A Mêlée without Sacrifice

Abstract

In this essay I want to explore a certain community of writing, namely the one between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The ongoing dialogue between the two on the subject of community has left in their writings only traces (with the exception of the first essay in Derrida's Voyous): implicit allusions or short references to be found mainly in footnotes. Those allusions turn mainly around the question of fraternity. Derrida claims that it is necessary to deconstruct the concept of community, to severe it from its genealogical ties. It is, according to Derrida, such a deconstruction of the concept of community that is missing in Nancy's work and that might still lead his thinking in the direction of a certain fraternity.1 Nancy, on his part, answers that he agrees with Derrida's critique of community as fraternity but adds that he already thinks beyond it and thus he reproaches Derrida for not getting at a deconstructed concept of community which could be used to think our being-with anew. Given the double movement of deconstruction (reversal and displacement),2 one could explain the "dialogue" as follows: while Derrida claims that Nancy skips the first phase (that he uses an old concept to name something new without analyzing the genealogical ties of that concept), Nancy claims that Derrida remains stuck in the first phase (that he does not sketch a new, displaced concept-as he did for example with "writing"). Because the two movements are necessary for a full deconstruction of a concept, it is my view that one can read Derrida and Nancy together, with one another in the strong sense of the term, as two sides of the same discourse. In this essay, however, I would like to read Nancy against Derrida. I want to underline a difference, maybe even an opposition, in their way of thinking the singular plural, the singular in the plural, or the plurality of singularities. To do so, I will oppose what I want to call Derrida's politics of sacrifice to Nancy's ontology of offering. Derrida on the Singular Plural Derrida has expressed in many places his reserve not only toward the word community, but also toward the thing itself (Pts 366). One reason for his reserve is that communities tend to neutralize differences and reduce the incommensurable alterity of the other by thinking it under the figure of the brother, the same, the next of kin, the neighbor, the fellow man. By severing the bond that binds the one to, or excludes the one from, a group, Derrida's deconstruction of community wants to make way for an experience of the other which would respect its incommensurable singularity. But one must also ask what kind of plurality remains when singularity is thought in such a radical way. In Derrida's work, singularity is another name for the tout autre (the wholly other) and is associated with two values which Nancy distinguishes from singularity, namely the absolute and the secret, or the absolute secret. Both words serve to describe that which is separated, isolated, remote, inaccessible. What is absolutely secret is the alterity of the other, its singularity: "The secret is not only a thing, a content that would have to be hidden or kept behind oneself. The other (autrui) is secret because he is other. ... A singularity is essentially secret, isolated" (PM 296). Or in Husserlian terms, the alter ego is other because he can never be given to me en personne (leibhaftig) in an originary presentation, but always only in an analogical appresentation (or presentification).11 can never gain a direct access to the subjective face of the lived experiences of the other as they are lived by him. This secret-that is the other-is absolute and must be distinguished from conditional secrets, secrets that can be uncovered or deciphered, secrets waiting under a veil, in a crypt, in a book or in one's heart to be unveiled, decoded or expressed. This thought of singularity as absolute secret introduces a heteronomical and dissymmetrical bend in the space where the one and the other-the absolute other-"meet" (PA 258). …