Thinking the Political with Jean-Luc Nancy

Janar Mihkelsaar

doi:10.33280/2310-3817-21-11-1-16-38

Abstract

In this article, I argue that at the center of Jean-Luc Nancy’s approach to the political lies the thinking of subject as that of relation. Throughout the historical actualizations of, for example, the individual, the state, or the people as a subject, the problematic of relation is one that has retreated and now demands to be subjected to a retreatment. When the arche-teleological presuppositions that constitute subject as that which is given enter the phase of deconstruction, subject comes to present itself as nothing but the activity of relating itself to itself. I respond to Nancy’s call to invent “an affirmation of relation” by way of rethinking the logics of sovereignty and democracy. While sovereignty unites, posits, finitizes, and finishes the self of the people, a post-68 democracy pluralizes, infinitizes, and disfigures the identity of the people. Between sovereignty and democracy, notwithstanding their conflicting tenets, the relation is not that of reciprocal exclusion. One is rather the correlative of the other. Without the one, the other would not make any sense. Through this Janus-faced economy of the political, the people can experience its own “reality”—to experience relation itself. The affirmation of relation is what gives and keeps free the voided site of the political for the infinite self-institution of the people, and for that reason is political par excellence.

Highlights

In one of his addresses in the center, published as “The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch,” Nancy tentatively summarizes what he understands as the political: “[T]he concept of the political is just that of the actualization,” meaning, the actualization of philosophemes such as good or, what concerns us here, the actualization of a class, a citizen, an individual, a state, or a people as a subject (Nancy 1993: 117; 1997: 106)
Whenever the problem of relation pops up in the Occidental tradition, as is written in one of the addresses in Retreating the Political, “the political becomes an enigma, lacuna or limit” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997: 118–19). This question of relation is at the center of ongoing debates on issues such as populism (e.g., Laclau), ontico-ontological difference (e.g., Heidegger), psychoanalysis (e.g., Lacan), speculative realism (e.g., Harman), and sovereignty (e.g., Agamben)
By tying the question of relation with the fate of the subject, this study contributes to recent research by offering a novel conceptualization of the people, democracy, and sovereignty

Summary

The Political as the Question of Relation

And somewhat arbitrarily, one may date the retreat of the theologico-political presupposition of a “politico-philosophical order” back to the first wave of democratic revolutions in the period between 1760 and 1800. While the first wave of democratic revolutions (1760–1800) did not so much efface as reinscribe the ideas of political theology in accordance with the schema of a subject, the significance of May ’68 in Nancy’s eyes lies in that it ventured to question “the truth of democracy” (Ibid.: 1) This venture inaugurated another approach to what democracy is — and should be — all about. While the effect of the sovereign power is to precipitate the infinite in the finite, the democratic spirit of ’68 pursues another path: it retraces the question of relation back from the sedimentations of a constituted self and exposes the non-coincidence and nonidentity of a finite self This means that the people is forced to assume itself in the space of separation. Separation undermines the positivity of any identity and blocks from within the self-identity of the people

Sovereignty and Democracy

Relation as the “Reality” — or Nothing — of the People

The Political as the Site of the Actualization of Relation as such