Benjamin Hutchens Jeanluc Nancy Justice Legality and World 1

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Jean-Luc Nancy


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Continuum Studies in Continental PhilosophySeries Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophyis a major monograph series from Con-

tinuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across thefield of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the fieldof philosophical research.

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Jean-Luc NancyJustice, Legality and World

Edited byB. C. Hutchens

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy


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Continuum International Publishing Group

The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane11 York Road Suite 704London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038

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B. C. Hutchens and Contributors 2012

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Jean-Luc Nancy: justice, legality, and world / [edited by] B. C. Hutchens.p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4411-2378-7 -- ISBN 978-1-4411-2849-21. Nancy, Jean-Luc. I. Hutchens, B. C. (Benjamin C.) II. Title.B2430.N364J44 2011194--dc23 2011028611

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Contents

List of Contributors vii

Introduction: Infinite Justice, Groundless Law and Many Worlds 1

B. C. Hutchens

Part One: Justice, Incommensurability and Being

1. From the Imperative to Law 11

Jean-Luc Nancy

2. Being Just? Ontology and Incommensurabilityin Nancys Notion of Justice 19

Christopher Watkin

3. The Just Measure 35

Ian James

4. Doing Justice to the Particular and Distinctive:The Laws of Art 47

Martta Heikkil

Part Two: Legality and Language

5. Abandonment and the CategoricalImperative of Being 65

Francois Raffoul

6. Illegal Fictions 82

Gilbert Leung

7. Nancy Contra Rawls 96

B. C. Hutchens


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List of Contributors

James Gilbert-Walshis an associate professor of philosophy at St. ThomasUniversity in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He specializes in nineteenth andtwentieth century European philosophy and has published articles onHeidegger, Derrida and Nancy. He has also translated several of Nancysessays into English.

Sen Handis Professor of French at the University of Warwick. His researchfocuses on radical and theoretical writings in French of the past 100 years.Recent publications include the books Emmanuel Levinas(London: Rout-ledge, 2008), Alter Ego: the Critical Writings of Michel Leiris(Oxford: Legenda,2004), and Michel Leiris: Writing the Self(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002). He has also translated the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Luce

Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Franois Lyotard. He iscurrently working on the ethics of violence, and on post-memory writing.He is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, a Fellow of the RoyalSociety of Arts, and a Chevalier dans lOrdre des Palmes Acadmiques.

Martta Heikkilis a Researcher in Aesthetics at the University of Helsinki,Finland. Her doctoral thesis At the Limits of Presentation: Coming-into-Presence and its Aesthetic Relevance (2007) was published by Peter Lang(Frankfurt) in 2008. She is currently doing research on the Hegelian legacy

in contemporary French aesthetics and art. Her latest publications includean article on Jean-Luc Nancys philosophy of portraiture in the collectionThe Event of Encounter in Art and Philosophy. She is also the editor and co-au-thor of a volume on the theory of art criticism, incorporating topics oncontemporary French thinkers. She writes reviews of contemporary art for

various Finnish journals of visual culture too.

Jane Hiddlestonis a Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford, and a

Fellow of Exeter College. She has published three books, Reinventing Com-munity: Identity and Difference in Late Twentieth Century Philosophy and Litera-ture in French(Legenda 2005), Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria(Liverpool 2006),


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viii List of Contributors

and Understanding Postcolonialism (Acumen 2009). She also recently com-pleted a monograph entitled Poststructuralism in Exile: The Anxiety of Theoryin a Postcolonial Era(Liverpool 2010).

B. C. Hutchenshas an Oxford D.Phil. and has been a Fulbright Scholar. HisJean-Luc Nancys Exposition of Freedom: The Critique of Kantis forthcoming withSUNY Press. He is the editor of The Nancy Dictionary, forthcoming with Edin-burgh University Press. His Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophywaspublished by McGill-Queens/Acumen in 2005.

Ian Jamescompleted his doctoral research on the fictional and theoreticalwritings of Pierre Klossowski at the University of Warwick in 1996. Since

then he has been a Fellow and Lecturer in French at Downing College,University of Cambridge. He is the author of Pierre Klossowski: The Persistenceof a Name(Oxford: Legenda, 2000), The Fragmentary Demand: An Introductionto the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006),and Paul Virilio(London: Routledge, 2007).

Gilbert Leungis a Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Human-ities. He holds an LLB from the University of Lancaster (UK), an LLM and

DEA with distinction from the European Academy of Legal Theory (Brus-sels), and a PhD in political and legal philosophy from Birkbeck, Universityof London. He is the author of Jean-Luc Nancy: The First Question of Law,

which is forthcoming with Routledge.

Daniel McDowis a university fellow in philosophy at the New School forSocial Research, New York City. He earned his masters degree at the NewSchool for Social Research with a thesis on Jacques-Alain Millers reading ofGottlob Frege and its influence on Alain Badious understanding of Jacques

Lacan. His doctoral research focuses on the development of philosophy oflanguage and its convergence with structural linguistics in Lacanian psycho-analytic theory.

Olivier Marchartis SNF Professor in the Sociology Department at the Uni-versity of Lucerne. He has held lectureships at institutes of philosophy andof political science at the Universities of Vienna and Innsbruck. He is theauthor of, among other works, Post-foundational Political Thought: PoliticalDifference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-versity Press, 2007).


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List of Contributors ix

Todd Mayis Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professor of Philosophy at Clem-son University. His area of specialization is recent French philosophy,including the thought of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Ran-

cire. He is the author of ten books of philosophy, most recently Contempo-rary Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancire: Equality in Action(EdinburghUniversity Press, forthcoming 2010).

Franois Raffoul is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana StateUniversity (LSU), USA. An ancien leve at the Ecole Normale Suprieureof St Cloud, agrg de Philosophie and Docteur en Philosophie from thecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France (Thesis Direc-tor: Jacques Derrida), he has published extensively on Contemporary Con-

tinental Philosophy and is Editor of the Contemporary French Thoughtbook series with the State University of New Press (SUNY Press). He is theauthor of The Origins of Responsibility(Indiana U. Press, forthcoming 2010),A Chaque fois Mien(Galile, 2004), and Heidegger and the Subject(PrometheusBooks, 1999). He has editedFrench Interpretations of Heidegger(SUNY Press,2008), Rethinking Facticity (SUNY Press), Heidegger and Practical Philosophy(SUNY Press, 2002), and Disseminating Lacan(SUNY Press, 1996). He hastranslated numerous books, including Nancys The Creation of the World or

Globalization, (SUNY Press, 2007), The Gravity of Thought(Prometheus Books,1998), and The Title of the Letter: a Reading of Lacan(by Ph. Lacoue-Labartheand J. L. Nancy SUNY Press, 1992).

Jason E. Smithis Assistant Professor in the Graduate Studies in Art Programat Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. His work hasappeared in Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Il Manifesto, Minne-sota Review, Parrhesia, Radical Philosophy and Rethinking Marxism, amongother places. He co-translated and introduced Jean-Luc Nancys Hegel: The

Restlessness of the Negative(2002) and co-translated Tiqquns Introduction toCivil War(2010). With Philip Armstrong, he published a book-length inter-

view with Jean-Luc Nancy, Politique et au-del(Galile, 2011). He is currentlyworking on a book about Guy Debords films.

Christopher Watkin is a temporary University Lecturer in French at theUniversity of Cambridge and Director of Studies at Murray Edwards Col-lege. He works on contemporary French and European thought, with par-

ticular focus on its systems, assumptions and contrasting trends. He is theauthor of Phenomenology or Deconstruction? The Question of Ontology in Maurice


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x List of Contributors

Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricur and Jean-Luc Nancy(Edinburgh University Press,2008), Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-LucNancy and Quentin Meillassoux(Edinburgh University Press, 2011), andFrom

Plato to Postmodernism: The Story of the West Through Philosophy, Literature andArt(Bristol Classical Press, 2011).


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Introduction: Infinite Justice, Groundless Law

and Many WorldsB. C. Hutchens

These chapters survey a vast domain of Nancys work while crossing onlypart of it. The first section of articles addresses the question of the ontologyof justice, emphasizing the problems of incommensurability, immeasurability

and the very significant matter of ethical and aesthetic dimensions of doingjustice. The second section of chapters considers crucial aspects of thenature of law and legality with respect to abandonment and categoricalimperative, the role of fictioning in legal reasoning, the scope and natureof law in a procedural theory of justice and the question of speech, writingand the ground of law in Nancys critique of Christianity. The last group ofchapters targets the relation between politics and world, wrestling withproblems of democracy, political creation, finitude and community, post-

foundationalism and the nature of communism.Floating dimly in the background of all these problems is an ontology ofsubjectivity contributing to, and ultimately dependent upon, the Kantianprinciple of autonomy. Although Nancys critique of this implication inThe Experience of Freedom is well-known, it may be beneficial to introducethese chapters with a brief survey of how the principle of autonomy and thetheory of value that supports it figure in Nancys work.

We are all familiar with the account. Save a good will, nothing else caneven be conceived as inherently valuable. Nothing within the world orbeyond it, Kant was careful to add. Except of course, the laws the self-rulingagent imposes upon itself universalizable and non-contradictory laws.

And, by extension, the act of imposing such laws upon itself, the self-legislating act, as well. From this sprang the principle of autonomy, sup-ported by a theory of value that has been problematic since its first proposalin The Metaphysics of Moralsand its Groundwork. This is a theory of value thatclassifies everything as either having a price even in matters of aesthetictaste, a fancy price which represents its inherent comparability, equiva-

lence and exchangeability with other things, such as human inclinationsand needs, or a dignity, which is to say that it is above all price, i.e., inher-ently valuable, incapable of comparison and exchange. Talents of mind and


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2 Jean-Luc Nancy

temperament, and gifts of fortune, are derivatively good if good at allbecause they have a market or fancy price. Implicated within the orderof interests, passions and inclinations, they possess a heteronomous nature.

The good will and all its genuine expressions, such as fidelity in promisesand benevolence motivated by basic principles of duty, have a dignity. Theybelong to the disinterested order of autonomy. Such actions require noassessment in terms of either possible objective consequences or subjectivedispositions (or tastes). On the contrary, the will that practises fidelity topromises, for example, already commands immediate respect even as rea-son imposes principles of duty upon that will without coaxing them from it.To imagine that the cognitive state that the principle of autonomy describescould be brought into comparison or competition with other such things

would be tantamount to an assault upon its holiness, or at the very least,an unreasonable denial of the dignity it must be thought to have.

Such high claims of dignity and holiness for the will that imposes univer-sal principles upon itself! What justifies them, Kant wonders?

It is nothing less than the shareit affords a rational being in the givingof universal laws, by which it makes him fit to be a member of a possiblekingdom of ends, which he was already destined to be by his own nature

as an end in itself and, for that very reason, as lawgiving in the kingdom ofends as free with respect to all laws of nature, obeying only those whichhe himself gives and in accordance with which his maxims can belong toa giving of universal law (to which at the same time he subjects himself).For nothing can have a worth other than that which the law determinesfor it.1

The law measures out the value something must have. It determines thefitness of a rational being for a possible kingdom of ends, for which he wasalready destined by his finite nature. And since the lawgiving will itselfmust have a dignity, and as such the will that gives itself a law alone meritsrespect, Kant is pleased to argue that autonomy itself is therefore theground of the dignity of human nature and of every rational nature.

Arguably, Jean-Luc Nancys approach to justice, legality and the worldcan be read very fruitfully indeed in conjunction with Kants theory of val-ues as it figures in the metaphysics of morals and the critique of pure practi-cal reason that provides its transcendental logic. In fact, in The Truth of

Democracyand elsewhere, Nancy has directly engaged with the Kantian the-ory of value mentioned above. He has written on everything associated withit, ranging from the power of the categorical imperative to the finitude


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enjoined by it, from the sense of an infinitely complex political community(that, qua kingdom of ends, has a holiness and dignity beyond all price) tothe plurality and singularity of sense itself (which lacks such holiness and

dignity but, qua singularity, remains incomparable and non-equivalent toany other sense). In his approach to ethico-ontological matters, Nancyscritique of subjectivity nearly always involves warnings against the allure ofthe principle of autonomy, especially in respect of the legality of self-legisla-tion that opens it to its own freedom. In a sense, if the Kantian metaphysicsof morals and the pure practical reason that gave it a critical edge culmi-nated in a principle of autonomy it was meant to sustain, Nancys empirico transcendentalist perspective works through the question of incommen-surability to arrive at a notion of singularity that enables us to challenge the

Kantian ontology of subjectivity. We have travelled, then, from the principleof equipollent autonomies to the an-archy of incomparable singularity.

A concern for justice, singularity and the law is discernible throughoutNancys work. I would like to accentuate two places in its corpus where jus-tice figures prominently. My aim here, of course, is merely to provide someminimal background in preparation for the articles that follow.

First of all, Chapter 7 of The Experience of Freedomtakes off from a critiqueof the ontology of subjectivity to explore the notion of a plurality of rela-

tions. Insisting that singularities have no common being, Nancy maintainsthat they com-pear (com-paraissent) on each occasion that common beingwithdraws from their relations. This withdrawing can only be done by free-dom itself, which in its generosity of being (a much neglected concept inNancys work) gives relation to singularities that cannot be conceived assuch outside of a plurality of such relations. Such being-in-common, heinsists, entails that being is neither something shared by us nor somethingdistributed to us as a common property. Being can only be shared betweenus and in us, he writes. Consequently, on the one hand, there is no beingbetween existents the space of existences is their spacing and is not a tis-sue or a support belonging to everyone and no one and which would there-fore belong to itself and on the other hand, the being of each existence,that which it shares of being and by which it is, is nothing other which isnot a thing than this very sharing. From this he concludes that it is the

withdrawal of being itself that divides us and is shared out to us, or rather,shared out to us precisely because it is what divides us as singularities.2And,he continues, when we consider the notion of justice as equality of sharing,

or sharing equally, we butt up against the question of the commensurableand the measurable upon which not only the subject of distributive justice,but the very distributivity of justice as such, depends. Clearly, for Nancy the


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notion of the share is quite different from the Kantian one of a share inthe giving of universal laws, by which it makes him fit to be a member of apossible kingdom of ends we noticed in the Groundworkabove. In respect

of value, Nancy insists, there is a share of the immeasurable figuring withinthe inoperativity of the work of existence itself: the share of the sharing(out) of the incalculable that is itself unshareable both exceeds politicsand opens possibilities that are potentialities rather than merely establish-ing rights.3

With such a view of sharing in mind, we are naturally led to wonder aboutthe relation between freedom and equality. Nancy maintains that they areimmediately linked because the latter is already the equality of singulari-ties in the incommensurability of freedom. Vehement that this does not

mean that will has an unlimited right to exercise itself or that freedom canonly be measured against itself, Nancy presents us with the intriguing notionthat freedom measures itself against nothing: it measures itself againstexistences transcending in nothing and for nothing. Freedom: to mea-sure oneself against the nothing.4Freedom has no ground against which itcould measure itself and no end for which its measuring is necessitated. Inthis way, the self is in a situation in which it must take the measure of itsexistence by measuring itself absolutely, that is to say, measuring itself

against the very measure of measuring itself. Being excessive, being withouta ground, freedoms very incommensurability with itself is the measurewhereby it must measure itself. Absolutely here means that there is noremainder, no reserve, that serves as an exception to this incommensurabil-ity with itself.

Precisely this incommensurability is vital to any understanding of the wayNancy approaches matters of justice. If the political is that which gives spaceand time to the self that is taking a measure of itself in this way, then justiceis inextricably bound up with the political spacing of freedom. In fact,although it is necessary for communal and political relations that thereshould be a technical measure of equality and of justice that could providethe self access to the incommensurability of its freedom to itself, andalthough all political negotiations are based on the reasonable hope for a

just mean, justice itself is not the justness of fair distribution under the stan-dard of the just mean; it is a just measure of the incommensurable, of thefinite opening each singular freedom has with itself in its incommensurabil-ity. Instead, justice can only reside in the renewed decision to challenge the

validity of an established or prevailing just measure in the name of theincommensurable.5Justice, we are to understand, is not merely the imposi-tion of a criterion of the just measure of distribution, but the challenge to


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the validity of any such measure in the selfs relation with its own groundlessfreedom.

And second, we might do well to glance at Cosmo Basileus, where cer-

tain questions about the nature of justice as measuring the immeasurable inand of existence arise. There we see that justice is denied any transcendentposition outside the world, a position of privilege from which it might healthe social wounds of the world. On the contrary, he insists, it is given in the

world, with the world, and as the very law of its givenness. In fact, the worlddoes not merely provide the supreme law of its justice: instead, the world,insofar as it happens and changes at all, stands in relation to itself as thesupreme law of its justice. Nancy concludes Cosmo Basileus with the claimthat the only task of justice is thus to create a world tirelessly, the space of

an unappeasable and always unsettled sovereignty of meaning. One mightwonder in what sense justice could have this task if it is not a transcendentposition outside the world. Perhaps in keeping with Nancys own require-ments it might be more exact to say that justice is the tireless creation ofthe world itself. It remains to be seen precisely how this could be so.

Just as we are to conceive of justice as immanent to the world withoutmerely being inside it, so are we to conceive of a world whose unity ismade up of diversity. This diversity is not something added onto the world.

Nor is it something to which this unity might be reduced. Diversity consti-tutes the unity of the world. Now, while Nancy has written extensively aboutthis matter in The Sense of the Worldand Being Singular Plural, what is of inter-est here is solely how such an ontological view of the world prepares for the

view of justice already mentioned. The world is in fact a diversity of worlds,a diversity constituting a unity of world. In this world, all the worlds thatcompose it are present. And each of these worlds is exposed to the world of

which it is a part and the world itself is exposed to each of these worlds. If aworld is a multiplicity of worlds, then by Nancys reasoning the unity of sucha world is the sharing out [partage] and the mutual exposure in this worldof all its worlds. Such a world, in fact, has no other law than precisely thissharing out of worlds within the unity of the world.6Any event, then, is anevent of sharing, the sharing of a singular world and the unity of the worldof which it is a part. There is exceptional singularity in anything that isshared, in the event of sharing and the sharing that any event already is.However, as singularity the ontological status of such an event is no settledmatter: sharing is always the giving of the gift of the world itself, which is to

say that such sharing is always challenging and bursting through any prede-termined limits of comprehension. Its sharing is at every moment put intoplay: universe in expansion, illimitation of individuals, and infinite demand


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for justice. To consider how sharing is put into play actively by an infinitedemand for justice, Nancy reminds us that justice is normally rendered,

which in his view means that it is given in return to each singular existent

(he is careful not to say in this context that it is owed in return for suchexceptional singularity). Singular existence is a gift to which justice must berestituted. Since precisely who or what a singular existent is does not alwaysprove to be clear or determinate (it never truly is, in his view), then it issomewhat unclear how and why justice must be restituted to the singularexistent. The ontological fuzziness of subjectivity is owed in whole or in partto the infinity of sharings and the indeterminacy of any sharing: Eachexistent belongs to more groups, masses, networks, or complexes than onefirst recognizes, and each also detaches from them and from itself,

infinitely.7One could take this to mean that there is always at least onemore group to which an existent might belong, and thus at least one moresharing one does not take into account with its existence; and there is alwaysat least one more form that any one sharing might take beyond whateverlimit one might conceive there to be on the number of such forms. Sinceneither the number of sharings nor the number of forms of any one shar-ing can be disclosed, the issue of the measure of an existence arises.

Curiously, it is not the notion of sharing but the concept of measure

that is pivotal in the thought-continuum from an ontology of singularityand relation to an ontological conception of the rendering of justice. Whatis the measure of existence and coexistence? In every work in which thisissue arises, Nancy is emphatically clear that the answer is neither someshared ontological ground nor any epistemological, moral or legal founda-tion. There is no common substance that singularities and relations mightshare. Indeed, here it is clear that Nancys conception of the logoscan shedsome light. We might read him to be saying of the logosthat justice is pre-cisely what was said of the logosof freedom itself. It is not the brief of phi-losophy to produce, construct, guarantee or defend any conception of

justice, though philosophy can keep open the access to the essence of thelogos of justice, inscribing and effacing it on the limit of philosophy in itshistorical manifestations.8This in turn leads us back to the question of com-munity. This is not the place to pause over the rather unwieldy matter ofcoexistence or compearance, but rather to look onwards to precisely whatNancy hopes will make sense of the justice rendered to the singular exis-tent. He writes that justice is thus the return to each existent its due accord-

ing to its unique creation, singular in its coexistence with all other creations.9

What is due is not anything akin to a debt, as if there were a common mea-sure by which correct payment could be made. Rather, each singularity is


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measured in relation to itself and in relation to others inasmuch as theyare measured against the immeasurable standard of their own existences.More specifically, the freedom of each singularity is measured in relation

to its own immeasurability (as we have seen above) and in relation to thesingularity of others and their singular creations. (Nancy is forced to merelydescribe these two measures rather than to analyze them, which is suitableunder the circumstances because we are then not tempted to treat them asstandards of measurement.) At any rate, he struggles to articulate how jus-tice must be rendered to the line of the proper, to its cut each time appro-priate, a severance between singularities that also draws our attention to itsrelations its with or togetherness. (I would argue here that Nancy isresponding to Kants analogy in The Metaphysics of Moralsbetween mathe-

matical lines and the mathematical exactitude of differentiating whatbelongs to each from what belongs to others in the doctrine of right.10) Inother words, what is given justice as its due is the act of cutting, severing ormerely distinguishing between a singular existent and other singular exis-tences, as each creates and recreates itself immeasurably. One might ven-ture to suspect at this point that Nancys conception of justice, where it isnot descriptively ontological, is procedurally deontological in the sense ofseeking a succession of principles by which to justify empirically each of

these acts of severance of singularity from itself, from others and from itscommunity. Since he provides few clues about how such a procedure isoperative, we are left with the challenge of understanding the infinite jus-tice owed to the singular existent, its incessant creation, and the finitude ofits birth and death, especially when this justice is, as he asserts flatly, visiblenowhere. In a manner that problematically mirrors his work on good andevil in The Experience of Freedom, Nancy insists that infinite justice and injus-tice cannot be extricated from one another and must collide brutally witheach other. Their interplay in the incessant creation of world does notpermit the infinite to accomplish itself, not even in a limitless return of aself to itself, as we can read in his underrated article A Finite Thinking as

well.11This non-infinite openness of the self, presented best in The Sense ofthe World, enables Nancy in The Truth of Democracyto declare that his ontologyof the share forces us to break with all predictive calculations such as thoseinvolving the just measure (and thereby transforming rights we anticipate

we will have in future to mere potentialities of present being).12The fini-tude of birth and death and the singularity of sharing and compearance

belong to this infinite without return or accomplishment. The forming andun-forming of subjectivity, the composition and decomposition of the linksof community and the proposal and testing of standards of just measure


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are all contributive to the making and unmaking of a world. Our world, ofcourse, the world in which a world is mutually exposed in an infinite exposi-tion is incessantly (un)made in this fashion. This is a world in which infinite

justice through its fluid social ontology is tirelessly making a world, evenwhen this justice can be seen nowhere, not even in the world we ultimatelyexpect to be commensurate with it or the laws that will serve as the repre-sentation and modality of its real commensuration there. This world is our

world, in a sense, only because we are ceaselessly measuring ourselvesagainst the immeasurability of an existence always open in itself, to itself.

Notes

1 Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. trans and ed. MaryGregor. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) p. 43.

2 Nancy, Jean-Luc.The Experience of Freedom. trans. B. McDonald. (Stanford: Stan-ford University Press, 1993) p. 69 (hereafter EF).

3 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Truth of Democracy. trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and MichaelNaas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). pp. 1617 (hereafter TD).

4 EF 71. 5 EF 71 and 75. 6 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World or Globalization. trans. Francois Raffoul

and David Pettigrew. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007) p. 109(hereafter CW). 7 CW 110. 8 EF 64. 9 CW 110. 10 Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. trans. and ed. Mary Gregor. (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 26. 11 Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking in A Finite Thinking. (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2003). 12 TD 16.


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Part One

Justice, Incommensurabilityand Being


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Chapter 1

From the Imperative to Law

Jean-Luc Nancy

I The Category of the ImperativeThe categorical imperative is one of those termini techniciof philosophy,

whose justified popularity has extended its usage, inevitably modifying itsmeaning (the same applies, for instance, to idea, monad or decon-struction).

In the ordinary sense, a categorical imperative is an absolute command,subject to no modalization, adjustment and a fortiori discussion. It is animperious imperative, so to speak, and thus in sum an intensification of the

jussive value of the imperative.Such value is certainly not foreign to the Kantian understanding of the

term, but it constitutes only an implication or a consequence of its conceptproper.

This concept is situated in the order of what is designated by the adjectivecategorical and cannot be limited to carrying the imperative characterto a greater power. We know that the adjective categorical qualifies suchimperative by distinguishing it from the hypothetical kind. As this last

term indicates, the other imperative commands with the condition of a sup-position; ifyou want this, then do that.Nonetheless, this conditional character is not to be opposed to the impe-

rious tonality of the command. If I want to get well, I must absolutely followsuch treatment: once the condition is given and received (granted that Iindeed want to get well), the imperative constraint is just as imperious, onits level, as if it were a moral obligation.

The imperative is always imperious, whatever its kind. Otherwise, it is notan imperative but advice an exhortation or a mere recommendation.

What rather characterizes the categorical imperative is that it commandswithout conditions. The character of command does not depend on an


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externally given end; it is intrinsic. It is a command in and of itself. In otherwords, what is commanded and the fact of the command are the same thing;to be precise, they belong to one another in a necessary way. There is not,

on the one hand, the concept of end, and on the other hand, a will that mayor may not will such end, and which must, if it wills it, submit to a constraint.There is instead the concept of an end that includes within itself the will forthat end and the submission of that will to the imperative of this end. Theimperative character is implied in the concept or category of the end.

Kant borrows the couple categorical/hypothetical from scholastic logicfor which the categorical or categorimatical proposition absolutelyaffirms a predicate for a subject, while the hypothetical affirms it with acondition (S is mortal/ if S is a man, then he is mortal). To this extent,

the categorical belongs to the propositional order, whereas the categorybelongs, as one knows, to conceptuality. The free variation that I proposehere consists in considering the categorical imperative as the propositionalmodality of the sole category, as if one said that the concept must be is theproposition included in the concept itself, prescribing itself as an end.

II Judgement

Furthermore, there is nothing illegitimate in treating the category as the ker-nel or fulcrum of a categorical proposition (affirmative or imperative), for thecategory in Kants or Aristotles sense is not the concept in the most generalsense of the term. It designates the order of possible predicates for any judge-ment (whether a proposition or a predication); thus the categories of unity,existence and community do not exist by themselves but as the possibilities ofattribution in a judgement (this thing is one, it exists, it is in a relation of com-munity with other things). In the categorical imperative, attribution or predi-cation is done on the imperative mode, not on affirmative or hypotheticalmode. For instance, this thing must be one! or else, this community of exis-tence must exist! This must implies an acting that responds and corre-sponds to it; therefore, the imperative states act in such a way that, that isto say, may your action realize the predication the designated categorization(without submitting to any other notion of interest or finality of that action).

A sole end pertains to this regime, the universality of rationality. Reasoncannot not will itself as an end. Thus it cannot, as rational will, not oblige

itself to this end. Whereas the hypothesis (ifI want such or such end) sup-poses the recourse to some empirical intuition (for instance, the attractionor advantage provided by health and thus the desire to be healthy rather


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From the Imperative to Law 13

than the opposite), on the contrary, the pure, intuition-less category1 byitself includes as well the command to will its end, or to will the end that ititself is reason or the rational, a reasonable or rational order of the world.

It follows from this, correlatively, that the hypothetical imperative pertainsto an analytic judgement if something is given, then something else can bededuced from it whereas the categorical imperative supposes a synthetic

judgement; the imperative is added a priori to pure reason or to the cate-gory.2The categorical imperative is in this sense a practical schematism, butit is a strict schematism of the practical subject and not of the object, for theobject in question a rational world cannot be represented (except byanalogy and according to what Kant calls the typic of practical reason, whichby itself does not have the imperative motion or dimension).

The category is, in this context, the complete order of concepts or cat-egories. It is the complete table of these, giving itself the imperative of itsown practical totality. Practically, as opposed to formally, the system of thiscelebrated table is prescribed as duty. I shall not give a detailed analysis ofthe 12 categories; it will suffice to say that their system indeed presents thetotality of determined existences, in the community of their relations atotality that, as the practical end, will be identical to the realization [effectua-tion] of freedom.

III A World Must Be

The categorical imperative signifies that the concept of a world is insepa-rable from that of an imperative a world must be and that the conceptof a pure imperative (not relative to a given end) is inseparable from theconcept of world; what must be is a world, and nothing other than a worldmust, absolutely, be brought forth [mis en oeuvre].

Kants categorical imperative thus inaugurates, in a peremptory and, nodoubt, irreversible manner, the contemporary age of ethics; it is no longera question of responding to a given order, neither in the world nor outsidethe world in the representation of another world; rather, it is a question ofinstituting a world where there is only a confused aggregate. One must, inthis world and despite of it, bring forth the world of reason, or reason as

world. This is the last avatar of the Christian ethosthat distinguishes betweenthis world and what is not of this world.

In such an avatar, what becomes clear is that the other world or ratherthe world that is the other is not given, neither here nor elsewhere. It isnot even given as reason, at least to the extent that rationality is not, as such,


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present [disponible]; it presents itself to itself as the command to make itself(as universal law of nature).

The categorical imperative is indeed the imperative of the category, of

the concept or of the Idea in that it is the imperative of purereason assuch. In the final analysis, incidentally, it indicates or prescribes nothingother than the act of freedom, which is the very Idea or full concept of rea-son. It states the self-prescription of reason. Far from being self-grounding,or to be precise, at the very place of its self-grounding, reason is self-prescriptive; and this indeed is the keystone (an expression used by Kant,as one knows, for freedom) of its very rationality. The concept of reasongives itself as a concept the command to realize itself if we understandthat what is to be realized is not given (cannot be intuited). Reason com-

mands itself to be what it ought to be, a freedom creating a world.It thus commands itself, as it were, to be the equivalent or substitute of

the creating God; the categorical imperative represents in this respect theresolution of all the problems that, prior to Kant, pertained to the idea ofGod and the freedom or necessity of His creating act. Reason obligatesitself to its freedom and frees itself for its obligation. The paradox is thatsuch a statement shows quite well the extent to which the difficulties regard-ing the God of metaphysics were linked to anthropomorphism and the con-

tradiction within it between freedom and necessity, a contradiction thatdisappears in Kantian reason. It also results from this that such a reason isnot anthropomorphic, in particular not psychological or social, and in theend not human. Or, the human in it is not given but self-prescribed.

IV The Other of the World

What is then prescribed, following yet again a Christian model, amounts tonot being ofthis world. It commands to open in this world another world.Reason must open itself in this world as another world and as the other ofthe world in general, as the other of the given.

All the ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions and aporias of theother (of the) world after Kant are already present here; the meaning ofhistory and of its end, utopia, the transformation of the world, messianismas advent or non-advent of a Messiah, the errancy of a destiny, the pre-cipitating of a train of events, the deliverance in and of the instant . . .

The categorical imperative commands simultaneously a present, a historyand an eternity. It is the unity of these three that remains to be thought, andthought as thepraxisof a reason that does not content itself with being what


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it can be; it does not content itself with all that we designate usually asrational and reasonable.

The destitution of the Supreme Being has the direct and necessary con-

sequence the obligation of creating a world. One will note in passing thatthis destitution the ruin of the ontological argument could only haveoccurred by undoing the necessary connection between category and exis-tence (the idea of the perfect being does not include its existence). In thisrespect, the categorical imperative can appear as thejussiverestitution of anecessity that used to be taken as both logical and ontological.

One finds here the source of a formidable ambiguity; the ontologicalorder, as we may call it, of the imperative (in the end the categorical hereproduces the ontological) could transfer the whole of being [ltre] in the

ought-to-be [devoir-tre]. With the ought-to-be in the position of substance,so to speak, one enters the reign of the subject in the sense in which Hegel

would precisely substitute it for substance. In other words, the ought-to-beengages the relation-to-itself of a will or a desire, a project or a programme,an intention or an expectation in general, a tension finalized by a repre-sentation of its own accomplishment. All the traps that we had indicated withrespect to history, destination and advent are ready to function here.

However, if these traps are to be avoided, and if we exclude the possibility

that the Supreme Being be conceived as an ought-to-be rather than a being,then it follows instead that the supreme is no longer a predicate of beingand that the imperative thus becomes its own consistency, as it were. Thereis nothing higher than this command; not the commanding but thebeing-commanded. Not the subject as master, but the subject as subjectedto the receptivity of that command.

It receives the command it receives itself as command of making aworld. However, it is not a question (and this is what the subject must under-stand) of coming to occupy the place of the demiurgic being, as it is pre-cisely that place that has just been emptied. It is a matter of standing in this

void and remaining within it that is to say, to re-engage anew what exnihilomeans. That nothingopens a world and opens in the world; that thesense of the world excludes any given truth and undoes any associated sig-nification. That I receive, that we receive, the command of standing in thatopening. It is, indeed, imperative.

V Right and Freedom

Right [le droit] disposes the relations between human beings as subjects offreedom; that is to say, as subjects of a world a world always to be made and


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remade, incessantly to be re-engaged. The relation between freedoms is notthe relation between given spheres of autonomy whose limits need to bedetermined, avoiding encroachments and frictions. What prevails is not

that my freedom stops where anothers begins. It is rather that our free-doms refer to each others in the perspective of a final unity an infiniteperspective, of course, and from which one must not expect any judicialrealization but whose infinite postulation signifies that freedom does notpertain to one without pertaining to another. As Kant says (to Jung-Stil-lung), the prescriptions of right must be thought as if only each had freely

willed them for all and all freely willed them for each .Right thus cannot be thought without this as if (that als obaround which

Vaihinger would build an entire philosophy, and to which Freud would pay

a lot of attention). How should we understand the as if? Certainly not assome sort of vain mimicking, the caricature of an ideal that is impossible torealize. It is not the realization of an illusion, which incidentally would bean auto-illusion. The as ifmust rather be understood as a relation to theIdea more than to the ideal insofar as that Idea is effectively presentand acting; we then comport ourselves as if it were present as an empiricalreality, knowing that this is not the case, but also knowing at the same timethat its presence as Idea is an effective presence.

As we know, the Idea of freedom is for Kant the sole Idea that is able to bepresent in experience; this paradoxical claim, at first glance, signifies thatthe idea of freedom is not an idea in the sense of a representation, oreven of an ideal representation (or of a thought or principle or anysuch thing), but is instead the Idea in the sense of the true form of an act,such that in this respect it is inseparable from that act.

There is not, on the one hand, an idea of freedom and, on the otherhand, some actions that would more or less correspond to that idea; on thecontrary, there are actions that act in accordance to that idea, not in accor-dance to a given empirical reality but in accordanceto aformthat the actionis in the process of giving to its act or its acting, to what it does, not in thesense of a produced result but in the sense of a movement and tension.

VI The Spontaneity of Right

Right thus proves exemplary much more, we could say, than this or that

other example of an action drawn from individual conduct. Right meansthat each person freely wills the freedom of all and that all freely will thefreedom of each. As we saw, just as the imperative, as it were, acquires the


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consistency of being (or of the category as designation of being and ofbeing as world), right as well acquires, through its formal and normativecharacter, the practical (or praxical) consistency of a form at work and

thus also of a force.The force of the form called right resides in an act that is in the processof enacting a freedom of all and of each as a universal sharing, which is atworkin such sharing and not just occupied with delimiting the spheres offree wills to protect one from the others. In other words, right enacts anactive freedom, creative not only of community but also, more radically, offreedom. Right is freedom creating itself, indefinitely.

That is to say, creating a world, that is the same thing. A world can only bea world of freedom or freedoms in the sense in which only the freedom of

all willed by all allows for a circulation of sense, which is properly that inwhich a world consists.

It is here that natural right, a notion that appeared long before Kant,finds the true elaboration of this natural that had only been until then asort of hypothesis or even rather a regulative fiction accepted without fur-ther examination or without being scrutinized in its difficulties as anature impossible to determine as such. Of course, Rousseau knew wellthat the state of nature was always-already caught in the civil society and

that there is no possible derivation of man from some kind of animal.Presumably, we may conjecture that Locke and Hobbes also knew it,although in different ways.

Yet, what Kant allows us to think is a resolutely non-natural character ofright (and of man, and of society). The domain or register of freedom canalways be adjusted, for practical reason, to what Kant calls a type, that is tosay, to the model of a natural legislation; freedom tends to create some-thing like a second nature. However, the type is neither a scheme (consti-tuting an object) nor a symbol (which remains within the order ofrepresentation). Nor is it, as we saw, an imperative, but it is, as it were, whatgives the imperative its form. One could say, the imperative gives the force,the type gives the form.

The choice of the term type indicates the impression of a character; thischaracter is nothing other than the character of a world. A world, a space ofsense, is not a nature but an act a dynamism in a state of constant tension and right, in the entire depth and scope of its demand, is nothing otherthan this tension opened onto a possibility of world.

Right definitely loses here any character of a law or a rule imposed by apower, as well as that of a property given and available for instincts or anyother spontaneity of a living being. On the contrary, right is the spontaneity


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of a freedom in act. This spontaneity does not have a given end. It opens ahistory. This history is not that of societies, cultures and technologies alone.It is also and in a sense above all the history of right itself, for right by

essence must project itself always farther than any given settled form, alwaystowards a new world or always towards more of world [plus de monde], ifone can speak in this way.

One word will be sufficient to conclude; the rights of man are today thedepositaries of this demand. They are not given, neither acquired nor natu-ral; right is not defined, and man has no essence. Both, individually, arein act, in the process of making themselves.

Translated by Franois Raffoul3

Notes

1We could introduce here, in this context, the delicate question of the pure formsof intuition. However, that would require an entirely different development.

2 See Immanuel Kant. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals(New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997), p. 31.

3 TN: I wish to thank professors Jon Cogburn and Chris Blakley, Philosophy Depart-ment at Louisiana State University, for their crucial help in reviewing this transla-tion.


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Chapter 2

Being Just? Ontology and Incommensurabilityin Nancys Notion of Justice

Christopher Watkin

The question of justice and its relation to ontology traces a fault line throughthe thought of the twentieth century and its understanding of the political.If a determinate politics is directly derived from, or justified in terms of, anontological ground, then such a political position very easily arrogates toitself the right to dispense Ultimate Justice on the basis of an ultimate andinflexible ontological justification. In the interests of foreclosing such atotalizing violence, the post-war decades of the twentieth century saw arejection of determinate political ontology by thinkers such as EmmanuelLevinas and Jacques Derrida, in favour of an ethics and a politics radically

dislocated from any determinate ontological justification. Derrida main-tains that the authority of laws rests only on the credit that is granted them.One believes in it; that is their only foundation. This act of faith is not anontological or rational foundation,1and justice has to be distinguished notonly from law but also from what isin general.2Justice is a promise that is tocome, always to come, open to the other, which will be radically differentfrom any idea we might have of it in the present.3

The risk run by this rejection of political ontology, however, is the spectreof certain quietism, an incapacity to make decisive interventions, to claimuniversality to or bring about decisive political change. This is the substanceof Alain Badious critique of Derrida as the anti-hunter. Whereas a regularhunter hopes that his or her quarry will stop so that he or she might take ashot, Derrida hopes that the beast will never cease fleeing away, so that hecan point out its endless disappearing. Badious Derrida hunts by expresslyletting his quarry escape:

The treasure is there or, the spring is there. What is disappearing

is there but, softly, softly otherwise the treasure will be stolen the spring will dry up. I have a plan, but its vague, vague enough to


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avoid stepping on the treasure put one foot on the treasure, and it isworthless even chance is dangerous softly 4

At bottom, argues Badiou, deconstruction has done its job when the logicalspace in which one is operating is no longer that of an opposition betweenaffirmation and negation. The capacity to seize the moment and makepolitical decisions capable of any revolutionary change is undermined.5

In this chapter, we shall examine the distinctive way in which Jean-LucNancy articulates his singular plural ontology with his notion of justice. Weshall argue that he avoids both the dangers of a straightforwardly politicalontology and the potential weaknesses of a Levinasian or Derridean disloca-tion of politics from the ontological justification. We situate Nancys justice

as a compelling response to the problem of political ontology sketchedabove, as a thought that provides us with a notion of the just that carries the

weight of an ontological justification, yet without its divisive or totalitarianexcesses, and a notion of the just that has the undiscriminating inclusivityof justice ruptured from the need for any determinate ontological justifica-tion, without falling into quietism or passivity.

I From Ontology to Politics? Nancean EthosIt is not only mistaken to speak of Nancys thought in terms of a movefrom ontology to certain ethical or political principles but also dangerous:

We should know that in the move from a thinking, let us say of being, ofessence, or of principles it matters little here to a politics and an eth-ics, the consequence is never good (why do we systematically forget themassive and enduring adherence of so many theorists of the philosophyof values to the Nazi regime?).6

The error in such a move is to pass unproblematically from the interroga-tion of the principal as such to the fixing of certain determinate principles.Principles cannot be deduced from the principal, understood as theprinciple of freedom, the originary sharing of being. Heideggers Nazism isthe proof of this point: That Heidegger should have been a Nazi was anerror and a mistake. That he could have been one is what belongs to the

archi-ethical principle of freedom.7

Furthermore, to distinguish physics andethics is already to be functioning within the history of philosophy governedby closure of metaphysics (the closure of sense into signification). It is to


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Ontology and Incommensurability in Nancys Notion of Justice 21

stop asking where something like ethics comes from and what, prior to anydomain of ethics, could authorize any ethical law in general.8

Nevertheless, the discourses of ontology and ethics are for Nancy post

factoreductions of a sens,which is before the division between the ontologi-cal and the ethical. It is a mistake to suppose that we need to make a movefrom ontology to ethics or politics, because being for Nancy is not a brutefact, an il y a, in the first place.9Being is not the there is of a brute given,but rather that there isgiving (quil y a don); in other words, no significationcan be ascribed to the fact thatbeing is, in the same way that we mightascribe signification to whatthere is. It is Nancys distinction between signi-fications(as determinate meanings) and sens(as meaningfulness, the condi-tion of possibility of meaning) that is doing the work here. There can be no

signification of sense, because sense is the condition of possibility of signifi-cation. Nancy articulates this position concisely when he says that ethics isphatic rather than semantic,10a thatnot a what.

Nancy rethinks the relation between ontology on the one hand and ethicsand politics on the other such that (1) ontology is framed as the questionof social being,11and (2) it is no longer a first philosophy upon which ethicsand politics supervene. When Nancy insists that singular plurality is notonly another signification but also another syntax,12he means to cast singu-

lar plural ontology as an ethos and a praxis. Singular plural ontology situ-ates itself before the distinction between ontology and ethics, or betweenbeing, acting, sense and behaviour, just as it is before the distinction betweensingular and plural. Adopting a Kantian idiom, Nancy insists that Pure rea-son is in itself practical reason, because it is, irreducibly, common reason(raison commune), having the with of being with at its groundless ground:There is no difference between the ethical and the ontological: the ethi-cal exposes what the ontological disposes.13

This changes our understanding of the ethical and the political in impor-tant ways. Ethics is not the discipline concerned with moral signification, asopposed to cognitive or physical significations, but it is the very touchingand disposition of being singular plural. It follows that all disciplines thecognitive, logical, physical, aesthetic and moral are originally ethical;14infact, only ontology can be ethical,15and ethics is the ontology of ontologyitself.16

For Nancy this original ethicity is an ethos, an a priori synthesis of conceptand affect.17 The Greek has two distinct meanings: presence and

sojourn, or disposition and behaviour. The two meanings blend in the motifof holding oneself, and it is such a self-holding that is at the bottom ofevery ethics.18Nancy elaborates in terms of the Latin words habitare and


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habitus. Both nouns come from habere to hold (oneself), to occupy, possessor have a place. Therefore, habereand designate a manner of being-there, of holding-oneself-there, a having with the value of a being.

Ethosfor Nancy is a behaviour, and the thought of this behaviour is origi-nal ethics: ethosas conducting oneself (la conduite) according to the truth19that is prior to any ethics or politics.20More fundamental than any ontol-ogy, it does not think beings in their Being, but the truth of beings. In Heide-ggers fundamental ontology, Nancy argues, it is not simply that the thinkingof being implies an ethics but, more radically, that the thinking of beingpresents itself as an ethics: Heideggers fundamental ontology is justlycalled an original ethics. Nancy is at pains to stress that ethosis not superim-posed on being from the outside, nor does it imbue being with any alien

values. Rather, ethos is always to be brought forth as the nothing-of-reason that underpins, conducts and forms statements that create sense(in science, poetry, philosophy, politics, ethics and aesthetics).21It is not a lawor an ultimate value but the decision or the freedom by which there can beany relation to values or law in the first place.22This is a thinking of beingthat is neither ethical nor ontological, neither theoretical nor practical.23

Ethosis not the Good, however it may be conceived (as Platos agathon,Kants good will, Spinozas joy, Marxs revolution, Aristotles zoon politikon

and so on); it is the archi-originary ethicity without which there would beno such determinations of the good,24namely the free decision to receiveoneself, to hold oneself as a decision (de se tenir elle-mme comme dcision). Inother words, the good for Nancy relies on a prior freedom of decision, adecision that is the empty moment of any ethics. We have to decide aboutethical content and ethical norms, laws, exceptions, cases and negotiations,but there is no law or exception for the decision itself, unless it is the lawthat withdraws from (and stands behind) all laws, namely freedom.

Nancy is not, for all that, propounding an ethics of freedom, but rathera freedom that is ethositself as the opening of space,25ethosas the space ofethics, rather than an ethics of ethos. This relation mirrors that between sensand significationsin Nancys thought,26there can be no gift of sense becausesense is the giving of the gift; there can be no ethics of ethosbecause ethosisthe possibility, the space, of ethics. Put another way, the province of ethosisnot one of possession but of abandonment, of poverty.27

The primacy of freedom is fundamental to an understanding of Nancysethosand a fortiori to understanding how he seeks to avoid any move from

ontology to ethics and politics. Freedom is not the property of such andsuch a being, rather being itself is opened by freedom. However, such anontology can in a Spinozan sense be easily called an ethics, where


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ethics by no means designates a morality in the service of a first philosophy,but first philosophy itself, inasmuch as it interrogates being in the name ofan ethos, that is, in the name of a holding and sending of existence

according to the ex- that constitutes it and animates it most fundamen-tally. This notion of ethosas that which animates being brings us back oncemore to the difference between the freedom before any good and thegoods that are made possible by that freedom.

The insistence on freedom means that ethosyields a thought that has noresult, not in the sense that it is impotent, but that it yields no determinatenorms or sets of values. Nevertheless, it is its own result, its own effect, pre-cisely because it is possible as a thought only to the extent that it is a behav-iour (conduite). It does not guide behaviour; but rather guides us to thinking

behaviour in general. As such, ethosavoids two equal and opposite errors.On the one hand, it is incommensurable with the philosophy of values,

which would attempt to fix signification by projecting it into some beyondor other, hitching the ethical to any determinate idea, concept or discourse.On the other hand, ethosdoes not yield a subjective, autonomous ethicalfree choice, and if it did, this would in fact amount to just the fixing of sensesame as the philosophy of values. Neither of these attempts to fix significa-tion, Nancy argues, can assure human dignity,28where dignity is understood

as having, in ones being, to make sense of being.The contemporary moral disarray, insists Nancy, stems from not havingfound a way to think values and free choice together. It is this marriage of

values and free choice that is provided by Nancys ethos, and it can be under-stood as follows. Ethos is to ethics as sense is to significations. Ethos, likesense, cannot be reduced to any particular ethical signification or determi-nate system of values because it is that which makes possible any system of

values whatsoever. However, although ethoshas no ethics, it does not followthat ethoshas no bearing on ethics. Ethics can be rethought as ethos, wherethe freedom of the free choice rather than the choice of the free choice becomes the ethical value. In an admirably concise formulation from Ona Divine Wink, Nancy sums up the twin dangers: To keep, to protect sensefrom being filled, as well as from being emptied that is ethos.29

II From Ethos to Justice? Nancean Incommensurability

In reflecting on the possible implications of Nancys ethosfor any determi-nate politics, we will find no simplistic, deductive transition; no politicalsystem springs forth from Nancys work like Combray from Prousts


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Madeleine. As Ian James, Philip Armstrong and Christopher Fynsk havestressed, reading Nancy will not tell us where to put our cross on any ballotpaper.30To trace how Nancys ethosinforms his notion of justice, we need to

plot a course through three important moments in his thinking: from capi-tal through democracy to communism.In Nancys account, capitalism appeared at the birth of the West, when

the sumptuous opulence of the riches of the sacred (Greek hagios, thatwhich is set apart from common space, time or commerce) gave rise toanother sort of wealth, a wealth of accumulation and growth, investmentand surplus value. This new capitalistic regime of wealth saw the growthof value for its own sake, a value that circulates in the autonomous and puri-fied sealed bubble of the financial markets. In contrast to the set apart

values of the sacred, capital inaugurates what Nancy, after Marx, calls ageneral equivalence, a levelling of distinctions and the reduction of excel-lence to mediocrity.31Capitalism is first and foremost the choice of a modeof evaluation: evaluation by equivalence. When a society takes the decisionthat value is in equivalence, that society is capitalist.32Ends, means, values,meaning, actions, works and persons are all exchangeable, circulable, forall are substitutable according to the universal equivalence of capital.

Nancy characterizes capitals universal as a bad infinity, the deregula-

tion of the indefinite that merely perpetuates indifference rather than theinfinite inscription of affirmative difference, thereby promoting tolerancerather than confrontation, a political and ethical grey rather than colour.33This bad infinity dissipates the world in a globalization that, althoughinfinitely expansible, is always closed in upon itself in its one universal valuethat destroys all other values: world without sky.34Capital reduces spacing tobanal general equivalence.

Capital is, however, not simply a way of universalizing value; it is also aquestion of ontology, which is in turn the same question as that of historyand politics.35The ontology of capital is an ontology of general equiva-lence. In seeking to situate his own thinking of justice both within andagainst capitalisms reduction to general equivalence, Nancy begins with afeature of capital itself, namely that its reduction of all values to generalequivalence is never complete. Existence is resistance to the general equiva-lence that would turn its nothing rien into an exploitable nothingness(nant), for singular plural existence is an actual infinite that exempts itselffrom capitals circulation. In other words, the spacing of singular plural

being cannot itself be commodified and exchanged, for the absence ofprice is what is inscribed and excribed with each existence as its eternalpresence, immediately in the world out of the world, instantaneously


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it is without models, without principle and without given end, and that isprecisely what forms the justice and the meaning of the world.38

The first clues of what creating the world in this sense might mean aregiven in capital itself, in its awkward attempts to gesture towards anothervalue, an absolute value that it cannot incorporate. Nancy explores thisuneasy relation in his discussion of the art market in La Pense drobe, wherehe reads the huge prices commanded by works of art as an impotent indica-tion of a value foreign to capital:

The very high price is like the manifestation impotent, gestural of theabsolute absence of a price: a da Vinci canvass ispriceless(and in such a

case, in fact, the literal and figurative senses of this expression convergetowards each other). We cannot say how much the Mona Lisais worth,and yet we can, just, in the logic of insurance for example.39

The task of creating the world is not akin to the fundamentalist crusade ofreplacing the order of capital with a substantialized, non-exchangeableidentity, but rather seeks to strike up a new relation to capital that disruptsboth capitals general equivalence and the symptomatic essential funda-

mentalism that parasitizes it.The possibility of striking up a new relation to capital is what Nancyexplores in his treatment of democracy. It is necessary, however, to disam-biguate this constructive use of the term democracy from Nancys critiqueof actually existing democracies. Nancy coruscates the new philosophers

who, during what he calls the bleak 1980s, substituted the terms totalitari-anism/democracy for revolution/imperialism, calling one and all to jointhe herds shepherded into the voting booths, this electoral theatre her-alding only the large-scale persecution of migrant workers.40However, wecannot simply reject general equivalence out of hand. Western democracyis intimately tied to capitals general equivalence, and the destiny of democ-racy hangs on the possibility of a transformation in the paradigm of equiva-lence, the introduction of a new inequivalence. However, this newinequivalence cannot take the form of economic domination of one groupby another, of aristocracies, systems of divine election and salvation, spiritu-ality, heroism or aestheticism.41The challenge, Nancy notes, is one of notintroducing another system of differential values, but of achieving a sense

of evaluation, of evaluative affirmation, that gives to each evaluating gesture a decision of existence, of work, of bearing the possibility of not being


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measured in advance by a given system but of being, on the contrary, eachtime the affirmation of a unique, incomparable, unsubstitutable value orsense.42

Only this introduction of the incomparable and incommensurable candisplace the economic domination that is merely the effect of the funda-mental decision of Western society for a value based on equivalence. It isthis detotalizing, incommensurable politics that Nancy chooses to call dem-ocratic a politics for which everything (or the everything) is multiple,singularplural, the inscription in finite bursts or an infinity in actuality.43The only meaning that can be given to democracy for Nancy is that it isa-figural: it provides no truth of the common but rather configures thespace of the common so that we can open out in that space the abundance

of forms that the infinite can take.44According to Nancys political thoughtdemocracy plays a role equivalent to sense in relation to significations, thatof an opening and a spacing. As such, democracy is (1) the name of aregime of sense whose truth cannot be subsumed under any orderinginstance, be it religious, political, scientific or aesthetic, but that engageshumanity (lhomme) as such and (2) the duty to invent the politics not ofends but of means, to open, and to keep open, the spaces in which thoseends are brought into play.45Politics thus configured must be thought as

distinct from the order of ends. This construal of democracy is different toDerridas emphasis on the messianic democracy to come, whose form is notyet discernible.46It is different in that Nancys democracy is both a meta-physics and a politics,47and not an unforeseeable future but an anarchicground of the political.

Nancy takes care, however, to stress that metaphysical democracy does notfound political democracy. Indeed, that would blur a distinction that is con-substantial with democracy itself: the order of the State (in this case, meta-physical democracy) does not decide on the ends of humanity, eithercommunal or singular. Democracy reconfigures ontology as anarchic, in thesense that it has no principle (or end), no precondition and no model, andthis anarchy is not in its turn subsumed under any principle or end. Never-theless, democracy does elicit actions, operations, even struggles that allowthe absence of archeto be rigorously preserved.48The democratic is the powerto frustrate the archeand then to take responsibility for its infinite opening.This is a fundamental choice made by a whole civilization, just like Nancysaccount of capitalism described above, but this choice for anarchic democ-

racy results in the annulment of general equivalence in favour of incommen-surability. Furthermore, this is no notional or theoretical preference:


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becomes communist, it will remain a system for managing necessities andleast worst options, shorn of any desire, spirit or sense.53

So what does it mean for communism to be the truth of democracy? The

stakes are as follows: democratic capitalism tries to make a world with simpleatoms, but that world dissipates in general equivalence. Something more,something else, something other than capitals general equivalence is nec-essary for a world, some clinamen,54and in his later writing, Nancy locatesthat clinamen at the heart of the bad infinity of general equivalence, as theincommensurable spacing of the singular plural. What the atomized indi-

viduals of democratic capitalism have in common is articulated by Nancyin terms of ontological communism. When Nancy says that communism isan ontological but not a political proposition,55we are to understand this

ontology as the being-in-common that is incommensurable with what exists,the giving, which cannot be reduced to anything that is given. It is this irre-ducible incommensurability of ontological communism that is the truth ofdemocratic equivalence.

Ontological communism precedes and exceeds every given, and it isthat by which anything in general can take place (avoir lieu). As such, com-munism is not an ontology of Being or of what is, but of being inasmuchas it exempts itself from the general equivalence of what is.56However, the

ontology of being-in-common must also be a political programme:

not political in the sense of theses and partisan projects, but rather in thesense that the political itself must completely re-program itself, mustregister a to-come that hides neither program nor conception of a poli-tics consubstantial with another or all of our ontologies.57

The political programme of communism is a political re-programming, thedecision of a civilization not to install equivalence as the only value, to takeaccount of the exposure of plural singularities and not simply of capitalflows. Furthermore, only an ontological communism can challenge theatomized ontology of the general equivalence that sustains political capital-ism:

If politics is again to mean something, and mean something new, it willonly be in touching this essentiality of existence which is itself its ownessence, that is to say, which has no essence, which is arch-essentially

exposed to that very thing. In its structure and nature, such an exposurecontains at the same time the finitude of all singularity and the in-com-mon of its sharing.58


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30 Jean-Luc Nancy

The communist ontology of being insofar as it is not what it is is crucial forNancys politics: Before all else, we are in common. Then we must become

what we are: the given is an exigency, and this exigency is infinite.59This

political demand to be what we are ontologically cannot be determinedor defined; it is preceded by no pre-vision, no foresight, and the demand isopen because it is incalculable, defying capitals general culture of calcula-tion and its anticipation of outputs and yields. It is because this incalculabil-ity is ontological that capital is loosened from its moorings; this is not acritique from within capitals circulating equivalence but an anarchic sub-

version of capitals closed bubble. At the same time, it distinguishes itselffrom Derridas justice in that it is not a messianic hope but an ontologicalimperative.

To discern more precisely how Nancys ontological communism situatesitself neither with Derridas messianic justice nor with the political ontologythat Derrida is reacting against, it is necessary to make a distinction between

what Nancy identifies as the two measures of incommensurability in ourtradition: incommensurability according to the Other and incommensura-bility according to the with (lavec). The Other, with its intimacy and prox-imity, is other than the social, where the social is understood as communion,as the shared being of the common. By contrast, the other of being-with is

an-other that never returns to the same; it is a just measure of the with,being-with as the just measure of the disposition of being singular plural.60It is in this way that Nancy sources in his communism a justice (which in thiscontext means a universality and an equality) that does not dissolve eitherinto capitals general equivalence or into the antisocial intimacy of incom-mensurability according to the Other.

This is not just a politics of distributive justice, however. Nancys politicsdemands more than justice understood as the equal distribution of rightsand freedoms. What is demanded is an effective equality of the uniqueand incommensurable appearing of a singularity that cannot be measuredagainst any signification. This more than justice could be called frater-nity and understood as the act of apportioning and interweaving that, assuch, has no sense but gives place to every event of sense.61This can beneither an exclusive fraternity of communal essences nor a fraternity ofgeneral equivalence. It is the fraternity of the in-common, not of the Otheror of capital. What ontological communism demands is the fraternalequality of the in-common. It is therefore a misguided conflation of the

two forms of incommensurability to read this evocation of fraternity inNancy either as a concession to community as communion (with all thedangers of political ontology that would bring), or to community as general


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equivalence (with its loss of any power to resist the general equivalence ofcapital).

The demand for equality, for the ontological fraternity of the being-with

in excess of the political calculation of distributive justice, is also the spear-head of Martin Crowleys reading of Nancys communism. The principle ofontological equality that Crowley calls the proposition of finitude controlsan in-principle solidarity with every other being, especially the exploitedand brutalized:

Here is the thesis of this book: that the proposition of finitude calls fora politics of egalitarian revolt a revolt that it has stirred up more thanonce, and that it must stir up again. Finitude makes itself political inas-

much as this logical equality immediately calls into question every con-crete inequality. Which is true, moreover, of every proposition of formalontological equality.62

The rhetoric of revolt here takes Nancys emphasis on challenging capitalsgeneral equivalence at its ontological root and adds to it a politics of revoltmore developed than we have seen in Nancys work to date. Yet this is notthe same revolt or resistance as the fundamentalist anti-capitalism that

Nancy rejects, for whereas fundamentalisms communal essences are merelysymptomatic of capitals globalizing equivalence, a revolt grounded in onto-logical communism subverts the logic of capital itself.

In his treatment of Nancys communism in Alain Badiou, une trajectoirepolmique, Bruno Bosteels stresses that Nancy understands communism tobe unforeseeable, still entirely to-come, failing to mention that it is Nancysontological communism that impels the demand for any communism-to-come in the first place.63For Bosteels, Nancys communism is separatedfrom all the dreams or nightmares of immanence and transcendence, pos-sessing no common measure with substances or subjects, but Bosteels ismistaken; for Nancy himself this ontological detachment (although Nancy

would prefer to call it an ethos) precedes both ontology and politics andprovides the means by which his communism (unlike Badious) can mountsomething more than a parasitic resistance to the unrestricted circulationof capital. Most fundamentally, ontological communism provides an affir-mation of the finite human that still leaves open the possibility of radicalchange. Furthermore, it provides a notion of justice that is not paralyzed by

its insistence on incommensurability, but rather for which incommensura-bility according to the with, not according to the Other is its anarchicground, which excepts itself from capitalisms general equivalence without


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32 Jean-Luc Nancy

disappearing into the messianic distance. Nancean ethosand communism asthe truth of democracy provide finite thinking with a compelling notionand practice of justice that avoids both the totalitarianism of political ontol-

ogy and the quietism that seeks to resist it.

Notes

1Jacques Derrida, Force of law in Acts of Religion. trans. Gil Anidjar (London:Routledge, 2002) p. 240.

2 See Jacques Derrida, I have a taste for the secret, in Giacomo Donis and DavidWebb (trans. and eds), A Taste for the Secret.(Oxford: Polity, 2001) p. 21.

3 Derrida, Force of law p. 270. 4Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon.(London: Verso, 2009) p. 136. 5 For a comparative study of Badiou and Nancy on the questions of justice and

political ontology, see my Difficult Atheism. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2011).

6 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Experience of Freedom. (Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 1993) p. 171 (hereafter EF).

7 EF p. 171. 8 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, La panique politique in Retreat-

ing the Political. ed. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 29. 9 Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

1993) pp. 176, 178 (hereafter FT). 10 FT p. 195. 11 Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E.

OByrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 57 (hereafter BSP). 12 BSP p. 37. 13 BSP p. 99. 14 FT p. 188. 15 BSP p. 21. 16 FT p. 187. 17 FT p. 191. 18 Nancy, The Creation of the World, or, Globalization. trans. Franois Raffoul and DavidPettigrew (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007) p. 42 (hereafter

CW). 19 FT p. 189. 20 Nancy, The Truth of Democracy. trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New

York: Fordham University Press, 2010) p. 33 (hereafter TD). 21 CW p. 52. 22 EF p. 163. 23 FT p. 189. 24 EF p. 163.

25 EF p. 146. 26 The equivalence is not foreign to Nancys thought, as we see from a discussion ofart in Les Muses:


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34 Jean-Luc Nancy

55 Nancy, La Comparution/the Compearance: From the Existence of Commu-nism to the Community of Existence, in Political Theory20:3 (1992) p. 378(hereafter LC).

56 LC p. 378. 57 LC p. 388. 58 LC p. 390. 59 TD p. 54. 60 BSP p. 81. 61 Nancy, The Sense of the World. trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1997) pp. 114

Documents

Benjamin Hutchens Jeanluc Nancy Justice Legality and World 1