3365-Nancy and Kant On

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Critical Horizons 1:1 February 2000

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2000

Stuart Dalton

Nancy and Kant on Inoperative Communities

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that Kants explanation

of the purposiveness-without-a-purpose of

beauty (in the third Critique) can help to

make sense of Nancys theory of the inop-

erative community.

KEYWORDS: Kant, Nancy, political theory,

aesthetics, purposiveness

My purpose in this essay is to argue for a

connection between the political theory of

Jean-Luc Nancy and the aesthetic theory of

Immanuel Kant. Community, in Nancys po-

litical theory, and beauty, in Kants aesthetic

theory, are both experienced as non-concep-

tual, as (in Kants words) purposive-without-a-purpose. I will argue that by drawing on

Kants aesthetics we can begin to supply some

of the elements of a transcendental explana-

tion for the inoperative community that

Nancy describes.

In The Inoperative Community (La communautdsoeuvre) Jean-Luc Nancy describes his pro-

ject as an attempt to articulate a certain expe-


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rience of community which is largely ignored:

I am trying to indicate, at its limit, an experience - not, perhaps, an experi-

ence that we have, but an experience that makes us be. To say that community

has not yet been thought is to say that it tries our thinking, and that it is

not an object for it . . . We must expose ourselves to what has gone unheard

(linoui) in community.1

As is evident from this quotation, the problem of recognition is central to

Nancys political theory. Nancys account of the inoperative community is

meant to recover something unrecognised, unheard, unthought in the way

that we experience community. In this essay I want to consider one aspect

of this general problem of recognition that emerges in Nancys theory of inop-

erative communities - the more specic problem of communal self-recogni-

tion. The question that I will pose here is this: when community is reconceived

according to Nancys theory, as the unworking which resists the work of

totalisation, how is such a community to recognise itself?2 Given that an inop-

erative community is the consequence not of a deliberate work intent upon

realising a unied essence, but instead results from a certain resistance tototalisation on the part of singular subjects - who are not drawn together and

given a unifying concept by their resistance - how is it possible for an inop-

erative community to become aware of its own existence? In other words, is

it possible for a community that recognises the unheard experience of com-

munity (which Nancy articulates) to recognise itself as a community, or must

it necessarily remain oblivious to its own reality?

Nancy himself seems well aware of the fact that, in his political philosophy,

the problem of creating community is replaced by the problem of recog-

nising a community that is always already there. Consider these two excerpts

from The Inoperative Community:

Community is given to us with being and as being, well in advance of all

our projects, desires, and undertakings. At bottom, it is impossible for us

to lose community. A society may be as little communitarian as possible; it

could not happen that in the social desert there would not be, however

slight, even inaccessible, some community.3

If I had to attempt to state the principle guiding the analyses in these texts,

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I might do so by saying this: community does not consist in the transcend-

ence (nor in the transcendental) of a being supposedly immanent to commu-

nity. It consists on the contrary in the immanence of a transcendence - that

of nite existence as such, which is to say, of its exposition. . . . By invert-

ing the principle stated a moment ago, we get totalitarianism. By ignor-ing it, we condemn the political to management and to power (and to the

management of power, and to the power of management). By taking it as

a rule of analysis and thought, we raise the question: how can the com-

munity without essence (the community that is neither people nor nation,

neither destiny, nor generic humanity, etc.) bepresented as such?4

All of these questions concerning the recognition or presentation of com-munities have aesthetic implications. In this essay I will argue that such ques-

tions connect the political theory of Nancy with the aesthetics of Kant. Nancy

acknowledges that many past accounts of aesthetic experience have in fact

been singular voices . . . speaking about community - though they did not

necessarily understand themselves as such, nor were they understood as such

by the political thought of the time.5 Taking a tip from this very interesting

suggestion in Nancys text, I will argue that in Kants third Critique we canrecognise elements of a theory of community that concern precisely the prob-

lem of recognition that Nancy has claried. These elements are found in

Kants account of the way that beauty has purposiveness without a purpose.

To make a case for this connection between Nancy and Kant I will begin in

section (1) by discussing three important axes of Nancys theory of inopera-

tive communities. These three axes concern the constitution of communityin the event of exposition, the singularity of political subjects, and the

task that communities have to resist their work. Then I will turn to two

important ideas in Kants aesthetic theory which can be used to address the

question of self-recognition that emerges in Nancys political theory. In sec-

tion (2) I will analyse Kants theory of purposiveness without a purpose, and

consider how it can be applied not just to beauty but also to communities.

Then in section (3) I will analyse Kants theory of sensus communis and con-sider how it too can be understood as both an aesthetic and a political idea.

(1) Nancy on the Experience of Community

(a) Exposition and Finitude

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Nancy argues that the true experience of community is an experience of

being-in-common or being together, but lacking a common-being. We nd

ourselves together, always already in communities, but we do not nd a com-

mon essence or concept for the communities that we inhabit. This experience

rests on a fundamental event, which Nancy calls the event of exposition.6

Consider two passages from the preface to The Inoperative Community which

describe this event:

To be exposed means to be posed in exteriority, according to an exteri-

ority, having to do with an outside in the very intimacy of an inside. Or again:

having access to what isproper to existence, and therefore, of course, to the

proper of ones own existence, only through an expropriation whose exem-plary reality is that of my face always exposed to others, always turned

toward an other and faced by him or her, never facing myself. This is the

archi-original impossibility of Narcissus that opens straight away onto the

possibility of the political.7

[C]ommunity does not consist in the transcendence (nor in the transcen-

dental) of a being supposedly immanent to community. It consists on the

contrary in the immanence of a transcendence - that of nite existence

as such, which is to say, of its exposition. Exposition, precisely, is not a

being that one can sup-pose (like a substance) to be in community.

Community is presuppositionless: this is why it is haunted by such ambigu-

ous ideas as foundation and sovereignty, which are at once ideas of what

would be completely suppositionless and ideas of what would always be

presupposed. But community cannot be presupposed. It is only exposed. 8

Nancy makes it clear in these two passages that what is ultimately exposed

by the event of exposition is the fact of human nitude. Finitude is that which

is proper to existence and it is revealed only through an expropriation

whose exemplary reality is that of my face always exposed to others.9

Exposition is an event which exposes an even more fundamental event: the

event of nite existence.10 When one confronts the face of another, one also

confronts the impossibility of facing oneself - of preserving ones own inte-

riority, comprehending ones own being. The face-to-face encounter exposes

the basic ex-position of the self: the fact that I am always already outside of

myself, and thus separated from the innity of my own immanence.11 The

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reality of human nitude, Nancy argues, is what ultimately determines the

true nature of communities. And he nds this reality to be rooted in the exte-

rior position of the self, an ex-position that leaves the self exposed to its own

limitations and cut off from the interior innity that it desires.

This fact of exteriority, this archi-original impossibility of Narcissus, leads

directly to the political insofar as community is nothing but the sharing of

nite existence.

[W]hat community reveals to me . . . is my existence outside myself. Which

does not mean my existence reinvested in or by community, as if commu-

nity were another subject that would sublate me (prendrait ma relve) in a

dialectical or communal mode. Community does not sublate the nitude it

exposes. Community itself, in sum, is nothing but this exposition. It is the com-

munity of nite beings, and as such it is itself a nite community. In other

words, not a limited community as opposed to an innite or absolute com-

munity, but a community ofnitude).12

In the event of exposition both the I and the Other confront the fact of their

nitude, and share that fact with each other. The face-to-face relation entails

not only the revelation - the exposure - of each persons own nite existence

to himself, but also the exposition or sharing of that nitude with the Other.

The face-to-face relation is nothing other than what undoes (dfait), in its

very principle - and at its closure or on its limit - the autarchy of absolute

immanence. 13 Once the idea of individual immanence has been undone in

this way, all that remains is a certain sharing of the nitude that exposition

reveals, a sharing that remains nite because it cannot be completed.14 Finite

existence precedes the desire for a consensus, and undermines the possibil-

ity of such a perfected form of sharing.15

Nancy calls this sharing of nitude which is constitutive of communities

being-in-common (tre-en-commun). This is to be distinguished from the

idea that communities are constituted by common-being, which is the more

traditional formulation. The difference that Nancy posits between these two

ideas is rooted in the particularity of nite existence. Being is in no way dif-

ferent from existence, which is singular each time.16 Existence only occurs

at the level of nite individuals. It cannot be raised up to a higher level in

the form of a community. Such a community composed of being raised up



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to a higher level, of nite-being now transformed into common-being, is

impossible because community does not sublate the nitude it exposes.

Individual, nite existence cannot be distributed in a way that renders it com-

mon, it can only be shared through the event of exposition in a way that

preserves its essential particularity. Sharing is a relation that is not strictlyrelational.17 Consequently, Nancy says, [w]e shall say . . . that being is not

common in the sense of a common property, but that it is in common.18

Being-in-common is the basic activity that is constitutive of communities

in Nancys theory. We nd ourselves together, connected by the exposition

of our individual nitude, but lacking a common concept for our being

together. There is no one who has nothing in common, but there is no sin-

gle common idea or form that binds us together and constitutes the being of

the community on a level above the being of each individual member of that

community.19 The sharing that constitutes community is not a communion,

nor the appropriation of an object, nor a self-recognition, nor even a com-

munication that is understood to exist between subjects.20 It is only the expo-

sition of human nitude in a way that brings different subjects together, and

establishes some connection between them, while still preserving the partic-ularity of their existence.21

(b) Individuality and Singularity

This particularity of nite existence, which is the source of Nancys concep-

tion of being-in-common, also has signicant implications for a theory of

political subjectivity. Nancy argues that the nature of the self in a political

context must be rethought. In Western thought it has become traditional to

regard the political subject as an individual. But individuality, according

to Nancy, presupposes a lack of limits that belies the true nature of nite

communities. As an individual I am closed off from all community, Nancy

writes, because the individual - if an absolutely individual being could ever

exist - is innite. The limit of the individual, fundamentally, does not con-

cern it.22

What Nancy is arguing here is that individuality is a concept that has been

generated by the same tradition that conceived of community as a matter of

common-being rather than being-in-common, and that this concept bears

traces of the same faulty assumptions about the nature of existence. In both

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cases what this tradition has lost sight of is the particularity of existence:

the fact that existence is always specic and limited. Existence is always my

existence - bracketed by my birth and my death - and it does not allow itself

to be divided between my self and any other self. This fundamental particu-

larity of existence is what all theories of individuality in the Western, lib-eral tradition have overlooked, leaving in their wake an unanswered question

concerning the true nature of the political subject. Nancy describes this as a

question concerning singularity:

[B]ehind the theme of the individual, but beyond it, lurks the question of

singularity. What is abody, a face, a voice, a death, a writing - not indivis-

ible, but singular? What is their singular necessity in the sharing that dividesand that puts in communication bodies, voices, and writings in general and

in totality?23

To reconceive the political subject according to its nitude, Nancy shifts his

focus away from the individuality of the subject to the singularity of

existence. He indicates that singularity is meant to designate both some-

thing less and something more than individuality. Singularity denotes

whatever it is that is exposed and ex-posited in the event of exposition.

I say singularities because these are not only individuals that are at stake,

as a facile description would lead one to believe. Entire collectivities, groups,

powers, and discourses are exposed here, within each individual as well

as among them. Singularity would designate precisely that which, each

time, forms a point of exposure (exposition), traces an intersection of limits

on which there is exposure.24

Nancy presents singularity as the inverse gure of Cartesian subjectivity.25

Whereas the Cartesian subject only discovers itself when it succeeds in iso-

lating itself completely from other subjects and from the rest of the world,

singularities always discover themselves vis--vis another person. A singu-

lar being appears, as nitude itself: at the end (or at the beginning), with the

contact of the skin (or the heart) of another singular being, at the connes of

the same singularity that is, as such, always other, always shared, always

exposed.26 For this reason Nancy argues that the singularity of the subject

does not, strictly speaking, appear, as if it were a totally independent and

isolated being, but rather that it can be said to compear. Singular subjects



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are always exposed together; their singularity is always manifest alongside

another singularity, in a multiplicity that does not annul the particularity of

existence. There is an originary sociality that connects singularities, with-

out unifying them in an immanent communion.27

The basis for this reformulation of the political subject is described by Nancy

in a passage that connects his ideas (again) to the work of Levinas:

The Self to which existence exposes is not a property subsisting before that

exposition . . . (Grammatically speaking, Self - as in the French soi - is an

object exactly like the reexive pronoun se with which it forms a pair, and

exactly like the French word for others, autrui, which, as Levinas has pointed

out, also has this particularity of being an objective case.) Soi has no nom-

inative case, but is always declined. It is always the object or the comple-

ment of an action, an address, or an attribution . . . soi is being in the

objective case, and there is no other case of being. Thats where itfalls (cadere,

casus), that is its essential accident (accidere).28

As this text makes clear, the key to Nancys reformulation of the subject is

the face-to-face encounter to which he links the event of exposition and towhich Levinas links the event of obligation. One immediate consequence

of this encounter, in both cases, is a revision of the case of subjectivity. The

face-to-face encounter does not reafrm the fundamental, nominative prior-

ity of the I, nor does it draw the self into the fusion of the rst person plural.

Instead, this encounter occasions the declension of the self into the accusative

case: the case of one who is always already in the position of a respondent.

Nancys description of the political subject is strikingly similar to what Levinas

calls accusative subjectivity.29 There is no alchemy of subjects, Nancy

argues. There is an extensive/intensive dynamic on the surfaces of exposi-

tion. These surfaces are the limits upon which the self declines itself.30

Community is not a communion that fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher

We. It is the community of others.31

(c) Work and Resistance

Nancy argues that the community which is composed of singular subjects

has a task (tche) to perform, which must be distinguished from its work

(oeuvre).32 The true experience of community has not yet been heard or felt,

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Nancy suggests, because it has been buried by a philosophical tradition

which has assumed that community is a work that needs to be completed.33

The Western political tradition has generally conceived of community in terms

of operativity - as a project that was waiting to be rendered operational, an

essence that had not yet been realised.34 This tradition has generated manyvariations on the same theme: different programs for the realisation of an

essence of community.35 But Nancy argues that conceiving of community in

this way - in terms of the work required to bring about the essence of com-

munity - is essentially totalitarianism.36 The actual experience of commu-

nity, he suggests, points us in a different direction. The true essence or

principle of community is experienced as incompletion, the lack of totality.37

We experience community not as a work that one produces, but rather as an

unworking (dsoeuvrement) which resists the work that communities have

traditionally given themselves to do.38

This experience of community can be traced back to the more basic experi-

ence of the nitude and the particularity of existence, and to the singularity

of human subjectivity which is a consequence of this:

[C]ommunity cannot arise from the domain of work. One does not produce

it, one experiences or one is constituted by it as the experience of nitude . . .

Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called unwork-

ing (dsoeuvrement), referring to that which, before or beyond the work,

withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do either with

production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, sus-

pension. Community is made of the interruption of singularities, or of thesuspension that singular beings are. Community is not the work of singu-

lar beings, nor can it claim them as its works . . . for community is simply

their being - their being suspended upon its limit. 39

The work that communities have given themselves to do - the project of real-

ising their essence as community - has in reality been the greatest obstacle

to the thinking of community.40 The thought of community as essence, as

common-being, has closed off the thought of real community, which is the

community of nitude - of being-in-common.41

Consequently, Nancy argues that we must distinguish a task (tche) of com-

munities which is distinct from their work (oeuvre).42 This task is pre-



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cisely the task of resisting the work that communities have traditionally

given themselves to accomplish. Community is not a work to be done or

produced but rather a gift to be renewed and communicated.43 This task

of renewal and communication requires the acceptance, by each singular sub-

ject within a community, of the nitude of being and of the consequent impos-sibility of common-being. A community is the presentation to its members

of their mortal truth (vrit mortelle) (which amounts to saying that there is

no community of immortal beings: one can imagine either a society or a com-

munion of immortal beings, but not a community).44 Communities come to

be insofar as they acknowledge their nitude, and therefore resist the work

of realising common-being.45 While traditional political theory continues its

project of attempting to render communities operative in terms of their essence,

the unworking that is actually constitutive of communities - as inoperative -

also continues, (though for the most part without being recognised). Nancys

political theory is all about the need to recognise this unworking which is

always already constitutive of community.

But can inoperative communities recognise themselves? To address this prob-

lem of self-recognition that emerges in Nancys political philosophy, I willnow turn to two important ideas that emerge in Kants Critique of Judgement:

the idea that beauty is purposive without having a purpose and the idea that

appreciation for beauty is made possible by a sensus communis that everyone

shares. In each case I will rst discuss the ideas aesthetic application, and

then I will consider the possibility of extending the idea into the domain of

Nancys political theory. Again, my purpose in turning to Kant is to use

resources in his aesthetic theory to answer some of the questions posed by

Nancys political theory. In particular I will focus on Kants account of the

purposiveness-without-a-purpose that characterises beauty, because it has

much in common with Nancys account of the inoperative community.

(2) Kant on Purposiveness Without a Purpose

Kant presents purposiveness-without-a-purpose as the third moment of the

Analytic of the Beautiful. This moment is a consequence of the unique activ-

ity of the faculties in a judgement of beauty. Whereas the feeling of the sub-

lime is engendered by a fundamental discord between imagination and reason,

the feeling of the beautiful arises when imagination and understanding nd

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themselves in basic agreement. The representation of the beautiful object by

the imagination bestirs the imagination and the understanding together, and

sets them both into motion. The result, Kant says, is a mental state in which

imagination and understanding are in free play.46 The mind feels this play

as a facilitated play, a quickening of the two faculties in a proportionedattunement.47 Consciousness of this attunement is a feeling of pleasure which

comes from referring the representation to the subjects feeling of life.48

Kant argues that the playful harmony that creates such pleasure in the sub-

ject is an activity that is indeterminate but . . . nonetheless accordant.49 The

play of the faculties is an activity that cannot be grasped or explained by the

mind unless some predetermining conceptual purpose is supposed. This leads

Kant to suggest that the beautiful form manifests purposiveness-without-a-

purpose (Zweckmigkeit ohne Zweck). The imagination and the understand-

ing reect this form when they vibrate together in harmony. The play of

imagination and understanding is a structured play, though it is not struc-

tured in advance. It is a free lawfulness . . . which has also been called pur-

posiveness-without-a-purpose.50 The form that this movement delineates

points to a concept, though when we seek it out, no concept can be found.51

When we remove any empirical presuppositions and try to comprehend what

is involved in all manifestations of purposiveness, we discover it to be essen-

tially a relation of causality, the causality that a concept has with regard to

its object.52 The concept of a thing is what sort of thing it is to be.53 [I]nso-

far as the concept of an object also contains the basis for the objects actual-

ity, the concept is called the thingspurpose.54 Purposiveness is indicative of

an organisation according to lawful principles that the understanding can

only comprehend by attributing it to the work of the will, which Kant denes

as the power of desire, insofar as it can be determined to act only by con-

cepts, i.e., in conformity with the representation of a purpose.55 Thus, pur-

posiveness is taken as a sign that an object was created by a rational agency,

following the pattern provided by a rational concept. This concept is the tran-

scendental ground of the object, the condition of its possibility in terms ofboth its existence and its form.56

To grasp such a transcendental condition requires that we consider not our

cognition of the object, but rather the object itself as an effect that refers

back to a cause - an effect that is possible only through a concept of that



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effect.57 To think purposiveness, therefore, is to think in reverse: to think

from effect to cause, from the object to the concept that made it possible. It

is thus a species of reective judgement.58 In this reective judgement the

representation of the object does not provide content for the syntheses of cog-

nition, but instead acts as an occasion for reection that refers thought fromthe object itself to the concept that is the condition of its possibility. The rep-

resentation of the object assumes an unusual role in this reverse movement.

Insofar as it initiates the reective regress by exhibiting the effect in the causal

relation, the representation of the effect is the basis that determines the effects

cause and precedes it.59 In this way the effect comes before - and in a cer-

tain sense determines - the cause in a reective judgement of taste. This occurs

because the thought of purposiveness makes use of the representation of the

object not as an occasion for the projective synthesis of cognition, but rather

for the regress of reection.

What differentiates the purposiveness associated with a judgement of beauty

from other forms of purposiveness is the fact that its reective movement

never arrives at a concept. An effect is represented to consciousness that must

have a conceptual cause, but no concept can be found, because the beautifulhas no concept.60 Beauty is an objects form of purposiveness insofar as it is

perceived in the object without the representation of a purpose.61 A judgement

of taste is neither founded on a concept, nor addressed to one as the telos of

its reection.62 Thus, the purposiveness of the beautiful is a purposiveness-

without-a-purpose.

It is the mere representation of the beautiful object that starts this reective

movement. A judgement of taste presupposes no concept but is directly con-

nected with the representation by which the object is given (not by which it

is thought).63 And what concerns a judgement of taste in this representation

is only the form that it contains. The form of the beautiful that is repre-

sented, and the purposiveness that is connected with it, is the determining

basis of a judgement of taste.64 Kant summarises all of this in a passage from

paragraph 11:

Therefore the liking that, without a concept, we judge to be universally com-

municable (mitteilbar) and hence to be the basis that determines a judge-

ment of taste, can be nothing but the subjective purposiveness in the

representation of an object, without any purpose (whether objective or sub-

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jective), and hence the mere form of purposiveness, insofar as we are con-

scious of it, in the representation by which an object is given us.65

It is not difcult to see how this idea from Kants aesthetic theory can be

applied to Nancys political theory. Inoperative communities do not have asingle unifying concept or purpose, and yet they do have a certain purpo-

siveness. We experience community as an unworking that resists the work

of conceptual unication, as a gift of incompletion that needs to be renewed

and shared - communicated. Like a judgement of beauty, the recognition of

community is a reective judgement that has no recourse to a universal con-

cept. A universal concept of community is impossible because community is

created by an event that is always singular: the event of exposition wherein

nite existence is shared between singular subjects.

Nancy explains how the recognition of this shared nitude can create com-

munity in the form of being-in-common. In Nancys description an inopera-

tive community has a play that cannot be xed by concepts. Kants third

Critique claries the way that we experience such communities. This experi-

ence is one of being together but lacking a common-being. In spite of thedemand (which we inherit from Western political thought), to identify and

apprehend a unitary essence that underlies each community, or a common

concept that gives it coherence from above, we continue to experience com-

munity differently. We experience it not as the unied operation of a coher-

ent system, but rather as the resistance to that very operation, the unworking

that renders the sought-after system inoperative. Kants account of purpo-

siveness without a purpose helps to explain how this experience is possible.

An even better understanding of our experience of inoperative communities

is available when we go on to consider Kants theory of sensus communis.

(3) Kant on Sensus Communis

In 40 of the Critique of Judgement, Kant introduces sensus communis by rst

clarifying what it is not. The common sense that he is interested in, he says,

is often confused with common human understanding (gemeinen Menschen-

verstand), or in other words, the very least that we are entitled to expect

from anyone who lays claim to the name of human being.66 This type of

common sense places the emphasis on the commonality - or, in Kants words,



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the vulgarity - of certain shared assumptions about the world. It regards

the communis of sensus communis as the adjective common in its nomina-

tive form: sensus communis is, therefore, the basic understanding that is

common to everyone; the sense of, for example, truth, decency, or justice that

we expect to nd everywhere.67

In the Prolegomena Kant explains why he is not interested in this understanding

of common human understanding. Writing of Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and

Priestly, who invoke common sense when they respond to Hume, Kant

argues that this notion is of no real value to philosophy. Seen in a clear light,

it is but an appeal to the opinion of the multitude, of whose applause the

philosopher is ashamed, while the popular charlatan glories and condes init.68 Common sense as mere popular opinion does not respond at all to

Humes problem, which was the question of the origin of concepts like cau-

sation - not just the question of the need that we have for such concepts.69

To respond to that more profound, more original question, what is needed

is a more critical faculty, one that is not limited by the opinions that are gen-

erally held by the present majority.

Kant presents his own version of sensus communis as just such a faculty. In

Kants account the sense of common sense refers not to empirical opinions,

but rather to an a priori capacity to judge. And just as important as the fact

that this capacity is common to everyone, is the fact that it is a capacity to

discern what is common to everyone: it is not just a sense that is common,

it is also a sense of the common. In Kants version of sensus communis the

communis can be understood as both an adjective in the nominative case (asbefore), and also as a noun (commune) in the genitive case.

The central feature of this expanded form of sensus communis that distin-

guishes it from common human understanding is the way in which it makes

judgements. Kant writes that his version of common sense, is essentially

distinct from the common understanding that is sometimes also called com-

mon sense (sensus communis); for the latter judges not by feeling but always

by concepts.70 Sensus communis is the common ability to discern common-

ality by means of feeling rather than by determinate concepts. It is,

a sense shared (gemeinschaftlichen), i.e., a power to judge that in reecting

takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone elses way of repre-

42 Stuart Dalton


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senting, in order as it were to compare our own judgement with human rea-

son in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mis-

taking subjective and private conditions for objective ones.71

By comparing our own judgements with the possible (not actual) judgementsof others, Kant argues, abstracting from the limitations that . . . attach to our

own judging, it is possible to attain a thought that is active, broad, and con-

sistent - a thought precisely that overcomes the limits of popular opinion.72

Kant argues that we must have such an ability, because otherwise we would

not be able to make judgements concerning the beautiful. Such judgements

always have an exemplary necessity - a necessity of the assent of every-

one to a judgement that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that

we are unable to state.73 Because the beautiful has no concept, only an abil-

ity to compare our judgement with the possible judgement of others on the

basis of feeling can explain how judgements of taste have the subjective uni-

versality that they do in reality have. The fact that whenever we call an object

beautiful, we believe we have a universal voice, and lay claim to the agree-

ment of everyone,74

proves that there is a shared critical faculty that allowsus to overcome the limitations of subjective judgements.

What this critical faculty really amounts to is the ability to experience a sub-

jective feeling in a way that is simultaneously both private and public. Because

of the sensus communis that facilitates judgements of taste, we regard this

underlying feeling (the feeling of pleasure on which the judgement is based)

as a common (gemeinschaftliches) rather than as a private feeling.75 When we

posit common sense behind judgements concerning beauty, we,

use the word sense to stand for an effect that mere reection has on the

mind, even though we then mean by sense the feeling of pleasure. We could

even dene taste as the ability to judge something that makes our feeling

in a given representation universally shareable (mitteilbar) without mediation

by a concept.76

Hence, sensus communis can be regarded as both a feeling and an ability. It is

an ability to feel pleasure as common pleasure, as a feeling that is simulta-

neously public and private.

Sensus communis can also be understood as the basis for recognising the pur-



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posiveness without a purpose that characterises inoperative communities.

The ability to recognise inoperative communities must be based on feeling,

since there is no concept to turn to. In Nancys political philosophy we expe-

rience community like we experience beauty: in the absence of a concept.

Communities, like scenes of beauty in nature and art, are gifts that we dis-cover and appreciate not by appealing to determinate concepts, but by recog-

nising the internal harmony of our mental faculties that is occasioned by

them. And in both cases the judgements that we make are communicable,

shareable (mitteilbar).77 The experience of being-in-common is shared in the

same way as the aesthetic experience of beauty: by recognising the free play

and free lawfulness of purposiveness without a purpose. Sensus communis

is the faculty that makes this recognition possible.

The Kantian version of sensus communis - an a priori capacity to judge that

transcends the limits of individual subjectivity - responds to the problem con-

cerning how inoperative communities are to recognise themselves, just as it

responds to the problem that concerned Kant in the third Critique: how to ex-

plain the subjective universality of beauty. By reading the experience of com-

munity that Nancy has described through the lens of Kantian aesthetics, amore complete picture of that experience emerges. Reading community in this

way allows us to recognise, on the one hand, our need to posit a unifying prin-

ciple behind such an experience, and on the other hand, the fact that no such

concept will be found. And it also gives us some insight into how it is possible

for us to recognise the communities that we are always already a part of, in

spite of the fact that we have no concept of community to which to appeal.

* Stuart Dalton is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Hilyer College, University of

Hartford, USA

Notes

* Note: Where reference is given to an English translation, the English pagination

will always be listed second, preceded by the pagination from the edition in the

original language. Emphasis in quotations is always the authors own, unless I

have noted otherwise. Where I have modied an existing translation, I have sig-

nalled this with an m after the page number from that translation. In reference

to Kant, all German texts are taken from Kants Gesammelte Schriften, Hrsg. von der

Preuischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 29 vols. Berlin: Walter de

44 Stuart Dalton


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Gruyter, 1902-1983.

1 Jean-Luc Nancy. La communaut dsoeuvre, Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986, English

translation, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor. trans. Peter Connor, Lisa

Garbus, Michael Holland, Simona Sawhney, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1991, pp. 67-68/26. The preface to the English edition (xxxvi-xli) was writ-ten especially for that translation; the French text has not been published.

2 This question is also raised by Peggy Kamuf in her essay, On the Limit, Community

at Loose Ends, ed., Miami Theory Collective, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1991, pp. 13-18.

3 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 87/35.

4 Ibid., pp. xxxix-xl, my italics.

5 Ibid., pp. 25-26/7.

6 Nancy has continued to focus on experience in works after The Inoperative

Community, such as LExperience de la libert, Paris: Galile, 1988. English transla-

tion: The Experience of Freedom, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Chapters

7 and 8 from that book, entitled Sharing Freedom: Equality, Fraternity, Justice,

and Experience of Freedom: And Once Again of the Community, Which It Resists,

show the continuity in Nancys thought from community to freedom.

7 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii.

8 Ibid., p. xxxix.

9 Ibid., p. xxxvii.

10 Jean-Luc Nancy, De ltre-en-commun. La communaut dsoeuvre. Paris: Christian

Bourgois, 1986. 199-234. English: Of Being-in-Common, trans. James Creech andGeorges Van Den Abbeele, Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. pp. 1-12, pp. 204/2.

11 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, pp. 50/18-19.

12 Ibid., p. 68/26-27.

13 Ibid., p. 19/4.

14 Ibid., p. 86/35.

15 Ibid., p. xl. In this part of the preface to The Inoperative Community, Nancy is clearly

alluding to Habermas theory of communicative practice.

16 Nancy, Of Being-in-Common, p. 201/1.



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17 Ibid., pp. 224-225/7-8.

18 Ibid., p. 201/1.

19 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 105/42. Nancy here implicitly disagrees with

one of the fundamental assumptions behind the recent book by Alphonso Lingis,

The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1994. In this text, Lingis questions the nature of community in

a way that resonates with Nancys work, but Nancy would not accept Lingis

assertion that it is possible - in the absence of a common language, a common cul-

tural heritage, a common religion, or common economic interests - for people to

have nothing in common, because for Nancy being in common is rooted in

something more basic than all of that: the event of exposition which occurs any-

time two people come face to face.


21 Nancys focus on the event of exposition as that which is fundamentally consti-

tutive of communities, demonstrates the inuence of Levinasian ethics on his polit-

ical thought. The event of exposition for Nancy is the political corollary of the

event of obligation for Levinas. In both cases the event is rooted in the alterity

of the other person and in the inability of a subject to remain closed within itsown identity. In Levinas account of the face-to-face encounter with the Other, a

subject is exposed to the fact of the otherness of the Other, (which always exceeds

the ability of the I to comprehend), and is also ex-posed in its own being. Just as

one cannot avoid confronting the face of the Other, so also one cannot avoid expos-

ing oneself in that face-to-face encounter. While Levinas focuses on the ethical

content of this event, and nds that the expression of the Others face is the

source of the non-cognitive obligation that is always already binding upon each

one of us individually, Nancy focuses on the political content of the event, and

nds that the exposition of both the self and the other that occurs whenever

two subjects come face-to-face is the source of the communities that bind all of us

together collectively. To my knowledge, the best analysis of the many sources that

Nancy has drawn from (including Levinas), and of the generally synthetic qual-

ity of Nancys social and political philosophy, is given by David Ingram in his

essay, The Retreat of the Political in the Modern Age: Jean-Luc Nancy on Total-

itarianism and Community, Research in Phenomenology, no. 18, 1988, pp. 93-124.

Ingram gives an excellent overview of the development of Nancys political phi-

losophy and especially of the sources that inform it, beginning with the founding

of the Centre for the Philosophical Study of the Political in 1980 under the impe-

46 Stuart Dalton


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tus of the Cerisy conference that same year on the work of Derrida (The Ends of

Man: Spinoffs from the Work of Jacques Derrida), up to the writing of The

Inoperative Community and other related texts in the mid-1980s, after the disso-

lution of the Centre. Another good discussion of Nancys work that focuses on

his activity with the Centre for the Philosophical Study of the Political is given by

Simon Critchley in his The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford:

Blackwell, 1992, pp. 200-219.

22 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, pp. 68-69/27.

23 Ibid., p. 23/6.

24 Nancy, Of Being-in-Common, pp. 223-224/7.


26 Ibid., p. 70/27-28.

27 Ibid., p. 71/28. Nancy explicates the meaning of compearance in his essay,

La comparution/the Compearance: from the Existence of Communism to the

Community of Existence, trans., Tracy B. Strong, Political Theory, vol. 3, no. 20,

August 1992, pp. 371-398.


29 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas,Autrement qutre ou au-del de lessence, The Hague: Nijhoff,

1974, pp. 22, 142-143. English translation, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence,

trans., Alphonso Lingis, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981, pp. 18, 111-112.


31 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 42/15. Nancys description of the singular-

ity of the political subject parallels the notion of a singularity in contemporary

physics in some interesting ways. In physics a singularity is an event which is

not governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. The most famous singularity is

the Big Bang which created the universe 15 billion years ago. Such events, like the

singular political subjects that inhabit Nancys inoperative community, have a par-

ticularity that escapes the grasp of concepts. The precise physical analogue of the

political subject for Nancy would be a naked singularity - an event that cannot

be conceptualised by current physical laws but that is nevertheless in principle

observable (a singularity that occurs out in the open rather than within a black

hole). Recently it was proven that naked singularities could possibly exist, which

forced the physicist Stephen Hawking to hand over 100 and a t-shirt to cover



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the winners nakedness in a bet that he had made. See, Malcolm W. Browne, A

Bet on a Cosmic Scale, and a Concession, Sort of, New York Times, February 12,

1997, national edition, A1.

32 This distinction is reminiscent of Kants distinction between a task (aufgegeben)

and a given (gegeben) in the solution to the rst antinomy (B 526).

33 Nancy, Of Being-in-Common, p. 202/1-2.

34 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, pp. 59-60/23.

35 Ibid., p. xxviii.

36 Ibid., p. 16/3.

37 Ibid., pp. 87/35, 22-23/6.

38 Ibid., p. xxxix.

39 Ibid., pp. 78-79/31.

40 Ibid., pp. 15-16/3.

41 Ibid., p. xxxviii.

42 Ibid., p. 89/35.

43 Ibid., p. 89/35.

44 Ibid., p. 43/15.

45 Ibid., p. xxxix.

46 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, (Ak. V), English: Critique of Judgement.

trans., Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. pp. 217-218/62.

47

Ibid., p. 219/63-64. Dieter Henrich provides a detailed survey of the historicaldevelopment of Kants theory of the harmonious play of the imagination and the

understanding in his Aesthetic Judgement and the Moral Image of the World: Studies

in Kant, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992, pp. 29-58.

48 Ibid., p. 204/44. Casey Haskins argues that, because the purposiveness of the beau-

tiful has this facilitating effect, Kant is assigning to art an instrumental autonomy,

and not the noninstrumental autonomy that has traditionally been supposed.

See Kant and the Autonomy of Art, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol.1, no. 47, Winter 1989, pp. 43-54.

49 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 219/63.

50 Ibid., p. 241/92m.

51 Mary A. McCloskey analyses the constrained freedom of the faculties in their

48 Stuart Dalton


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play in, Kants Aesthetic, London: Macmillan Press, 1987, pp. 69-71.


53 Ibid., p. 227/74.

54

Ibid., p. 180/20.55 Ibid., p. 220/65m.

56 Ibid., p. 220/65.

57 Ibid., p. 220/65.

58 Ibid., pp. 179-181/18-20. Christel Fricke argues that judgements concerning pur-

posiveness are reective judgements in Explaining the Inexplicable. The Hypothe-

sis of the Faculty of Reective Judgement in Kants Third Critique, Nous 24, 1990,pp. 45-62. Rudolf Makkreel argues that because judgements of aesthetic purpo-

siveness are reective, it is possible for them to be constitutive (in terms of aes-

thetic pleasure and displeasure) without being dogmatic. See his Differentiating

Dogmatic, Regulative, and Reective Approaches to History in Kant, Proceedings

of the Eighth International Kant Congress, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,

1995, pp. 123-137.

59 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 220/65m.

60 Ibid., p. 231/79.

61 Ibid., p. 236/84m.

62 Ibid., p. 209/51.

63 Ibid., p. 230/77m.

64 Ibid., p. 223/69.

65 Ibid., p. 221/66m. This point about the need for aesthetic judgements to be share-

able in principle is made by Rudolf Makkreel in his The Conuence of Aesthetics

and Hermeneutics in Baumgarten, Meier, and Kant, The Journal of Aesthetics and

Art Criticism, no. 54, vol. 1, 1996, pp. 65-75, and by Hannah Ginsborg in Reective

Judgement and Taste Nous, 24, 1990, pp. 70-75, and The Role of Taste in Kants

Theory of Cognition, New York: Garland, 1990, pp. 1-44.

66 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 293/160.67 Ibid., p. 293/159-160.

68 Prolegomena. (Ak. IV). English: Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be

Able to Come Forward as Science, trans. Paul Carus, Rev. James W. Ellington,

Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977, p. 259/5.



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69 Ibid., p. 259/4.


71 Ibid., p. 293/160m.

72

Ibid., pp. 294-295/160-161m.73 Ibid., p. 237/85.

74 Ibid., p. 216/59-60.

75 Ibid., p. 239/89.

76 Ibid., p. 295/162m.

77 Ibid., p. 221/66.

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