, empty place. Marx is the term of contrast used by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe to emphasize this avoidance. On his end, Marx “evokes 22.  S. Sparks, Politica ficta, cit., p. XXIV.  23.  Ibidem.  24.  Ivi, p. XXV.  25.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, cit., p. 21. 

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or invokes the Staatswesen of the future communist society”26, that is the fulfillment of a common essence, the dissolution of the separate state the moment it realizes itself in the social: an essence will have to find historical realization without remains. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe reiterate the need for a relaunch of the political thought starting from the awareness “des implications d’une pensée de l’immanence totale, ou de l’immanentisation totale du politique dans le social”27. Therefore, in the attempt of avoiding the traps of a ‘political philosophy’ that would bring back a founding thought and a project of total realization of the political, Nancy and Lacoue-­ Labarthe turn to Bataille and Heidegger, whose discourse “s’ordonnait en réalité à un registre fondamental qu’on pourrait désigner comme ‘outre-politique’”28.  26.  Ibidem. 27.  Ibidem. See N. Fraser, French Derrideans, cit., p. 140: “Marx’s neglect of the political, along with his early project of negating the State as a separate instance in society, which in the East has meant the incursion of the State into all social instances, should be rethought from the standpoint of the Center’s problematic”.  28.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, cit., p. 22. The centrality of Heidegger and Bataille’s figures at this stage of Nancy’s thought can be explained with the pages R. Esposito dedicates to the two authors in Communitas. Origine e destino della comunità, Einaudi, Torino 1998, a book in which the Author works on the ontology of the being in common, parallelly to Nancy, who was going to focus on it right after the experience of the Centre. About pushing Heidegger’s reflection to the furthest edge of the political, Esposito writes: “non esistono [nel pensiero del filosofo tedesco] individui fuori del loro essere-in-un-mondo-comune. È questo il motivo per cui si sono rivelate non solo fallaci, ma intrinsecamente infondate, tutte le ricerche sulla ‘filosofia politica’ di Heidegger: perché quella heideggeriana non è una filosofia politica, ma precisamente la sua decostruzione nel pensiero della comunità. Mentre la filosofia politica parte sempre dagli individui precostituiti – per restarvi o per fonderli in un individuo più grande cui essa può dare anche il nome di ‘comunità’ – il pensiero della comunità parte sempre dal rapporto di condivisione”, p. 100. The deconstruction of the

27

The same question of power can’t be dealt with without a deconstruction of subjectivity, without first getting rid of the archeo-­theological domination of the Subject. What does such domination mean? Here’s Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument: l’évidence politique du Sujet tient à la présupposition absolue du rapport des ‘sujets’. Seulement cette présupposition permet d’ordonner une téléologie politique, et surtout d’ordonner le politique comme telos. C’est par l’ideal ou par l’idée de la polis, plus que par tout autre, que l’époque moderne – le romantisme, bien sûr, et tout l’idéalisme, y compris l’idéalisme socialiste – s’est réamarrée à l’origine et à la finalité grecques de l’Occident, c’est-à-dire a voulu se réassurer comme sujet de son histoire, et comme histoire du sujet.29

The premise of modern political philosophy is the existence of subjects in mutual relationships. Such subjects, then, predate their relationship, which can find its place of realization in the polis. According to Nancy it’s necessary to pose the question of the relationship “non présupposé, et pourtant en tant qu’impossible à déduire ou à dériver d’une première subjectivité”30. Nothing, no substance predates the relationship. subject operated by Bataille, Esposito explains, is even more radical: both for him and for Heidegger “il senso ultimo della vita di ciascuno si trova in riferimento alla propria morte”, but while for the author of Being and Time “tale morte è appunto propria, nel senso che l’uomo le si rapporta come alla più autentica delle sue possibilità, in Bataille, al contrario, essa rappresenta l’annullamento di ogni possibilità nella dimensione espropriante ed espropriata dell’impossibile: la morte è la nostra comune impossibilità di essere ciò che ci sforziamo di restare – individui isolati. Da qui il sovrappiù di eccitazione, e anche di violenza, che scuote il testo di Bataille rispetto alla ‘stabilità’ dell’universo heideggeriano. Se in questo il cum è lo stampo originario che definisce fin dall’inizio la nostra condizione, per Bataille costituisce la zona-limite di cui non si può fare esperienza senza perdersi”, p. 139. 29.  Ivi, p. 24.  30.  Ivi, p. 25. 

28

2. The Question of the Relationship Consistently with this approach, the other resource – also far from a strictly political reflection – Nancy and Lacoue-­ Labarthe mention without delving deeply into it, is Freud’s psychoanalysis: “pour une pensée qui exclut en principe et au principe la position d’une autosuffisance et d’une autocratie, la question du rapport ne peut que surgir. Comme question, c’est-à-dire dans l’impossibilité de présupposer la solution du rapport”31; where clearly “solution du rapport” means at the same time interruption of the relationship and solution to the problem. It’s important to distinguish the concept of rapport from that of rélation, in order to clarify an aspect that should be borne in mind when the chance to analyze Nancy’s reflection on community arises. While relationship refers to already built entities to which it (potentially) occurs, the rapport is exactly the untying of any bond: it ‘consists’ exactly in retreating the terms of a relationship. In other words, the rapport doesn’t have an ontic status – it is not a ‘thing’ – but an ontological one. However, once again, in order to give a shape to such a precarious ontology, to give back materiality and concreteness to an otherwise intangible theme, Nancy, together with his Lacoue-Labarthe, traces on Freud’s footsteps the figure of the mother: si le ‘lien social’ fait question véritable – et fait, du coup, question-limite –pour Freud, c’ est que le rapport donné (nous voulons dire: le rapport tel que, malgré tout, Freud se le donne, tel qu’il le présuppose, lui aussi, comme toute la philosophie), ce rapport d’un sujet avec la subjectivité elle-même dans la figure d’un père, implique, dans l’origine ou en guise d’origine, la naissance (ou le don, précisément) de ce rapport. Et une 31.  Ibidem.

29 pareille naissance implique le retrait de ce qui n’est ni sujet, ni objet, ni figure, et que l’on peut, par provision et par simplification, nommer ‘la mère’.32

The social bond hides an original untying that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe picture through the image of the mother; in the second and final volume that contains the works of the Centre, the two authors would write: “est celui de la deliaison ou de la dissociation et qui renvoie par conséquent à ce que nous avons appelé: la question de la mère”33. Therefore “derrière la politique (s’il faut l’identifier au Père), ‘la mère’”34. This figure had already emerged during Nancy and Lacoue-­ Labarthe’s deconstructional work on Freud’s psychoanalysis well before the foundation of the Centre, and even before the Cérisy conference.  In a recently reissued text, originally published in 1979, the two authors work on a second deconstruction of psychoanalysis with the express purpose of “une problématisation rigoureuse du ‘rapport’ entre psychanalyse et politique”35, stating as follows: “nous refusons les comportements de panique théorique 32.  Ivi, p. 26. 33.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Le “retrait” du politique, in Iid. (dir.), Le retrait du politique, Cahiers du Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique, Galilée, Paris 1983, p. 197.  34.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, cit., p. 26.  35.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, La panique politique [1979], suivi de Le peuple juif ne rêve pas, Gallimard, Paris 2013, p. 9. Two things catch the eye. First of all, the authors write “rapport”, quote-unquote, to emphasize that the research is not about an object, a set of data. Secondarily, a few lines earlier, the authors were describing this problematization as “nécessaire, voire urgent”, to then shift to a specific stance: “s’il s’agit d’affronter, nous savons où nous placer; et puisqu’il semble inévitable, aujourd’hui, de mettre sur les i d’énormes points, disons: à gauche”, p. 10, showing once again the intention to take the deconstruction praxis away from a logic of undecidability/indecisiveness, and use it instead to affect reality.

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(et pratique) où chacun se préserve, par un discours narcissique, contre le sentiment de la dissolution des liens qui assuraient la cohésion de la foule occidentale”36. Analyzing some of Freud’s texts, especially Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse37, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy explore the edge that joins and separates psychoanalysis and politics, that common border that ends up generating aporias in both fields, that is the assumption of a subject, of an absolute beginning, which the social bond would follow. According to the two authors, on one side the Father figure – absolute narcissist, autistically and autarchically withdrawn, perfectly self-sufficient, who only through an oedipal passing of the torch allows the identification of the son and with it the formation of a social bond – and on the other, the Power as a political pendant of the Father figure – prevent the access to the territory that predates the position of these two allegedly original instances: si la limite de la psychanalyse est celle du sujet, la même limite, en tant qu’elle trace le contour du politique, est celle du pouvoir. Le pouvoir n’est pas la dernière question ni la première instance. Avec la question du non-sujet doit surgir celle d’un non-pouvoir, ou d’un impouvoir.38

The intention of the who authors is to expose thought to the “wider scenario [weiteren Bühne]”39, to oppose the “pulsion

36.  Ivi, p. 10.  37.  S. Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921), in Id., Gesammelte Werke 13, S. Fisher-Imago Publishing Co., Frankfurt a.M.-London 1972, pp. 71-161.  38.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, La panique politique, cit., p. 23. 39.  This is how S. Freud defines the territory beyond psychoanalysis in the Nachschrift of 1935 to the Selbstdarstellung (1924), in S. Freud, Gesammelte Werke 14, S. Fisher-Imago Publishing Co., Frankfurt a.M.-London 1948, pp. 31-96: p. 33. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call it instead “no man’s land”, p. 15.

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ou passion archéphilique qui fait l’essence même du désir métaphysique (et) politique”40, opening the reflection to the original unbinding or to origin as ubinding: il faut passer avant le Père, parce que le Père, en tant que Narcisse absolu (ainsi que le qualifie Massenpsychologie), est tout simplement, si l’on peut dire, impossible. Ou plus exactement : si l’on commence avec un pur Narcisse, on n’aura jamais aucune raison d’en sortir. Aucune objectalité ne peut s’instaurer. L’archéphilie implique l’autarcie intégrale de l’archê. Théoriquement, c’est l’infranchissable ipséité. Politiquement, c’est l’une ou l’autre forme du sacrifice total au Souverain.41

Thinking beyond these symmetrical figures of immanence, brings them to the following conclusion: La scène plus large est donc le no man’s land de plusieurs narcisses. Ce qui signifie que ces narcisses ne sont pas absolus, et qu’ils sont en rapport par leur non-rapport. C’est la scène de la panique, en tant qu’elle n’est donc pas la scène d’un unique Pan totalitaire (tautologie mytho-politique), mais celle d’un violent désordre d’identités dont aucune n’est l’Identité, et dont chacune pourtant ne se pose que par l’exclusion des autres, chacune se trouvant par là même aussi bien déposée… Ni au principe, ou au sommet, ni à la base, dans chaque Narcisse, il n’y a de Pan, l’Archê, de Puissance initiale. L’anarchie est au principe, ce qui veut dire précisément qu’il n’y a pas d’archie, ni “anarchique” ni “monarchique”.42

The origin is not, then, the fight with the original Narcissus, as Freud postulated in Totem and Taboo: “rien ne commence par l’affrontement du Narcisse absolu: tout commence, au

40.  Ivi, p. 40.  41.  Ivi, p. 26.  42.  Ivi, p. 32. 

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contraire, dans l’entame infiniment originaire des narcisses, par quoi se scelle leur non-rapport”43. The death and the mother are the two conceptual crowbars with which Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy attempt to disclose the un-original no man’s land. On one side, death “l’expérience de la mort, chez Freud comme chez Heidegger, fait l’expérience d’autrui – de cet autre qui n’est pas ‘même’ et que son altérité enlève tout d’abord à lui-même; elle fait ainsi l’expérience identificatoire de cet autre autrui que ‘je’ suis”44. On the other, the mother is the “substance” that lies upstream of the subjective and identificative instance of the Father: la paternité ne fait que succéder : elle est toujours de succession. Elle succède au cramponnement, c’est-à-dire aussi bien au dé-cramponnement. Le cramponnement est l’attache sans attache, le dés-attachement dans lequel s’origine (et l’origine, donc, reste inassignable et seulement se répète, se détache d’elle-même) celui qui n’est ainsi ni sujet ni non-sujet, ni masse ni individu, mais le Narcisse entamé : ce qui l’entame, c’est la mère qui l’expulse et le retient, qui lui présente et lui dérobe le père.45

The two authors are driven by the ambition of being exposed to this origin as a scission, split, separation46. Whereas the

43.  Ivi, p. 38. 44.  Ivi, p. 39. 45.  Ivi, p. 40. 46.  It should be noted that this dynamic of unbinding doesn’t predate the institution of the political: it’s not an original scene, but something longitudinally cutting our history. “Gli autori analizzano il panico come situazione a un tempo originaria e attuale. Se il panico era all’inizio (cf. la teoria dell’orda freudiana) ed è nell’oggi, ciò significa che l’origine è sempre in atto”, A. Zino, C. Tabacco, Prefazione a P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Il panico politico, ETS, Pisa 2018, p. 8. 

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Western political thought tries to hide this lack of principle by posing an arché:  La panique a lieu dans le retrait de cette naissance. Dissolution du Politique, elle révèle l’absence, et plus que l’absence du Père-Pan. On peut alors reconstituer le Politique, la simulation cathartique et réappropriative de la perte du Narcisse. Ou bien, puisqu’on vient ainsi de définir d’abord la Religion : le Politique est la volonté de l’intégrale appropriation de cette simulation elle-même ; devenir profane de la religion, il présuppose ici même (et non dans le ciel) donné le Sujet : l’homme doué de parole et de sens moral que pose Aristote au début de sa Politique.47 

Obviously the deconstruction of this archephilia, the exposition to the origin as anarchy, does not have anything vitalistic, in that the two French philosophers do not aim towards accessing a vital power predating the oedipal interdicted48.

47.  Ivi, p. 59. It should be kept in mind that, despite the position of the Father as original and absolute Narcissus, Freud did not ignore the issue of the relationship as unbinding. J. Van Ginneken, in his The Killing of the Father. The Background of Freud’s Group Psychology, in “Political Psychology”, n. 3, 1984, pp. 391-414, piecing together the historical background of Freud’s Totem und Tabu (1913) and Massenpsychologie, highlights how these researches reflected the dissolution of the multinational empires that had characterized Europe, first throwing it in a world war, then destined to a sort of “anarchy”, lacking a string leading power, capable of ensuring long-term order. 48.  In this sense, P. Soulez’s interpretations of the mother figure as a form of naive enthusiasm appears as a misunderstanding: see Id., La mère est-elle hors-jeu de l’essence du politique, in P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Le retrait du politique, cit., pp. 183. On their hand, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy focus on an extremely pessimistic Freud. Massenpsychologie also works as a reply to his pupil Paul Federn, author of some sort of philosophy of history according to which the progressive/ongoing civilization would lead to the demise of any principle of authority and asymmetry in human relationship: see P. Federn, Zur Psychologie der Revolution: die vaterlose Gesellschaft, Anzengruber, Wien 1919. Il tema è ampiamente sviluppato da D. Tarizzo

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Their aim is to identify an essential element of the social bond as something that avoids the ontic plane and the empiric consideration, thus preventing from thinking the political in irenical and non-confrontational terms49. This is how they focalize: Un problème du retrait, c’est-à-dire le problème d’une négativité non dialectique, le problème d’un avènement (de l’identité et du rapport) par soustraction (du ‘sujet’); ou encore le problème de ce qui fait le rapport comme rapport, dans la mesure ou le rapport a pour nature (si jamais il y a une nature…) le retrait réciproque de ses termes, dans la mesure

in Quando un popolo muore, in S. Freud, Psicologia delle masse e analisi dell’Io, cit., pp. VII-LI. Here the author writes: “Quando un popolo muore, quando cominciano a tremare le istituzioni religiose, morali, sociali, politiche su cui si basano le masse stabili e organizzate, quando ci approssimiamo al tramonto del patriarcato su cui queste istituzioni hanno poggiato per secoli, non ci troviamo necessariamente all’alba di una società senza padre, completamente democratizzata”, p. XLI. Before this finish line, he continues, looms the very concrete threat of what Freud calls the “reversion” to the “animal” state (p.73) of the mass/mob. Tarizzo drew similar conclusions in Massa e popolo: Freud e Laclau, in M. Baldassarri, D. Melegari (ed.), Populismo e democrazia radicale. In dialogo con Ernesto Laclau, ombre corte, Verona 2012, pp. 53-59.  49.  When Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write of wanting to avoid “l’impasse des proclamations (oscillant de la gauche anarchiste à la droite libertaire) selon lesquelles, une fois dévoilé le piège libidinal du politique, il faut abandonner celui-ci à l’histoire caduque de son délire occidental, et lui substituer une esthétique ou une morale”, P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, La panique politique, cit., p. 9, they seem to be referencing somewhat contentiously M. Foucault who, in La volonté de savoir (Gallimard, Paris 1976) felt that desire, although powerful catalyst for emancipation, is easily governable by the new forms of capitalism, capable of capturing the same energies that were freed in this “emancipation”. For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy it’s not about abandoning oneself to a vitalistic desire nor accepting the drift of a political that is capable of subsuming the most powerful human energies; it’s about working on the unresolved issues of the Western political thought.

35 ou le rapport (peut-on même dire le rapport?) est fait de la division, de l’incision, de la non-totalité qu’il ‘est’.50 

3. The “Retreat” of the Political What’s the political? How is it different from politics? Consistently with what was previously said, and as it can be read in the last quote, the political is one with its own retreating. Exceeding the set of positive phenomena through which politics, administrative praxis, unfolds itself, the political not only does not overlap the latter, but can’t be used as foundation of a theory nor of a praxis. Therefore, the difference between the two dimensions doesn’t give rise to a theory of pure politics. This was the result of Carl Schmitt’s reflection. In the essay of 1932, Der Begriff des Politischen he conceived the political as something transcending the political activity. This is why its space doesn’t overlap the statal one; of course, the German jurist doesn’t believe there could be politics outside of the state: the meaning of an expression such as “total state” is in the fact that “statal” and “political” stop being distinct and independent dimensions. And yet he affirms an irreducible specificity of the political: Eine Begriffsbestimmung des Politischen kann nur durch Aufdeckung und Feststellung der spezifisch politischen Kategorien gewonnen werden. […] Das Politische muß deshalb in eigenen letzten Unterscheidungen liegen, auf die alles im spezifischen Sinne politische Handeln zurückgeführt werden kann. Nehmen wir an, daß auf dem Gebiet des Moralischen die letzten Unterscheidungen Gut und Böse sind; im Ästhetischen Schön und Häßlich; im ökonomischen Nützlich und

50.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, cit., p. 26. 

36 Schädlich oder beispielsweise Rentabel und Nicht-Rentabel. Die Frage ist dann, ob es auch eine besondere, jenen anderen Unterscheidungen zwar nicht gleichartige und analoge, aber von ihnen doch unabhängige, selbständige und als solche ohne weiteres einleuchtende Unterscheidung als einfaches Kriterium des Politischen gibt und worin sie besteht.51

As we see, Schmitt seeks an anchor point to identify the essence of the political phenomenon. And he notoriously finds it in the oppositional pair friend [Freund] and foe [Feind]. More specifically, the political isn’t simply found in the hostility as such, but rather in the incandescence of the opposition: “Das Politische liegt nicht im Kampf selbst” but it is “sondern nur den Intensitätsgrad einer Assoziation oder Dissoziation von Menschen” so that: die reale Freund-Feindgruppierung ist seinsmäßig so stark und ausschlaggebend, daß der nichtpolitische Gegensatz in demselben Augenblick, in dem er diese Gruppierung bewirkt, seine bisherigen “rein” religiösen, “rein” wirtschaftlichen, “rein” kulturellen Kriterien und Motive zurückstellt und den völlig neuen, eigenartigen und, von jenem “rein” religiösen oder “rein” wirtschaftlichen und andern “rein” Ausgangspunkt gesehen, oft sehr inkonsequenten und “irrationalen” Bedingungen und Folgerungen der nunmehr politischen Situation unterworfen wird.52

As a result the conflict, to a certain degree of intensity, configures the totality of the being in common, gives it a shape53. 

51.  C. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, Dincker & Humblot, München 1932, pp. 13-14.  52.  Ivi, pp. 25-26.  53.  See G. Sartori, Elementi di teoria politica, il Mulino, Bologna 1995 (19871), p. 278, where the Author contends that, according to Schmitt, the category of the political is “primaria e riassorbente: essa trasforma l’altro da sé (il religioso, l’economico, ecc.) in sé”. For a detailed analysis of Sch-

37

From Nancy’s perspective instead, the political is one with its retreat: its excedence doesn’t lead to a foundation; the essence of the political is not the conceptual barycenter towards which political praxes converge, it’s rather the blind spot that removes them. Not an anchoring then, but a disorientation. This offers a reading of Nancy’s definition right after the closing of the Centre: Politique serait le tracé de la singularité, de sa communication, de son extase. “Politique” voudrait dire une communauté s’ordonnant au désoeuvrement de sa communication, ou destinée à ce désoeuvrement: une communauté faisant consciemment l’expérience de son partage.54

While in Schmitt’s model, the political bilds a homogeneous community that expels from itself the non-conforming, the “tracé de la singularité”, the idle relationship between singularities, that abundantly exceeds the institutional and constructive field of politics, makes it so that the community can only experience its internal fracture, its ‘own’ alterity within itself55. mitt’s thought, it’s fundamental to refer to C. Galli, Genealogia della politica. Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno, il Mulino, Bologna 1986. About the indeterminateness of the political, he says: “il ‘politico’ indetermina […] è la contingenza che inerisce ad ogni Idea (che la rende propriamente ‘assente’), che fa di ogni ‘valore’ una macchina polemica, che intrinsecamente esige il kat’echon e che al contempo lo travolge nel proprio destino. Indeterminato oggettivamente, il ‘politico’ è determinato epocalmente; la sua scienza è scienza non di un oggetto, ma di quell’Intero non integro che è la modernità, l’epoca della impossibilità della politica e della coazione alla politica”, pp. 474-748. 54.  J.-L. Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée, cit., p. 100. 55.  Those who assimilate Nancy to Schmitt have a wholly different view, stating that, despite his intentions, the latter never branched off from the former. For such a reading, see A. Norris, Jean-Luc Nancy and the political. After Heidegger and Schmitt, in P. Gratton, M. Morin (eds.), Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense, State University of New York Press, Albany 2012, pp. 143-158. This inter-

38

The political/politics distinction made by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, then, “must be understood against the backdrop of their critique of foundationalism. […] When they call for a certain vigilance with respect to the scientific reduction of phenomena to positively given empirical facts, they do this because they are suspicious of what one could call the reduction of the phenomenon of the political and its retreat to politics as a distinct sub-domain of the social”56.  The erasure of the distinction between political as retreating and politics as government technique is nothing but totalitarianism. Something Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe still feel as a looming threat, to the point of stating, paraphrasing Sartre, that it is “l’horizon indepassable de notre temps”57. However, this concept of totalitarianism becomes clear in the minds of the two philosophers through the confrontation with Lefort. In his contribution during the work of the Centre, he attempted to identify the specificity of the democratic system and at the same time the seed of totalitarianism hiding at the heart of democracy itself: “et la tache s’impose de comprendre ce qui fait la singularité de la dèmocratie, et ce qui en

pretation is based on the fact that, since Nancy’s thought lacks directions that are applicable to pragmatic politics, his arguments can only bring back the concepts of subjectivity, sovereignty, citizenship that they wished to move on from. In fact, “Every community will require some instantiation, and that will only come at the cost of making citizens subjects, making the inoperative community operative, and, finally, sovereign”, ivi, p. 153. 56.  O. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2007, p. 67. 57.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Le “retrait” du politique, cit., p. 188. Sartre speaks of Marxism as “comme l’indépassable philosophie de notre temps” in Questions de méthode (1957), in J.-P. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique. Tome I, Gallimard, Paris 1960, p. 9. See ivi, pp. 13-111.

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elle se prête à son renversement, à l’avenement de la société totalitaire”58. According to Lefort, democracy is: la société historique, par excellence, société qui, dans sa forme, accueille et préserve l’indétermination, en contraste remarquable avec le totalitarisme qui, s’edifiant sous le signe de la création de l’homme nouveau, s’agence en réalité contre cette indétermination, prétend détenir la loi de son organisation et de son développement, et, se dessine secrètement dans le monde moderne comme société sans histoire.59

A democratic society does not have fixed points, doesn’t let conflicts and contradictions unfold without them being restricted by power: in fact “le trait révolutionnaire et sans précédent de la démocratie”, especially compared to the Ancien Régime, is that “le lieu du pouvoir devient un lieu vide”60, not appropriable. Then again, Lefort warns, in the wake of Tocqueville’s studies, in a society that lacks the foundation of its own order, “le dérèglement de la logique démocratique reste ouverte”: when the conflict can’t find symbolic and institutional outlets, “se développe le phantasme du peuple-un, la quête d’une identité substantielle, d’un corps social soudé à sa tête”61. Well, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, while accepting Lefort’s phenomenology, express their doubts on the philosopher’s neat distinction between democracy and totalitarianism: “l’on pourrait encore se demander si une certaine opposition toute faite et qui circule beaucoup, entre totalitarisme

58.  C. Lefort, La question de la démocratie, in P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy (dir.), Le retrait du politique, cit., pp. 71-98: p. 78.  59.  Ivi, p. 80.  60.  Ivi, p. 82.  61.  Ivi, p. 85. 

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et démocratie, même si elle est vraie et si les différences sont criantes, n’est pas en réalité trop simple”62. In other words, the two philosophers see in Lefort the inability to historicize phenomena, to grasp the specificity of contemprary democracy: “si la démocratie de Tocqueville contenait en germe le totalitarisme classique, rien ne prouve que la nôtre ne soit pas en train de secréter autre chose, une forme inédite de totalitarisme”63. By saying “nôtre”, they don’t just mean their own 80s era, but also the peculiarities of the Western context: Lefort’s analysis referred mostly to Eastern European regimes and the Soviet Union64, making the opposition democracy-totalitarianism similar to the West-East one; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy wonder instead about a possible dark side of the most developed liberal democracies65. 62.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Le “retrait” du politique, cit., p. 191. 63.  Ibidem. 64.  C. Lefort, La question de la démocratie, cit., pp. 76-78. 65.  “What exactly is Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s understanding of totalitarianism? In a broad sense, it designates the merging of the political with diverse authoritative discourses, among which the authors count socio-economic, technological, cultural, or psychological discourses. Simultaneously, the political converts itself – given the absence or the spectacularization of public space – into ‘technological’ forms of management or organization, a process which leads to the effective silencing of genuinely political questions. Liberal democracies, and herein their understanding differs from other theories of totalitarianism, are not excluded by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe from the regimes which incur this charge (which would be an unconvincing exception anyway, given the authors’ argument as to the all-encompassing epochal nature of the “undivided reign of the political”). The ‘new totalitarianism’ the authors want to mark out can, in a first step, be determined in economic fashion by three basic traits. First, the victory of the animal laborans; second, the ‘recovery of ‘‘public space’’ by the social’, which implies that communal life is no longer regulated by public or political ends, but according to the necessities of subsistence; and third, the loss of authority and of freedom as related to the transcendence of a foundation. The last point also marks out a difference between the ‘new totalitarianism’

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That’s how they come to the distinction between “totalitarisme classique”66, the one stigmatized by Lefort and Arendt and that “procede de l’incorporation et de la présentation de la transcendance”67, and “le totalitarisme inédit”, characterized by “de la dissolution de la transcendance, qui vient des lors imprégner toutes les spheres de la vie sans plus aucune alterité”68. The concept of the political, then, emerges from its reverse mold, as a trace of this “dissolution”. The retreat of the political is, at first, retreating from alterity. On the other hand, the whole of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe intended to shake a somewhat pessimistic and post-apocalyptic view, that was establishing itself in the late 70s and would prevail in the 80s, according to which, once (political and human) emancipation processes were concluded, there were no alternatives to the neoliberal

and ‘classical totalitarianism’: while the latter incorporated any form of transcendence […], the former dissolves any transcendence into all spheres of life, which also dissolves any alterity”, O. Marchart, in Post-Foundational Political Thought, cit., p. 66. 66.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Le “retrait” du politique, cit., p. 192. 67.  Ibidem. To describe this scenario, the two authors openly borrow three essential concepts from Hannah Arendt: 1. The victory of the laborans animal, the human being reduced to working being; 2. The saturation of the public space, experienced merely as an environment in which material and economic needs are met; 3. The loss of authority as a distinctive feature of power. The text the two authors refer to is H. Arendt, What is Authority, in Ead., Between Past and Future. Six Exercises in Political Thought, The Viking Press, New York 1961, pp. 91-142. 68.  Ibidem. A convergence can be noted with Foucault’s discourse on the switch, in the modern era, from the politics of the reason of state to a set of government techniques that make up what he called “gouvernementalité”, that is a grid of practices that directly affect populations in the immanence of their vital processes. See M. Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Cours au Collège de France 1977-1978, Seuil-Gallimard, Paris 2004. See also Id., La “gouvernementalité”, in Id., Dits et écrits (1954-1988), Gallimard, Paris 2001, pp. 635-657.

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model that was shaping itself and would govern lives according to a completely mercantile logic69. Well, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe do not equate the re-treat of the political with its extinction. Because re-treating also means re-tracing, putting back into play, opening of new possibilities. The re-treat doesn’t leave emptiness, it leaves tracks: “la question du retrait n’est pas de ‘récuperer’ une transcendance retirée, mais de se demander comment le retrait impose de déplacer, de réelaborer et de rejouer le concept de ‘transcendance politique’”70. It’s neither about exiting the political register to seek out a supposed new one, nor about restoring it in its original purity – “comme si l’on pouvait, tout bonnement, sortir le politique de son retrait (ou comme si le retrait du politique n’était qu’une simple retraite)”71. It is instead about delving into the re-treat itself, faire l’épreuve de ceci que le politique s’articule sans doute comme un ‘retrait’ essentiel ou selon un ‘retrait’ essentiel, qui

69.  This political rationale, that pretends to be neutral and natural, would impose itself in the 80s with the impulses of Reagan and Thatcher (who uttered the famous expression There is no alternative), but already in the late 70s, when Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe were writing, the political liveliness expressed in the previous twenty years was undergoing a neutralization. A clear example of this counterattack, first theoretically and then practically, M.J. Crozier, S.P. Huntington, J. Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy. Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, New York University Press, New York 1975. On neoliberalism as the dominant political rationale see P. Dardot, C. Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde. Essais sur la société néolibérale, La découverte, Paris 2009. On the current crisis of such rationale see C. Crouch, The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism, Polity Press, Cambridge 2011. On the same theme see also M. De Carolis, Il rovescio della libertà. Tramonto del neoliberalismo e disagio della civiltà, Quodlibet, Macerata 2017. 70.  Ivi, p. 193.  71.  Ivi, p. 195. 

43 est peut-être le retrait de l’unité, de la totalité et de la manifestation effective de la communauté. […] Cette problématique ne peut pas être celle d’un fondement (ou d’un nouveau fondement) du politique.72

It’s quite obvious how Nancy’s theoretical act is both strong and fragile. On one hand, we get a radical shift of the discourse on the ontological plane, through which the debate entirely avoids the logic of acceptance of the end of history. In fact, while following on Heidegger’s footsteps on the logic of closure, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, far from attempting to tie this theme into the Stimmung of nostalgia – of nostos, of going back to something that got away – they direct its sense towards openness to something new. The re- in retreat doesn’t mean return to the original position, but rather repetition itself as an origin. Delving into the retreat means, then, digging towards an opening to the novelty73. Here we can appreciate a typical feature of Nancy’s reflection, that is the overlapping of prescriptive and normative. On one hand, the retreat is something that exists, is within things; on the other it is what needs to be urged in order to shake the political out of its overlap with government praxes.

72.  Ibidem.  73.  See S. Sparks, Politica ficta, cit., p. XIV: “it is precisely in this gesture of repetition, in the unending – and, essentially, endless – repetition of the philosophy’s movement toward its own exhaustion, that the possibility of ‘something else’ emerges”. But, despite what Sparks claims in the following lines, that’s where Nancy’s distance from Heidegger can be appreciated. The latter, in § 6 of Sein und Zeit, emphasizes the “positive” aspect of a destruction of ontology, stating that such destruction is essentially linked to the history of being: a history that should be gone through again, should be repeated. The repetition appears in Heidegger more as folding than opening: “Das Dasein ist je in seinem faktischen Sein, wie und ‘was’ es schon war”, M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927), Max Niemeyer, Tübingen 1967, p. 20. 

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Symmetrically, the reflection is somewhat placed on a completely abstract, ontological level; nevertheless, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe tend to compensate Lefort’s analysis in a historicizing sense. The ambiguous pattern of their thought is a strength, but also the cause of its impasse. In Fraser’s words: There is an incessant sliding back and forth between two heterogeneous levels of analysis, a constant venturing toward the taking of a political position and a drawing back to meta-political philosophical reflection. This oscillation is clearly visible in the treatment of totalitarianism. The thesis about “hard” and “soft” totalitarianism is patently a political position, a venture into la politique. For totalitarianism is without doubt a politically contested notion. And Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe concede as much when they counterpose their conception to that of Lefort, arguing that the latter is not adequate to think the character of contemporary Western societies. Here, they are supposing a specific interpretation of social reality, a view which is not merely deconstructive and philosophical, but empirical, normative and critical.74

But right when they’re about to take an explicitly argumentative stance on a theoretical and political plane, compared to authors such as Habermas, Foucault, and Marx himself, Fraser says that they They reflect on the “essence of the political”, the “delivery of the question of the political”, “finitude”, the “social bond” an “archi-originary sociality”, “the mother” and a “wholly transformed alterity”. The problem is not that such speculation is in itself useless or irrelevant. It is rather that it functions for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe as a means of avoiding the step into politics to which the logic of their own hopes and thought would otherwise drive them.75

74.  N. Fraser, French Derrideans, cit., p. 148. 75.  Ibidem. The mutual neutralization of the two terms of the political/politics distinction, posed by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, is also the focus of

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It feels like the two authors, in their swinging from politics to political – or from politics to metapolitics – were repeating the very act of the retrait through which a reality (as will be seen, the device of retreating has in Nancy’s thought a ‘universal’ ontological role) exists only in its retreat76. Furthermore, it’s also possible to note that, according to this thought, it’s not a “sliding”, as Fraser believes, but a clear imbalance in favor of the “ontological” pole. Which is what can be read in Critchley’s interpretation, according to whom there is in Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe “constant reduction of the factical, the empirical, the contingent, the on tic – that is to say, la politique”77. Such a reduction is the price to pay for a certain “dwelling on the essence of le politique”, because of which the historical concreteness of politics would be lost: Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s reduction of la politique to le politique leads to a synoptic and transcendental vision of the political in which any trace of la politique must be excluded. But it is precisely this gesture that I want to question, because rejection of la politique means rejection of the very genre of political debate, of dispute and dissension, persuasion and the battle over doxa.78 D. Kambouchner’s contribution, De la condition la plus générale de la philosophie politique, in P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy (dir.) Le retrait du politique, cit., pp. 113-158.  76.  About this, Alain Badiou described Nancy’s thought through the contradictory expression “offrande réservée”. See A. Badiou, L’offrande réservée, in F. Guibal, J.-C. Martin (dir.), Sens en tous sens. Autour des travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy, Galilée, Paris 2004, pp. 16-24. Especially p. 20: “c’est là l’offrande réservée de Nancy. D’un côté la pensée, dans le mode inévitable du discours, mous offre un signifiant-maître approprié à l’injonction du temps. Cependant, cette proposition, cette offrande, il faut qu’elle soit là, exposée, sans nous imposer sa présence”. 77.  S. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Lévinas, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1999 (19921), p. 214. 78.  Ivi, p. 215.

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This imbalance in favor of the ontological pole is in clear contradiction with the thought that Nancy is trying to endorse, which consists – as seen in the paragraph above – in letting the ontic, factic concreteness of things and thoughts emerge. In Critchley’s words “should it not be asked whether there remains a trace, or grapheme, of empiricity and facticity in the reduction of la politique to le politique that disrupts or deconstructs the possibility of such a reduction?”79. This contradiction, or as Critchley calls it, this “The Impasse of the Political”80, Nancy wraps himself in will lead him to terminate the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique, and start new paths of research.

79.  Ibidem.  80.  See ivi, pp. 212-217.

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II

The Inadequacy of the polis A Confrontation with Hannah Arendt

Any study on Nancy’s political thought always sets out from the text that brought him to fame, La communauté desœuvrée. The thesis here argued is that the work on the community, far from being the epitome of his politological reflection, actually represents its conclusion, its abandonment. More generally, the intention is to contend that his thought slides into an impasse, since the moment it insists on moving – as mentioned at the end of last chapter – in a balance between amorphism and specificity of the political. The theme of democracy takes a bigger and bigger space in his discourse – up to the text on May ’68, mentioned at the beginning – filling in the spot so far occupied by the being in common: the openness to “democracy” fulfills his purpose of taking a step back from any debate that could be construed as political, in order to move towards an in-depth work on defiguration. On the other hand, getting away from the political is paradoxically the most powerful resource for a hypothetical re-thinking of it. It’s no coincidence that the essay on community was published in 1983, the year of the termination of the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique. A single, eminently philosophical reason explains the end of Centre and the start

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of reflection on the being in common: it was necessary, for the inherently logical thought of Nancy, to clearly distance himself from a theoretical work that intended to find or completely adhere to the praxes of government. Nancy himself, with Lacoue-Labarthe, admits this need when, in November 1984, he writes a missive1 to the members of the Centre to explain the deep reasons for the “suspension” of the activities. The works had reached “critical point, perhaps even a limit point”2, that is the fact that the “breach”3, barely opened by the work done up until that moment, seemed to be closing. According to the two directors of the Centre, there was a growing “consensus”; that’s the term they use to refer to the “end of questioning”4 of the categories they proposed: the philosophical, the political. When these concepts stop working as critical crowbars – according to the two philosophers – a conformism to the trends of the time is inevitably produced. The stakes in this whole thing are nothing less than totalitarianism: “This consensus bears, first of all, on the simple and vehement designation of a unique political danger: ‘totalitarianism’”5. Far from considering the political as foundation, original ground in which to reabsorb praxis, it has, for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, exactly the function of opening a gap between economic-administrative activities and an excess that is immeasurable on this level. Totalitarianism is the closure of this gap, a saturation that the two philosophers can

1.  The document, never published in his original version, is now available in the English translation with the title Chers amis, in P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Retreating the Political, cit., pp. 143-147. 2.  Ivi, p. 144. 3.  Ibidem. 4.  Ivi, p. 145. 5.  Ibidem.

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see happening in the neoliberal project6 taking shape in those years: The end of Marxism, modestly and curiously baptised the ‘end of ideologies’, is insidiously transformed into the end of every consideration and every operation which has in view the identity of the collectivity, its destination, the nature and exercise of its sovereignty. An intellectual attitude (for this does not amount to a thinking) which privileges the ethical or the aesthetic, even the religious (and sometimes the social) over the political, has been allowed, little by little, to gain ground.7

This approach has two consequences: “by definition, it cuts short any questioning of the essence of the political”, and secondly “It scarcely leaves any scope for a political choice”8. What others have read as an impasse – the unbalance in favor of the ontological pole of the question, at the expense of praxis – from the perspective of the Strasbourgeois philosopher is instead an authentic engagement: not “dirtying one’s hands” in facticity, but rather maintaining an opening (not considered in the neoliberal rationale) between the government techniques and the essence of the political. The concept of retrait, as previously seen, already had the function of indicating a relationship of “co-appartenance essentielle” between philosophy and politics, which required to bring the latter back into play, to rethink it starting from an intersection of the two terms. The concept of “political” does

6.  About the prefix “neo-”, the two authors say that “The haste of disappearances and rebirths is, incidentally, the mark of the epoch”, ibidem, exactly to highlight how hastily that era was trying to break even with all its problematic issues. Obviously this attempt at resetting history would raise many “questions which might well risk returning one day, in the classic fashion of something repressed”, ibidem. 7.  Ivi, p. 146. 8.  Ibidem.

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not allude to the institutional forms in which power is exercised, but to the original being-in-common of the singularities. However, Nancy clearly sees the necessity for a firm step back towards ontology, in order to mark the difference from any politological discourse. The philosophical reason for closing the Centre stands in this conceptual shift from the “retreat” to the “community”. This very shift/transition will be analyzed below. In order to be emancipated from “la domination arche-teleo­ logique du Sujet” – that is the assumption of a nodal point from which the relationships between subjects radiate outward and then back inward – it’s necessary to go back to the ontological premise of the polis itself: “la polis présuppose le rapport – le rapport logikos, ou le logos comme rapport que pourtant elle inaugure –, et c’est en quoi, peut-être, elle est le fondement philosophique”9. That’s why the dimension towards which Nancy’s research is oriented stops being truly political. During the years of the Centre, Nancy had already started taking apart the categories of foundation and subjectivity. He started this work under the sign of “la question du rapport”10. This concept prefigures the reading key of his philosophy of community, that is the fact that the relationship doesn’t connect, doesn’t tie, but paradoxically unties from any bond. What Nancy has in mind is a relationship that “pour nature le retrait réciproque de ses termes”11. This means that the cut, the break line that divides the social substance, preventing it from coagulating into a fusional body, is not traced between an individual and the other, but crosses every subject, to the point 9.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, cit., p. 24. 10.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Le “retrait” du politique, cit., p. 197. 11.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, cit., p. 26.

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that it becomes, as will be seen, nothing but this cut. In this regard, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe drafted the figure of the mother: what bears the rift of the scission, what experiences the untying, the déliaison; it is nothing but this very tear. It is clear, then, that the scenario in which this scission happens can’t be the polis: Nancy aimed, since the years of the Centre, towards a kind of experience that isn’t given into the forms of sociality, into the dynamics that are typical of the polis: the mother is the very making of the relationship before its crystallization on the social or public scene. Even more so, the work Nancy will carry out on the community is not politological. The polis appears to fail at containing the excess that the community displays. The disproportion of the common appears to be in contrast with Hannah Arendt’s analyses12. Disregarding their huge differences, there’s no doubt that Arendt’s work played a great part in inspiring the development of Nancy’s thought13. It is well known that Arendt, in her attempt at elaborating an anthropology that would restore the traits of unpredictability and spontaneity of human actions, that theory, but also effective exercise of power, were going to suppress, dismisses the relationship between philosophy and politics as impossible and contradictory: the former, with its abstracting tendency that ties any phenomenon to a metahistorical essence, isn’t capable to open itself to the latter as a dimension of unpredict12.  For an overview on Arendt’s thought, interweaving her intellectual work with her life experience, see S. Swift, Hannah Arendt, Routledge, New York 2009. 13.  This influence was highlighted by H. Faes, in En découvrant l’humaine sociabilité avec M. Heidegger, H. Arendt et J.-L. Nancy, in “Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques”, n. 8, 1999, pp. 707-736, and by B. Moroncini, in Mondo e senso. Heidegger e Celan, Cronopio, Napoli 1998, e La comunità e l’invenzione, Cronopio, Napoli 2001.

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able emergence of novelty14. Hannah Arendt’s first motive was the need for elaborating “una politica, o meglio una cultura post-totalitaria”15. It’s a crucial point in this discourse: the intention is to highlight how totalitarianism weighs down on all the major theoretical-political proposals that arose in the second post-war period. It’s clear to a trained eye that a moralistic answer would have been inadequate to that experience. It was instead necessary to constantly monitor the temptation of fulfillment, built in such a way that its own inner workings would prevent its complete realization16. Generally, it can be stated that the effort to maintain the thought in the opening of power, rather than in the form of action, is a feature of many political theories of the second half of the 20th century17.

14.  For Arendt there’s not just mutual negation between philosophy and politics, but even hostility: “The hostility between philosophy and politics, barely covered up by a philosophy of politics, has been the curse of Western statecraft as well as of the Western tradition of philosophy ever since the men of action and the men of thought parted company – that is, ever since Socrates’ death”, H. Arendt, On Revolution, cit., p. 319. From the perspective of this book, “the great hope of the modern age and the modern age’s revolution has been, from the beginning, that this rift might be healed”, ivi, p. 177. 15.  S. Forti, Hannah Arendt: filosofia e politica, in Ead. (ed.), Hannah Arendt, Mondadori, Milano 1999, pp. I-XXXIII: p. V. 16.  Thought devices, then, similar to Tinguely’s useless machines. About that, see G. Steiner, Grammars of Creation, Yale University Press, New Haven 2002. 17.  The “specter” of totalitarianism appears in the work of S.S. Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated. Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2008, theorizes an “inverted” totalitarianism, a totalitarianism that is one with the original vocation of a democracy that, in the US and in general in the industrialized countries, is thought as a commingling with no remains of politics and economics. On the most recent metamorphosis of liberal democracy starting from the “populist turn” of the new millennium cf. N. Urbinati, Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2019.

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What is hereby highlighted in Hannah Arendt’s thought becomes perspicuous if one considers the close yet critical relationship with Heidegger18. In her last text, in fact, Arendt comments an excerpt from her former teacher, in which the philosopher describes the act of retreating of the Being abandoning the beings: “die Unverborgenheit des Seienden, die ihm gewährte Helle, verdunkelt das Licht des Seins”19. Starting from this excerpt, she emphasizes the non-existence of any original place in which the entities would atone for their inauthenticity: any axiology is eliminated, the ontological difference exhausts itself within the entities, on an exclusively ontic level. Arendt states, in agreement with Heidegger: “the entities are adrift in errancy”; but to this errancy does not correspond to a lost highway, because “this errancy constitutes

18.  Ivi, p. 519. The hypothesis of a continuity of Arendt’s thought in relation to that of her ‘master’ is disproven point by point by J. Taminiaux, Arendt, disciple de Hiedegger?, in “Études Phénoménologiques”, n. 2, 1985, pp. 111-136; I will quote the Italian translation by F. Sossi, Arendt, discepola di Heidegger, in “aut aut”, n. 239-240, 1990, pp. 65-82. According to Taminiaux, in an Arendt essay dated 1946 with the title What is Existential Philosophy?, we find “pagine di un’estrema durezza consacrate a Heidegger, che annunciano già, in contrappunto, e nella forma di una specie di alleanza con Jaspers, i temi fondamentali a cui si alimenteranno la critica del totalitarismo e l’analisi di Vita Activa”, p. 66. The author then states that the main concepts and themes of a more mature Arendt “lungi dall’essere ispirati tali e quali da Heidegger […] si sono imposti in opposizione diretta con ciò che le sembrava essere l’insegnamento di Sein und Zeit. I più evidenti sono: il mondo, la pluralità, la natalità”, p. 67. Reminder that Arendt’s essay What Is Existential Philosophy?, in “Partisan Review”, n. 1, 1946, pp. 34-56; now in Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego 1994, pp. 163-187, contains a paragraph titled The Self as Being and Nothingness: Heidegger, pp. 179-182, highly polemical against the philosopher from Meßkirch. 19.  M. Heidegger, Der Spruch des Anaximander (1946), in Id., Holzwege, in Gesamtausgabe V, Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 1977, pp. 321-373: p. 377.

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[…] the space in which history unfolds”20. The retreating of the being, then, doesn’t originate a source beyond the ontic inauthenticity: “In that scheme, there is no place for a ‘History of Being’ (Seinsgeschichte) enacted behind the backs of acting men”21. Naturally, in Heidegger’s thought “‘essere-nel-mondo’ e ‘essere-con-altri’ sono caratteri costitutivi del Dasein, ma nella relazione filosofica qui implicata ‘mondo’ e ‘altri’ giocano un ruolo periferico rispetto alla centralità del Dasein, che si esprime soprattutto nel proprio della coscienza”22. While seeking a full immersion in the world of life, the philosopher from Meßkirch chooses, however, an intellectualist rather than corporeal way. Because of this, although it seems difficult to ascribe Heidegger’s semantics to the modern tradition of subjectivism, of which it appears to be the complete “destruction”, in Arendt’s perspective, however, “Heidegger, nel suo appello alla coscienza, non esce dal solco di una tradizione che ha sempre visto nel ‘mondo’ il luogo di perdizione del soggetto e del sapere”23. Arendt tries instead to get away from this tradition, to be allowed a thought that is “‘gettato’ e ‘situato’ assai più dell’Esserci heideggeriano”24. 20.  H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Two/Willing, Harcourt Inc., New York 1978, p. 191. 21.  Ivi, p. 192. 22.  A. Dal Lago, Introduzione a H. Arendt, Tra passato e futuro, Garzanti, Milano 1999, pp. 7-20: p. 10. 23.  Ivi, p. 11. 24.  S. Forti, Hannah Arendt: filosofia e politica, cit., p. XII. The relationship between Arendt and Heidegger isn’t mere criticism from the former against the latter. On Heidegger’s 80th birthday, the philosopher writes a text full of admiration for her former teacher, see Martin Heidegger zum 80. Geburtstag, in “Merkur”, n. 10, 1969, pp. 893-902. In this sense R.J. Bernstein highlights that the lectures on Plato and Aristotle that the author of Being and Time held in Marburg in 1924-25, when young Hanna Arendt

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From a more strictly political perspective, this rooting in the concrete historical and worldly action of humans finds its realization in these words: Politik beruht auf der Tatsache der Pluralität der Menschen. Gott hat den Menschen geschaffen, die Menschen sind ein menschlichen, irdisches Produkt, das Produkt der menschlichen Natur. Da die Philosophie und di Theologie sich immer mit dem Menschen beschäftigen, da alle ihre Aussagen richtig wären, auch wenn es entweder nur Einen Menschen, oder nur Zwei Menschen, oder nur identische Menschen gäbe, haben sie keine philosophisch gültige Antwort auf die Frage: Was ist Politik?25

In this excerpt, Arendt’s interest for an ontology of plurality and difference, in which there’s no room for Unity and Identity, is immediately recognizable. Philosophy, being under the spell of everything metahistorical, is incapable of understanding the political fact, which is possible only thanks to a world where differences can blossom, meet and interact freely. The relationship between politics and philosophy can only be one

was his pupil, were one of the reasons for her lasting interest in Aristotle. Bernstein then describes their relationship in terms of provocation by one and concept appropriation by the other, a criticism then, from Arendt, that inserts itself in the path of his teachings: “il pensiero politico di Arendt può essere compreso come una efficace risposta critica a Heidegger, una replica che mette in evidenza soprattutto l’incapacità da parte di Heidegger di comprendere il significato dell’arendtiana ‘condizione umana della pluralità’”, R.J. Bernstein, Provocazione e appropriazione: la risposta a Martin Heidegger, in S. Forti (dir.), Hannah Arendt, cit., pp. 226-248: 234. On the Heidegger/Arendt relationship see also S. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Modernity and Political Thought), Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2003 (19961). About the German philosopher’s biography, it’s also important to see E. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Yale University Press, New Haven-London 1982. 25.  H. Arendt, Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß, Piper, München-Zürich 1993, p. 9.

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of negation, of mutual exclusion. The western theoretical-political tradition should then be completely re-examined and redacted26. Certainly, being men’s free action untied from any essentialistic premise (it’s men acting, not the Man), such action has no determined territorial foundation. However, it has its transcendence in the public space: people meet freely in the polis, in the agorà, emphasizing the there in Heidegger’s being-­there, the locationing of the Dasein. Such dimension “seppure non si riferisca ad alcuna territorialità, ha pur sempre una sua peculiare topologia che presuppone, e spesso coincide, con la nozione arendtiana di ‘mondo’”27. It is then the consequence of worldly actions and conversations. Actually, rather than “consequence”, it should be called a sort of coincidence: one transcending the other, action and world are in fact the same event. A world exists everytime people present themselves to one another in action and in conversation: Man qua man, each individual in his unique distinctness, appears and confirms in speech and action, and these activities, despites their material futility, possess an enduring quality of their own because they create their own remembrance. The public realm, the space within which men need in order to

26.  Cf. H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind. One/Thinking, Harcourt Inc, New York 1978, p. 212: “I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories, as we have known them from their beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it. Historically speaking, what actually has broken down is the Roman trinity that for thousands of years united religion, authority, and tradition. The loss of this trinity does not destroy the past, and the dismantling process itself is not destructive; it only draws conclusions from a loss which is a fact and as such no longer a part of the “history of ideas” but of our political history, the history of our world”. 27.  S. Forti, Hannah Arendt: filosofia e politica, cit., p. XXI.

57 appear at all, is therefore more specifically ‘the work of man’ than is the work of his hands or the labor of his body.28

The work Arendt mentions has a conditional and evenemential character. It is not ‘objective’, placed before its maker; it’s not even functional, being void of telos; it’s not permanent, it can only exist and subsist as long as people partake in its ‘construction’: it is a work that owes its subsistence to the persistence in it of human action29.

28.  H. Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London 1958, p. 153. 29.  More specifically, a telos belongs to both action and production (poiesis). Since Aristotle, in fact, it is possible to differentiate two forms of knowledge: one pertaining poiesis, a practical-technical knowledge (techne, ars), the other pertaining praxis, a practical-moral knowledge (phronesis, prudentia, sensus communis). However, while the érgon, the product of the poiesis, can be measured and evaluated on the basis of a model (the eidos that predates it), there’s no such model available for the praxis, since the telos of this action is immanent within the action itself. Being enèrhgeia – thus different from érgon – praxis is free. About this, see H. Arendt, The Human Condition, cit., pp. 206-207. On Aristotle’s blueprint, Arendt attempts to avoid conceiving practical-moral knowledge as a knowledge that leads or determines the action: the latter is free because it doesn’t answer to a theoretic/eidetic knowledge that directs it; conversely, the phronesis, the sensus communis is no longer a knowledge untied from its ‘object’, it’s not unbiased, neutral, but rather a situated, experimental knowledge, that is born and coexists with what it knows. That’s why the attempt at referring Arendt’s thought back to practical philosophy, whose restoration was being promoted in Germany in the 60s, and to Neo-Aristotelianism, appears rather questionable. The emphasis that Arendt poses on the theme of praxis brings her thought outside of the typically Aristotelian conflict between two different abilities, a theoretical and a practical one, to determine a knowledge that would lead the action. Instead, it seems appropriate to highlight, together with Volpi, how Aristotle’s practical philosophy has for Arendt a different historical meaning from the paradigmatic function attributed to it by Neo-Aristotelianists, since the red thread of her thought is exactly “l’intento di una decostruzione del carattere metafisico e teoreticistico del pensiero politico tradizionale nel suo insieme; e questa decostruzione mira a spianare il terreno per una

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Her book Vita activa, since its first lines, is dedicated to a phenomenology of such an action: With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action […]. Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body […]. The human condition of labor is life itself. Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurrign life cycle […]. The human condition of work is worldliness. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. […]. This plurality is specifically the condition – not only the condition sin qua non, but the condition per quam – of all political life.30

This phenomenology outlines an ascending trajectory going from the undermost level, the one in which the action, in the form of work, is reduced to pure biological needs, to an intermediate one, the operation level in which the physiological experience transcends towards the artificiality of production, up to a level in which action, specifically distinguished from poiein,

comprensione specifica dell’originarietà e dell’autenticità dell’agire quale determinazione fondamentale, anzi, quale modo d’essere stesso del vivere umano. Nel pensiero politico tradizionale Hannah Arendt vede il progressivo affermarsi di determinazioni e comprensioni non originarie dell’agire e del politico. Esse non sono originare nel senso che non poggiano su un coglimento genuino e appropriato dei caratteri specifici di tale campo fenomenico, ma lo comprendono invece nel quadro di un implicito privilegiamento della theo­ria, non messo in questione. In quest’orizzonte non originario si sviluppa la comprensione dell’agire e del politico attuata nel pensiero occidentale a partire da Platone”, F. Volpi, Il pensiero politico di Hannah Arendt, in R. Esposito (ed.), La pluralità irrappresentabile. Il pensiero politico di Hannah Arendt, Edizioni QuattroVenti, Urbino 1987, pp. 73-92. 30.  H. Arendt, Vita activa, cit., p. 7.

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and identified as primarily political, completely fulfills the virtues of men, who are now free from any material mediation31. Arendt’s ontology is specifically political, and symmetrically, her politics is specifically ontological. Being means appearing and, so to speak, it waits to appear. Only within the action and the discourse human beings can appear. Conversely, appearing needs to happen in a set space, a world that was opened through action and discourse: Such a space of appearances is not to be taken for granted wherever men live together in a community. The Greek polis once was precisely that ‘form of government’ which provided men with a space of appearances where they could act, with a kind of theater where freedom could appear.32

The public space is then the dimension in which human beings are fulfilled as such, and as free. In such a space, which Arendt often describes through theater metaphors, humans change from objects into subjects33. This subjectivation, as

31.  See J. Kohn, Per una comprensione dell’azione, in S. Forti (ed.), Hannah Arendt, cit., pp. 155-176, where the very tight connection between freedom and action in Arendt’s reflection is highlighted. Besides, through Arendt’s interpretation of the aphorisms by René Char – both actor and narrator of the French resistance –, Kohn stresses the temporal dimension of the action. As previously seen, it is exhausted in the present, and its “work” overlaps its own performativity. But through the narration, the action acquires a meaning to those who have partook in it, thus making the narration a specifically political manner/method of understanding events; see ivi, pp. 165-176. 32.  H. Arendt, What is Freedom (1961), in Ead., Between Past and Future. Six Exercises, cit., p. 143-172: p. 154. 33.  Arendt emphasizes the spatial character of politics: the latter has to do with appearing, requires a “spazio fenomenico in cui la libertà possa dispiegare il suo fascino e divenire una realtà visibile e tangibile”: I quote the Italian translation of H. Arendt, On revolution by M. Magrini: Sulla rivoluzione, Edizioni di Comunità, Milano 1983, p. 30, because the English version lacks this passage. On the spatial dimension of politics in Arendt and on the re-

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we’ve seen, happens in the moment when humans turn to each other, skipping the mediation of their material productions: “it is an indispensable element of human pride to believe that who somebody is transcends in greatness and importance anything he can do and produce”34. This moment of mutual and immediate apparition triggers the dynamic that catalyzes the change from what to who: the really great talents “remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive; for this source springs indeed from who they are and remains outside the actual work process as well they are and remain outside the actual work process as well as independent of what they may achieve”35. Conclusively, Arendt thinks a mutual presence, void of mediations, an in person presence, happening in a specific place, the public space of the polis: humans get out of the narrow oikos and meet, free and equal, in the agorà. Her proposal, then, has an elective destination that makes it political in a strong sense. It’s certainly not a call to the territory, the soil. On the contrary: il riferimento alla polis non ha alcuna pretesa filologica o storica. Hannah Arendt […], vuole comprendere in termini filosofici come una stessa area concettuale, derivata dalle antiche nozioni di politeia e di polis, possa designare oggi qualcosa di completamente diverso dal significato originario.36

However, it seems appropriate about Arendt to mention a constructivist, foundational approach. Hers is a true utopia, as long as the term isn’t read in the way it crossed political phi-

lationship of such dimension with the diachrony of the historical time cf. L. Bazzicalupo, Hannah Arendt. La storia per la politica, ESI, Napoli 1995. 34.  H. Arendt, The Human Condition, cit., p. 211. 35.  Ibidem. 36.  A. Dal Lago, “Politeia”: cittadinanza ed esilio nell’opera di Hannah Arendt, in “Il Mulino”, n. 3, 1984, pp. 417-441: p. 426.

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losophy from Plato to the 20th century; Arendt’s utopia isn’t the one of the ideal city imagined by philosophers, it’s rather the practical utopia finding space in the public sphere of action and discourse37. In this ontology, the work is immanent to the action that makes it happen, and conversely, the actors are “subjects” as long as they stick to this praxis: in this dynamic – that is exit and meeting – they experience the shift from what to who. It is indeed a shift, a movement: only through this meeting humans can be fulfilled as free subjects38. These very themes keep Arendt’s still formidable reflection out of reach of the philosophy of community as it was elaborated in France and Italy in the 80s: this thought of the common is, in fact, one that experiences, first of all, the inadequacy of the polis, and then of all the concepts that stem from it: subject, actor, presence. The public space in which free and equal humans meet is not that of the “community”: it’s appropriate “riconoscere che [Hannah Arendt] è soltanto la più radicale pensatrice dell’intersoggettività”39. In fact, “gli abitanti della polis cercano un’identità permanente nella memoria dei posteri”40, the agorà is a safe and empower37.  On this point cf. P.P. Portinaro, La politica come cominciamento e la fine della politica, in R. Esposito (ed.), La pluralità irrappresentabile, cit., pp. 29-46. 38.  However, as it’s been aptly noted, this projection into the public space, while falling in with Arendt’s definition, especially in the text Sulla rivoluzione, of “public happiness”, has nothing spontaneist or dionysiac, but sparks from a rigid discipline: see G. Kateb, Political Action: Its Nature and Advantages, in D. Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2000, pp. 130-147. 39.  R. Esposito, Polis o communitas, in S. Forti (ed.), Hannah Arendt, cit., pp. 94-106: p. 94. 40.  Ivi, p. 95.

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ing place for the self. The political dimension strengthens and stabilizes the subjects. It is certainly true that bisogna stare molto attenti ad adoperare, per Arendt, termini fortemente compromessi dalla tradizione metafisica come quello di “soggetto”. La sua definizione come un “chi” contrapposto a un “che cosa” già ne esclude una formulazione sostanzialistica. […] Una decostruzione della categoria umanistica di soggettività è confermata dalla circostanza che nella sfera dell’apparenza ciascun soggetto di sguardo ne è allo stesso tempo oggetto e dunque non solo e non tutto soggetto.41

On the other hand, Esposito continues, Arendt’s motive is not the preservation of life, according to a Hobbesian paradigm: on the contrary, the action happening in the polis “assume senso proprio dallo scarto che essa sperimenta rispetto ai processi biologico-naturali. […] La polis nasce quando la preoccupazione per la vita individuale è sostituita dall’amore per il mondo comune”42. But despite the closeness to a thought of the being-in-common, and while having the strength to crack a representative model by profiling a specific conception of action that doesn’t originate a work, while thinking a subject without substance, Arendt doesn’t reach the excess that the community proves to have compared to the dimension of the political. The community is not in the polis and it is not the polis. Esposito notes that it isn’t at all: la comunità non è la polis, e non è neanche res publica. E ciò non solo per la genericità dell’aggettivo (“pubblico”, lontano dall’esprimere tutta la complessità di “comune”) ma per l’assoluta inadeguatezza del sostantivo. La comunità non è una

41.  Ibidem. 42.  Ivi, p. 96.

63 res. È anzi il suo “non”, il fondo in cui la “cosa” minaccia di perdersi o la fenditura in cui rischia di scivolare.43

The Italian philosopher – who was often in contact with Nancy and admits an “inextinguishable debt [debito inestinguibile]”44 with the latter’s Communauté désœuvrée – identifies an essential point in the thought of the being in common, which is the fruitful relationship with nihilism, and thus with the deconstruction of the subjectivity, inhabited and excavated by the nihil. He delves into this theme in the essay Nichilismo e comunità. The relationship between the two terms is fundamental because the penetration of nihilism in political theory originates the thought of community, which is its deconstruction. The community is, in fact, “il luogo di sovrapposizione tra cosa e niente”45. It always “fulfills” itself in a subtractive manner: ciò che […] i membri della communitas condividono […] è piuttosto un’espropriazione della propria sostanza che non si limita al loro “avere”, ma che coinvolge e intacca il loro stesso “essere soggetti”. Qui il discorso assume una piega che lo sposta dal terreno più tradizionale dell’antropologia, o della filosofia politica, a quello, più radicale, dell’ontologia.46

43.  Ivi, p. 97. 44.  See R. Esposito, Communitas, cit., p. XXXII, note. About the prolific dialogue between the two, see, Id., J-L. Nancy, Dialogo sulla filosofia a venire, in J.-L. Nancy, Essere singolare plurale, Einaudi, Torino 2001, pp. VII-XXIX; R. Esposito’s essay Libertà in comune, in J.-L. Nancy, L’esperienza della libertà, Einaudi, Torino 2000, pp. VII-XXXV. And, finally, J.-L. Nancy, Conloquium, introduction to the French edition of R. Esposito, Communitas. Origine et destin de la communauté, PUF, Paris 2000, pp. 3-10. 45.  R. Esposito, Nichilismo e comunità, in R. Esposito, C. Galli, V. Vitiello (eds.), Nichilismo e politica, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2000, pp. 25-42: p. 27. 46.  Ivi, p. 28.

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The mutual expropriation is what allows the community to persist in its nothingness. The nothingness doesn’t equate with the community’s setback or ending, but it’s rather “il suo unico modo d’essere. La comunità, in altre parole, non è interdetta, oscurata, velata – ma costituita dal niente”47. This is the inherent limit of subjects, cutting them open and preventing them from building themselves as closed individuals; the “con” links them together. Esposito distinguishes two types of nothingness: “il primo è quello della relazione – la lacuna, o lo spaziamento, che fa dell’essere comune non un ente, ma un rapporto – il secondo è invece quello del suo scioglimento: lo scioglimento della relazione nell’assolutezza del senza-rapporto”48. One can easily read the Hobbesian model in the double closure of the second type of nothingness, swallowing itself and eliminating the relationship. Its absolutism shouldn’t be trivially interpreted as hypertrophy of the power, but rather as full positivization of the nothingness of the community, that inevitably equates with the “cancellazione della communitas a favore di una forma politica fondata sullo svuotamento di ogni relazione esterna al rapporto verticale fra individui e sovrano e dunque sulla stessa dissociazione”49. As the etymology of the term implies, it is a “principio di scioglimento di tutto ciò che è ancora ‘legato’, di qualsiasi rapporto che non sia quello della dissociazione stessa”50. As an alternative to this typically modern model, Esposito brings back resources deployed by Heidegger and Bataille, whom he acknowledges as “i due pensatori novecenteschi della comunità (insieme a Simone Weil, per altri versi)”51.

47.  Ivi, p. 29. 48.  Ivi, p. 30. 49.  Ivi, p. 31. 50. Id., Communitas, cit., p. 13. 51. Id., Polis o communitas?, cit., p. 99.

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Regarding the former, his importance lies not in having theorized the mit for the first time, but rather in having been “il primo pensatore a cercare la comunità proprio nel niente della cosa”52. The text mentioned by Esposito is the famous reflection of 1950 on Das Ding, in which, delving into reflections already sketched in the essay on Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes and significantly focusing on an “empty” or “open” object like the jug, he can conclude that “Die Leere ist das Fassende des Gefäßes. Die Leere, dieses Nichts am Krug, ist das, was der Krug als das fassende Gefäß ist”53. At the bottom of things there’s emptiness. But forgetting this emptiness, replacing it with a fullness, be it the nothing itself raised to the dignity of substance, means annihilating the thing. Which needs to be acknowledged in its fundamental absence. In fact, Esposito concludes, “è la dimenticanza di questo nulla – il vuoto – a consegnare la cosa a un punto di vista scientista, produttivista, nichilista, che l’annulla”54. As for Bataille, he, in Heidegger’s wake, directly put communication and sovereignty as categories that are only thinkable in the shadow cone of nothingness. To him too the community isn’t thinkable starting from the subjects, but rather from their emptying. Bataille contends: la “communication” ne peut avoir lies d’un être intact à l’autre: elle veut des êtres ayant l’être en eux-même mis en jeu, placé à la limite de la mort, du néant. […] La “communication” n’a lieu que entre deux êtres mis en jeu – déchirés, suspendus, l’un et l’autre penchés au-dessus de leur néant”55.

52. Id., Nichilismo e politica, cit., p. 33. 53.  M. Heidegger, Das Ding (1950), in Vorträge und Aufsätze, cit., pp. 165188: 170. 54.  R. Esposito, Nichilismo e politica, cit., p. 34. 55.  G. Bataille, Sur Nietzsche (1955), in Id., Œuvres Complètes V, Gallimard, Paris 1973, pp. 11-205: pp. 44-45.

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Two points can be fixed. The first, regarding Arendt, is that she remains, despite it all, tied to an intersubjective thought. The themes of presence and mutual apparition keep her within a phenomenological horizon56. Her intention of excluding death, pain, finitude from the political thought, confining them within the private sphere of the oikos is not compatible with 56.  Arendt’s stance about phenomenology remains peripheral. On one hand, in Che cos’è la filosofia dell’esistenza?, Arendt dedicates a paragraph, titled Il tentativo ricostruttivo della fenomenologia (pp. 198-200), to show the “epigonal” character of Husserl’s phenomenology, in the attempt of re-establishing the unity of thought and being. As written by an attentive reader of Arendt’s: “La ‘parola magica’ ‘alle cose!’, in filosofia, in letteratura, in pittura corrisponde all’esperienza di un modo in cui le cose non hanno più significato. Per salvarle dall’alienazione, esse vengono tuttavia sottratte definitivamente al mondo reale, creando una loro identità insulare in un nuovo contesto, estetico o coscienziale. Si prospetta qui un asse centrale del ragionamento di Hannah Arendt sul non senso della realtà moderna. C’è una via umanistica, ‘neoclassica’ che procede a ricostruire il mondo spezzettato secondo un processo di ‘seconda creazione’: l’uomo si riafferma creatore del mondo, creatore di se stesso attraverso un’operazione semplicemente mentale, la decontestualizzazione delle cose, la messa tra parentesi del mondo reale”, L. Boella, Hannah Arendt “fenomenologa”. Smantellamento della metafisica e critica dell’ontologia, in “aut aut”, n. 239-240, 1990, p. 87. On the other hand, Arendt was thoroughly impressed by Merleau-Ponty’s reflection, trying to interweave thought, language, and world, so much so that the first pages of her last, and unfinished, work are dedicated to the French phenome­nologist (see H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind. One, cit., pp. 19-65). Arendt’s last reflection has an especially phenomenological tone, as explains L. Boella, in Hannah Arendt “fenomenologa”, cit., p. 96: “l’atteggiamento arendtiano, in contrasto con l’atteggiamento teorico o filosofico tradizionale, tende a fissare l’attenzione su esperienze di pensiero o di vita quotidiana – ciò che Arendt chiama spesso sbrigativamente ‘fatti’ – intesi come modalità concrete di operare nei diversi campi dell’attività umana. Occorre in ogni caso precisare che Hannah Arendt rimane polemica verso la ‘filosofia’ di Husserl, in particolare verso l’epoché considerata un metodo: se deve designare la sospensione del senso di realtà, l’epoché è una ‘questione di ordinaria amministrazione’ per quanto riguarda il pensare, certo ‘non un metodo particolare che possa essere appreso e insegnato’”; quotes from H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind. One, cit., pp. 52-53.

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the thought of community, which “non può escludere la ferita ‘privata’ del dolore e della morte, dal momento che ne è costituita”; so “non si può dire che Arendt sia scesa davvero a fondo nell’abisso della comunità”57. She founds the paradigm of the in-between, the paradigm of a thought that pays attention to the “world” as what “relates and separates men at the same time”58. This radically anti-representative thought, contesting synthesis to the benefit of plurality, doesn’t leave room for the One, is not a philosophy of the Subject. However, the One is replaced with the many: non c’è soggetto, nella polis, che non sia già da sempre i soggetti. O meglio la loro interrelazione. Ma […] cos’è l’interrelazione dei soggetti se non una, la più esplicita, forma di intersoggettività? E cos’è l’intersoggettività se non il reciproco riconoscimento che fa dell’altro sempre un alter ego simile in tutto e per tutto all’ipse che si vorrebbe contestare e che invece si riproduce raddoppiato.59

The second point is that the thought of community is at the limits of politics, since it moves in a dimension that is liable to the destitution of all the political categories. Nancy, in the first phases of his thought, pushed himself towards this very edge; but in the more recent developments of his work, he definitely overcame it: it’s the passage from the philosophy of community to the thought of democracy.

57.  R. Esposito, Polis o communitas?, cit., p. 99. See this excerpt from H. Arendt, On Violence, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego-New York-London 1969, pp. 67-68: “[death] is perhaps the most antipolitical experience there is. It signifies that we shall disappear from the world of appearances and shall leave the company of our fellow-men, which are the conditions of all politics. As far as human experience is concerned, death indicates an extreme of loneliness and impotence”. 58.  H. Arendt, The Human Condition, cit., p. 39. 59.  R. Esposito, Polis o communitas?, cit, p. 98.

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III

Between Politics and Aesthetics

Since the mid-1980, Nancy’s reflection would be focused on the theme of “sense”, and the specifically political issue would become an inner working of this matter. This approach marks a shift towards aesthetics, a favored field when it comes to openness to/of sense. Obviously this switch to aesthetics isn’t Nancy’s individual risk. It’s instead part of a historical and conceptual context in which “l’estetica ha preteso di essere molto più che la teoria filosofica del bello e del buon gusto”1. The erosion, registered during the 20th century, of a transcendent rationale justifies the privileged role of aesthetics in the understanding of phenomena that are more and more framed in an entirely worldly, immanent dimension, with which the knowledge of aisthesis clearly shares an elective affinity. The exhaustion of any transcendent dimension will make it so that “l’estetica della vita acquisti una valenza politica”2. The “aesthetical dimension of politics” isn’t meant as the huge investment that the subjects of power make in boosting their 1.  M. Perniola, L’estetica contemporanea. Un quadro globale, il Mulino, Bologna 2011, p. 9. 2.  Ivi, p. 10.

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image and its effectiveness in terms of consensus. That one is a fundamental issue, notoriously at the core of Benjamin’s reflections on the aestheticization of the political. This study deals instead with the implosion of sovereignty, with the fall of a pure and detached political dimension, and the resulting immanentization of the political scene, precisely its constitution as a scene, a plane of immanence that doesn’t leave room for the representative transcendence achieved with the theological-political device. As we know, “tra Ottocento e Novecento tramonta quel modo di pensare che faceva perno sulla secolarizzazione del monoteismo, sulla teologia politica come riduzione delle differenze all’unità logica e normativa dell’ordine politico”3. Western rationalism can no longer lead to multiple syntheses, remain united, nor be upright and soaring: la struttura monocratica, gerarchica dell’autorità – la teologica politica – era stata secolarizzata nello Stato moderno mantenendo il suo carattere sacro. Dunque si era conservato il raddoppiamento della realtà in un mondo ideale trascendente e ordinante, che, grazie alla sua verità sostanziale, non modificabile dalla pluralità degli uomini, garantiva ad essi un criterio di giudizio per giustificare o meno l’ordine esistente.4

Once this dualistic and founding (that is, dualistic yet “monocratic”, insofar as reducing to the unity of the foundation) structure falls short, the only option is the reality we are in, which has nothing behind or beyond itself. In this context the democratic pluralism, that nonetheless defeated the totalitarianisms of the early 20th century, is not granted to distinguish itself from them: in its current form, 3.  L. Bazzicalupo, Politica. Rappresentazioni e tecniche di governo, Carocci, Roma 2013, p. 63. 4.  Ibidem.

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western democracy conceived but one world, crushed on itself, in which the fact imposes itself as stringent norm5. Not for nothing, the most often disputed point made by the “deconstructive” works is a certain empathy with the neoliberal strategy that proceeds on consecutive fragmentations and the destitution of any transcendence6. Here’s the outcome of this disillusionment:

5.  Let’s consider how the rhetoric of the “crisis” has worked in the last few years as a device of government, aimed to reintroduce a philosophy of history in an age that fancies itself to be past history and truth: the “crisis” reintroduces necessity where only contingency exists, it makes the contingent necessary and it does it by promising a better world to come. On the crisis as a government device see G. Agamben, Lo stato di eccezione. Homo sacer, II, 1, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2003, now Iustitium. Stato di eccezione, in Id., Homo sacer. Edizione Integrale 1995-2015, Quodlibet, Macerata 2018, pp. 169-250. See also Id., La crisi perpetua come strumento di potere. Conversazione con Giorgio Agamben, interview at “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, 24 maggio 2013, available at www.lavoroculturale.org/la-crisiperpetua-come-strumento-di-potere-conversazione-con-giorgio-agamben. On the same note, see D. Gentili, La crisi come arte di governo, Quodlibet, Macerata 2018. 6.  See the generally pessimistic perspective recently developed by G. Lipovetsky and J. Serroy. They call “transesthétique” the current phase of aestheti­ cization of the world, in which basically capitalism has really subsumed even the creative energies that opposed it: “remodelée pour l’essentiel par des logiques de marchandisation et d’individualisation extrêmes. À une culture moderniste, dominée par une logique subversive en guerre contre le monde bourgeois, succède un univers nouveau dans lequel les avant-gardes sont intégrées dans l’ordre économique, acceptées, recherchées, soutenues par les institutions officielles. Avec le triomphe du capitalisme artiste, les phénomènes esthétiques ne renvoient plus à des petits mondes périphériques et marginaux: intégrés dans les univers de production, de commercialisation et de communication des biens matériels, ils constituent d’immenses marchés façonnés par des géants économiques internationaux. Fini le monde des grandes oppositions rédhibitoires, art contre industrie, culture contre commerce, création contre divertissement: dans toutes ces sphères, c’est à qui sera le plus créatif”, G. Lipovetsky, J. Serroy, L’esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste, Gallimard, Paris 2013, pp. 25-26.

72 se il mondo ideale è una costruzione finalizzata all’esercizio di poteri, quando viene de-costruito, resta la realtà che appare, quella che si vede, l’apparenza, dunque, “dietro” cui non c’è niente. Ma un’apparenza che si squaderna davanti ai nostri occhi nella sua immanenza è sempre solcata da verità/poteri che si contendono l’organizzazione della realtà. Questa è l’attualità, tardo moderna o post-moderna: l’immanenza nel mondo, lo star dentro alla realtà sensibile, estetica e non simbolica (se simbolo è un rimando ad un’altra più vera verità).7

The aestheticization of the scene coincides in the late-modern phase with the destitution of the subject (individual, collective, political, and metaphysical). Aesthetics imposes itself more and more as a lens through which to look at the present, since there are no longer transcendent and permanent instances placed above the plane of immanence and capable of making the differences organic. They instead take shape within the act of becoming, temporary and performative shapes that don’t universally synthesize the scene, but are always in close comparison with other shapes. If already in Hegel the Spirit is not given once and for all, but needs to present and expose itself in an experiential dimension, Nietzsche is the one to radically register this switch. All of his work, his very writing style denounces the impossibility of a representative exercise of the logos: the thought must be lived, experienced. Since the very beginning of his reflection, he theorizes an actual “Artisten-Metaphysik”8 which is characterized by the removal of a foundation of reality and the emphasis on the appearance versus the permanence of the Idea. The thought 7.  L. Bazzicalupo, Politica, cit., p. 65. 8.  See F.W. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I-IV. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870-1873 (1872), de Gruyter, Berlin 1967, pp. 9-156.

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must in fact not go seeking for logical-mathematical abstract entities, but rather follow those “allgewaltigen Kunsttriebe” or the “inbrünstige Sehnsucht zum Schein” present in “Natur”. So: Sehen wir also einmal von unsrer eignen “Realität” für einen Augenblick ab, fassen wir unser empirisches Dasein, wie das der Welt überhaupt, als eine in jedem Moment erzeugte Vorstellung des Ur-Einen, so muss uns jetzt der Traum als der Schein des Schein, somit als eine noch höhere Befriedigung der Urbegierde nach dem Schein hin gelten.9

The inevitable consequence of this “aesthetical metaphysics” is that “nur als aesthetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt”10. The “dionysiac” aestheticization registered by Nietzsche has an ambivalent charge. On one hand, the vision of a punctiform or apical subject, stable and immune to change, must be left behind. Without a solid metaphysical foundation, it is completely immersed, “thrown” into the flow of living, of becoming. Consequently, the political theory, that in modernity was defined by the concepts of order, stability, predictability, must completely sort out its premises. On the other hand, the fact that existence now sits outside of a representative cone, exposed and detached from any premise, is what allows it to experience itself as free. Nancy’s reflection penetrates into this very thickness/density that would remain opaque to a gaze that attempts to bring the multiplicity back to a consistent synthesis. Instead we are dealing with la prevalenza della dimensione estetica, nel senso più ampio della parola, che assorbe etica e cognitivo: spaziosità, presenzializzazione, espressività, tonalità emotive sensibili-sensoriali non mediate, il campo immanente delle percezioni, affetti,

9.  Ivi, p. 39. 10.  Ivi, p. 47.

74 desideri che si impongono come determinanti e legittimanti: estetica come aisthesis, il sentire come soglia di verità, di vita irriducibile alle identificazioni simboliche e sociali; ma anche estetica come spettacolarizzazione, mediatizzazione senza mediazione, presunta immediatezza, presa diretta.11

What interests Nancy isn’t the study of the concrete historical forms of politics. The focus of his interest is the sense, its free flow; all of his philosophy is nothing but an exercise in the opening to/of the sense. And naturally the dynamism of the sense is something that leads to the dissolution of the (political) form. This relocation in regard to the political makes it impossible to combine Nancy’s work with the “impolitical” proposals with which he is often, and not without reasons, associated. It seems appropriate to note the difference between the previously mentioned Esposito’s “impolitical” categories, and the perspective of the French philosopher, in order to highlight the latter’s specificity. The impolitical proposed, completely autonomously, by Esposito in the same years in which Nancy was elaborating the notion of retrait, it’s a wholly political category. It doesn’t aim to place itself outside of the political space, nor against it: it doesn’t attempt to fight it from within, and it doesn’t delude itself in believing there’s an outside of the political space: “quell’‘esterno’ non esiste che come proiezione ideologica, mitica, autolegittimante, dello stesso politico”12. Esposito aims to reactivate the resources of the philosophical-political debate from within, and by remaining within it, in the place it inevitably escapes. He wants to grasp the nucleus of political philoso-

11.  L. Bazzicalupo, Coesistenza, in “Filosofia politica”, n. 1, 2017, pp. 4758: p. 50. 12.  R. Esposito, Categorie dell’impolitico, il Mulino, Bologna 1999 (19881), p. XIV.

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phy, which has been neutralized: the impolitical “è lo stesso politico sottratto alla propria pienezza mitico-operativa”13. Going through, and shaking, modernity, Esposito’s perspective intends to open an alternative path to the outcome of depoliticization the world had come to. It’s about reactivating the political: “l’impolitico si costituisce in opposizione diretta a ogni forma di spoliticizzazione”14, and interprets this contrast in a manner of rehabilitation of the themes of relationship and conflict that modern political theory had instead neutralized. Therefore, the implicit negation of the word “impolitical” is the double negative that the political made itself into in modern reflection. Of course the impolitical’s categorial exercise inevitably follows a deconstructive, negative trend, yet it has the “positive” intention of reinvigorating the philosophical-­political debate. In this sense then, Esposito’s exploration “oltre la politica”15, aims to renew the terms of that debate, making them overlap with the entire reality of human relationships, taking them away from the grip of the theological-political machine. In conclusion, impolitical means the return of politics to itself. Naturally, these inevitably short passages subsume a much more complex line of thought that underwent significant shifts and self-criticism. Following the publication of Communitas, Esposito will in fact try to exacerbate, so to speak, the political scope of the impolitical. The association with Foucault, starting from the early 2000s and through the conceptual shift represented by the book Immunitas16, will be aimed to con-

13.  Ivi, p. XXVIII. 14.  Ivi, p. 20. 15.  See R. Esposito (ed.), Oltre la politica. Antologia del pensiero “impolitico”, Mondadori, Milano 1996. 16.  See R. Esposito, La comunità come concetto ontologico. Dialogo con Constanza Serratore, in Id., Dall’impolitico all’impersonale, Mimesis, Mi-

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nect the deconstruction of the traditional political figures – individual, subject, totality – with the proposal of an affirmative biopolitics, that is a theoretical perspective aimed to actually emancipate life from the captivity of the sovereign power. It’s important to highlight how the intensification of the most productive political aspect of Esposito’s ontology was made possible by the fact that its first formulations, whilst still involved with a negative or deconstructive lexicon, already emphasized, in the common logic, the moment of the munus, whereas Nancy focused on the cum17. Where the French philano 2012, pp. 65-76: p. 73: “Quando ho terminato di scrivere Communitas sono rimasto parzialmente insoddisfatto da questa lettura impolitica – pur senza abbandonarne gli aspetti più fecondi. L’accostamento a Foucault ha costituito per me, in qualche modo, un transito da un pensiero puramente decostruttivo a un tentativo di pensiero affermativo. Immunitas, Bíos e anche il nuovo libro che sto scrivendo [Terza persona. Politica della vita e filosofia dell’impersonale, Einaudi, Torino 2007] rappresentano proprio questo passo oltre, o a lato della decostruzione. In questo senso, mentre in Categorie del politico e in Communitas il discorso si costituisce sostanzialmente all’interno del lessico filosofico, con Immunitas cerco di fuori uscirne, incrociando produttivamente quelli della biologia e dell’antropologia. Immunitas è il libro-soglia attraverso il quale mi sposto da una prospettiva all’altra, senza abbandonarne gli aspetti precedenti, ma cercando di inserirli in un orizzonte più ampio, in cui ai temi dell’impolitico e della comunità si affianca quello della vita. Nelle ultime pagine di Immunitas il richiamo all’evento biologico della maternità dà il segno di questo passaggio”. On the same theme, see also T. Campbell, L’immunità come soglia. Dialogo con Timothy Campbell, ivi, pp. 77-89. 17.  Cfr. R. Esposito, Da fuori. Una filosofia per l’Europa, Einaudi, Torino 2016, p. 180: “In Nancy la comunità non è concepita come ciò che mette in rapporto i soggetti, ma come l’essere stesso del rapporto. […] Assegnando alla comunità una connotazione ontologica di esplicita ascendenza heideggeriana, Nancy ne rende assai problematica l’articolazione con la politica, trattenendola in una dimensione inevitabilmente impolitica. Anche la sua riconduzione – questa volta attraverso Bataille – all’assenza di opera non risolva l’aporia. Come arrivare a una definizione politica fuori dall’attività di determinati soggetti – qualsiasi accezione si voglia conferire a questo termi-

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losopher tried to think the being as relationship, and the latter as deposition of its terms, Esposito, in going back to the etymology of the word “community”, placed the stress on the other semantic pole involved in the term, the munus, the gift that can only be given, not received, thus marking the relational density of the historical-empirical communities. The ontological approach, in this case, except for a critical potential allowed by this displacement in regard to the perspective of “political science”, already tipped the debate in favor of political facticity. If in Esposito’s reflection the impolitical is what must enrich the strictly politological reflection besides political praxis itself, in the thought of Giorgio Agamben – author of an important and original reflection on community, which bears mentioning, even briefly – there’s an aim for destituting politics18. Nancy and Esposito, in fact, think the community, the being together; one puts the stress on the cum, holding the community on an ontological plane that predates (and complicates) its political articulation, the other on the munus, in order to emphasize its relational, immediately worldly and political aspect. However, there’s in both a tension with empiric facticity and Nancy himself has immediately started working on diverting the “community” from the purely ontological dimension his thought destined it to. Agamben, on his side, intends to get back on a path that the Western world has blocked the moment it defined itself as such; in order to go back to this latent possibility in our history there must be a total detachne? La mia impressione è che al fondo di tale difficoltà a declinare politicamente la comunità vi sia la tendenza a guardare a essa dal punto di vista del cum, anziché da quello del munus. È come se il privilegio assegnato alla figura della relazione finisse per cancellare il suo più rilevante contenuto – l’oggetto stesso dello scambio reciproco. E, con esso, anche il suo potenziale significato politico”. 18.  For an overview on Agamben’s thought, see C. Colebrook, J. Maxwell, Agamben, Polity Press, Cambridge (USA) 2016.

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ment from (political) praxis. While Nancy expands and radicalizes Heidegger’s reflections on existential analytics, Agamben radicalizes Heidegger’s theory according to which “Höher als die Wirklichkeit steht die Mög-lichkeit”19. If the specific trait of being there is its potential character, its “Seinkönnen”20, this preceding potential is then the act that must be revisited, whereas politics has always thought itself as action and actualization. The fundamental idea developed in a research on the theme of the sacredness of life21 – closed, or in the author’s words, “abbandonata”22 twenty years after its start – is that the fundamental political relationship is not the pact, but the “bando”23, a paradoxical movement with which the sovereign produces naked life as a political element, including the mere life of the species in the system. The naked life is not, and this is the crucial point, biologically or naturally intended, on the

19.  M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, cit. p. 38. 20.  See ivi, p. 193: “Das Seinkönnen ist es, worumwillen das Dasein je ist, wie es faktisch ist”. 21.  A research that propagates from Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Einaudi, Torino 1995 to L’uso dei corpi. Homo sacer, IV, 2, Neri Pozza, Vicenza 2014. The nine texts comprised in the study have been published, with minor edits, in a single volume titled Homo sacer. Edizione integrale 1995-2015, cit. On Agamben’s placement in the current landscape of the Italian debate cf. A. Lucci Categorie italiane della filosofia. Sul posizionamento teoretico di Giorgio Agamben nel canone del pensiero italiano contemporaneo, in “Lessico di etica pubblica”, n. 1, 2019, pp. 40-50. 22.  See G. Agamben, A. Lucci, Homo Sacer. Intervista a Giorgio Agamben, in “doppiozero”, 29 ottobre 2018, www.doppiozero.com/materiali/ homo-sacer-intervista-giorgio-agamben. 23.  See G. Agamben, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (1995), now in Homo sacer. Edizione Integrale 1995-2015, cit., pp. 11-169: pp. 2940. Here Agamben, in describing the paradoxical logic of sovereignty, claims (p. 39) to have adopted from Nancy himself the concept of bando. The French philosopher had used it in the text L’Être abandonné, in “Argiles”, n. 23-24, 1981.

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contrary it’s a power construct, separating within the order it produces, a meaningless, always expendable life. Transcending the sovereign logic means then to go back to the original potential of this idle life, in order to open a road that has been forever hidden by the fundamental performance of the sovereign power. Politics must then be rethought beyond the sphere of action, brought back to the specific potential of human beings as a potential whose specific trait is not turning into action. Diametrically opposed to Arendt’s claims, the fullness of human beings does not lie in the action nor in the dialogic interaction, but rather in idleness: […] il tema del desœuvrement, dell’inoperosità come figura della pienezza dell’uomo alla fine della storia, che appare per la prima volta nella recensione di Kojève a Queneau, è stato ripreso da Blanchot e da J.-L. Nancy, che lo ha posto al centro del suo libro sulla Comunità inoperosa. Tutto dipende da che cosa si intende per “inoperosità”. Essa non può essere né la semplice assenza di opera né (come in Bataille) una forma sovrana e senza impiego della negatività. Il solo modo coerente di intendere l’inoperosità sarebbe quello di pensarla come un modo di esistenza generica della potenza, che non si esaurisca (come l’azione individuale o collettiva, intesa come la somma delle azioni individuali) in un transitus de potentia ad actum.24

Therefore Agamben on one side elaborates an image of the community worthy of this negative potential, and on the other he draws the profile of the form of life inherent to such potential. He speaks of a community to come, a community 24.  Ivi, p. 66. On the slippery ambiguity of this “fullness”, that risks to go back to an authenticity lexicon, see S. Forti, Strategie di decostruzione della nuda vita, in E. Stimilli (ed.), Decostruzione o biopolitica, Quodlibet, Macerata 2017, pp. 25-38. However, this research attempts to show – in this chapter especially – that Nancy’s concept of idleness doesn’t completely adhere to Agamben’s take on it, in that for Nancy it’s about elaborating a thought always involved with the praxis, and “engaged” in actively shaking things.

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made by whatever singularities: “L’essere che viene è l’essere qualunque”25. This definition says that, on one side the ‘subjects’ of the community aren’t the beings who are, but those who come. They do not come from a common substance: on the contrary, the whatever being is “l’essere tale qual è”26, it completely coincides with its singular way of being. Thus the singularity fumbles the distinction between common and particular, placing itself in a wellspring at the edges of which the above mentioned categories fail: come, in una linea di scrittura, il ductus passa continuamente dalla forma comune delle lettere ai tratti particolari che ne identificano la presenza singolare, senza che in nessun posto, malgrado l’acribia del grafologo, si possa tracciare un confine reale fra le due sfere, così, in un volto, la natura umana transita in modo continuo nell’esistenza e proprio questa incessante emergenza costituisce la sua espressività.27

If such are the “members” of the community, the latter is, in contrast, thought in its manner, as a mannerist community, as long as the term maneries is not meant as originating from manere, which would suggest stability, the being’s being present to itself, but rather from manare, indicating “l’essere nella sua sorgività. Questo non è, secondo la scissione che domina l’ontologia occidentale, né un’essenza, né un’esistenza, ma una maniera sorgiva: non un essere che è in questo o quel modo. Ma un essere che è il suo modo di essere”28. The whatever

25.  G. Agamben, La comunità che viene, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2001 (first edition 1990), p. 9. 26.  Ibidem. 27.  Ivi, p. 21. 28.  Ivi, p. 28. In Agamben’s attempt at immersing in this dimension of pure springing power, preceding any positive determination, Greg Bird – unlike S. Forti (Strategie di decostruzione della nuda vita, cit.) – finds the chance for deconstructing “the dispositif of the proper”, the machine that

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beings, that make up the texture of the community, placed in a “limbic” zone of absolute “impassibilità”29, are such in that they can afford their impotence: nella potenza di essere, la potenza ha per oggetto un certo atto, nel senso che, per essa, energein, essere-in-atto, può solo significare passare a quella determinata attività (per questo Schelling definisce cieca questa potenza, che non può non passare all’atto); per la potenza di non essere, invece, l’atto non può mai consistere in un semplice tran sito de potentia ad actum: essa è, cioè, una potenza che ha per oggetto la stessa potenza, una potentia potentiae.30

It is then impossible to overlook the radically impolitical outcome of such an approach, in which the theme of the relationship between theory and praxis is completely excluded: unlike Esposito and Nancy – who also happens to make similar points on occasion –, Agamben makes the “impolitical” not a critical displacement in regards to the traditional political categories, but rather a destitution31 of the political thought, completely abandoning the political field in favor of a completely aesthet-

produces identities that are perfectly aligned with the neoliberal rationale. See G. Bird, Dwelling in the Proper: May 68, Political Economy, and Identity Politics, in “Shift. International Journal of Philosophical Studies”, n. 1, 2018, pp. 31-44, and, more extensively, Id., Containing Community. From Political Economy to Ontology in Agamben, Esposito, and Nancy, Suny Press, New York 2016. 29.  See ivi, pp. 11-12. 30.  Ivi, pp. 33-34. 31.  R. Esposito talks about “paradigma destituente” in regard to Agamben in the volume Pensiero istituente. Tre paradigmi di ontologia politica, Einaudi, Torino 2020. However, Agamben himself had broadly developed the notion of a “potenza destituente”: see the chapter Per una teoria della potenza destituente, de L’uso dei corpi. Homo sacer, IV, 2, cit., now in G. Agamben, Homo sacer. Edizione integrale 1995-2015, cit., pp. 10051279: pp. 1265-1279.

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icizing approach32 that awaits to reach an ontological fullness it never really achieved historically, or some sort of palingenesis of the human: se gli uomini, invece di cercare ancora una identità propria nel la forma ormai impropria e insensata dell’individualità, riuscissero ad aderire a questa improprietà come tale, a fare del proprio esser-così non un’identità e una proprietà individuale, ma una singolarità senza identità, una singolarità comune e assolutamente esposta – se gli uomini potessero, cioè, non esser-così, in questa o quella identità biografica particolare, ma essere soltanto il così, la loro esteriorità singolare e il loro volto, allora l’umanità accederebbe per la prima volta a una comunità senza presupposti e senza soggetti, a una comunicazione che non conoscerebbe più l’incomunicabile.33

Back to Nancy, we must now grasp the specificity of the “outre-­ politique”34 register towards which his thought is addressed. The openness of/to the sense that he seeks out isn’t, as seen in the previous chapter, containable in the space of politics, and the latter “only” serves to keep alive the possibility of openness: la politica costituisce senza dubbio una nozione che non può più essere contenuta entro la definizione – anche questa incerta – che le si attribuiva fino a qualche tempo fa, ossia il

32.  Cf. A. Galindo Hervás, La soberanía. De la Teología Política al Comunitarismo Impolítico, Institució Alfons el Magnánim, Valencia 2003, p. 203: “Que Agamben delimite ontológicamente esta (otra) política concibiéndola sin relación a acto alguno (permaneciendo como potencia absoluta), o afirmando que se trata de una política ‘no estatual’, que proponga como modelo di relación entre la singularidades el amor o, en definitiva, que sua comunidad eluda todo tipo de representación y condición de pertenencia, son circunstancias que permiten adjetivar su pensamiento de impolítico”. 33.  Ivi, pp. 52-53. 34.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, Ouverture, cit., p. 22.

83 modo per eccellenza, in regime non religioso, di assunzione dell’esistenza comune.35

It’s a thought that directly experiences the crisis of modern political categories; it doesn’t attempt to fix the crisis by restoring principles and categories, on the contrary it deepens the impasse, surpassing it on a different plane. It’s the shift from politics to art. Not a quantum leap, nor a kierkegaardian difference in the phases of existence36. There’s no privileged sphere of existence where the sense is understood, grasped and embraced: in any place it only exists in its retreat. However, Nancy himself admits that “l’arte è forse il regime per eccellenza nel quale si fa questo scavo del senso”37. In this space, that is quintessentially the field of the aisthesis, of the outward appearance, that we can find the “chance del pensiero, la cui possibilità consiste, prima di tutto, nel mantenersi spoglio di significati dati e di figure già tracciate”38.

35.  J.-L. Nancy, Die Liebe, übermorgen, Salon, Köln 2010; I quote the Italian translation by R. Borghesi and C. Tabacco, L’amore, dopodomani, in J.-L. Nancy, Prendere la parola, Moretti & Vitali, Bergamo 2013, pp. 88-105: p. 89. 36.  On this issue, allow me to address my own Al di là di paura e coraggio. Tre note sull’esposizione di Jean-Luc Nancy, in “Epékeina. International Journal of Ontology History and Critics”, n. 2, 2013, pp. 283-305, where the theme of the openness to the sense is explored through the three registers, placed in an upward trajectory, of the political, aesthetical, and theological. 37.  J.-L. Nancy, Dialogo con Jean-Luc Nancy, in A. Potestà, R. Terzi (ed.), Annuario 2000-2001. Incontro con Jean-Luc Nancy, Cortina, Milano 2003, pp. 3-60: p. 8. 38.  F. Ferrari, J.-L. Nancy, La pelle delle immagini, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2003, p. 9.

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IV

Aisthesis: Being within and Transcendence

We must now deal with Nancy’s notion of sense. As previously illustrated, this notion constitutes the catalyst for Nancy’s transition towards the aesthetic dimension of politics. If on one hand politics cannot take on the existence in common, represent it in view of a telos, on the other hand we’ve pointed out how, for Nancy, the openness to the nothingness of the sense is achieved in dimensions that are beyond the specifically political one, starting from the artistic dimension. The notion of “sense” shows all its ambiguity. The chance for its circulation comes from its very subtraction. Be it politics as corrosion of the sovereignty and dismantling of the theological-political device, or art as chosen place of the openness of/to the sense, either way we are dealing with a subtraction of the sense. The void that opens up grants the invention of existence. Invention, artifice, project: se pensiamo alla sola modernità, non può sfuggirci quanto tutta la politica attiva sia annodata attorno ad un fare, un costruire. Artificio, contratto, Stato, organizzazioni razionali secondo un modello, sono poste in essere per dare ‘forma’ all’informe presunto dello stato di natura, all’intollerabile disordine di una coesistenza priva di senso. Ma forse se travalichiamo i

86 confini della modernità, questo carattere di costruttività della politica, di artificio o di convenzione finalizzata all’ordine, raggiunta attraverso rituali, gerarchie, ha sempre caratterizzato le ‘forme’ politiche.1

Nancy, while elevating invention and artifice to original data, emphasizes how in modernity above all the thought is often exposed to itself, deprived then of a transcendent dimension to refer to in order to shape a normative model to impose in reality: Le dédoublement d’une pensée hors de la pensée est un mouvement constant et constitutif de l’expérience moderne de la pensée. Il commence avec Kant, dont toute l’opération consiste précisément à détacher la pensée du savoir ou de la connaissance. […] l’histoire moderne (et peut-être plus ancienne, depuis la noesis noeseôs…) d’un surmontement nécessaire de la pensée de connaissance et de reconnaissance, d’un outrepassement et d’une subversion de la philosophie et de la postulation théorique.2

The doubling of the thought means that it is exposed only to itself, which is then outside of itself, stripped of the shield of a given Sense. Devoid of a transcendent model, existence must invent itself. It must give itself a sense that, as we’ve learned with Hegel, it cannot have outside of itself. Nonetheless, the structure of the sense can only be that of a direction, a moving towards: even when lacking transcendence, existence is not trapped in immanence. Immersed in the world, the ‘subject’ is caught in a thread of relationships where it doesn’t stand out, but also doesn’t get stuck, the relationships being the one condition in

1.  L. Bazzicalupo, Mimesis e aisthesis. Ripensando la dimensione estetica della politica, ESI, Napoli 2000, p. 10. 2.  J.-L. Nancy, La pensée dérobée, Galilée, Paris 2001, p. 38.

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order to experience freedom. So it’s the catalyst of sense, with its irreducible duplicity, that allows Nancy to remain within immanence, and at the same time to open it to its transcendence. The “being within” seems to be an inescapable fact of the contemporary thought: […] il compimento della secolarizzazione nell’immanentismo nichilista è il dato ineludibile dell’autocomprensione filosofica dell’universo mondo nella contemporaneità e investe con la sua duplice irresolubile aporia ogni prospettiva politica attanagliandola nella possibilità del: 1) non esiste né vale nessuna verità (né giustizia), nessun fondamento, 2) esistono e valgono infiniti e simultanei mondi-linguaggio, infinite e compresenti verità-giustizie.3

The French philosopher escapes this submissive or epigonous outcome by restoring the category of sense, declined in an aesthetic key. It’s about gaining a different perspective to the “totalizzante dell’ordine-esito ultimo […], e spostare l’attenzione sulla relazione orizzontale anche se dissimmetrica tra i singoli coesistenti, con-parenti insieme, non preventivamente ordinati in un’immagine”; it’s about “mettere a fuoco la relazione che si propaga tra i singoli che li lega e li slega”. It’s clear, then, that: lo sguardo a partire dalle singolarità è prevalentemente estetico, non perché non ci sono relazioni etiche, e eventualmente responsabili, ma perché l’effettualità estetica lascia manifestarsi le forme di relazione prima di valutarle, senza pregiudicare le percezioni, senza discriminare le singolarità plurali.4

Clearly the intertwining of politics and aesthetic here suggested doesn’t just pertain the inherent operational, performative approach of politics (especially the modern one). Aesthetics

3.  L. Bazzicalupo, Mimesis e aisthesis, cit., p. 31. 4.  Ivi, p. 33.

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itself is in fact considered in its duplicity: theory of art and theory of sensitivity; the thought performed on the action, on the operability, on the production of shapes, and the thought of passivity, receptiveness, idleness. It is intended in one way: come avente per oggetto ta aisthetà, i sensibili, che sono a loro volta da intendere non solo come modificazione indotta nel soggetto passivo, sensazioni, ma anche e soprattutto come sensus communis che trascrive la passività in rappresentazione sensibile di assenti. Dunque estetica come teoria generale della sensibilità, che […] ha nella sua etimologia l’aisthesis il sentire, il percepire.5

But in another way estetica è anche, ovviamente, l’arte, la poiesis, il fare, il produrre per eccellenza e dunque la mimesis, la produzione secondo un modello, un eidos, una immaginazione creativa, una forma, una rappresentazione. Ecco, estetica è anche produrre una forma, rappresentare in una formatività, un immaginario, in relazione, costitutivamente dualistica ambivalente, con qualcosa di rappresentato che non c’è, che è assente, non è là. Tecnica, anche: technè e physis insieme.6

So, if the notion of sense restored by Nancy takes us towards an aesthetic evaluation of politics, there’s an intertwining of two duplicities: that of the sense – sensible and intelligible – and that of aesthetics – mimesis and aisthesis. It’s paramount to emphasize the concept of aesthetics as mimesis, production of shapes. This aspect will be continually deconstructed by Nancy, who will work more and more towards the amorphous, thus imposing the pair aisthesis/methexis. It’s already apparent in his previously examined debate about freedom: 5.  Ivi, pp. 9-10. 6.  Ivi, p. 10.

89 on sait bien, désormais, comment la pensée du couple forme/ fond doit être déconstruite, et on peut ajouter que toute la question de la liberté s’y trouve peut-être investie, par exemple à partir des motifs classiques de la ‘liberté’ ou ‘nécessité’ de la ‘forme’ par rapport au ‘fond’.7

Nancy writes this passage in a context where he is wondering what form of debate is appropriate to the theme of freedom8, identifying it in the fragment: not meant as a literary form, as a stylistic option, on the contrary as what revokes the form, discontinues, cracks, fractures it, or better yet, determines the form as fracture. Philosophy (we’ve addressed the its elective relationship with freedom) registers this fracture of the form: “le discours philosophique est aujourd’hui la fragmentation même. La philosophie ne cesse plus de s’écrire sur la limite de la rupture de son discours”9. The erasure of the form, its interruption, its re-trait, the retreat that leaves a trace (trait), is the necessary condition for freedom, that is for the circulation of the sense. The sense is free as long as it frees itself from any form, and the sense of freedom consists in heading to nothing that is pre-formed. In fact, if it’s now clear that freedom only exists in common, it is equally clear that the free community, or the community of freedom, is such only as long as it has no form. If a form was given, co-existence wouldn’t be free, but designated, would be mimesis of an archetype. On the contrary, “la libertà consiste nel coincidere con l’inizio di un mondo”, where:

7.  J.-L. Nancy, L’expérience de la liberté, Galilée, Paris 1988, p. 194. 8.  Ivi, p. 191: “Comment un discoues de la liberté doit-il correspondre à son objet (à supposer que cela ait un sens)? Comment doit-il ‘parler libre’ (comme on ‘parle franc’ ou comme on ‘parle fort’) en parlant de la liberté et pour parler d’elle, ou pour la laisser parler?”. 9.  Ivi, pp. 191-192.

90 ‘l’inizio’ designa: non un momento che può essere messo in relazione esso stesso a uno stato anteriore […] ma quello che, in atto, non si riduce a questa determinazione e, di conseguenza, neppure al soggetto. Direi: ciò che determina un’apertura di senso – e che viene sempre da più lontano di ‘me’ per andare anche più lontano.10

Freedom, which is not a subject’s attribute, nor its feature, but it’s rather what overthrows subjectivity, thus dynamizing it, launching it, deforming it, it’s absolute beginning, not preceded, nor revealed, nor predicted by any form. Once again, the change of course made by Nancy, who increasingly insists on the theme of beginning, rather than on arguments that mark the work of the negative, is evident. Counter-intuitively, a thought that always works by subtraction and retraction increasingly insists on issues like the momentum, the creation, the desire, the new11. Nancy succeeds in this shift precisely by reactivating a number of “classical” notions, such as those of community, meaning, world, and freedom12. This was aptly addressed as affirmative thinking: il pensiero sottratto, paradossalmente affermativo, dice di sì a ciò che viene e, mantenendo il proprio contegno mentre si spoglia fino alla nudità di una singolarità, conferisce di nuovo senso e forza a parole quali comunità e libertà, perché il senso non è che la condivisione dell’esistenza, le partage de l’étre.13

10.  J.-L. Nancy, Che cos’è il collettivo, in U. Perone (a cura di), Intorno a Jean-Luc Nancy, Rosenberg & Sellier, Torino 2012, pp. 15-22: p. 16. 11.  The theoretical action with which Nancy emancipates himself from a negative lexicon and conceptuality is the focus of an essay by B. Manchev, La métamorphose du monde: Jean-Luc Nancy et les sorties de l’ontologie négative, in “Europe”, n. 960, 2009, pp. 254-261. 12.  This operation raised much criticism, especially from Badiou and Derrida. 13.  M. Vergani, Un pensiero affermativo, in J.-L. Nancy, Il pensiero sottratto (2001), Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2003, pp. 7-15: p. 15.

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Based on these assumptions, the next two paragraphs will first show how politics is, in Nancy’s thought, subsumed within a logic of meaning. Next, an attempt will be made to define Nancy’s specific position within the contemporary debate: while holding firm to the distinction between “two lines of thought,” one “German” the other “French,” as well as Nancy’s own claimed affiliation with the former, many points of tangency with an “affirmative” ontology will be pointed out. Situated at the point of convergence of the two paradigms, Nancy certainly does not represent their synthesis; rather, he registers their aisthesis and methexis, their mutual touching and contaminating.

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V

The Aesthetic Approach of Hannah Arendt Heroism and Common Sense

The notions of meaning and singularity – intertwined to the point of being indiscernible – occupy such a place of relevance in Nancy’s ontology that it is not possible, for those who attempt the elaboration of a political theory and a reading of contemporary democracy from the theories of the French philosopher, to disregard them. This is the origin of politics, which exists only at the moment when the undifferentiated unity is interrupted by the singular event of meaning, which is divided between and as a differential multiplicity of entities. Thus, an aesthetic dimension emerges, which refers to spatiality, exteriority, and corporeality. To illuminate this sphere, a comparison with Arendt is useful, once again, in order to illuminate the particular relationship that Nancy hypothesizes between politics and democracy, according to which the latter would lie, problematically, outside politics. We will have on the one hand Arendt, who initiates the reflection on judgment in order to subtract the political from philosophical consideration, which would stifle its authenticity. On the other hand we have Nancy, who through his signature

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philosophical move, the retrait, wants to subtract democracy from the political in order to infer its truth. Arendt’s reflection on the relationship between politics and art, the assimilation she attempts between aesthetic judgment and political judgment are particularly interesting to us because they represent the effort to step outside the philosophical order of discourse. The aesthetic dimension is, for her, precisely the one that cracks the philosophical representation of the political. What remains foreclosed by the latter is the world of common sense. It is, in fact, the world tout court: the English expression “common sense” does not have the pejorative meaning ascribed to the Italian “senso comune”. If the latter locution indicates the superficial and unreflected experience by which subjects are passively permeated, thus finding themselves immersed in a set of cognitions taken for granted and obvious, by common sense (or sensus communis) Arendt means to refer to a shared sense of reality, that minimum point toward which men’s discourses must converge. Without this ontological connection, the free dialogue of men would be a self-referential game devoid of political efficacy. Instead, the world and the discourses, the cosmos and the opinions of men are ousted from philosophical discourse, dissolved by its veritative stride that sacrifices the concreteness of reality – with its correlates of motility, plurivocity, multiplicity – to the firm manageability of the concept, one and universal1. It is 1.  Arendt asserts that truth, while fundamental in politics, must not, however, have a deterministic effect with respect to the latter. Rather than an ultimate truth, politics owes its condition of possibility to contingency, so political action must open up a space between the cogent character of truth and that fragile contingency of facts and events which, for Arendt, is the price of freedom: The political attitude toward facts must, indeed, tread the very narrow path between the danger of taking them as the results of some necessary development which men could not prevent and about which they can therefore do nothing and the danger of denying them, of trying to ma-

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this ouster that determines what for the German philosopher is a real “hostility between philosophy and politics”, a hostility that “barely covered up by a philosophy of politics, has been the curse of Western statecraft as well as of the Western tradition of philosophy ever since the men of action and the men of thought parted company”2. Such an incompatibility determines Arendt’s firm refusal to call herself a philosopher3. It is in the Platonic gesture, in fact, that she locates the fatal separation between men of thought and men of action, that split within the density of acting that results in a polarized situation in which those who think without acting are opposed to those who act without thinking. This opposition is read in terms of the will to dominance. Indeed, the German philosopher argues that Plato wrote his Republic, “to justify the notion that philosophers should become kings”4. Plato’s work records the conflict between the philosopher and nipulate them out of the world”, A. Arendt, Truth and Politics, in Ead., Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises, cit., pp. 227-264: p. 259. 2.  A. Arendt, On Revolution, cit., p. 319. 3.  “Ja, ich fürchte, ich muß erst einmal protestieren. Ich gehöre nicht in den Kreis der Philosophen […]. so erwähne ich immer, daß zwischen Philosophie und Politik eine Spannung lebt. Nämlich zwischen dem Menschen, insofern er ein philosophierendes, und dem Menschen, insofern er ein handelndes Wesen ist, eine Spannung, die es in der Naturphilosophie nicht gibt. Der Philosoph steht der Natur gegenüber wie alle anderen Menschen auch. Wenn er darüber denkt, spricht er im Namen der ganzen Menschheit. Aber er steht nicht neutral der Politik gegenüber. Seit Plato nicht! […] Gibt es eine Art von Feindseligkeit gegen alle Politik bei den meisten Philosophen […]. Ich will an der Feindseligkeit keinen Teil haben, das heißt, ich will Politik sehen mit, gewissermaßen, von der Philosophie ungetrübten Augen”, televised conversation with Günter Gaus held on 28 October 1964 in the series “Zur Person” by the Second German network, then published in A. Reif (ed.), Gespräche mit Hannah Arendt, Piper, München 1976. 4.  A. Arendt, Lectures on Kant ’s Political Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1992 (19821), p. 21.

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the polis, the latter’s hostility toward him. Socrates’ death is, so to speak, the straw that breaks the camel’s back; it is from this moment, in fact, that the philosopher’s rebellion is triggered. He now “announces his claim to rule, but not so much for the sake of the polis and politics […], as for the sake of philosophy and the safety of the philosopher”5. That it was not the city and concrete human affairs that were Plato’s primary interest, is clearly demonstrated, according to Arendt, by the parable of the cave, in which Plato recounts that the philosopher leaves the darkness of the cave, that is, the common world, the political world, in short, the world tout court, to head for the light of eternal truths. From then on, “philosophy from Plato to Hegel was ‘not of this world’”6. Indeed, even the philosopher, when he returns to the cave, experiences the “loss of orientation in human affairs”7. The apolitical and antipolitical character of Platonic idealism is demonstrated by the fact that in other places, such as the Symposium or the Phaedrus, the Idea is defined according to the criterion of its splendor, its beauty. It is juxtaposed with the beautiful since, like the latter, it is that which most shines, is ekphanestaton, in contrast to the confused appearance of the humble empirical world. To the Idea, in short, does not belong the character of the good, a concept this to which the Greek mentality closely associated that of suitability, functionality, applicability. Platonic essences, on the other hand, had no such fitness originally, “for the original function of the ideas was not to rule or otherwise determine the chaos of human affairs, but, in ‘shining brightness’, to illuminate their darkness”8. 5.  A. Arendt, Between Past and Future, cit., p. 107. 6.  Ivi, p. 23. 7.  Ivi, p. 110. 8.  Ivi, pp. 112-113.

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However, having found himself disoriented upon returning to the mortal world, having assayed the worldly futility of ideas: It seems that Plato was the first to take exception to the political ‘irrelevance’ of Ms new teaching, and he tried to modify the doctrine of ideas so that it would become useful for a theory of politics. But usefulness could be saved only by the idea of the good, since ‘good’ in the Greek vocabulary always means ‘good for’ or ‘fit’.9

With a barely discernible semantic shift, the beauty in the earlier dialogues becomes the Good in the Republic, whose goal, Arendt concludes, is not so much to present a new doctrine as to bridge the hiatus between the dimension of the hyperuranium, to which the philosopher is enraptured, and the world of men. The Platonic gesture sets in place that conflicting tension between philosophy and politics, the hegemony that the former tends to place over the latter, which, running through the entire history of the West, leads to an outcome of depoliticization that knows a decisive moment in the modern phase to then have its culmination in the twentieth century. So a longitudinal dynamic with respect to the historical development of the West as a whole. Arendt offers a small excursus of this path: Aristotle did not follow Plato, but even he held that the bios politikos in the last analysis was there for the sake of the bios theöretikos. […] Spinoza said in the very title of one of his political treatises that his ultimate aim in it was not political but the libertas philosophandi; and even Hobbes, who certainly was closer to political concerns than any other author of a political philosophy (and neither Machiavelli nor Bodin nor Montesquieu can be said to have been concerned with 9.  Ivi, p. 113. It must be said that here as elsewhere, Arendt performs one of her typical meta-narratives that are also contradictory according to her attention to an unrepresentable plurality.

98 philosophy), wrote his Leviathan in order to ward off the dangers of politics and to assure as much peace and tranquillity as was humanly possible.10

The ultimate depoliticization of late modernity is seen as the effect of the “common sense in retreat”11. In a paragraph from Vita Activa titled Introspection and the Loss of Commnon Sense, Arendt contends that “introspection […] must yield certainty, because here nothing is involved except what the mind has produced itself; nobody is interfering but the producer of the product”12. Modernity creates this space of absolute protection, in which man, each man, is in contact only with themselves, hermetically closed to any stimulus that may come from the world or from other men. While this closure has the advantage of ensuring an inviolable order that no unforeseen event, no insurgency can disturb, the problem that arises is that of moving from the certainty of self to the certainty of the existence of others and the world. It is precisely from the difficulty of going “from the mere consciousness of sensations […] into reality with its shapes, colors, forms and constellations”13, that particular modern theodicies arise, centered, Arendt notes, not on the demonstration of God’s existence, but on the demonstration of his goodness: “Descartes and Leibniz needed to prove not the existence of God, but his goodness”14. This is clearly seen in Descartes, whose doubt “does not concern the existence of a highest being, which, on the contrary, is taken for granted, but concerns his revelation, 10.  A. Arendt, Lectures on Kant ’s Political Philosophy, cit., p. 21. 11.  Arendt takes the expression from A.N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (1920), Cosimo Inc., New York 2007, p. 43, which Arendt quotes in The Human Condition, cit., p. 283. 12.  A. Arendt, The Human Condition, cit., p. 280. 13.  Ivi, p. 281. 14.  Ibidem.

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as given in biblical tradition. And his intentions with respect to man and world”15. According to Arendt, the Cartesian hypothesis of an evil Genius, is a kind of bogeyman whose function is to bring the rising center of all experience into the closed and protected space of the self; in this framework, “the goodness of the God of the theodicies, therefore, is strictly the quality of a deus ex machina; inexplicable goodness is ultimately the only thing that saves reality in Descartes’ philosophy”16. Arendt goes on to state that Cartesian introspection makes use “the nightmare of non-reality as a means of submerging all worldly objects into the steam of consciousness and its processes”17. Modern introspection, of which Cartesian meditations offer the clearest paradigm, is a one-way path, devoid of reversals, in which man sinks into himself without ever accessing a dimension that exceeds him. The highest ideal of knowledge is offered, in fact, by mathematics, not, however, understood as “the knowledge of ideal forms given outside of the mind but of forms produced by a mind which in this particular instance does not even need the stimulation – or, rather, the irritation – of the sense by objects other than itself”18. There are two consequences that Arendt stigmatizes. The first is the ultimate loss of the world and other men; the second is the assurance of an order, cosmological and political, which is inviolable since of hangs on a subject who wants to be absolute, complete and self-sufficient: Nothing could prepare our minds better for the eventual dissolution of matter into energy, of objects into a whirl of atomic occurrences, than the dissolution of objective real15.  Ibidem. 16.  Ivi, p. 282. 17.  Ibidem. 18.  Ibidem.

100 ity into subjective states of mind or, rather, into subjective mental processes. Second, the Cartesian method of securing certainty against universal doubt corresponded most precisely to the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the new physical science: though one cannot know truth as something given and disclosed, man can at least know what makes himself.19

What, then, goes astray on the part of man understood as cogitating substance – rather than as an incarnate, living, acting body – is common sense, the shared sense of reality. Better still, it undergoes a radical transformation: For common sense, which once had been the one by which all other sense, with their intimately sensations, were fitted into the common world, just as vision fitted man into the visible world, now become an inner faculty without any world relationship. This sense now was called common merely because it happened to be common to all. What men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds, and this they cannot have in common, strictly speaking; their faculty of reasoning can only happen to be the same in everybody. The fact that, given the problem of two plus two we all come out with the same answer, four, is henceforth the very model of common-sense reasoning.20

Well the inevitably abstracting trend of any philosophy would not escape an outcome of acosmism, with its annihilating effect for politics. It is a matter of reconstructing a space of convergence for men, for their encounter, even and especially polemical. It can then be said that the philosopher’s entire speculative journey – from the emphasis on the vita activa to the shift of emphasis on the life of the mind (also declined, as will be seen in a moment, not in a solipsistic key) – has been

19.  Ibidem. 20.  Ivi, p. 280. Emphasis added.

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driven by the need to open political theory to a dimension that exceeds the space of the self, the closed and private space of a living being that manages its actions in terms of costs and benefits. It becomes necessary for Arendt to push the political toward an “aesthetic” dimension, since it has to do with exteriority, with the perception of others and of a shared space. The ontological turn of his reflections does not, therefore, consist in the search for a hidden essence that the community should realize or cherish, but, quite otherwise, starting from the assumption that being is resolved entirely in its appearance, in the recovery of a dimension in which men are mutually exposed to an equal dialogical confrontation. Ontology (i.e., aesthetics: these are non-separable domains) must reconstruct this inter-being of men. It is only in this way that it is possible, according to Arendt, to respond to a crisis that is, simultaneously cultural, artistic and political. Art and politics have, in fact, in common the need for a public space in which to appear. The works of art “share with political ‘products’, words and deeds, the quality that they are in need of some public space where they can appear and be seen”21. Politics and art share the fact that they oppose the factory logic, that of continuous production of consumer objects with ephemeral existence: “seen against the background of political experiences and of activities which, if left to themselves, come and go without leaving any trace in the world, beauty is the very manifestation of imperishability”22. In conclusion: The common element connecting art and politics is that they both are phenomena of the public world.23

21.  A. Arendt, Between Past and Future, cit., p. 218. 22.  Ibidem. 23.  Ibidem.

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Modern introspection has dissolved precisely this space, which Arendt’s work aims to reconstruct. It is “love of the world”24 that directs her research, a dogged search for a logical onto hook for the actions and discourses of men. It is in light of this need that Arendt’s attention to the theme of understanding and its relationship to politics should be understood. It was in 1953 that she wrote the essay Understanding and Politics. For Arendt, understanding is not divorced from action, it is, on the contrary, an indispensable prerequisite of it, or, better yet, not something that precedes action by determining it, but is action itself in its least ostentatious and conspicuous aspect. First of all, the philosopher clears the field of any possible misunderstanding: the understanding she is talking about is neither scientific knowledge nor a philanthropic gesture comparable to forgiveness: Many people say that one cannot fight totalitarianism without understanding it. Fortunately this is not true; if it were, our case would he hopeless. Understanding, as distinguished from having correct information and scientific knowledge, is a complicated process which never produces unequivocal results. It is an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world.25

24.  See E. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, cit. 25.  H. Arendt, Understanding and Politics, in “Partisan Review”, XX, n. 4, 1953, pp. 377-392, now in Ead., Essays in Understanding. Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, Schocken Books, New York 1994, pp. 307-327: pp. 307308. The close link between understanding and totalitarianism shows how for Arendt the latter constitutes the negative cast from which to infer the truth of politics: “l’idea di totalitarismo rimane costantemente lo sfondo oscuro su cui si ritaglia in assoluta opposizione il concetto arendtiano di politica, la negazione non dialettica e non conciliabile che fa risaltare in contra-

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So it is a matter, first of all, of identifying a form of intellectual activity that is distinct from scientific and philosophical argumentation, which with its necessary process of reduction to unity leaves out of itself the “diversity” the “mutability” from which instead a political discourse cannot prescind. Second, and conversely, through this intellectual activity, it is necessary to seek a reconciliation with the world that is not akin to a form of forgiveness, indulgence, rapprochement or appeasement, but rather a rediscovery of our “being in the world”. Understanding does not mean forgiving26, but finding a grounding in the world: understanding “is the specifically human way of being alive; for every single person needs to be reconciled to a world into which he was born a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness, he always remains a stranger”27. Understanding is thus a mode of worldly acting, of that acting which is distinct from producing since it brings into being something original and original, an absolute beginning irreducible to all that precedes it as a cause. Since each man is such a beginning – an openness to the unpredictable, the “different” and the “mutable” – then, despite the absolute exceptionality and incommensurability of the totalitarianisms that have plagued the twentieth century, each man “may have

sto, negando la negazione, la rappresentazione positiva di un agire politico autentico”, L. Bazzicalupo, Hannah Arendt, cit., p. 69. 26.  Here Arendt enters a very lively debate in postwar Europe, triggered by the demand made by some in 1960s Germany to see the crimes that had bloodied the preceding decades condoned. She asserts the imprescriptibility of such crimes as early as her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), cit. Of this debate, Enrica Lisciani-Petrini offers an accurate picture, particularly centered on Jankélévitch’s intransigent position, in her Charis. Saggio su Jankélévitch, Mimesis, Milano 2012, see pp. 81-118. 27.  A. Arendt, Understanding and Politics, cit., p. 308.

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enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality”28. Once again it is important to emphasize that the sensus communis of which Arendt speaks has nothing to do with a comfortable and anesthetized vulgata. On the contrary, it is what always remains unpredictable since it is inherent in the irreducible novum that each human being is. It is on the basis of this common sense that there is a link between understanding and politics: if the essence of all, and in particular of political, action is to make a new beginning, then understanding becomes the other side of action, namely, that form of cognition, distinct from many others, by which acting men (and not men who are engaged in contemplating some progressive or doomed course of history) eventually can come to terms with what irrevocably happened and be reconciled with what unavoidably exists.29

Two points should be emphasized. The first relates to the fact that this discourse on understanding is inscribed in the dimension of incommensurability opened up by the totalitarian catastrophe. That is, the very fact that the phenomenon of totalitarianism eludes all cognition obliges us to a commitment to understanding. Understanding and judging fulfill their indispensable function precisely when the meters of understanding and judgment that come from tradition collapse. The implosion of the classical categories of political thought means that precisely an inactual or utopian theory30 as the Arendtian one takes the shape of exactly that reservoir of thought that has a political role in special emergencies, as that range of “re-

28.  Ivi, p. 321. 29.  Ivi, pp. 321-322. 30.  In the sense specified above, see Chapter II.

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flections that will inevitably arise in political emergencies”31. The second point is the theme of imagination, which, as will be seen in a moment, will return central to the study of Kant and the faculty of judgment. Dealing with understanding in the terms we have seen, Arendt identifies imagination as a key resource for dealing with the political crisis of her time. It is anything but an arbitrary reverie: “To distinguish imagination from fancy and to mobilize its power does not mean that understanding of human affairs becomes ‘irrational’”32. Conceived as an exercise in enlarging the mind, able to accommodate within itself the opinions of others and to put some distance between itself and the various objects it considers so as not to become too involved in them, imagination is at one with the activity of understanding: Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair. This distancing of some things and bridging the abysses to others is part of the dialogue of understanding, for whose purposes direct experience establishes too close a contact and mere knowledge erects artificial barriers. Without this kind of imagination, which actually is understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world.33

It is very important to emphasize the place that the Good occupies in this approach. A few pages ago we gave an account of the semantic shift that Arendt identifies in Plato, when the Idea, at first associated with the beautiful, passes to represent 31.  H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind. One, cit., p. 192. 32.  H. Arendt, Understanding and Politics, cit., pp. 322-323. 33.  Ivi, p. 323.

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the Good. Plato and Kant represent a kind of frame, the two points, beginning and end, within which “political philosophy” has been able to move, certain of a coincidence between beauty and the Good: that which is maximally resplendent is also a point of moral orientation. Well, Kant represents, according to Arendt, precisely the breakdown of this organicity between the good and the beautiful. Indeed, as has been appropriately noted, una prima profonda discontinuità è segnata dal passaggio al moderno quando emerge la questione stessa dell’estetica, nel momento in cui viene meno lo spessore ontologico, naturale e sociale della bellezza e del bene e la soggettività umana emerge nella dissoluzione di questa ontologia.34

On the other hand, still in the modern, “il romanticismo hegeliano toglie la frattura estetica nella prospettiva etico-storica dell’eroe”, who “cammina all’unisono dello Spirito del popolo e lo rappresenta”. Romanticism aspires to perfect or­ ganicity, “grazie all’affermazione di una Verità/Ragione/Natura che sorregge l’individualità eccezionale riassorbendola nella sua dialettica”35. Well, contemporary democracy must be thought of, starting with Arendt, first and foremost in the dismissal of that organic unity (“Verità/Ragione/Natura”) that still informed the extreme phase of the modern. It is this emptiness of foundation that distinguishes the Arendtian model from the, in many ways similar, model of Habermas: the dialogicality thought of by the latter still has a support plane constituted by a rationality that can always permeate the deliberations of men. In contrast, for Arendt no foundation guarantees the encounter between 34.  L. Bazzicalupo, Estetica e politica nella figura dell’eroe, in “Filosofia Politica”, n. 1, 2014, pp. 77-98: p. 80. 35.  Ivi, pp. 80-81.

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free and equal actors. The latter must expose each other, and expose themselves precisely to the groundlessness to which they are surrendered. Their gesture of mutual exposure is itself the form of subjectification that must respond to the lack of foundation proper to democracy. It is thus an aesthetic and performative paradigm, in which the subject’s calculation, the prescient reasoning that tallies up the risks and benefits inherent in an initiative, has no place. Free action is such precisely insofar as it exposes itself to an unpredictable outcome, insofar as it is not directed toward the protection of life36. There’s something heroic about it. It thus creates, in a way that is only seemingly paradoxical, a link between heroism and the constitution of common sense: “sensus communis rispetto al quale l’eroe è dentro e fuori”37. Action produces aisthesis itself, that is, a discontinuity, a rupture within the “imperceptible” order in which it is produced. For Arendt it is about saving phenomena: non sembri paradossale l’invocazione di una Bild quasi platonica, in un quadro di così grande precarietà e di conclamata immanenza. Pensare ancora un’idea/figura/forma eroica, nelle coordinate mediali di oggi quando il fenomeno sembra perduto o oscurato, promette di salvarlo salvando le storie passate e future dove sarà riconosciuto.38

This is precisely the path that Arendt opens up for us, which “pensa in modo eroico e agonico la politica come modus del­ l’agire”39.

36.  “Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world”, H. Arendt, Between Past and Future, cit., p. 156. 37.  L. Bazzicalupo, Estetica e politica nella figura dell’eroe, cit., p. 85. 38.  Ivi, p. 87. 39.  Ibidem.

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Here then is the relationship between hero and common sense, between political gesture and doxa. The hero, the free man who exposes himself in the public square, breaks common sense, but at the same time constitutes it, creating, by his gesture or speech, a sensitive interruption; he thus elicits an emotional and cognitive response that in turn recognizes and creates the hero as such. Heroism and mundanity, politics and common sense are thus shown as planes not simply opposed and mutually exclusive, but as intertwined in a dynamic of mutual transcendence. Arendt has always insisted on the importance of foundation, on the indispensability of gestures capable not simply of overthrowing a status quo, but of establishing something new and lasting40: it is about the very need to shape political subjectification: la forma del soggetto politico ‘eroico’ coincide dunque con la scissione della forma del sé, con la de-indentificazione delle verità che lo hanno costituito: in questo senso è sempre anarchica, rispetto a ogni potere archico o totalizzante, e meta politico è il gesto che ne mostra la contingenza e apre lo spazio alla rivedibilità politica. La sua verità evento fa esplodere la verità della città rivelando un antagonismo strutturale destinato a scontrarsi con la pretesa dell’Ordine di essere tutto, di saturare lo spazio delle possibilità.41

Arendt’s work on political judgment represents the densest moment of her aesthetic-political reflection. Focusing particularly on Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, she emphasizes there attention to these elements: “the particular, whether a fact of nature or an event in history; the faculty of judgment as the faculty of man’s mind to deal with it; sociability of men as the

40.  Especially in On Revolution, cit. 41.  L. Bazzicalupo, Estetica e politica nella figura dell’eroe, cit., p. 90.

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condition of the functioning of this faculty, that is, the insight that men are dependent on their fellow men not only because of their having a body and physical needs but precisely for their mental faculties – these topics, all of them of eminent political significance – that is”; all themes, Arendt immediately adds, “of eminent political significance”42. At the convergence of these three points lies the very origin of politics, that is, the plurality of men meeting on a public stage, without their differential plurality being reabsorbed, subsumed into a representative concept. In fact, “the faculty of judgment concerns the particular that ‘as such’, compared to the universal, contains something contingent, while thought has to do with the universal43. Particular, judgment and sociability delineate, in their chiasma, a dimension that discards the dynamic of reductio ad unum characteristic of the representational procedure. The object of which we judge, in fact, that of which we say “this is beautiful, this is good,” is not subsumed under a general category. The this resists, its particularity and contingency are irreducible. But, on the other hand, what interests us most is the subject of this judgment itself, finds itself frayed, open, stretched toward a space that exceeds it. Arendt, in the wake of Kant, argues that thought itself, far from being a solipsistic activity that necessitates a distancing from others, on the contrary demands their presence. This is precisely the resource found in Kant, this radical sociability through which common sense can be rehabilitated. If the first two Critiques dealt with man as mankind, part of nature, and as a reasonable being subject to the laws of reason that he gives himself, finally the third Critique deals

42.  H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, cit., p. 14. 43.  See ivi p. 13, where Arendt refers to a passage from I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Id. Werke V, Reimer, Berlin 1913, § 67, pp. 401-405: p. 404.

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with the “Men = earthbound creatures, living in communities, endowed with common sense, sensus communis, a community sense; not autonomous, needing each other’s company even for thinking”44. Multiplicity, then, settles at the very heart of subjectivity. As can be seen, this is the point of maximum tension in Arendtian discourse. The “subject” of enunciation turns out to be a shared space. Arendt appeals, to operate this forcing of the subjective dimension, to Kantian notions of “impartiality” and “enlarged mentality”. Both are shown as implications of what Kant calls critical thinking. Certainly critical thinking consists in thinking for oneself, making use of one’s own reason as a weapon to demand that all prejudices, dogmas and opinions give an account of themselves, show their validity. However, “to think critically applies not only to doctrines and concepts one receives from others, to the prejudices and traditions one inherits; it is precisely by applying critical standards to one’s own thought that one learns the art of critical thought”45. This activity of (self-)criticism is only possible if one is able to consider one’s own judgments with impartiality. And this impartiality is possible only through an encounter with others, an encounter that is able to make me distance from myself. This encounter is not only that which takes place in public, but it is, first of all, that which is made possible by the faculty of imagination, which consists in welcoming in me the views of others. Imagination is the faculty that makes my thinking – which other minds would be a vain and sterile soliloquy – a dialogue. It is on this faculty that the common sense of which Arendt speaks is founded. Kant defines it this way: Unter dem sensus communis aber muss man die Idee eines gemeinschaftlichen Sinnes, d.i. eines Beurteilungsvermögens verstehen, welches in seiner Reflexion auf die Vorstellungs44.  H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, cit., p. 27. 45.  Ivi, p. 42.

111 art jedes andern in Gedanken (a priori) Rücksicht nimmt, um gleichsam an die gesamte Menschenvernunft sein Urteil zu halten, und dadurch der Illusion zu entgehen, die aus subjektiven Privatbedingungen, welche leicht für objektiv gehalten werden könnten, auf das Urteil nachteiligen Einfluß haben würde.46

Taking account a priori of the thought of others means that the relation does not overtake an already independently constituted core of thought; on the contrary, thought itself – the faculty to which tradition has imputed the most jealous custody of identity – discovers itself here as originally plural. We could say that multiplicity is the transcendental of thought: Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all others are open to inspection. Hence, critical thinking while still a solitary business has not cut itself off from ‘all others’. By force of imagination it makes the others present and thus moves potentially in a space which is public, open to all sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kant’s world citizen. To think with the enlarged mentality – that means you train your imagination to go visiting.47

The impartiality of judgment consists in this enlargement of ‘my’ thinking made possible by the faculty of imagination through which I welcome points of view far removed from my own. It is not critical distance with respect to the object being judged, but is first and foremost a distance with respect to the very subject who enunciates the judgment; distance, therefore, with respect to that reverse of the sensus communis which Kant calls sensus privatus and which, defining it also as a “logischer Eigensinn” he likens to madness48. 46.  I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, cit., p. 293. 47.  H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Two, cit., p. 257. 48.  See I. Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1797), in Id., Werke VII, Reimer, Berlin 1917, pp. 117-335: p. 219.

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The expanded thought questions the concept of autonomy of the subject, of this subject being founded and known as autonomous: “To think, according to Kant’s understanding of enlightenment, means Selbstdenken, to think for oneself, ‘which is the maxim of a never-passive reason. To be given to such passivity is called prejudice’, and enlightenment is, first of all, liberation from prejudice”49. One is all the more “subject” and “autonomous” the more one is ready to move away from the self. Judgment is an exercise in intersubjectivity, in cracking the private limits of thought, and in exposing oneself to that a priori of thought itself constituted by others. Imagination, “the ability to make present what is absent”50, is fundamental in the exercise of judgment, because it is through it that it is possible to gain a critical distance toward the object being judged, but also with respect to oneself. In this regard, Arendt recalls the example of Kant himself, who wrote as a spectator not immediately involved in the events of the French Revolution: Only what touches, affects, one in representation, when one can no longer be affected by immediate presence – when one is uninvolved, like the spectator who was uninvolved in the actual doings of the French Revolution – can be judged to be right or wrong […]. One then speaks of judgment and no longer of taste because, though it still affects one like a matter of taste, one now has, by means of representation, established the proper distance, the remoteness or uninvolvedness or disinterestedness, that is requisite for approbation and disapprobation, for evaluating something at its proper worth. By removing the object, one has established the conditions for impartiality.51

49.  H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, cit., p. 43. The quote is from I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, cit., p. 294. 50.  Ivi, p. 65. 51.  Ivi, p. 67.

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The gap between Arendt’s early work, which focused on action and thus on diving fully into the political arena, and the last phase of her work, which is more reflective and where critical distance is favored, is often emphasized52. In fact, even this research showed53 how Arendt, in theorizing acting, thought of a reciprocal presence devoid of mediation, an in-person presence of individuals in the public square: the difference between this thinking of in-person presence and representational thinking, which summons the object while maintaining it in its absence, is then evident. Moreover, we have already given an account of the dynamic by which the what is converted into the who, and we have seen that it is a

52.  See for example R. Beiner, Hannah Arendt on Judging, in H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, cit., pp. 89-156: p. 91: “Surveying Arendt’s work as a whole, we can see that she offers not one but two theories of judgment. […] In her writings up until the 1971 essay, Thinking and Moral Considerations, judgment is considered from the point of view of the vita activa; in her writings from that essay onward, judgment is considered from the point of view of the life of the mind. The emphasis shifts from the representative thought and enlarged mentality of political agents to the spectatorship and retrospective judgment of historians and storytellers. The blind poet, at a remove from the action and therefore capable of disinterested reflection, now becomes the emblem of judging”. On the other hand, the theme of thought is a central plank of all of Arendt’s work and one that has developed in different and branching directions. See in this regard R.B. Bernstein, Arendt on Thinking, in D. Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, cit., pp. 277-292: p. 277: “it is commonly believed that Arendt started thinking about thinking only late in her career. But the truth is that Arendt’s concern with thinking always exerted a powerful influence on the character of her own passionate thinking. The more closely one examines her writings, the more striking it becomes that thinking is a pervasive theme in her entire corpus. I want to review some of the highlights of her thinking about thinking (or more accurately her thinking through thinking); then I intend to step back in order to see how the various threads of her reflections are woven together”. 53.  Cfr. supra, Chapter II, The Inadequacy of the polis.

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dynamic not only of the constitution of individuals into subjects, but also of the empowerment of these same subjects. However, it is worth noting that the exercise of judgment requires not only the “removal of the object” that we saw earlier, but, in a sense, also the removal of the subject itself. The dimension of common sense is, after all, a space of equidistance from the object and the subject; or rather an alternative space to this dualism. It is a dimension, that of intersubjective common sense, founded by way of practice rather than theory, or, rather, constituted in the indistinction of these two terms54. In fact, in the same way as action, which elicits the passage from the oikos to the agora, judgment produces the exit from the private space of contemplative thought toward a dimension in which plurality is an aprioristic given. In both cases there is, certainly, an empowerment, an “enlargement” of the subject; but likewise, as seen in the first part of this section, there is risk for the self, insofar as it is its own. The aesthetic (or ecstatic) dimension of common sense enhances subjective

54.  So, as we have seen, the concept of common sense develops progressively during Arendt’s reflection. If in the earliest phase of her work, focused on the theme of totalitarianism, it was valid as an opposition to the sense of unreality of a totally ideological regime, later it acquires new facets:“il sensus communis è quindi in qualche modo diverso da come la stessa Arendt lo aveva designato sempre con il termine di senso comune, parlando della sua crisi come guida e orientamento in relazione al Novecento e al totalitarismo: in quel luogo si trattava di senso comune, come comune buon senso, che genericamente è l’insieme delle regole non sapute, irriflesse, introitate che fanno da limite e misura alla prassi quotidiana, “ragione passiva”. Qui nel discorso mutuato da Kant, rimane il concetto affascinante di limite, di misura quasi istintiva che autoregola l’eccesso alla ragionevolezza della prudenza e della fronesis, ma si accentua l’orientamento attivo del “senso comunitario” gemeinschaftlicher Sinn, cui presiedono le massime del pensare da sé, del mettersi col pensiero al posto di ogni altro (la mentalità ampia) e la massima della coerenza, dell’essere d’accordo con se stessi”, L. Bazzicalupo, Hannah Arendt, cit., p. 305.

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autonomy, but this autonomy is given, now, only through the transcendental of others: when I judge, says Arendt, “I still speak with my own voice and I do not count noses in order to arrive at what I think is right. But my judgment is no longer subjective either, in the sense that I arrive at my conclusions by taking only myself into account”55.

55.  H. Arendt, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy (1966), in Ead., Responsibility and Judgment, Random House Inc., New York 2003, pp. 49146: p. 141.

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VI

The Creation of Democracy Nancy’s Theory of Judgment

It is in the wake of the path opened by Arendt that we would also like to inscribe our reading of Nancy. The German philosopher understood that, in a historical phase of moral and categorical emptiness, what saves phenomena can only be a performative politics, an acted politics. On the one hand, “l’apparire antagonista intacca la rappresentazione”, “interrompe un sistema di verità”1, and shakes off the anesthesia of the everyday; on the other hand, the gesture of irruption triggers a shared aisthesis, a contagion or “imitazione metonimica”. The Arendtian aesthetic approach, in short, aims to recover the concreteness of the world, which modernity – and all the more so postmodernism – loses in the game of interpretations, and, at the same time, points to intersubjectivity as the resource capable of reactivating politics. Nancy’s theoretical position is very different from the Arendtian one, but it is in this order of problems that we would like to inscribe the reading of democracy that he proposes. That is why, in the following pages, his thought will be interrogated 1.  L. Bazzicalupo, Estetica e politica nella figura dell’eroe, in “Filosofia Politica”, n. 1, 2014, pp. 77-98: pp. 88, 89.

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starting from the form/democracy pair. First, however, we will proceed to explain the meaning of the expression “creation of democracy”. The formula “creation of democracy” suggests two important aspects of Nancy’s work on the political. Consistent with the meaning that the term “creation” takes on in Nancy – not the deliberate act of a subject-person who, in this activity, detaches himself from a product, but rather the process of deconstructing every transcendent principle that is supposedly separate from its work – by such a formula we refer to a collective dimension that has no foundation, existing only as a systematic and never accomplished dismantling of any transcendent principle. Nancy refuses to tie democracy to a natural given (equality of men), or to a historical process (emancipation), or to an abstract principle (justice), or to a subject (State, class, people). Creation of democracy means that nothing sustains democracy itself2. It is the operationalization of a “principle” that only exists as partage. Consequently, we speak of the creation of democracy and no longer of the political since, in Nancy “democracy” is the political name that no longer designates a political regime, but precisely an outflow from the political, something of the order of momentum, of creative energy. Where Arendt works on the repoliticization of the contemporary world, in reverse, for Nancy it is a matter of removing the world and life from the political: “democracy” is the (nevertheless political) 2.  Political creation as understood here, therefore, has nothing to do with the concept of the same name, which, taking shape within rigidly normative perspectives, conceive of political creation in the same way as progress, that is, as an “increase” of emancipation to be reworked from the project of modernity. The exhaustive monograph E. Profumi, Sulla creazione politica. Critica filosofica e rivoluzione, Editori Riuniti, Roma 2013, which, consistent with its own assumptions, programmatically excludes approaches of “metafisicapolitica che fanno dell’idea astratta della possibilità assoluta dell’Essere il motore primo dell’importante distinzione tra la politica e il politico”, p. 10.

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name for this gesture, this momentum that subtracts singularities from the political, in view of an exposure to the (nothingness of) meaning, and a liberation of its circulation. The second aspect one would like to suggest with this expression is the fact that it simultaneously dodges both the naturalist, Rousseauian paradigm and the artificialist paradigm. While it is clear that the Nancyan democracy, devoid of root or principle, does not restore any natural essence, it should also be reiterated that it does not bring into being a telos that awaits in the more or less near future; it is anarchic and atelic, devoid of both origin and destination. The creation of democracy is the dismissal of the typically modern model, according to which politics is exclusively artifice, the imposition of a form on an inert matter. It addresses what in Nancy as in Derrida takes the name of “à venir” which is distinguished from the future precisely because it escapes the logic of the project, it eludes a grasping or shaping. Creation of democracy means the exposure of life to its absence of foundation and given form, an absence that is, immediately, an injunction to give infinite form and infinite shapes to life itself. To approach the aesthetic dimension of democracy in Nancy, we will start precisely from the analysis of this injunction.

1. Kant and the Categorical Imperative We have seen that the Kant on whom Arendt focuses most is the one who, in the Third Critique, analyzes the faculty of judgment. Nancy, on the other hand, in his 1983 book L’impératif catégorique3, reads primarily the Critique of Practical 3.  J.-L. Nancy, L’impératif catégorique, Flammarion, Paris 1983; I will quote the Italian translation by F. Palese, L’imperativo categorico, Besa, Nardò 2018.

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Reason, thereby disrupting the intersubjective framework of Arendt’s thought: the categorical imperative is, in fact, read by him as something that exceeds the subject, exposing him to a passivity that for him is precisely imperative; man’s freedom is linked to the obligation that binds him to this relationship with something that exceeds him and deposes him as a subject. In this way the question of freedom, which Nancy would put on the subject a few years later, in L’expérience de la liberté4, is closely intertwined with this reading of Kant. Freedom is not conceivable as an attribute, a property of the subject, but, on the contrary, as something that opens up the subject, exposes it to something to which it in effect subjects itself. The link between the imperativeness of Kantian law and freedom had already been appropriately pointed out by Esposito, who in his introduction to the 1988 book writes: non soltanto la libertà non appartiene al soggetto che se ne fa interprete, ma lo eccede al punto di contestarne ogni pretesa di autonoma consistenza. Non solo, e non tanto, sotto il profilo gnoseologico – come aveva sottolineato Heidegger privilegiando lo schematismo recettivo dell’immaginazione rispetto all’attività logica della coscienza – ma soprattutto sotto quello pratico. È da questo punto di vista – centrato soprattutto sulla seconda Critica – che assume rilievo la questione dell’imperativo categorico alla quale Nancy aveva dedicato un libro strettamente contiguo e propedeutico [L’esperienza della libertà].5

In the first lines of her essay on Kant, Nancy hints at a link between freedom and imperativeness, in the sense that “le verità imperative non devono avere il carattere del vincolo, dell’este-

4.  J.-L. Nancy, L’expérience de la liberté, Galilée, Paris 1988. 5.  R. Esposito, Libertà in comune, in J.-L. Nancy, L’esperienza della libertà, Einaudi, Torino 2000, pp. VII-XXXV: p. XIX.

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riorità, né legarsi all’esercizio di un’ingiunzione, di un vincolo e di una sottomissione”6. The principle of my action cannot come from outside, as if it were a command: this would suddenly nullify my freedom. The “subject” has been progressively deprived of its spontaneity by a series of instances external to it, which have emptied its freedom: si apre uno scarto, abissale, tra ciò che da una parte si continua a chiamare bizzarramente ‘soggetto’ e che viene rappresentato spogliato della sua spontaneità dall’economia, dalla storia, dall’inconscio, dalla scrittura, dalla tecnica, e dall’altra la Libertà, che è in effetti il vero concetto metafisico del soggetto – al quale in fin dei conti, in nome della nostra libertà, neppure sappiamo più di assoggettarci.7

The categorical imperative adheres in full to the subject, or, rather, to its allocutor, that – or whom – it is directed towards. It adheres to it not as something superimposed on it from outside, but as the immeasurable excess to which a singularity is constitutively exposed. For, as we know, the categorical imperative does not prescribe anything, it is not possible to fulfill it, with respect to it one can only remain in default. Nancy emphasizes that the imperative exists because evil exists, understood as the possibility and disposition to transgress the moral law8. The latter arises as an imperative precisely because it is addressed to someone – or something – that can violate the law (not because of a “natural” predisposition, otherwise the law’s injunction would be useless and absurd, but in the sense that the possibility of violating the law must also

6.  J-L. Nancy, L’imperativo categorico, cit., p. 18. 7.  Ibidem. 8.  On the theme of evil in Kant, with reference to the law-freedom-will node, see the intense pages of R. Esposito in Communitas. Origine e destino della comunità, cit., pp. 60-82.

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be imputed to man)9. This is not to say that the imperative is external to the law, as if it has only pedagogical value or corrective. Imperative and law are the same thing, la legge non ha luogo che come imperativo. Tant’è che l’imperativo non prescrive di agire secondo la legge, perché ‘la legge’, in questo senso, non è data, né dall’imperativo né anteriormente né esteriormente a esso. L’imperativo prescrive di agire legalmente, nel senso di legislativamente.10

In this way man’s properly rational core is discovered as an instance to act: pure reason is immediately practical, since it is originally prescribed to law-making action11. Law, in fact, stands as a duty. It is precisely this that distinguishes it from law, which “non dice mai ‘agisci’. Il diritto enuncia una regola e vi sottopone il singolo caso, ma in quanto tale non comanda”12. Similarly, it is distinguished from order, as “quest’ultimo vincola all’applicazione di una legge con la quale, di per se stesso, non si identifica: viceversa la presuppone riconosciuta, quale che sia (per esempio, la legge del più forte)”13.

9.  See J-L. Nancy, L’imperativo categorico, cit., pp. 23-24. 10.  Ivi, p. 22. Law, in other words, exists as a voice that enunciates the imperative: since, voice consists in its resonance (see J-L. Nancy, Le partage des voix, Galilée, Paris 1982, and Id., À l’écoute, Galilée, Paris, 2002), law is simultaneous with the mutual appearance of singularities. Law prescribes multiplicity, and the latter, in turn, is given as imperative. 11.  Needless to reiterate how Nancy’s work on Kant, as on any other author, is never strictly philological, so the accuracy of Nancy’s reconstruction matters little here. It is possible, however, to say that for the German philosopher the foundational moment of reason is not the logical but the practical. On this point, see L. Imperato, La ragione ricondotta all’intelletto? La critica di Jacobi a Kant e le funzioni della ragione, in T. Dini, S. Principe (eds.), Jacobi in discussione, Franco Angeli, Milano 2012, pp. 65-81. 12.  Ivi, p. 25. 13.  Ivi, p. 26.

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As a duty, the imperative is perceived as something that is said, or, rather, as something that comes, from an outside that disrupts the supposed steadfastness and autonomy of a subject: l’imperativo non appartiene alla natura del soggetto, ma è ciò che, benché simile a un soggetto, ne eccede, nel senso più forte, lo statuto: esso appartiene alla condizione di possibilità di una ragione che risulta per se stessa pratica. Precisiamo: la ragione risulta pratica per se stessa, ma non è per se stessa che risulta tale (essa non si “rivela’); al contrario, ciò le sopravviene, come un fatto, come un factum rationis di cui essa non è il soggetto.14

Here then is the trait of union with Arendt. Reason is not substance, it is nothing in itself, it results practical for itself only in the sense that it responds to the admonition to act. Praxis then, as seen in Arendt, does not transcend reason, does not add to it: la praxis per Kant (che ripropone, al riguardo, la tradizione aristotelica) non è tanto l’ordine delle azioni che dovrebbero essere sottomesse a delle valutazioni e a delle norme, ma è soprattutto l’ordine dell’agire stesso in quanto si impone come ordine della ragione e impone così la praxis, cioè l’azione il cui risultato non è distinto dall’agente.15

One sees then the contiguity between the operations of Arendt and Nancy. Just as Arendt works on the faculty of judgment to discover in the intimacy of the subject something that already constitutively extricates it, demonstrating that already thought is “in itself” a communal activity16, so Nancy, analyz14.  Ivi, pp. 27-28. 15.  Ivi, p. 28. 16.  It is especially R. Esposito who emphasizes how the premise of Kantian work is the axiom of the communitarian character of thought: with Kant, Esposito writes, it comes to light that “la comunità […] non è uno dei tanti contenuti possibili della filosofia; e neanche, precisamente, un suo problema:

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ing the categorical imperative rather than the third Critique, finds in the very heart of subjectivity something that erodes it to its foundations. The specularity between the two authors, however, is interrupted here: Arendt lingers on a substantive and intersubjective plane, a plane in which judgment, like action before it, enables the transit from the private dimension of the oikos to the public dimension of the agora; in Nancy this very passage makes no sense, since the immeasurable to which reason is exposed digs a furrow in it that renders the inside and the outside, theory and praxis, indiscernible. Indeed, reason is not given, but must always make itself: in questo modo, e per la prima volta nella sua storia, la ragione non consiste più in una razionalità data (quaggiù o nell’aldilà) rispetto alla quale bisognerebbe misurare gli atti, ma si confonde in quanto ragion pura pratica, con il dovere a priori di essere – cioè di agire – ciò che essa è: ragion pura pratica.17

Nancy, projecting on the German philosopher a specificity of his own thought, reads an existentialism in Kant insofar as the logos is not given once and for all, but must always put itself into being historically, in praxis18. In the deepest core of Kant’s work, the apex moment of the modern construction of

ma la sua stessa forma, dal momento che il pensiero, anche nella modalità più ‘singolare’, non assume senso che dall’orizzonte comune in cui comunque si situa”, R. Esposito, Communitas, cit., pp. 60-61. 17.  Ibidem. 18.  On Nancy’s existentialism see F. Neyrat, Le communisme existentiel de Jean-Luc Nancy, Lignes, Paris 2013. More generally, on this precise sense of the term “existentialism”, one may recall the commentary that MerleauPonty, in the wake of Hyppolite, made on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. See M. Merleau-Ponty L’existentialisme chex Hegel, in Id., Sens et non-sens, Gallimard, Paris 1996 (19481), pp. 79-87.

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the theoretical subject, he discovers a reason ordered to action19, deposed as a punctual and abstract dimension: L’imperativo categorico fa dell’azione un fine. […] Ma poiché questo fine è incondizionato, non può presentarsi come una necessità tratta da una precedente legge – per esempio dalla natura della ragione. […] L’azione libera come fine non è altro che un cominciamento, un’iniziativa o un’inizialità senza fine (come si sa Kant definisce la libertà come il potere di co-

19.  In this sense, there has been talk of an archi-ethics in Nancy, which is not a theory of justice at all, but rather coincides with the original co-equal nature of imperative and freedom: “Nancy’s ‘archi-ethics’ of the groundless resistance to ontological reduction and his challenge to the measure of justice leads him to propose that justice is a matter of ‘revolutionary politics’. In the absence of any discourse of history in which justice would be the incessant correction of implementations of law, the ‘interminability’ of freedom and community is the sporadic reinauguration of justice itself. Each demand for it and challenge to it (re)creates the condition of justice in terms of the difference of singularities on each of their irreducible and incomparable occasions. Freedom is always the beginning (not an established end of the discourse and praxis of freedom), and in this respect can only be ‘taken’ through the assertion of freedom itself. Hence, on the one hand, freedom is not ‘given’ as an award or deserved right. On the other hand, it can only be ‘taken’, not in the sense that it has been seized from others who possess it, but rather in the sense that, in trying to seize it, one inexorably expresses one’s own groundless state of existence. Freedom, then, is this incessant seizing that produces that which it strives to seize. This politics of the groundless and nonderivable freedom is itself the network of such seizures of the speech that circulates sense through the public space, thereby providing a configured dimension within which sharing occurs. Therefore, Nancy provides neither a ‘theory of justice’ nor a method for assessing competing theories. Instead, he is fixated on the groundlessness of human existence that enables justice to be in question in the first instance. Moreover, the archi-ethical imperative putting justice discursively into question is accomplished precisely because freedom itself requires it”, B.C. Hutchens, Archi-ethics, Justice, and the Suspension of History in the Writing of JeanLuc Nancy, in P. Gratton, M.-E. Morin (eds.), Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking. Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense, Suny Press, Albany 2012, pp. 129-142: p. 140.

126 minciare da sé) neppure è inscritta nel senso di preinscritta: essa è ingiunta. La ragione o la razionalità della ragione (forse così si avvia la sua decostruzione) fa posto a un’ingiunzione.20

Reason, which in modernity was intended to be one, univocal, planted in itself and as such free, turns out to be passive with respect to an injunction, and it turns out to be free precisely insofar as it is exposed to this injunction. The injunction of the imperative divides reason: it “applica, congiunge alla ragione la prescrizione di un’azione libera”21. Reason turns out, then, to be demultiplied, no longer one or even univocal, since it is unbalanced toward a practical dimension that exceeds it: “l’ingiunzione imperativa congiunge assolutamente la ragione a ciò che assolutamente la eccede”22. The praxis toward which reason is originally moved is not within its availability, not its power or choice; in this sense the imperative imposes itself as a fact, factum rationis, with respect to which reason is passive: la ragione è affetta dall’imperativo. Il che vuol dire anche che esso la umilia […] ma soprattutto vuol dire che esso le giunge, come a una materia passiva, dall’esterno, da un esterno che eccede ogni passività e tuttavia non si confonde con l’attività 20.  J-L. Nancy, L’imperativo categorico, cit., p. 29. 21.  Ibidem. 22.  Ivi, p. 30. See J. Gilbert-Walsh, Broken Imperatives. The Ethical Dimension of Nancy’s Thought, in “Philosophy and Social Criticism”, n. 2, 2000, pp. 29-50: p. 31 “Being-in-common happens as a kind of interruptive ‘event’, an event which is not merely a condition for the possibility of concrete communication but this very communication itself. This interruptive event whereby being-in-common ‘happens’ is none other than the imperative address par excellence – but such that the sens of the imperative must be heard otherwise, and heard otherwise each time it is heard”. This nexus, discussed at length in the essay just cited, between appearance and injunction to act (i.e., reciprocity itself as an original injunction) goes a long way toward refuting readings that reproach Nancy with a transcendentalism that lacks outlets on the pragmatic plane.

127 (perché l’attività è prescritta, è il fine). L’imperativo è inattivo, è imperativo, appunto. Esso eccede la coppia dell’attivo e del passivo, dello spontaneo e del recettivo.23

An original heterogeneity settles, then, in the core of subjectivity. Reason finds itself inhabited by something that it does not control, and to which it is exposed.

2. The Sublime and the Form In Nancy’s reading of Kant, the surplus of the imperative is symmetrical to the feeling of the sublime24. In truth, that of the sublime – which Nancy prefers to call “emotion” rather than feeling – is a theme that has such a large space in Nancy’s thought, constituting its background and fundamental motive, that it will barely be possible in this brief note to suggest its scope. It is very significant that Arendt does not focus on the sublime but only on the beautiful. Kant, in fact, represents for her the moment when aesthetics as such emerges, through the rupture of the organic unity that held beauty, justice and nature together; out of this rupture arises human subjectivity in its autonomy. Now, for the philosopher, the repoliticization of the world has as its prerequisite that the unfolding of intersubjectivity can refound that organic unity, and can do so, precisely, according to the model of beauty, understood, platonically, as a form that resists the vanishing to which all entities are subjected. According to Arendt, in fact, “Seen against the background of political experiences and of activities which, if left

23.  Ivi, p. 31. 24.  Just as the sublime “è il sentimento del limite delle nostre facoltà”, similarly “la legge eccede assolutamente i limiti ultimi della rappresentazione e della misura”, ivi, p. 37.

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to themselves, come and go without leaving any trace in the world, beauty is the very manifestation of imperishability”25. In Nancy, the sublime is that which deposes all forms of subjectivity. Forcing his reading of Kant to the limit, the French philosopher makes a distinction between the “beautiful” and the “sublime” that is posed first and foremost in these terms: Pris à la lettre en tant que le pur plaisir de la présentation pure, le beau se révèle répondre à l’intérêt caché mais d’autant plus intéressé de la raison: elle s’y satisfait de son pouvoir de présenter et de se présenter, elle s’admire à l’occasion de ses objets, et elle tend, comme c’est pour Kant, la loi de tout plaisir, à se conserver en cet état, elle tend à conserver la jouissance de son propre Bild.26

Aesthetic judgment would not be disinterested at all, for within it, reason rejoices in its faculty of presenting itself a completed form: in the feeling of the beautiful, the subject finds itself firmly within itself. So much so that the French philosopher goes so far as to conclude that the beautiful is subjectivity itself27. With the sublime, something quite different is at stake, and precisely that which destitutes a subject. In it there is not a form, an outline, a profile that sets a limit, but exactly

25.  H. Arendt, Tra passato e futuro, cit., p. 281. 26.  J.-L. Nancy, L’offrande sublime, in “Po&sie”, n. 30, 1984, pp. 76-104; maintenant in J.-F. Courtine, M. Deguy, É. Escoubas, P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-F. Lyotard, L. Marin, J.-L. Nancy, J. Rogozinski, Du sublime, Belin, Paris 2009, pp. 37-75: p. 48. 27.  “La seule beauté, ou la beauté seule, isolée pour elle-même, c’est la forme dans sa pure convenance è elle-même, ou bien, ce qui est la même chose, dans son pur accord avec l’imagination, avec la faculté de la présentation (ou de la formation). La beauté seule, sans intérêt, sans concept et sans Ideée, c’est le simple accord, qui par lui-même est un plaisir, de la chose présentée avec la présentation. Telle est du moins, ou telle a tenté d’être la beauté moderne: une présentation réussie et sans reste, accordée à elle-même (au fond, c’est la subjectivité en tant que beauté)”, ivi., p. 50.

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what lies beyond that limit: this ulteriority is not itself an “object” of presentation, its ontological difference consists precisely in exceeding objecthood, presentification. The sublime opens the subject to the unlimited: la forme, ou le contour, c’est la limitation, qui est l’affaire du beau: l’illimité, au contraire, est l’affaire du sublime. […] Avec le sublime, il ne s’agit pas de la présentation, ni de l’imprésentation de l’infini, posée à côté de la présentation du fini et construite su un modèle analogue. Mais il s’agit, et c’est tout autre chose, du mouvement de l’illimité, ou plus exactement de l’illimitation (die Unbegrenzheit) qui a lieu sur le bord de la limite, et donc sur le bord de la présentation.28

Once again we are dealing with an underlying nothingness, with a negativity that burrows into presence. But this Abgrund is not a precipice, but rather an incoactive impulse, a rising up, an initial outburst: dans le sublime, il est question de la figure du fond, de la figure que fait le fond, mais en tant précisément que cela ne peut faire une figure, et que pourtant c’est un “enlèvement”, c’est un tracé illimitant, le long de la figure limitée.29

The sublime is the emotion that in form and through form perceives what lies beyond it, at its origin: “il est l’infini d’un commencement”30. It is about the form in the act of forming itself, the energy that rises from the form that is being fulfilled. The latter will be in the domain of the beautiful, while to the sublime pertains that which separates itself from fulfillment31. This is why Nancy speaks of a sublime offering [offrande sublime]: 28.  Ivi, pp. 50-51. 29.  Ivi, p. 51. 30.  Ibidem. 31.  “Le sublime engagera toujours, s’il est quelque chose et s’il fait une esthétique, une esthétique du mouvement en face d’une esthétique de l’état”, ivi, p. 52.

130 […] l’offrande offre, port en avant et met devant (étymologiquement, l’offrande n’est pas très différente de l’objet), mais elle n’installe pas dans la présence. Ce qui est offert reste à une limite, suspendu au bord d’un accueil, d’une acceptation – qui ne peut à son tour qu’avoir la forme d’une offrande.32

The fundamental point of the Nancyan theory of the sublime (of course, fidelity to the Kantian text is not of interest here) is the fact that what is at stake in the sublime is not a gateway, an exit in the direction of an elsewhere, since that momentum that separates itself from form, lies in form itself: it is form itself as a forming force. So that two separate – and perhaps hierarchically arranged – domains are not given, which would correspond respectively to the beautiful and the sublime. The latter concerns the giving of the world: Le beau réside dans la forme comme telle, dans la forme de la forme, si on peut dire, ou dans la figure qu’elle fait; dans le tracement, dans l’enlèvement de la forme, indépendamment de la figure qu’elle délimite, et donc dans sa quantité prise absolument, comme ‘magnitudo’. Le beau, c’est le propre de telle ou telle image, le plaisir de sa (re)présentation. Le sublime, c’est qu’il y ait de l’image, donc de la limite, à même laquelle se fait sentir l’illimitation. Ainsi, le beau et le sublime, s’ils ne sont pas identique – bien au contraire –, ont lieu au même endroit, et en quelque sort l’un sur l’autre. Le beau et le sublime sont la présentation, mais de telle sorte que le

32.  Ivi, p. 67. However, there is an extremely equivocal point in Nancy’s discourse, which the philosopher does not dissolve. The term offrande, in fact, refers to the votive offering, the gift of sacrifice. Nancy, while aware of this use of a sacrificial lexicon, simply glosses over the subject, barely mentioning it in a footnote, in these terms: “Je passe outre l’économie du sacrifice, très visible dans le texte, puisque l’imagination y acquiert ‘une portée et une force plus grandes’. C’est que je ne prétends pas que l’offrande soit purement ‘en pure perte’. Mais au sein de l’économie (de la présence, de l’art, de la pensée), ça s’offre aussi, il y a aussi de l’offrande, ni perdue, ni gagnée”, ibidem, n. 21.

131 beau, c’est le présenté dans la présentation, tandis que le sublime c’est la présentation dans sa motion – qui est l’enlèvement absolu de l’illimité le long de toute limite. Le sublime n’est pas ‘plus grand’ que le beau, il n’est pas plus élevé – il est en revanche, si j’ose dire, plus enlevé, en ce sans qu’il est lui-même l’enlèvement illimité du beau.33

To decline democracy on an aesthetic dimension (of the sublime) means, for Nancy, to seek in the effervescence of a world coming into presence, a momentum that politics must make its own: for democracy does not subsume existences in a collective form, but works at the “removal” of forms, at the inscription of forms of existence as forces. The (political) emotion of the sublime is exposed to the non-figural, but this emptiness is not critical or paralyzing, rather it is productive. One can thus measure the full distance from a similar perspective elaborated in the same years by Jean-François Lyotard34. In the latter’s analysis, politics precipitates under the weight of an ethical injunction, which only reaffirms to man his powerlessness. According to Lyotard, art has the task of representing, or rather ir-representing, in the sensitive structure of works, a radical otherness irreducible to the mere satisfaction offered by commodities and consumer goods, in order to testify to men their debt to a condition from which they are continually distracted by the trappings of commodities. It was said to “ir-­represent”, because the work can only hint at an Otherness that is not representable: if it were, indeed when art succumbs to the temptation of representation it falls on the “ontic” plane of commodities. Through an aesthetics of the unrepresentable, Lyotard separates – with Platonic gesture – the artistic practices of the sublime from other modes of making that are of

33.  Ivi, p. 55. 34.  See J.-F. Lyotard, L’Inhumain. Causeries sur le temps, Galilée, Paris 1988.

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inferior rank and have to do with alienation or the reification of the market. In this way the aisthesis is lost: the sensible is worth only as a trace of the Other and as an ethical injunction to resistance. The political value of art lies, then, not in the opening of/to the sense of the world, but in the search for a gateway to a truth of this world that lies beyond it35.

3. Ur-teil: Originary Separation Unlike in Arendtian reflection, in Nancy’s lexicon there is no longer room for subjects to meet in the world: singularities constitute the grain of the world, are its differential and common openness. The world itself is subject, it communicates itself in its finiteness, it divides itself in the transcendence (to nothing) to which it is exposed. The subject is thus abandoned, destitute in and by this abandonment. Insofar as the imperative destitutes for lawmaking, un modo di abbandonare. L’imperativo categorico non può che essere una trasformazione della verità tragica, che il destino essenzialmente abbandona. La legge abbandona – a se stessa. Ciò che ci ossessiona, da quando non abbiamo più la rappresentazione della tragedia, o da quando l’imperativo ce ne presenta l’irrappresentabilità, è questo abbandono.36

Abandonment is not exclusion: una legge ordinaria lascia il fuori-legge fuori da se stessa, per definizione. Ma la legge della legge lo include come colui al quale essa è necessariamente rivolta; colui al quale essa è, in

35.  On this theory by which politics is translocated within an ethical discourse, see J. Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Galilée, Paris 2004. 36.  J.-L. Nancy, L’imperativo categorico, cit., pp. 38-39.

133 questo senso, abbandonata, mentre egli, a sua volta, è abbandonato a tutto il rigore della legge.37

The creation of democracy begins here, in this radical erosion of all verticality, which opens up a dimension where singularities are abandoned, that is, taken inside an outside, ordered to reciprocal exposure, excepted. The creation of democracy is itself the deposition of the representative regime: it excepts (ex-capere, to take out) singularities, subtracts them from the representative cone to lay them bare, to expose them. Democracy is the event of subtraction of/from representation, an event of uncovering, laying bare singularities and igniting meaning38. Having scratched the individual, the relationship emerges: on ne fait pas un monde avec de simples atomes. Il y faut un clinamen. Il faut une inclinaison ou une inclination de l’un vers l’autre, de l’un par l’autre ou de l’un à l’autre. La communauté est au moins le clinamen de l’‘individu’. Mais aucune théorie, aucune éthique, aucune politique, aucune métaphysique de l’individu n’est capable d’envisager ce clinamen, cette declination ou ce déclin de l’individu dans la communauté.39 37.  Ivi., pp. 24-25. The particular logical structure of abandonment is at the heart of Agamben’s work, who in bringing it into focus, explicitly takes from Nancy the concept of “bando (dall’antico termine germanico che designa tanto l’esclusione dalla comunità che il comando e l’insegna del sovrano)”, to designate “questa potenza della legge di mantenersi nella propria privazione, di applicarsi disapplicandosi”, in modo tale che “il rapporto originario della legge con la vita non è l’applicazione, ma l’Abbandono”, G. Agamben, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, cit., p. 34. 38.  On the theme of the bareness in Nancy, see S. Piromalli, Nudità del senso, nudità del mondo. L’ontologia aperta di Jean-Luc Nancy, Il Poligrafo, Padova 2012. 39.  J.-L. Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée, cit., p. 17. It is barely worth noting that in this clinamen theme, which runs through all of Nancy’s work (see, for example, Id., Corpus, cit., p. 46: “Il fuadrait donc un corpus. Dis-

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Nancy discovers in the heart of Kant’s thought the path that opens to the thought of singularity. If Ego sum, the 1979 book dedicated to Descartes40, worked to deconstruct the moment of the erection of the theoretical subject, showing how the latter is originally taken inside a relational circuit, the study on Kant discovers in the imperativeness of the moral law what deposes the individual, what “accuses” the point-subject and singularizes it, bends it by exposing it to the groundlessness from which it is affected, and through which it is exposed to other singularities, to an otherness that is not additive, being rather an excavation that prevents any closure of an identity. The clinamen of which Nancy speaks, then, is not confused with intersubjective contact, nor with the dynamic by virtue of which subjects, entangled in the oikos or in private and narrow thinking, enter into relation in the public space of the agora, or in the expanded dimension of the sensus communis. Rather, it is an original bending that tilts and cracks the individual. Nancy discerns the weight of this bending, this “accusation” that the subject suffers, in the irreconcilability between the law of reason and the moral law. The former finds its jurisdiction within a representational scheme in which the particular is in relation to the universal of the concept. Within this dualism the task of the particular is to participate in the universal, to take a part of it. But retraction of/from the representation means exactly that the universal with respect to which the particular is in relation of subsumption is lacking. On the contrary, says Nancy: la legge morale – l’imperativo – è in ritrazione [est en retrait] rispetto alla legge razionale. […] La legge interdice (è anche

cours inquiet, syntaxe casuelle, déclinaison d’occurrences. Clinamen, prose inclinée vers l’accident, fragile, fractale”. 40.  J.-L. Nancy, Ego sum, Flammarion, Paris 1979.

135 il suo unico interdetto) che l’universalità consista nell’erezione a universale di una volontà singolare. Il compito dell’universale è il contrario dell’appropriazione di questo da parte della particolarità soggettiva.41

The injunction of the categorical imperative, then, exceeding the subject, also points to a dimension beyond subjectivity: “la legge morale non sorge solo in eccesso su ciò che dovrebbe essere un soggetto della ragione, essa ingiunge anche un al di là della soggettività in generale”42. The deconstruction of reason – the foundation balance of the theoretical subject – starts with this exposure of reason to an excess that prevents it from “ogni posizione-di-sé della ragione”43. It becomes then necessary to elaborate “uno statuto della singolarità che non è più quello della soggettività”44. It is in this exposition that the “subject” discovers freedom as its metaphysical foundation. The imperative is then categorical, Nancy asserts, in the sense that it accuses the subject: Kategorèin è accusare, dire la verità accusatrice di qualcuno, e di qui affermare, imputare, attribuire. L’imperativo categorizza il suo destinatario: afferma la sua libertà, gli imputa il male, e lo destina o lo abbandona alla legge. In questo triplice modo, l’imperativo categorizza nell’eccesso di ogni categoria, di ogni modo proprio, essenza o natura, dell’uomo.45

Having abandoned the subjective-representational dimension, judgment can no longer have the same emphasis in this semantics of singularity as it does in Arendt. It certainly cannot be conceived as the activity of an agent. Judgment is, if any-

41.  J-L. Nancy, L’imperativo categorico, cit., p. 34. 42.  Ibidem. 43.  Ivi, p. 31. 44.  Ivi, p. 34. 45.  Ivi, p. 41.

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thing, suffered by the subject, who is, thus, torn apart by it. Nancy speaks of judgment as something in which action and passion are confused without allowing themselves to be distinguished. Kant, again, is singled out as the point at which the collapse of the foundation that ensured a steadfastness to the position of the theoretical subject46 is recorded, the point of rupture of the organic unity between man, reason and nature. Nancy, then, plays on the etymology of the German word for “judgment”, Urteil, which he rewrites to Ur-teil. If Ur is a prefix referring to that which originates, teil refers to teilen which means to cut. Ur-teil is thus an original cut: non siamo forse stati generati noi, i ‘moderni’, o qualunque sia il nome che ci possa essere attribuito, nella separazione originaria di cui Kant e l’‘idealismo tedesco’ furono testimoni: l’Ur-teil, il giudizio come origine, la divisione al principio perché divisione del principio?47

Judgment, then, is not a (more or less collective) activity of man, but is posited as an origin, as an inoriginal principle, which affects the subject by exposing it to its groundlessness. The political originates precisely in this lack, which abandons entities to their being in common:

46.  Although, this deconstruction of the foundation is not an event that cuts across the history of philosophy, and that can be placed further forward or further back along this history; much less is it the deliberate choice of an empirical subject. This deconstruction is, in Nancy’s view, longitudinal, coinciding with the history of thought itself; the history of philosophy, history tout court is open, created as deconstruction. 47.  J-L. Nancy, La comparution, in Id., J.-C. Bailly, La comparution (politique à venir), Bourgois, Paris 1991, pp. 49-100; I quote the Italian translation by M. Armano, La comparizione (Dall’esistenza del ‘comunismo’ alla comunità dell’‘esistenza’), in G. Agamben, A. Badiou, M. de Carolis, J.-L. Nancy, G. Russo, M. Zanardi, Politica, Cronopio, Napoli 1993, pp. 11-59: p. 15.

137 la finitude se présente toujours dans l’être-en-commun et comme cet être lui-même, et que de cette façon elle se présente toujours à l’audience et au jugement de la loi de la communauté, ou plutôt et plus originairement au jugement de la communauté en tant que loi.48

4. Addenda. Deleuze: Do Away with Judgment? In Nancy, singularities experience momentum because, as a result of the Ur-teil, they are exposed to something inappropriate: their dynamis is the operationalization of this lack. In contrast, in Deleuze, the power of singularities lies precisely in the integral adherence to their vital flux. So if in Arendt judgment is that mental activity that breaks the solipsism of narrow thinking and, by recovering a contact with the world, pushes the subjective dimension almost to the point of laceration, and on the other hand, in Nancy it is thought of as the negativity that cuts through the subject to partition it into exposed singularities, well Deleuze, for his part, simply wants to do away with judgment. The latter is conceived by him as a diminution of the vital power: it denies and coarsens the exuberance of living and desiring bodies because it separates embodied life from itself, from the plane of immanence in which it unfolds, connecting it to an unattainable plane. The judgment “tient sa condition d’un rapport supposé entre l’existence et l’infini dans l’ordre du temps. À celui qui se tient dans ce rapport est donnée le pouvoir d’être jugé”49. The ontological presupposition of an infinite order arranges – indeed, orders – the existents within a frame-

48.  J-L. Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée, cit., p. 72. 49.  G. Deleuze, Pour en finir avec le jugement, in Id., Critique et Clinique, Minuit, Paris 1993, pp. 159-169: p. 159.

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work in which they can judge and/or be judged. Differently, Deleuze elaborates, working on Antonin Artaud’s aesthetics, an immanent plane where the exercise of judgment proves utterly impossible. If, in fact, “dans la doctrine du jugement, les dettes s’écrivent sur un livre autonome, sans même qu’on s’en aperçoive, si bien que nous ne pouvons plus non acquitter d’un compte infini”50, in the Artaudian theater of cruelty51, on the other hand, living bodies directly discount on themselves the marks of their relationships. Against the infinite debt – which “n’est douce qu’en apparence” –, “Artaud donnera au système de la cruauté de sublimes développements, écriture de sang et de vie qui s’oppose à l’écriture du livre”52. The opposition that Deleuze identifies is ultimately this: “le système de la cruauté énonce les rapports finis du corps existant avec des forces qui l’affectent, tandis que la doctrine de la dette infinie détermine les rapports de l’âme immortelle avec des jugements”53. 50.  Ivi, p. 160. 51.  On Artaudian theater, see A. Amendola, F. Demitry, V. Vacca (eds.), L’insorto del corpo. Il tono, l’azione, la poesia. Saggi su Antonin Artaud, ombre corte, Verona 2018. 52.  G. Deleuze, Pour en finir avec le jugement, cit., p. 160. Interestingly, a few lines later Deleuze also refers to Kafka who, the philosopher writes, “oppose au grand livre du Procès la machine de la Colonie péniténtiaire, écriture dans le corps qui témoigne d’un ordre ancien comme d’une justice où se confondent l’engagement, l’accusation, la défense et le verdict”. Well, in Corpus, cit., Nancy refers to the same Kafka’s novella, but to stigmatize it as “detestable”. Since, the Strasbourg philosopher explains, “toucher au corps, toucher le corps, toucher enfin – c’est ce qui arrive tout le temps dans l’écriture” (p. 13); then “il ne s’agit pas du tout de trafiquer avec les limites, et d’évoquer on ne sait quels tracés qui viendraient s’inscrire sur le corps, ou quels improbables corps qui viendraient se tresser aux lettres. L’écriture touche aux corps selon la limite absolue qui sépare le sens de l’une de la peau et des nerfs de l’autre. Rien ne passe, et c’est là que ça touche. (Je déteste l’histoire kafkaïenne de La colonie pénitentiaire, fausse, facile et grandiloquente de bout en bout)”, ibidem. 53.  G. Deleuze, Pour en finir avec le jugement, cit., p. 161.

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Existence asserts itself as such in its radical anarchy, lack of origin and end, absence, consequently, of order and organicity with a view to development. Deleuze writes: “les éléments d’une doctrine du jugement supposent que les dieux donnent des lots aux hommes, et que les hommes d’après leurs lots sont bons pour telle ou telle forme, pour telle ou telle fin organique”54. A doctrine of judgment is possible, according to Deleuze, only on condition that a subject can arrange entities according to a rational and organic order; it is therefore selective, diairetic, Platonic; it assigns to every existence its form as a watertight compartment. A philosophy of transformation is evidently incompatible with this representational device: “Voilà l’essentiel du jugement: l’existence découpée en lots, les affects distribués en lots sont rapportés à des formes supérieures”55. The existence that opposes judgment is amorphous or metamorphic, is not contained in any form, is always becoming, exceeds all form, and exceeds, therefore, all organicity or organization. In its immanence, life merely lives, does not organize itself in hierarchical forms in view of an end. The strongest resistance to this organicity/organization in which existence is caught, Deleuze finds it again in Artaud, and particularly in the well-known theory of the body without organs: Le jugement implique une véritable organisation des corps, par laquelle il agit: les organes sont juges et jugés, et le jugement de dieu est précisément le pouvoir d’organiser à l’infini. D’où le rapport du jugement avec les organes des sens. Tout autre est le corps du système physique; il se dérobe d’autant plus au jugement qu’il n’est pas un ‘organisme’, et qu’il est privé de cette organisation des organes par laquelle on juge et est jugé.56

54.  Ibidem. 55.  Ibidem. 56.  Ivi, pp. 163-164.

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“Le corps du système physique” is the body living in an immanence to itself, discovering its own nonorganic vitality, a drive for existence that knows no partitions or limits. In Artaud’s project “le corps sans organes est un corps affectif, intensif, anarchiste, qui ne se comporte que des pôles, des zones, des seuils et des gradients”57. It had already been Nietzsche’s project to “définir le corps en devenir, en intensité, comme pouvoir d’affecter d’être affecté, c’est-à-dire Volonté de puissance”58. Deleuze, in short, wants to enforce the energy of an existence that, in its continuous becoming, disrupts the hierarchies that judgment necessarily repurposes. The argument with which he explains his critique of the judgment device is interesting: ce qui nous gênait, c’était qu’en renonçant au jugement nous avions l’impression de nous priver de tout moyen de faire des différences entre existants, entre modes d’existence, comme si tout se valait dès lors. Mais n’est-ce pas plutôt le jugement qui suppose des critères préexistants (valeurs supérieures),

57.  Ivi, p. 164. 58.  Ibidem. Here, too, it is important to emphasize proximity and divergence with Nancy, who, in his elaboration of an anarchic and atelic body, nevertheless retains the idea of an intrinsic multiplicity, of a body that is not organized but intimately distributed, beginning precisely with the five senses, which already form a community in this numericity; it is, in short, always the multiplicity that takes essence and purpose away from existence. This is how Nancy expresses himself in a passage in which he is proposing the notion of “dessin” understood as tracing a gesture that does not refer to any meaning, producing rather a meaning immanent to its tracing: “une signifiance immanente, c’est-à-dire sans sortie du signe vers un signifié, mais un sens offert à même les corps, à même un corps qui se fait moins actif, efficient ou opératoire qu’il ne se prête à une motion – et à une émotion – qu’il accueille, venant de plus loin que de sa corporéité fonctionnelle. Ce corps gestuel est un autre corps que le corps organique, sans être pour autant un corps sans organes: il devient plutôt le corps-organon de l’art, donc de la technique (ars – techné) mise en jeu, ici graphique, là vocale ou colorée, tactile ou verbale”, in J.-L. Nancy, Le plaisir au dessin, Galilée, Paris 2009, p. 50.

141 et préexistants de tout temps (à l’infini du temps), de telle manière qu’il ne peut appréhender ce qu’il y a de nouveau dans un existant, ni même pressentir la création d’un mode d’existence?59

In the Deleuzian view “le jugement empêche tout nouveau mode d’existence d’arriver”, so that “c’est peut-être là le secret: faire exister, non pas juger”60. However, the problem with which this thesis is measured is exactly this: can a thought of continuous becoming, of imperceptible becoming make manifest, make sensible – aesthetic – difference between modes of existence, or does it not rather risk reducing everything to equivalence? This seems to us to be precisely what is at stake in today’s neoliberal governmentality.

59.  Ivi, p. 168. 60.  Ivi, pp. 168-169.

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VII

The Approach of Aesthetics and Democracy Transimmanence

In the preceding pages we have spoken, with regard to the Arendtian reflection, of an aesthetic approach to the political: through an aesthetic dimension it is possible, for her, to approach again the political root of the human condition. For Nancy, on the contrary, it is a matter of removing existence from all political figuration in order to expose it to the excess that the political is. Consequently, one cannot speak of an “approach” with respect to something whose ‘consistency’ is nothing but its retrait: aesthetics is the dimension in which, more than elsewhere, exposure to this retrait is kept active. Aesthetics and politics do not, as in Arendt, share phenomenality, the fact of giving themselves in a public space; for Nancy, both work at the unclosing of/to meaning, at its infinite revival. Using a concept fine-tuned, in a completely different context, by the French philosopher, one can define the relationship between aesthetics and politics as an approximation. It is something that is distinguished from the gesture that touches and grasps because, even in its touching, it maintains a distance from the touched. One could say that it touches precisely this distance, this intimate gap, it touches the irreducibility of distance and otherness. In the approaching, which is at the same

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time a retracting of the subjects, the subjects disappear and a world opens up. Ce qui est à voir est le monde, mais le monde nous fait bien voir que ce qui voit et ce qui est vu n’ont lieu que dans l’approche de chacun par l’autre et dans l’approche de chacun vers l’autre. Cette approche est infinie – littéralement et actuellement infinie. Non potentiellement: ce n’est pas une distance toujours progressivement mais sans fin réductible. C’est un écart toujours infiniment présent. C’est l’imminence d’une immanence qui reste imminente. Qui, par conséquent, ne cesse pas de transcender – de transparaître ou de transpirer.1

No aestheticization of politics, then. Aesthetics does not devour politics in order to expose, deformed, its core of truth. Nor, in Arendt’s way, is the aesthetic the plane on which politics expounds its essence (which is appearance). Rather, aesthetics and politics approximate each other insofar as both excavate this transcendence in immanence, prevent the latter from totalizing itself. In light of this intrinsic excavation, Nancy returns to the distinction between the political and the political, which, as seen in the first chapter, had been the starting point of the work of the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique. In more recent years, however, he no longer speaks of the distinction between, on the one hand, the political as administrative management and technique of government, and on the other hand, the political as an essence that is never fully translated into individual administrative practices. Instead, he expresses himself in the terms of a disjunctive link between two senses of “politics”, each of which attempts to totalize the other:

1.  J.-L. Nancy, Le poids d’une pensée, l’approche, La Phocide, Strasbourg 2008, p. 121.

145 vi è in ‘politica’ la questione, cruciale, di un termine che si concepisce esso stesso come una delle sue parti – e che rilancia sempre al tempo stesso il sogno di una politica che si compie, pienamente significante, e l’illusione inversa di una rinnovata denuncia della ‘politica politicante’, della politica interessata, cinica, profittatrice.2

Where these two parts tend to overlap, theoretical work must consist first of all in grasping this sort of “divisione, di deiscenza di/in ciò che si persiste troppo spesso a definire “politica” in una sorta d’indistinzione tra gestione pubblica (e/o regime) e vivere-insieme”3. Philosophy is called to see how “la politica si distacchi da se stessa, apra attraverso se stessa a una deiscenza”4. Art is, for Nancy, inherently deconstructive, in the specific sense that deconstruction acquires in the French philosopher’s discourse, and which we have tried above to decline precisely as “disclosure” or “creation”. Art, in fact, has to do with a sense that is always necessarily localized, which, that is, is not given except in its own inscription. And yet inscription only hints at a sense that does not allow itself to be captured, and which consists, if anything, precisely in the “difference” between a presence and the absence to which it is exposed. Art essentially has to do with the ontological condition of exposure, of the nakedness in which we are. This explains the “centralità della

2.  J.-L. Nancy, Politico e/o politica, in Id., Politica e «essere-con». Saggi, conferenze, conversazioni, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2013, pp. 77-88: p. 81. The disjunctive link is emphasized by the formula Nancy chooses for this text, Politique et/ou politique, in which connective and disjunctive conjunctions appear, and, on the other hand, the determinative article that would enable the two senses of “politique” to be distinguished is absent. 3.  Ibidem. 4.  Ibidem.

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riflessione nancyana sull’arte, che a vario titolo si presenta in quasi tutti i suoi scritti”5. What art does is exactly to activate “un sens métaphysique du ‘physique’ qui reste ‘physique’, sensible donc, et singulièrement pluriel”6: it is in the space of the work of art that, more than elsewhere, transcendence opens up a space in immanence. So, aesthetics and politics intersect, or rather approach each other in the space opened by the retraction of an original datum: “è dalla fine di un mondo di presenze divine, determinate nei culti e nelle rappresentazioni rituali, che deriva la triplice istanza politica, filosofica e artistica”7. The co-­originality and co-appearance of philosophy, art, and politics lies in the dismissal of a principle and the absence of a given end: “au regard d’une ‘nature’, l’art est en défaut d’origine et de fin”8. The question from which Nancy’s above-mentioned text moves is as follows: pourquoi y a-t-il plusieurs arts, et non pas un seul? […] Que peut signifier un principe (ou une raison, ou une essence) qui ne serait pas un principe de pluralité, mais le pluriel luimême comme principe? Et en quoi cela devrait-il appartenir en propre à l’essence de l’art?9

Nancy traces a brief genealogy of the concept of “art” in the singular to show how it emerges in modernity within a theoretical device that thinks of its plurality only to derive a uni-

5.  D. Calabrò, Jean-Luc Nancy: alla frontiera di un pensiero a venire, in J.-L- Nancy, Il peso di un pensiero, l’approssimarsi, Mimesis, Milano 2009, pp. I-XXXIV: p. XXV. 6.  J.-L. Nancy, Les Muses, Galilée, Paris 1994, p. 30. 7.  J.-L. Nancy, Preface to the Italian edition, by C. Tartarini, of Le Muse, Diabasis, Reggio Emilia 2006, pp. 11-15: p. 12. 8.  J.-L. Nancy, Les Muses, cit., p. 50. 9.  Ivi, pp. 11-12.

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fied conceptual synthesis10. This genealogy identifies three stages. The first is identified in the reflection of Kant, who admits the partition of the arts according to the criterion of the forms of expression that humans use to communicate with each other, namely, word, gesture and tone, to which correspond the art of speech, the figurative art and the art of sensation play; however, this multiplicity “cette partition contient le germe de sa propre résorption”11, since only the combination of these three registers restores communication in its integrity. The second phase is represented by Schelling, who subsumes the multiplicity of the arts under that concept of the Absolute which they are responsible for presenting in the particular. Finally, Hegelian aesthetics recognizes the mutual externality of the arts, but only as a moment that will have to be reabsorbed into the unity of a sphere that will surpass art itself, which dissolves into thought. Modernity is thus inhabited by a multiplicity that it attempts to bring to synthesis. Nancy, in attempting to bring out this multiplicity in its absolute value, begins by not thinking of the arts in a relationship of integration with respect to the senses: “l’hétérogénéité des sens n’est pas homothétique à celle des arts”12. Rather, art activates un sens métaphysique du ‘physique’ qui reste ‘physique’, sensible donc, et singulièrement pluriel. C’est sans doute le fond du problème. Le singulier pluriel est la loi et le problème de l’‘art’ comme du ‘sens’, ou du sens des sens, du sens sensé de leur différence sensible.13

10.  Which is what, as Nancy himself appropriately points out, is not done by Th.W. Adorno in his Ästetische Theorie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1970. 11.  J.-L. Nancy, Les Muses, cit., p. 22. 12.  Ivi, p. 26. 13.  Ivi, p. 30.

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Nancy calls this work of the arts “transimmanence”14, a being exposed that is still being within, emergence without reabsorption, thus openness, spatialization. Sense as a continuous relaunching of self, exposed to nothing but this relaunching itself, is what Nancy thinks of through the symmetry between aesthetic pleasure and sexual pleasure. As is well known in Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie15, Freud elaborates the notion of Vorlust, or a preliminary pleasure described as similar to aesthetic pleasure. Nancy, on the other hand, asserts that it is preliminary in an absolute sense: it has no subsistence beyond the limes it precedes, since it is not a pleasure in repletion, or rather it is a pleasure in non-repletion. It is this absolute premiliminitude that allows the transit from the artistic to the erotic: “de même que, dans l’ordre sexuel, la ‘décharge’ finale annule l’excitation érotique, de même, dans l’ordre esthétique, la satisfaction donnée aux pulsions n’est plus de l’ordre esthétique”. Erotic pleasure and aesthetic pleasure live only in their tension and extension that know no apical moment of reabsorption: “les sensualités érotique et esthétique ont lieu à même une diversité en retrait de l’intégration ou de l’unité”16. The notion of “sensuality” is developed by Nancy in a text that has pleasure as its theme, Le Plairis au dessin: La formule par laquelle Kant caractérise la specificité du jugment esthétique – finalité sans fin – reste la matrice de toute investigations au sijet du beau ou de l’art.17

14.  Ivi, p. 36. 15.  S. Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, Franz Deuticke, Leipzig-Wien 1905. 16.  J.-L. Nancy, Les Muses, cit., p. 32. 17.  J.-L. Nancy, Le Plaisir au dessin, cit., p. 111.

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The endlessness – purpose and term – of beauty, as well as of eros, liberates the senses by making the “individual” a community of senses, an acephalous and anarchic empirical partition: a transcendence of the physical that remains physical. The operation that art enacts on man is this production of his sensuality: this is why it is not possible to consider art as founded on the senses or for the senses: ce qui doit importer à la considération esthétique c’est le fait que’en dépit de tout il aura lui-même mis en relief l’importance de la constitution de la sensibilité en sensualité. Car ce qui caractérise le ‘plaisir préliminaire’ peut être désigné comme sensualité, si par ce mot on entend une sensibilité qui jouit d’elle-même et ne se contente pas de fournir des informations sensorielles. Or le plaisir esthétique n’est pas autre chose qu’une sensualité se communiquant à tous (ou tendant à le faire) et jouissant de cette communication.18

Art, like eros, singularizes the subject, demultiplies its body: erotic or aesthetic, the one traversed by aisthesis is a body devoid of generality, “ou plutôt, il n’a de généralité que dis-loquée, partes extra partes, non seulement res extensa sur le mode cartésien, mais être-hors-de-soi général et générique, un être zoné de la condition dite ‘sensible’”19. The intimate dehiscence of this body “s’expose par le primat du toucher”20. Indeed, touch is the sense of otherness that remains as such; it is the sense of irreducible heterogeneity that the “individual” discovers within himself. It, therefore, represents all the senses: […] Le toucher n’est autre chose que la touche sens tout et tous sens. Il est sensualité comme sentie et sentante. Mais

18.  Ivi, p. 99. 19.  J.-L. Nancy, Les Muses, cit., p. 34. 20.  Ibidem.

150 le toucher lui-même, en tant que sens et par conséquent en tant qu’il se sent sentir, et plus encore, en tant qu’il se sent se sentir, puisqu’il ne touche qu’en se touchant aussi lui-même, touché par ce qu’il touche et parce qu’il le touche, le toucher présente le moment propre de l’extériorité sensible. […] le toucher n’a donc un ‘primat’ ou un ‘privilège’ que pour autant qu’il ne se subordonne rien: il n’est ou il ne fait que l’extension générale et l’extraposition particulière du sentir. Le toucher fait corps avec le sentir, ou il fait des sentirs un corps, il n’est que le corpus des sens.21

So, given that there is no privileged sphere in which sense is caught, grasped, and appropriated, since, as is now clear to us, everywhere sense is given only in its retraction, yet Nancy himself admits that l’arte è forse il regime per eccellenza nel quale si fa questo scavo del senso.22

The one singled out by the operation of art is an exposed “subject”: que fait donc l’art, si ce n’est en somme toucher à, et toucher par l’hétérogénéité principielle du ‘sentir’? Dans cette hétérogénéité de principe qui se résout elle-même en une hétérogénéité du principe, il touche au toucher lui-même: autrement dit, il touche à la fois au ‘se toucher’ inhérent au toucher et à l’‘interruption’ qui lui est non moins inhérente. En un autre lexique, on pourrait dire: il touche à l’immanence et à la transcendance du toucher, ce qui peut aussi s’énoncer: à la transimmanence de l’être-au-monde.23

The exposed subject is such insofar as it is intensified in its presence, intensified as presence, as that whose essence con-

21.  Ivi, pp. 35-36. 22.  J.-L. Nancy, Dialogo con Jean-Luc Nancy, cit., p. 8. 23.  J.-L. Nancy, Les Muses, cit., p. 36.

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sists in being at, prae-sum, being before, exposed. It is a subject-image, integrally outside itself, coincident with its surface. What manifests itself in the artistic dimension, however, is not a mere presence, an inert datitude. It is instead a representation: “Le re- du mot ‘représentation’ n’est pas répétitif, mais intensif […] la repraesentatio est une présentation soulignée”24. That is, the word indicates a forcing of presence, a pressure exerted on presence so that it exposes itself. La représentation est une présence présentée, exposée ou exhibée. Elle n’est donc pas la pure et simple présence: elle n’est justement pas l’immédiateté de l’être-posé-là, mais elle sort la présence de cette immédiateté, pour autant qu’elle la fait valoir en tant que telle ou telle présence.25

Representation is not the copy or duplicate of the thing. On the contrary, in the representation the following intersect “l’absence de la chose (pensée comme l’original, la présence réelle et seule valide) et l’absence à la chose murée dans son immédiateté”26. Once again, Nancy’s deconstructive exercise restores the density of things: representation exposes precisely the absence of the thing in its obviousness, to kindle its irreducible sense. In this sense “la ‘représentation’ n’est pas seulement un régime particulier d’opération ou de technique, mais que ce mot propose aussi un nom général pour l’événement et pour la configuration ordinairement nommés ‘Occident’”27. The perversion of this event or historical configuration came about when the gap between presence and absence through which it is constituted was filled by a full and massive presence devoid

24.  J.-L. Nancy, La représentation interdite, in “Le Genre humain”, n. 1, 2001, pp. 13-39: p. 21. 25.  Ivi, p. 22. 26.  Ibidem. 27.  Ivi, pp. 20-21.

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of dynamis. Referring to Nazism, Nancy calls this perversion “surreprésentation”: un régime où il s’agit non seulement de représenter l’humanité triomphante dans un type (comme c’est aussi le cas, à la même époque, dans l’art stalinien), mais de (re)présenter un type qui est lui-même le (re)présentant, non pas d’une fonction (faucille et marteau), mais d’une nature ou d’une essence (le corps aryen) dans laquelle consiste véritablement la présence de l’humanité créatrice de soi. […] La surreprésentation ne consiste donc pas seulement dans un caractère colossal, démesuré de l’appareil de représentation, de démonstration ou de mise en spectacle de l’Anschauung et de l’Anschauer: elle consiste bien plutôt dans une représentation dont l’objet, l’intention ou l’idée s’accomplit intégralement dans la présence manifestée.28

The execution of this (hyper)representation without remains is the execution of the West: c’est exactement du sein de notre histoire occidentale qu’a surgi et que s’est déchaîné ce ‘contraire strict’, cette contraction révulsée et révoltante de nous-mêmes.. […] Au Goulag un ordre militaro-policier exécutait de monstrueuses basses oeuvres, tandis qu’à Auschwitz s’exerçait une vengeance de l’Occident contre lui-même, contre sa propre ouverture – l’ouverture, précisément, de la (re)présentation.29

At this height, democracy is not simply a political form. Instead, it is the revival of this ontological status of the West30. 28.  Ivi, pp. 24-25. 29.  Ivi, p. 30. 30.  In this sense, the democratic dynamic has much to do with what Lévinas called “évasion”: for this, far from being confused with forms of divertissement or frivolity, is the movement out of all determinism: “l’évasion est-elle le brsoin de sortir de soi-même, c’est-à-dire de briser l’enchaînement le plus radical, le plus irremissible, le fait que le moi est moi-même”, E. Lévinas, De l’évasion, cit., p. 98.

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VIII

Democracy to Come

At this point it is clear that the link of democracy with the art space is not, in Jean-Luc Nancy, merely analogical or metaphorical. The first, in fact, is not a political form, but precisely the experience of the absence of a political form: art and democracy share such a condition, in which both engage in an infinite exercise of an opening of/to the sense. We are not dealing with a compensatory production of forms, but with a deposition of them, in the dual sense of destitution, and, on the other hand accommodation, laying, as they say about the laying of eggs, the laying of anew life: the being-together, just like the artistic gesture, is forged by a mimesis that looks at a transcendent model, rather it is in itself a methexic transcending which opens space for a common life, a life that does not respond to patterns that are dropped from above, but emerging from life itself. Politics itself is deposed, ousted and relaunched. Through the subjects of gesture and writing, Nancy tries to think something that in non dealing anymore with the appropriation of significations, neither with the coherent elaboration of projects: we call writing that which does not respond to any model whatsoever of the appropriation of significations, that which opens at once relation and, along with relation, significance

154 itself. […] “writing” is what precedes signification, what succeeds on it and exceeds it, not as another and always deferred signification, but as the outline, the breaking of the path through which it becomes possible not only for signification to be signified but them to make sense in being passed on and shared among individuals. Sense is consequently not the “signified” or the “message”: it is that something like the transmission of a “message” should be possible.1

This dynamic, far beyond the subject and action, is what Nancy calls democracy2. It is the point of greatest tension and fragility of the “politologi­ cal” Nancy’s discourse, where it risks to spill over into a naive aestheticism of politics, that is in an understanding of it exclusively playful, that in the name of the free movement of the sense, sacrifices the subjects to the arbitrary seizure of power. The only positive role that Nancy recognizes to politics is, in fact, that of “dare forma e visibilità alla possibilità di vivere insieme”; but “questa esigenza non implica di per sé la richiesta di realizzare, di dare pienezza al vivere insieme o di attribuirgli un corpo un senso o una verità”3. Democracy does nothing but run its own margin: qualunque siano la complessità e la difficoltà inerenti alla concezione di ciò che ho definito “forma e visibilità alla possibilità di vivere insieme”, ciò non toglie che la politica debba assicurare questa possibilità: essa deve

1.  J.-L. Nancy, Le sens du monde, Galilée, Paris 1983; I quote the English translation by J.S. Librett, The Sense of the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London 1997, p. 118. 2.  On the theme of gesture see G. Agamben, Karman. Breve trattato sull’azione, la colpa e il gesto, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2017. 3.  J.-L. Nancy, Politico e/o politica, in Id., Politica e «essere-con», Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2013, pp. 77-88: pp. 83-84.

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dargli un contorno e una struttura, deve significare per noi “così, in queste condizioni secondo questa costituzione – utilizzo il termine lato sensu – voi potete vivere insieme, la vostra coesistenza è garantita”.4 In other words, democracy is democracy insofar as it traces the profile of a space in which the sense can circulate, but without ever occupying this space5. The specific sense of this conception emerges, however, in relation to the authors who are upstream of it: Lefort and Derrida. The first, in fact, defines the politics as a movement that, at the same time, shows itself and withdraws: Le politique se révèle ainsi non pas dans ce qu’on nomme l’activité politique, mais dans ce double mouvement d’apparition et d’occultation du mode d’institution de la société. Apparition, en ce sens qu’émerge à la visibilité le procès par lequel s’ordonne et s’unifie la société, à travers ses divisions; occultation, en ce sens qu’un lieu de la politique (lieu où s’exerce la compétition des partis et où se forme et se renouvelle tance générale de pouvoir) se désigne comme particulier, tandis que se trouve dissimulé le principe générateur de la configuration de l’ensemble.6

Democracy is the political form that takes charge of this “double measure”:

4.  Ivi, p. 84. 5.  About this self-limitation to the tracking of a board, the philosophy of Nancy has benne also described as an “infrapolitics” or a “parergonal” politics. See A. Moreiras, El incidente inconspicuo, in “Soft Power. Revista euro-americana de teoría e historia de la política y del derecho”, n. 2, 2018, pp. 221-230. For a discussion on this essay I refer to my essay: M. Villani, Notas sobre el paradigma infrapolítico, ivi, pp. 231-238. On the theme of the parergon see J. Derrida, La vérité de la peinture, Flammarion, Paris 1978. 6.  C. Lefort, La question de la démocratie, cit., p. 74.

156 La démocratie se révèle ainsi la société historique, par excellence, société qui, dans sa forme, accueille et préserve l’indétermination, en contraste remarquable avec le totalitarisme qui, s’édifiant sous le signe de la création de l’homme nouveau, s’agence en réalité contre cette indétermination, prétend détenir la loi de son organisation et de son développement, et, se dessine secrètement dans le monde moderne comme société sans histoire.7

Lefort resolutely distances himself from political science, because the latter intends to objectify the forces that are expressed in the social8, but, unlike Nancy, his thought, while rejecting any normative claim, still intends to “contribuer et d’inciter à une restauration de la philosophie politique”9. In other words, its representation, of the social intends to institute a political form on the basis of the forces which express themselves on the social plane10. Instead Nancy’s perspective is, so to speak, centrifugal and it intends to open a space for a non-political realization of the political. The fragility of such

7.  Ivi, p. 80. 8.  “Cette volonté d’objectivation a, d’autre part, pour corollaire la position d’un Sujet capable d’effectuer des opérations de connaissance qui ne doivent rien à son implication dans la vie sociale, – sujet neutre, occupé à détecter des relations de causalité entre les phénomènes, ou des lois d’organisation et de fonctionnement de systèmes et de sous-systèmes sociaux”, ivi, p. 75. 9.  Ivi, p. 71. 10.  On the theme of an instituting praxis, which finds its theoretical basis precisely in Lefort’s thought, besides the aforementioned R. Esposito, Pensiero istituente, the essay specifically centered on the French philosopher by M. Di Pierro, Il concetto di istituzione in Claude Lefort, in E. Lisciani-­ Petrini, M. Adinolfi (eds.), “Discipline Filosofiche”, n. 2, 2019, pp. 99-120. The whole of the above mentioned review – titled Il problema dell’istituzione. Prospettive ontologiche, antropologiche e giuridico-politiche – is dedicated to the theme of the institution. More generally, on the thought of Lefort see M. Di Pierro, L’esperienza del mondo. Claude Lefort e la fenomenologia del politico, ETS, Pisa 2020.

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perspective lies precisely in the risk of becoming ineffective. Democracy, indeed, conceived as a non-political form – and as a liberation of a force that express itself outside of politics – presents itself only deferring itself: it infinitely delays itself, forsaking all logical design, thus leaving the very camp that it should garrison: the one of the political. The reference then is Derrida. His “democracy to come” is exactly the destitution of all projectuality. Philosophy itself is, according to him, a thought that is launched toward the unknown without aiming a prefigured goal11. That of “à venir” is a concept that indicates a dimension of radical disorientation, something that. is not given outside of a surprise, without any pre-announcement. The à venir avoids the temporal coordinates of before and after. It is not the past, but it is not even the future, because “future” is the name of what is programmed, predictable. To come is also the past, which does not cease to recur, freed from determinism. Well, “democracy” is the name that Derrida uses to mean a politics that lacks essentially the concept, a politics that is not anticipated or predetermined: Comme si “démocratie à venir” voulait moins dire “démocratie à venir” (avec tout ce qui reste à en dire et que je tenterai peu à peu de préciser) que “concept à venir de la démocratie”, acception sinon nulle du moins encore non avenue, encore irrévolue, du mot “démocratie”: sens en attente, encore vide ou en vacance, du mot ou du concept de démocratie.12

Derrida, in fact, identifies an aporia intrinsic to the concept itself of democracy, something that from within hinders its

11.  See J. Derrida, La carte postale. De Freud à Socrate et au-delà, Flammarion, Paris 1980. 12.  J. Derrida, Voyous. Deux essais sur la raison, Galilée, Paris 2003, p. 28.

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realization. On the one hand, it is not conceivable outside a circular shape that gives it an autonomous structure, that is sans la circularité, fût-elle pré-technique, pré-machinique et pré-géométrique, de quelque tour ou plutôt de quelque retour automobile et autonomique à soi, vers soi et sur soi, sans le rouage de quelque retour ou rotation quasi circulaire vers soi, à soi et sur soi de l’origine, qu’il s’agisse de l’auto-détermination souveraine, de l’auto-nomie du soi, de l’ipse, à savoir du soi-même qui se donne à lui-même sa loi, de toute auto-finalité, de l’auto-télie, du rapport à soi comme être en vue de soi, à commencer par soi à fin de soi, autant de figures et de mouvements que j’appellerai désormais, pour gagner du temps et parler vite, rondement, l’ipséité en général.13

Democracy seems to be the realization of this ipseity, where ipseity means not only the self which is the beginning and end of self, but also “un principe de souveraineté légitime”, involved “dans la position même, dans l’auto-position de l’ipséité même”14. In this way, democracy would be precisely “une force (kratos), une force détenninée en autorité souveraine”15. Yet, on the other hand, a different truth undermines this autonomous and sovereign structure of democracy, something that undermines the values of the One, of homogeneity and that is “la vérité de l’autre, de l’hétérogène, de l’hétéronomique, du dissymétrique, de la multiplicité disséminale, du ‘quiconque’ anonyme, du ‘n’importe qui’, de ‘chaque un’ indéterminé”16. Democracy is, in the thought of Derrida, specifies to me what makes resistance to the closure of existence in the perfection 13.  Ivi, p. 30. 14.  Ivi, p. 31. 15.  Ivi, p. 33. 16.  Ivi, p. 35.

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of the shape of a circle. This scattered multiplicity lacks a summit that is able to resolve the indeterminacy of this heterogeneity. So, no circle can lock up this mass that is overflowing and chaotic. Devoid of vertex, it is also anonymous, impersonal. Derrida points out that both Plato and Aristotle always present it as “une sorte de discours convenu, de croyance, d’opinion accréditée, de doxa”17. In the discourses of both the democracy does not make way as the revelation of a subject, but always according to the anonymous formula of “it is said”. This fractionality of democracy can regain a circularity to the extent that we are within a sort of pre-understanding of democracy: “Si peu qu’on sache de ce que devrait vouloir dire ‘démocratie’, encore faut-il, par quelque pré-compréhension, en savoir quelque chose. Et voilà que tourne de nouveau le cercle herméneutique”18. Of course this understanding does not weigh on the concept of democracy nor as a lost origin to be found again, neither as an inauthenticity that waits to be overcome. On the contrary, it constitutes the space for democracy understood as an exercise of freedom, an exposure without essentialistic constraints. This same freedom opens democracy as aporia, since it disarticulates the concept of it, prevents it from being totally implemented, and, through this fragmentation of its concept, opens for it an authentically historic dimension, that is the ‘to come’ which is not a simple wait, but exposition that eludes the deterministic dimensions of time: Cette liberté dans le concept est plus marquante parce qu’il y a là comme l’ouverture vide d’un avenir du concept même et donc du langage de la démocratie, la prise en compte d’une historicité essentielle de la démocratie, du concept et

17.  Ivi, p. 45. 18.  Ivi, p. 39.

160 du lexique de la démocratie (seul nom de quasi régime ouvert à sa transformation historique, assumant sa plasticité intrinsèque et son auto-criticité interminable, on dirait même son analyse interminable).19

The expression “démocratie à venir” appears for the first time in a 1989 text20, and it indicates the link that identifies democracy to the dynamics of différance, and therefore also the indissoluble bond that tightens together democracy and deconstruction: La démocratie n’est ce qu’elle est que dans la différance par laquelle elle se diffère et diffère d’elle-même. Elle n’est ce qu’elle est qu’en s’espaçant au-delà de l’être et même de la différence ontologique; elle est (sans être) égale et propre à elle-même seulement en tant qu’inadéquate et impropre, à la fois en retard et en avance sur elle-même, sur le Même et l’Un d’elle-même.21

Very opportunely, this idea of the idea of democracy was recently put in relation to the theme of common sense. Actually, democracy to come “si fa pienamente carico della sua struttura differaenziale. Il sintagma democrazia a venire è un’esplicitazione di questa essenza senza essenza della democrazia”22. In other words, the “to come” states that democracy will never exist, will never give itself as a presence reached or established. But, at the same time, “to come” works as an injunction: “la democrazia in differaenza come democrazia a venire è una

19.  Ivi, p. 48. 20.  J. Derrida, La démocratie ajournée, in L’autre cap, suivi de La démocratie ajournée, Minuit, Paris 1991, pp. 103-124. On this theme see M.-L. Mallet, La Démocratie à venir. Autour de Jacques Derrida, Galilée, Paris 2004. 21.  J. Derrida, Voyous, cit., p. 63. 22.  S. Regazzoni, Esoterismo pop e democrazia. Le confessioni della decostruzione, in F. Vitale, M. Senatore (eds.), L’avvenire della decostruzione, il melangolo, Genova 2011, pp. 101-123: 114

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democrazia che occorre fare e lasciare venire: è l’ingiunzione stessa della democrazia”23. But all this raises the question of a relationship between democracy, philosophy and common sense. The apophatic discourse, typical of deconstruction, risks, in a completely paradoxical way, to exclude the most from access to the very discourse of democracy: “come può un discorso che parla in nome della democrazia, come può la decostruzione che opera in nome della democrazia e della democrazia in filosofia, essere un discorso esoterico e riservato a pochi?”24. Deconstruction, then, should go beyond the philosophical texts, where Derrida still held her back; but this going beyond should point at the erosion of borders that separate the philosophical places, the ‘high’ ones, from the ‘low’ ones: in the era of mass culture and communications “restare ancora chiusi nello spazio del testo filosofico, significa non rispondere alla questione circa che cosa significhi, oggi, dirsi, per una filosofia popolare e quali siano, oggi, i rapporti tra il filosofico e il popolare”25. So, whereas Derrida rimane prigioniero dell’opposizione gerarchica tra cultura alta e cultura bassa, precludendosi così alla decostruzione di ambiti testuali importanti, […] l’avvenire della decostruzione, e della democrazia, si gioca, oggi, sulla sua capacità di rompere con un certo esoterismo della decostruzione e sul coraggio di dirsi per una certa filosofia popolare.26

The derridian notion of democracy to come is for Nancy a reference point. He too, in fact, “mira ad una politica a veni-

23.  Ivi, p. 115. 24.  Ivi, p. 117. 25.  Ivi, p. 121. 26.  Ivi, p. 122.

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re che non sottragga più il senso dell’essere-in-comune e che sfugga alla condizione teologica-politica secolarizzata, cioè ad una democrazia fondata su altre basi che non quella della semplice negazione del teologico-politico”27. On Derrida and its concept of democracy to come, he states: parlare di “romanticismo”, di “avvenire” o di “utopia” è del tutto fuori luogo: equivale a non leggere Derrida. Il suo “a venire” è sempre formalmente opposto all’avvenire, al futuro, cioè al presente-futuro progettato, rappresentato e fissato in anticipo in quanto scopo e avvenimento possibile. La formula “a venire” che amava ripetere, indica la natura propria di ciò che è essenzialmente e sempre nel “venire”, di ciò che non è mai “venuto”, deposto, disponibile. Se la democrazia è data, fissata e realizzata, non si potrà più dire che deve essere migliorata – ma se si dice che non è perfetta, allora occorre capire che forse la sua essenza sfugge a qualsiasi perfezione rappresentabile, anticipabile o realizzabile – non perché la democrazia sarebbe un’“utopia” ma perché la sua essenza è la tensione stessa di un’esigenza incompatibile con qualsiasi realizzazione.28

Democracy remains an artificial fact, something to be invented all the time, but that ‘to come’ that is essential to it does not make it a product waiting to be made. The dimension of the ‘to come’, in fact, opens only when each paradigm that can assign the existence to a given form withdraws. It is rather inoperative, because it does not respond to a model that predetermines it: siamo in comune significa che mettiamo in atto, subito, in noi stessi e per noi stessi la palingenesi (la trasformazione radicale) emotiva e vitale che è la comunità: esposta in sé stessa.

27.  D. Calabrò, Dis-piegamenti. Soggetto, corpo e comunità in Jean-Luc Nancy, Mimesis, Milano 2006, p. 131. 28.  J.-L. Nancy, Le differenze parallele. Deleuze e Derrida, ombre corte, Verona 2008, p. 62.

163 Non che manchino i progetti, ma il nodo della svolta non è profetico né costruttivista, ma palingenetico: il cambiamento è qui, subito, senza percorsi di trasformazione. Non è un’opera, da fare, semplicemente è.29

Democracy to come, far from being a utopian purpose, is the immediate exposition of man and the world, and of man to the world. The very word ‘democracy’ may, on the one hand, designate “les conditions des pratiques de gouvernement et d’organisation”, but, in a more clear sense, it designates L’Idée de l’homme et/ou celle du monde dès lors que, soustraits à toute allégeance envers un outre-monde, ils n’en postulent pas moins leur capacité d’être par eux-même et sans subreption de leur immanence, sujets d’une transcendance inconditionnée, c’est-à-dire capables de déployer une autonomie intégrale.30

Of course Nancy recognizes that this second meaning is arbitrary, and yet he insists in stressing that, in particular in the modern democracy, it is the being of man in his entirety to be put into play: La démocratie moderne engage l’homme, absolument, ontologiquement, et non le seul “citoyen”.31

The democratic event, therefore, records a real anthropological leap, a mutation in which man produces from himself his humanity. However, not in the sense of a production and realization of the human essence. On the contrary, the democratic uprising is the event in which man strips himself of his essence and is exposed to the responsibility of existing without the protection of any transcendent principle (God, History, Nature). 29.  L. Bazzicalupo, Politica, cit., p. 68. 30.  J.-L. Nancy, Démocratie finie et infinie, in É. Hazan (dir.) Démocratie, dans quel état?, Éditions Écosociété, Montréal 2009, p. 54. 31.  Ibidem.

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This is the palingenetic shock of the democratic uprising has an anarchist character. Democracy revokes the presence of a principle, of an arché: La démocratie implique par essence quelque chose d’una anarchie qu’on voudrait presque dire principielle.32

Nancy goes on: Il n’y a pas de “démarchie” : le “peuple” ne fait pas principe […]. C’est aussi pourquoi le droit auquel renvoie l’institution démocratique ne peut vivre en vérité que dans un rapport toujours actif et renouvelé à son propre défaut de fondation. Que la première modernité ait forgé l’expression “droit naturel”, et que l’implication philosophique de cette expression continue à être active, mais sur un mode implicite et confus dans l’expression de “droits de l’homme” […]. Il est plus que temps de réaffirmer et de faire travailles cette affirmation dont la teneur et la portée sont pourtant, théoriquement, bien établies : non seulement il n’y a pas de “nature humaine”, mais l’“homme”, si l’on veut confronter à l’idée d’une “nature” (d’un ordre autonome et autofinalisée), n’offre pas d’autres caractères que ceux d’un sujet en défaut de “nature” ou en excès sut toute espèce de “naturel”: le sujet d’un dénaturation en quelque sens, le pire ou le meilleur, qu’on veuille prendre ce mot.33

Modernity, on the contrary, has exalted the concepts of order, of a regular and manageable structure of community. Le piège que la politique s’est tendue à elle-même avec la naissance de la démocratie moderne […] est le piège qui fait confondre la maîtrise de la stabilité sociale […] avec l’idée d’une forme englobante toutes les formes expressives de l’êtreen-commun.34 32.  Ivi, p. 58. 33.  Ivi, pp. 58-59. 34.  Ivi, p. 63.

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Democracy, therefore, is an endless policy. The anthropological or anthropogenic rift in which the democratic event consists is not a foundation, an autarchic gesture in which man puts himself and his end. On the contrary it is a spoliation, an exposition: “Démocratie” est donc le nom d’une mutation de l’humanité dans son rapport à ses fins, ou à elle-même comme “être des fins” (Kant). Ce n’est pas le nom d’une autogestion de l’humanité rationelle, ni le nom d’une vérité définitive inscrite au ciel des Idées. C’est le nom, ô combien malsignifiant, d’une humanité qui se trouve exposée à l’absence de toute fin donnée – de tout ciel, de tout futur, mais non de tout infini. – Exposée, existante.35

We are now able to read the text that Nancy writes in 2008, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Parisian uprisings of “May 68”. The title sounds strange, since, as it is. is said insistently in this study, Nancy works on the removal of the truth and the activation of a sense that is no other than the common partition of existences. In what sense, then, the truth of democracy? What is this core hidden in the heart of democracy? In reality there is nothing hidden that awaits a spotlight: it is, rather, for us to become what we already are. There is, according to Nancy, a close link between the theme of democracy, and the event of May 1968. It is necessary to read 68 outside the schemes that make it a dispute, a revolutionary movement, a rebellion or a revolt. Rather, 68 – this is how Nancy calls it – marked the need to radically question the achievements of democracy, which at that time were represented by decolonization, the extension of rights, the strengthening of the “Rule of Law”. The movements were long prepared by the feeling of frustration due to a democracy that, in the af-

35.  Ivi, p. 65.

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termath of the Second World War, was substantially empty: “C’est à la démocratie gestionnaire que s’en prenait sa véhémence et, plus avant encore, c’est une interrogation sur la vérité de la démocratie qui s’y ébauchait”36. Democratic forms did not grasp a profound historical and conceptual change: after and against totalitarianism, “il ne pouvait suffire de rectifier l’image du bon sujet de l’histoire”37. A paternalistic view of history did not understand that “on ne sortait pas seulement des ‘conceptions’, des ‘visions’ ou ‘images’ du monde (Weltbilder). On sortait du régime général ou la vision en tant que paradigme théorique implique aussi le tracé d’horizons, la détermination de visées et la pré-vision opératoire”38. The ferment culminated in 68 is therefore that of the need for a new regime of thought that wants: non plus l’engendrement de formes chargées de modeler un donné historique par lui-même déjà en quelque sorte préformé […] mais l’exposition des objectifs eux-mêmes (l’‘homme’ ou l’‘humanisme’, la ‘communauté’ ou le ‘communisme’, le ‘sens’ ou la ‘réalisation’) à un outrepassement de principe: à ce qu’une prévision ne saurait épuiser car cela engage un infini en acte.39

Nancy’s thesis is focuses on this “outrepassement”. Democracy still remained caught up in a subjective semantics, both from a collective and historical-political point of view, both from an existential one. Something like an inaccessible core inhibited the unfolding or, better, the disclosure (la déclosion)40 of democracy: “Représentative ou directe, la démocratie n’a pas en36.  J.-L. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, Galilée, Paris 2008, p. 10. 37.  Ivi, p. 20. 38.  Ivi, pp. 21-22. 39.  Ivi, p. 24. 40.  See J.-L. Nancy, La Déclosion. (Déconstruction du christianisme, 1), Galilée, Paris 2005.

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core clairement dégagé ses ‘conceptions’ de la présupposition du sujet maître de ses représentations, volitions et décisions”41. In other words, democracy is usually thought of as the political form which must bind individuals according to the criteria of rights and freedom. Instead, Nancy tries to open up a completely different perspective, that consists in overcoming the political dimension as such, abandoning, therefore, the field of political philosophy. In the words of Roberto Esposito: “mentre la filosofia politica parte sempre dagli individui precostitui­ ti – per restarvi o per fonderli in un individuo più grande cui essa può dare ance il nome di ‘comunità’ – il pensiero della comunità parte sempre dal rapporto di condivisione”42. Starting from the need of this ontology of the community Nancy can say that: «La démocratie n’a pas assez retenu qu’elle devait aussi être ‘communiste’ en quelque manière, faute de n’être que gestionnaire des nécessités et des pis-aller, privée de désir, c’est-à-dite d’esprit, de souille, de sens»43. There can be no democracy without an ecstasy, without a deicience or a mutual exposition of the subjects. The “management” of subjects does not open (to) the sense. If politics is overcome through its own withdrawal, then there is such an opening. This overcoming is therefore not a response to a programme whose outcome is given in advance. So declining existence according to the sense-in-common is not a requirement, rather it is desire, that is, a tension directed not towards an object of satisfaction but towards itself. Desire is not a subjective or intersubjective dimension. In desire the subject tends and extends not in the direction of

41.  J.-L. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, cit., p. 25. 42.  R. Esposito, Communitas, cit., p. 100. 43.  J.-L. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, cit., p. 30.

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something, but it unfolds in its pure possibility, in pure power without act. It is possible to connect this being in power of desire with the theme of waiting, that is an existential posture that “au lieu d’y élaborer et d’y avancer des visions et des prévisions, des modeles et des formes, on préféra y saluer le présent d’une irruption ou d’une disruption qui n’introduisait aucune figure, aucune instance, aucune autorité nouvelle”44. The truth of such a democracy is a “spirit” or a “breath”. Nancy chooses this vocabulary full of motility to emphasize how in democracy is always in question an impulse of being, rather than an ultimate definition of it. L’esprit de la démocratie n’est pas moins que cela même: le souffle de l’homme, non pas l’homme d’un humanisme mesuré à la hauteur de l’homme donné – et ou prendrait-on ce donné? dans quelle condition, quel statut? –, mais l’homme qui passe infiniment l’homme.45

Only an excessive and unmanageable element can resist “aux requisitions d’une culture de calcul general – nommée ‘capital’”46. Stifled democracy, which 68 wanted to give breath and breath, is the regime of equivalence, of continuous identity and interchangeability, it is the world reduced to market, the world flattened in its lack of exception and excess. It is: le capitalisme, dans lequel ou avec lequel, sinon comme lequel la démocratie s’est engendrée, est avant tout, dans son principe, le choix d’un mode d’évaluation: par l’équivalence. Le capitalisme relève d’une décision de civilisation: la valeur est dans l’équivalence.47

44.  Ivi, p. 28. 45.  Ivi, p. 31. 46.  Ivi, p. 32. 47.  Ivi, p. 45.

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Obviously to this choice Nancy intends to oppose the semantics of the difference, of the différance. Most importantly, he intends to force this difference into immanence itself, thus producing a common and widespread exception, namely the mutual comparison of absolute and incomparable singularities. Democracy is this sharing of difference: what is common is this partition of the immeasurable. The proliferation of the immeasurable which deprives democracy of representational possibilities: La démocrarie n’est pas figurable.48

In this context Nancy sets out in the most explicit way the link which he establishes between aesthetics and democracy. If, in fact, democracy “impose de configurer l’espace commun de telle sorte qu’on y puisse ouvrir tout le foisonnement possible des formes que l’infini peut prendre, des figures de nos affirmations et des déclarations de nos désirs”49, well this is precisely the task – if you can talk about the task – that took on the art. “Depuis cinquante ans”, in fact, “L’art se tord dans l’effort d’enfanter des formes qu’il voudrait lui-même en excès sur toutes les formes de ce qui se nomme ‘art’ et sur la forme ou l’idée d’‘art’ elle-même”50. Art is, therefore, the paradigmatic regime for what Nancy means with the name of democracy. But the most delicate point of this discourse is precisely this: the overcoming is not access to another dimension, there is no jump at all. Overcoming occurs in immanence itself. The political, in this case, is overcome by remaining somewhat political. This is how the following statement is explained:

48.  Ivi, p. 50. 49.  Ibidem. 50.  Ivi, p. 51.

170 On me dira: vous déclarez donc ouvertement que, pour vous, démocratie n’est pas politique! […] Tout au contraire. Je tiens en effet que la question politique ne peut plus se poser sérieusement qu’à partir de la considération de ce que la démocratie engage comme un dépassement principiel de l’ordre politique – mais un dépassement qui n’a lieu qu’à partir de la polis, de son institution et de ses lunes telles qu’il nous est demandé de les penser sub specie infinitatis humani generis”.51

Nancy’s challenge is to think of a transcendence that remains in the immanence. This overcoming of democracy must be thought of from that surplus on the political constituting the polis in its essence. It is therefore an overcoming that remains “political”, that has a “political” effect. Nancy recognizes the fragility of this perspective. But, he says, “Entrer dans cette pensée, c’est agir déjà. C’est être dans la praxis par laquelle se produit un sujet transformé plutôt qu’un produit conformé, un sujet infini plutôt qu’un objet fini”52. As can be seen, therefore, the creation of democracy takes place at the level of the subjects when they are exposed, disclosed in a mutual dehiscence and turned to the nothingness of sense, in an endless transcendence. The truth of democracy is this decomposition of an alleged closed nucleus, this singularization or ecstasy of existence. In conclusion to expose such truth according to Nancy, we will not avoid, a long quote from this pamphlet that has been so far the guide text of this study: La vérité de la démocratie est celle-ci: elle n’est pas une forme politique parmi d’autres, à la différence de ce qu’elle fur pour les Anciens. Elle n’est pas une forme politique du tout […]. La “démocratie” est ainsi: 51.  Ivi, p. 53. 52.  Ivi, p. 58.

171 – d’abord, le nom d’un régime de sens donc la vérité ne peut être subsumée sous aucune instance ordonnatrice, ni religieuse, ni politique, ni scientifique ou esthétique, mais qui engage entièrement l’homme en tant que risque et chance de ‘lui-même’, ‘danseur au-dessus de l’abime’ pour le dire de manière paradoxale et délibérée en termes nietzschéens. Ce paradoxe expose parfaitement l’enjeu: la démocratie est aristocratie égalitaire. Ce premier sens n’emprunte un nom politique que de manière accidentelle et provisoire; – ensuite, le devoir d’inventer la politique non pas des fins de la danse au-dessus de l’abîme, mais des moyens d’ouvrir ou de garder ouverts les espaces de leurs mises en œuvre. Cette distinction des fins et des moyens n’est pas donnée, pas plus que la distribution des ‘espaces’ possibles. Il s’agit de les trouver, de les inventer ou d’inventer comment ne même pas prétendre les trouver. Mais, avant tout, la politique doit être reconnue distincte de l’ordre des fins – même si la justice sociale constitue d’évidence un moyen nécessaire à toutes fins possibles.53

53.  Ivi, pp. 60-61.

173

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Indice

Narrow Passages

p. 9

I The Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique 1.  The Philosophical Interrogation of the Political 2.  The Question of the Relationship 3.  The “Retreat” of the Political

p. 17 p. 19 p. 28 p. 35

II The Inadequacy of the polis. A Confrontation with Hannah Arendt

p. 47

III Between Politics and Aesthetics

p. 69

IV Aisthesis: Being within and Transcendence

p. 85

V The Aesthetic Approach of Hannah Arendt. Heroism and Common Sense

p. 93

VI The Creation of Democracy. Nancy’s Theory of Judgment 1.  Kant and the Categorical Imperative 2.  The Sublime and the Form 3. Ur-teil: Originary Separation 4. Addenda. Deleuze: Do Away with Judgment?

p. 117 p. 119 p. 127 p. 132 p. 137

VII The Approach of Aesthetics and Democracy. Trans­ immanence

p. 143

VIII Democracy to Come

p. 153

Bibliography

p. 173

Zeugma

Lineamenti di Filosofia italiana | Proposte Diretta da: Massimo ADINOLFI e Massimo DONÀ

1. Francesco Valagussa, La scienza incerta. Vico nel Novecento. 2. Alfredo Gatto, René Descartes e il teatro della modernità. 3. Fabio Vander, Ortologia della contraddizione. Critica di Heidegger interprete di Aristotele. 4. Ernesto Forcellino (a cura di), Verità dell’Europa. 5. Lucilla Guidi, Il rovescio del performativo. Studio sulla fenomenologia di Heidegger. 6. Armando d’Ippolito, Arte e metafisica delle forme. Creazione. Crisi. Destino. 7. Guido Bianchini, L’inquietudine dell’Altro. Ebraismo e cristianesimo. 8.  Pedro Manuel Bortoluzzi, Carlo Michelstaedter e la testimonianza della verità dell’essere. 9. Antonio Branca (a cura di), Possibilità. Dell’uomo e delle cose. 10. Federico Croci, Deus Terribilis. Quattro studi su onnipotenza e me-ontologia nel Medioevo.

Aisthesis: Being within and Transcendence

11. Federica Buongiorno, La linea del tempo. Coscienza, percezione, memoria tra Bergson e Husserl. 12. Giuseppe Pintus (a cura di), Figure dell’alterità. 13. Marco Martino, Il sistema dei bisogni di Hegel. Un possibile itinerario. 14.  Maria Teresa Pansera, La specificità dell’umano. Percorsi di antropologia filosofica. 15. Massimo Donà - Francesco Valagussa (a cura di), Alterità e negazione. 16. Giuseppe Pintus (a cura di), Relazione e alterità. 17.  Maurizio Maria Malimpensa, La scienza inquieta. Sistema e nichilismo nella Wissenschaftslehre di Fichte. 18. Marco Bruni, La natura divisa. Hans Jonas e la questione del dualismo. 19. Nazareno Pastorino, Destino ed eternità di tutti gli enti. L’opera di Emanuele Severino. 20. Massimo Adinolfi, Qui, accanto. Movimenti del pensiero. 21. Giuseppe Gris, L’escatologia del destino. L’apocalisse del linguaggio nell’opera di Emanuele Severino. 22. Michele Ricciotti, Provare l’Io. Julius Evola e la filosofia. 23. Valentina Gaudiano, La filosofia dell’amore in Dietrich von Hildebrand. Spunti per una ontologia dell’amore. 24. Silvia Dadà, Il paradosso della giustizia. Levinas e Derrida. 25.  Giulio Goria, La filosofia e l’immagine del metodo. 26. Carmelo Marcianò, Essere epicurei. Divagazioni su Epicuro e noi. 27. Fabio Vander, Genesi e destino. Filosofia e onto-teologia del mysterium iniquitatis.

28. Massimo Villani, Time and History. Researches on the Ontology of the Present. 29. Massimo Villani, On Extension. Jean-Luc Nancy in the Wake of Hannah Arendt.

Zeugma | Lineamenti di filosofia italiana 29 - Proposte

Collana diretta da: Massimo Adinolfi e Massimo Donà Comitato scientifico:

Andrea Bellantone, Donatella Di Cesare, Ernesto Forcellino, Luca Illetterati, Enrica Lisciani Petrini, Carmelo Meazza, Gaetano Rametta, Valerio Rocco, Rocco Ronchi, Marco Sgarbi, Davide Tarizzo, Vincenzo Vitiello.

ISBN ebook 9788855290470

The point of intersection between the theoretical paths of Nancy and Arendt lies in the theme that is also the most difficult problem they bequeath to us. Both, in fact, think of being in terms of a drive to appear, a movement that tends to be infinite and, for that very reason dangerous, and yet one that must be indulged and even urged. Thought must, so to speak, stay close to this original dimension in which extension spaces itself: it is in this proximity that existence experiences a thrill, a fervor. It is what Arendt calls “public happiness” and Nancy calls “ferveur” or “extase”. The stakes of both philosophical exercises are very similar. It is a matter of identifying with extreme accuracy and within a much broader ontological drive, the narrow space between an intensification of existence comparable to fascist and fusional ardor, and an exposition that remains at a suspended step. It is a matter of taking the narrow path between mystical ecstasy, and an inoperative ecstasy, that is, a projection towards the outside that does not access any surreality, but merely spaces – continually putting back into play – immanence in which we are. Massimo Villani has a PhD in Political Philosophy. His studies concern modern and contemporary thinking. He is a member of the scientific staff of «Shift» and «Post-filosofie». He has translated and edited the Italian edition of several works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. He collaborates with the reviews «OperaViva», «err. scritture dell'imprevisto». He published the monograph Arte della fuga. Estetica e democrazia nel pensiero di Jean-Luc Nancy (Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2020) and Time and History. Researches on the Ontology of the Present (Inschibboleth, Roma 2022).

€ 11,00