Mito Interrompido

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JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 9 NUMBER 4 (OCTOBER 2005)

ISSN 1479–7585 print/1740–1666 online/05/040331–19© 2004 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14797580500252571

On Interrupted Myth

Ian JamesTaylorandFrancisLtd RCUV125240.sgm10.1080/14797580500252571JournalforCulturalResearch1479-7585 (print)/1740-1666 (online)OriginalA rticle2005Taylor&FrancisLtd 94000000October 2005IanJamesDirectorof StudiesMML,GraduateTutorandFellowLibrarianDowningCollegeCambridgeCB21DQUK 00441223 [email protected]

This article engages critically with Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking of community suchas it develops in his collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in the Centre

for Philosophical Research on the Political (1980–1984) and in the major workwhich arises from this collaboration, The Inoperative Community (1986). It exam-

ines some of the responses to Nancy’s thinking on community (principally by NancyFraser, Simon Critchley and more recently by Andrew Norris), in order to suggestthat the (to varying degrees) negative criticisms which have been advanced donot do justice to the philosophical complexity of his account. Through a detaileddiscussion of Nancy’s engagement with myth in The Inoperative Community andwith the notion of “interrupted myth” this article argues that, although Nancy’sthought does not allow philosophy to provide a metaphysical foundation orprojected programme for an engaged politics, it does point towards a “politics-to-come”. Such a politics would be articulated at the point at which Nancy’s think-ing of community, “interrupted myth” and judgment or decision meet or mutuallyimply each other. Through a final discussion of Nancy’s more recent work around

the question of worldhood and what he terms the “creation of the world”, thisarticle will conclude that Nancy’s “politics of interruption” allows for a renewedengagement with the term “communism” and for a limited re-inscription of theconcept of the universal with political judgment or decision.

Introduction

At the beginning of the essay, “War, Law, Sovereignty - Techne,” written in 1991

in the very middle of what has now become known as the first Gulf War, Nancy

notes the way in which, in the face of violence, death and suffering, the imme-diacy of contemporary events demands a concomitant immediacy of engagement

and response: “What matters today are the immediate factors, deaths, all kinds

of suffering, the great pity which accompanies all wars … What matters […] are

the political determinations, gestures of approbation or criticism, the motives

and the reasons which can still engage, if possible, the responsibility of each of

us” (Nancy 1996, p. 127; Conley 1993, p. 28). Yet although our responsibility is

engaged in an immediate way with political determinations, it is by no means

exclusively limited to these determinations and to the demands of action in the

world: “our responsibility is also, already, engaged in a different manner: as the

responsibility of thought” (Nancy 1996, p. 127; Conley 1993, p. 28). Nancy’s



332 JAMES

essay on war, law and state sovereignty goes on to examine in a singular, but

rigorously philosophical idiom the forms of sense which have historically been

attached to these concepts, the way they have interacted historically, and the

manner in which, within the context of “technological warfare”, they have been

transformed in the event of the first Gulf War. Yet his opening comment reflectsmore broadly on the manner in which he thinks the relation, or rather the differ-

ence, between the philosophical, the political and the realm of politics. On the

one hand there is the empirical and immediate sphere of events and our respon-

sibility to decide and act in relation to them. On the other hand, and perhaps

prior to this first moment, there is the responsibility of thought, a responsibility

which leads Nancy to consider the historical and contemporary sense of war, law

or sovereignty in a philosophical idiom, and on a level which is in some way

withdrawn from the field of empirical reality, yet which is nevertheless deeply

implicated in its possibility of becoming. Here the responsibility of thought real-izes itself as a practice of philosophical writing. This does not preclude the

imperatives and the real possibility of decision, position taking, and active

engagement, but nor does it directly dictate the basis on which these should

occur.

The opening of “War, Law, Sovereignty, Techne” appears, then, to raise a ques-

tion which it leaves largely unanswered: namely what is, or should be, the exact

relation between what might broadly be called a deconstructive philosophical

practice and an engaged practice of politics within the empirical realm. Such a

question, of course, is not new and has been consistently posed since Derrida’s

writing achieved prominence in the late 1960s, most explicitly for instance in the

colloquium held in July 1980 entitled The Ends of Man (Spivak & Fynsk et al. 1981).

This question also informs the collaborative work of Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-

Labarthe for the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political carried out over

four years from 1980 to 1984.1 In a rather more reactive vein there were, of course,

the Heidegger and de Man affairs of the late 1980s which sought tendentiously to

implicate the politics of deconstruction in the politics of fascism or Nazism (see

Farias 1987; Derrida 1987, 1989; Lyotard 1988, 1990; see also Hamacher et al.

(1989) and Lacoue-Labarthe (1987)). What follows will seek to offer, albeit tenta-

tively, a more developed answer to the question of thought and its relation to polit-ical practice as is posed by the opening of “War, Law, Sovereignty, Techne”.

The discussion will begin by outlining some of the principle criticisms which

have been leveled against Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. These have been aimed

at their thinking of “the political” and their attempt to distinguish it from the

empirical sphere of “politics”. They have also been aimed at Nancy’s thinking of

community, such as it is developed in The Inoperative Community . The broad

1. The Center for Philosophical Research on the Political was opened in Paris at the Ecole NormaleSupérieure on the rue d’Ulm in November 1980 and continued its work for four years until its closure

in November 1984. During this period two published volumes of collected papers were produced; seeNancy and Lacoue Labrthe (1981) and Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (1983). Papers from the originalconference “The Ends of Man” and from the work of the Center are reprinted in English in Nancy andLacoue-Labarthe (1997).



ON INTERRUPTED MYTH 333

thrust of all these criticisms is that the fundamental philosophical engagement

with the nature of “the political” as such disables any possibility of engaged prac-

tice within the empirical realm. This initial overview of responses will be

followed by a number of critical readings, firstly of the work carried out in the

Center for Philosophical Research on the Political, and then, in more detail, of The Inoperative Community itself. Nancy’s understanding of community will be

examined in the light of his philosophical engagements with Georges Bataille and

Martin Heidegger. On this basis I will argue that Nancy’s conception of myth

(understood as a fictional quasi-transcendental foundation of politics), and

specifically his thinking of “interrupted myth”, allows the relation of philosoph-

ical thought to political practice to be conceived in new and productive ways. In

the light of this it is arguable that the criticisms which have been leveled against

Nancy to date are somewhat misplaced insofar as they fail to engage properly

with key aspects of his thinking. The discussion will conclude by indicating theway in which Nancy’s thinking of community prefigures his later ontology of the

singular plurality of being and by showing how what one might call a “politics of

interruption” is worked out in his recent thought in terms of a renewed under-

standing of political decision and judgment.

Critical Responses to Nancy and the Thought of “the Political”

Nancy’s short essay ‘The Inoperative Community’ first appeared in 1983 in

the fourth issue of the review Aléa (published subsequently in Nancy (1986,

pp. 9–105, 1991, pp. 1–42)). The full-length volume bearing the same title is

perhaps Nancy’s most important contribution to a philosophical thinking about

the political and has attracted a range of critical responses from a number of

different commentators (Fraser (1984), Critchley (1992), Ingram (1988); see

also Sparks in Nancy & Lacoue-Labarythe (1997, pp. xiv–xxviii), Caygill (1997)

and Norris (2000)).2 The substance of the original essay should be understood

firstly within the context of the sustained engagement with the thought of

Georges Bataille that informed the review Aléa, and secondly within the

broadly Heideggarian questioning of essence which informed Nancy’s andLacoue-Labarthe’s work for the Center for Philosophical Research on thePolitical. This Heideggerian and Bataillian context underlines perhaps the most

evident and important aspect of Nancy’s rethinking of community, namely that

2. The full-length volume contains the original essay together with a number of other essays, nota-bly the essay principally under discussion here ‘Le Mythe Interrompu’ (Interrupted Myth); see Nancy(1986, 1991). The full-length work was published in the wake of Blanchot’s critical response toNancy’s original article entitled La Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community ); seeBlanchot (1983, 1988). Here Blanchot takes Nancy to task, specifically in relation to his reading of Bataille and generally for his use of a Heideggerian idiom. For more detailed accounts of this

encounter see Hill (1996, pp. 196–209) and James (2006, Chapter 5, ‘Community’). In a more recentwork Nancy indicates that he was preparing a full-length version of The Inoperative Community when Blanchot’s response was published and the implicit “reproach” of that response had a largeimpact on his work. See Nancy (2001, pp. 37–38).



334 JAMES

occurs as an ontological or existential reworking of the term.3 It is within the

light of this specifically ontological dimension that the question of the relation

of philosophical practice to politics most insistently poses itself. If, as Nancy

says, “Community is given to us with being and as being, well before all our

projects, aims and enterprises” (Nancy 1986, p. 87, 1991, p. 35), then it isdifficult to see how this might be relevant to any engagement with the realm

of politics as such, since, as an ontological given, our shared being would seem

to be posited prior to any order of political decision or commitment, action or

inaction.

Such, at least, is the concern of a number of commentators who have

responded critically to Nancy’s collaborative work for the Center for Philosoph-ical Research on the Political and the thinking of community which emerges from

that work throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, in particular the responses by

Fraser (1984) and Critchley (1992). These responses have identified the specifi-cally ontological dimension of Nancy’s thought, its insistence on a primordial

questioning of being, as a hindrance or a barrier to any engagement with the

mess of political struggle, of political or ethical decision and judgment. For

instance Nancy Fraser in an article written in late 1982 in response to the work

of the Center argues that Nancy’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s affirmation of the

withdrawal of philosophy from politics, so that philosophy might engage with a

more fundamental question of the ontological essence of the political: “func-

tions … as a means of avoiding the step into politics to which the logic of their

own hopes and thought would otherwise draw them” (Fraser 1984, p. 148). Like-

wise Simon Critchley (1992, pp. 200–219) argues that the very distinction made

by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe between the essential questioning of the “politi-

cal” on the one hand and the practice of “politics” on the other is itself highly

reductive, and all too Heideggerian in its subsumption of the multiplicity of the

empirical realm into an overarching ontological frame. In a Levinassian inspired

reading Critichley argues, in a rather more philosophically sophisticated manner

than Fraser, that such an emphasis on an essential questioning of the political

misses or passes over the key moment which must inform all political practice or

relation, namely the ethical moment, that is, a relation of the self to an instance

of transcendence or alterity which exceeds any horizon of being or possibility of ontological disclosure. So Critchley follows Fraser in suggesting that the empha-

sis on an ontological recasting of the political comes at the expense of the possi-

bility of engaging with and indeed properly understanding the empirical field of

political events.

3. In this context the term ‘ontological’ needs to be understood specifically within the framework of Heidegger’s reworking of the question of being in works such as Being and Time. See Heidegger(1962). For an account of Nancy’s relation to Heidegger see James (2006), Chapter 2, ‘Space’. Itshould be stressed that the Heideggerian perspective is by no means the exclusive frame of reference

within which Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe pose their fundamental questioning of the political. Animportant psychoanalytic and specifically Freudian perspective on the question of an originary soci-ality is explored in the co-authored article La panique politique in Confrontations 2 (1979), 35–57;the English translation appears in Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (1997, pp. 1–31).




This reservation has been repeated, albeit from a very different perspective,

in a response by a political theorist. In an article published in the journal

Constellations Andrew Norris (2000, pp. 272–295) argues that from the perspec-

tive of political philosophy or theory, Nancy’s notion of an “inoperative commu-

nity” is important insofar as it constitutes: “one of our most comprehensivearguments against [the] understanding of politics as a form or expression of

identity” (Norris 2000, p. 273). He praises the manner in which Nancy’s work

fundamentally challenges received notions of political community and thus

provides a conceptual framework within which political concepts of all kinds can

be rethought and their history re-evaluated. Norris’ article, then, marks an

important gesture of recognition by a political scientist of the way in which

Nancy’s thought can have an impact beyond the area of strictly philosophical

endeavor. To this gesture of recognition, however, Norris adds an important

reservation. What Nancy’s thinking of community lacks, he suggests, is an effec-tive and properly rigorous theory of political judgment. Whilst such thinking

gives us the conceptual tools to articulate critical suspicion of all politics and

ideology based on assumptions of identity, it fails, he argues to develop criteria

for judgment, or to offer any standard which would allow us to differentiate

between political alternatives. Nancy, Norris writes: “is too content to rest with

deconstructive aporias, and not sufficiently attentive to the inevitability, the

necessity, and the dignity of political judgment” (Norris 2000, p. 274). Norris’s

solution to this is to turn to Rousseau, and specifically to the Rousseau of TheSocial Contract, and to a theory of political judgment based upon contract

theory and notions of collective will and public good. In so doing he aligns

Nancy’s thinking of community with a pre-contractual “state of nature” and

suggests that the theory of decision which Nancy develops in works such as TheExperience of Freedom (Nancy 1988, 1993a) is an empty formalism which would

have no effectiveness in the pragmatic realm of political decision and judgment,

since it lacks any criteria or standards upon which judgments can properly be

made.

The criticisms leveled at Nancy by commentators such as Norris, Critchley

and Fraser all have in common this judgment that the ontological dimension in

which the rethinking of the political and of community unfolds is necessarily ahindrance to any practical engagement with politics. I want to argue that, to

varying degrees, each fails to engage fully with, or to properly read, Nancy’s

writing, since each, perhaps, reads that writing through the lens of their own

specific concerns: Norris’s defense of a contract theory based account of polit-

ical judgment, Critchley’s commitment to a Levinassian account of ethical

relation and Fraser’s call, at the end of her article, for a direct engagement

with contemporary feminist struggle. For instance, whilst Norris appears to be

very sympathetic to the account of community given in The InoperativeCommunity , his appeal to a theory of judgment based on shared standards and

criteria and to the necessity of a contract model of social organization is rigor-

ously incompatible with the thinking of finitude from which, arguably, all

Nancy’s writing flows. Any sustained engagement with Nancy’s writing in the



336 JAMES

1970s and early 1980s would make this abundantly clear (Nancy 1976, 1979,

1983).4

Nancy conception of “unworked” or “inoperative community”, when taken

together with his thinking of myth and its interruption, offers an understanding

of the relation between the political and the practice of politics which has anoutcome other than that supposed by Fraser, Critchley, and Norris. His thinking

of community, myth and interruption have their origin in the work of the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political and it is to this that the discussion will

now turn.

The Center for Philosophical Research on the Political

Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s work for the Center is informed by the doublemeaning which they give to the phrase “le retrait du politique” or the “retreat

of the political”. In the first instance the “retreat of the political” would

designate the manner in which, in the contemporary world, the question of the

political, that is the question as to its exact nature or essence, retires or with-

draws into a kind of evidence or self-givenness, in which that which is political

in politics is taken for granted or accorded a kind of obviousness which is univer-

sally accepted. An example of this would be what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe

hold to be the dominant belief in the early 1980s that politics is ultimately, and

in its last moment, a function of political economy , and that all other consider-

ations and areas of social life are necessarily subordinate to this. This definition

of the retreat of the political as a kind of withdrawal involves a complex account

of history on the part of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, one which is Heideggarian

but also Nietzschean and Marxian in origin. It involves specifically an account of

the history of political institutions in Europe from the Enlightenment onwards

passing through the advent of Marxism, Fascism and of totalitarian regimes in the

early part of the twentieth century. This historical or epochal understanding

which Nancy brings to bear on the problem of the political cannot be fully

addressed here. What is important is their view that, in the wake of the supposed

failure of Marxism, a failure felt acutely by much of the European left in the early1980s, the question of the political, or of the political as that which can be

placed in question, has withdrawn. The political retreats, then, insofar as it is

not a question or in question, but is rather that which, in politics, goes unques-

tioned. This, in turn leads to the second sense Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe give

to the phrase “the retreat of the poltical”, one which implies a necessary and

urgent retreating, retracing or rethinking of the political. Insofar as the political

has retreated or withdrawn into obviousness, it has become that which necessar-

ily needs to be retreated or retraced. The “retreat of the political”: “must allow,

or even impose, the tracing anew of the stakes of the political” (Nancy & Lacoue-

Labarthe 1981, p. 194; 1997, p. 131). It is in the context of this necessity or

4. For a full account of Nancy’s early career see James (2005), chapter one, ‘Subjectivity’.




urgency imposed by the contemporary world that philosophy, for Nancy and

Lacoue-Labarthe, withdraws from politics, from the empirical field of events and

action, in order to “displace, re-elaborate and replay the concept of ‘political

transcendence’”. It is in this sense also that the withdrawal from politics and the

concomitant “re-treating of the political” is a deeply engaged gesture, one whichdoes not intervene or make prescriptive/normative judgments about the

present, but which demands that the present be thought.The immediate question that imposes itself relates to what might arise from

this rethinking of the essence of the political. What, in the closure of the political

or in the total dominance of political economy is to be retraced by thought as it

withdraws and takes its distance in order to engage in a more fundamental philo-

sophical questioning? Within the text of the paper delivered at the Center entitled “Retreating the Political” only a very schematic and rather undeveloped

answer is given to this question by way of listing five “basic traits”. These traitswhich would inform the retracing of the political are:

1. “The exigency of getting away from the metaphysical ground of the political,

from a transcendent or transcendental ground, for example in a subject”

(Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe 1983, p. 196; 1997, p. 132).

2. The placing: “in opposition to the motifs of ground and the subject … the

motif of finitude” (Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe 1983, p. 196; 1997, p. 133).

3. A posing of: “The question of relation” (Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe 1983,

p. 197; 1997, p. 133).

4. A posing of: “The question of the mother … of an ‘originary’ or arche-originary

sociality” (Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe 1983, p. 197; 1997, pp. 133–134).

5. The insistence that the reference to a “specificity of the political … is

precisely not to a specificity of the empirical by which the political would be

signaled” (Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe 1983, p. 198; 1997, p. 134).

With the exception of the fourth trait, the psychoanalytic “question of the

mother” which falls by the wayside, these traits inform Nancy’s recasting of

community in The Inoperative Community in a very exact and rigorous fashion.

The “Inoperative Community”

One can see in these traits the way in which the stakes, for Nancy, always turn

around the possibility of rethinking of the communal relation, according to a

thinking of finitude (that, is a relation to death) which exceeds the resources of

a metaphysics of the subject, and which precedes empirical concerns.5 This

fourfold emphasis on relation, finitude, the overturning of the subject and on

pre-empirical ontological essence is what informs Nancy’s turn to the thought of

Georges Bataille and that of Heidegger in The Inoperative Community . What his

readings of Bataille and Heidegger show is that both these thinkers offer an

opening to thought in which such a fundamental reworking of the concept of



338 JAMES

community on the basis of a thought of shared finitude might occur. Yet Nancy

also argues that both, in very different ways and at different moments, fall back

into an unreflective and unthought logic of subjectivity which compromises their

thought.

What interests Nancy is the way in which Bataille is able to think of communityas a shared relation to death, specifically within the context of his understanding

of sacrifice and the various projects he became involved in the 1930s which sought

to reintroduce practices of the sacred into modern life, through a privileging of

an archaic notion of sacrificial community. At the heart of Bataille’s conception

of sacrifice in the 1930s lies an understanding of death which is both different

and similar to that of Heidegger. Where in Being and Time the death of others is

the impersonal death of “das Man” and is never the same as my death (my

ownmost possibility which each time is always and only my own), for Bataille it

is conversely and exclusively in the death of others that our mortality is revealed.It is in seeing others die and in our participation in that same potentiality for (or

being -toward) death that we encounter our own finitude. Death, then, in

Bataille’s terms is not something that can be thought of in isolation from commu-

nity, indeed it is on the basis of the fact that our mortality or finitude is always

already shared that something like community can exist in the first instance. It

is also and crucially a shared relation to finitude which cannot be put to work in

order to produce community as a subject or identity (a nation or people). Yet,

Nancy argues, Bataille’s thought is compromised by insofar as he tends, in works

such as Inner Experience, to view each singular existence in terms of a subject–

object relation (Bataille 1973, V, p. 74). Nancy puts this in the following terms:

“Properly speaking, Bataille had no concept of the subject. But, at least up to a

certain point, he allowed the communication exceeding the subject to relate back

to a subject, or to institute itself as subject” (Nancy 1986, p. 63, 1991, p. 24).

So although Bataille thinks of the communal relation as a shared finitude which

exceeds the resources of a metaphysics of the subject, on the level of each singu-

lar existence his thinking is recuperated within the orbit of that metaphysics.6

Conversely, Nancy gives an account of Heidegger, which highlights the manner

in which he thinks of each singular existence as a relation to, or being-toward

death which unties subjectivity. The ecstatic-temporality of being-in-the-world

5. In his more recent works, however (e.g. Noli me Tangere (2003), Au fond des images (2003), andCréation du monde (2002)), Nancy has shifted emphasis away slightly from a language of finitudeand being-with which so heavily dominates The Inoperative community to a language which muchmore clearly foregrounds separation, distance and the infinite excess of finite existence over anyinstance of phenomenal disclosure or presentation. If this is so it is surely a response on the onehand to his longstanding dialogue with Blanchot (see note 6) and to Derrida’s important response inLe Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy . See Derrida (2000).6. Nancy’s reading of Bataille here is perhaps open to question and is strongly contested by Blan-chot (as indicated in note 2). For Blanchot, Bataille poses existence as always already insufficient,contested and exposed to impossibility prior to any logic of recognition or dialectical work, and

prior, therefore, to any logic of working and unworking. According to Blanchot, therefore, Bataille’sthought is not recuperated into a metaphysics of subjectivity, rather it is Nancy, in his invocation of a Heiedeggerian thinking of Being, who remains locked within an unavowed legacy of metaphysicalthought. See Blanchot (1983, pp. 16–21), and Blanchot (1988, pp. 5–8).




places Dasein beyond any topology of substance or metaphysical grounding in a

subject. Yet, Nancy contends, Heidegger also “goes awry” or is compromised

when he thinks of community as the assumption of the historical destiny of a

people and thus conceives of that community as a subject and in identitarian

terms (Heidegger 1962, p. 436). Put very schematically then, Nancy’s readings inThe Inoperative Community expose the latent thinking of subjectivity in both

Heidegger and Bataille, but seeks to think of community anew by combining the

way the former conceives singular existence (Dasein) with the way the latter

thinks of communal existence (shared finitude). The philosophical idiom which

results from this will be Heideggerian, but without the concomitant invocation of

community as historical people, and Bataillian but without the invocation of

singular existence as a relation of subject to object.

Nancy’s community is “unworked”, then, insofar as it is a multiplicity of singu-

lar existences who are “in common” only on the basis of a shared mortality whichcannot be subsumed into any communal project or collective identity. This rela-

tion to death is not the communication, communion or fusion of a subject and

object as it might be in Bataille. It is the exposure of each singular existence, its

being-outside-of-itself, to a death which is revealed in and through the death of

others. Community reveals, or rather is, our exposure to the unmasterable limit

of death, and thus our being together outside of all identity, or work of subjec-

tivity. This is expressed in the following terms:

Sharing comes down to this: what community reveals to me, in presenting to me

my birth and my death, is my existence outside of myself … Community does notsublate the finitude it exposes. Community itself, in sum, is nothing but thisexposition. It is the community of finite beings, and as such it is itself a finitecommunity … a community of finitude, because finitude “is” communitarian, andbecause finitude alone is communitarian. (Nancy 1986, p. 68; 1991, pp. 26–27).

Community here cannot be a project to be realized, or the basis of a political

program. It does not occur as a series of social practices and is not a value or an

ideal, but rather is only as shared finite existence. This understanding responds

in a very precise manner to four of the five “basic traits” which were listed in

“The ‘Retreat’ of the Political” in the context of the work of the Center . It isarguable that, in responding to these traits, the figure of community which

emerges in The Inoperative Community offers a very specific and engaged

response to the contemporary world of 1980s politics, and indeed today’s politics,

insofar as it refuses the dominant understanding of the political as the “techno-

economical organization or ‘making’ operational of our world” based, as it argu-

ably is, on an essentialized understanding of the human as homo ecomomicus. At

the same time this figure of community, insofar as it figures existence itself in

terms of a fundamental relationality of singular instances prior to any logic of

identity or subjectivity, clearly prefigures Nancy’s mature ontology of the singular

plural such as it is developed in works such as Être singulier pluriel (Nancy, 1996).

The question remains as to how such a perspective might relate to or inform

the practice of politics. Nancy’s response to this is necessarily circumscribed by



340 JAMES

the thinking of finitude he proposes and will necessarily remain disappointing to

those who look to philosophy to lay a ground or foundation for political projects

or decisions. This is because he resolutely refuses any straightforward movement

between the order of philosophical reflection on the one hand and that of politics

on the other. He refuses the notion that philosophy should lay theoretical groundsfor a project or program which would then be conceived as the concrete effec-

tuation, or completion, of the philosophical within the realm of the political. The

expectation of such a movement from philosophical reflection to political project

articulates, according to Nancy, the very essence of the metaphysical attitude

within philosophy, and is deeply implicated in the recent history of European total-

itarianism and the destructive or genocidal energies which that history unleashed.

Yet his thinking of community as a shared relation to finitude does allow an

opening for what one might call a post-metaphysical thinking of politics and what

he calls in his work co-authored with Jean-Christophe Bailly, a “politics to come”(Nancy & Bailly 1991). The roots of this, I would argue, lie in his conception of

myth such as he elaborates on it in the second section of The Inoperative Commu-nity . Myth, here, refers not simply to fabulous tales transmitted by tradition and

should not be understood in the way we might more usually understand mythol-

ogy. Rather myth, in this context, is that to which a political community appeals

in order to found its existence as such and to perpetuate that existence as the

intimate sharing of an identity or essence. It is in myth, then, that the passage

from the political to the sphere of politics occurs insofar as it is in myth that the

existence of lived community is founded and perpetuated, and upon a shared

myth that political institutions gain their sense, their purpose and their legiti-

macy. Myth, if you like, functions as what Nancy terms a “transcendental auto-

figuration of nature and humanity” (Nancy 1986, p. 138; 1991, p. 54). It does not

function as cause of historical events or political practices but rather as a tran-

scendental, or more properly speaking, a quasi-transcendental condition of

possibility. In Nancy’s words: “Myth is above all a full and original speech, which

both reveals and forms the intimate being of a community” (Nancy 1986, p. 122;

1991, p. 48). Myth, then, would be a language or discourse which allows the

world of shared finitude to be known and understood in specific ways and which

would in turn inform or underpin the manner in which we live and interacttogether within political and communal structures or institutions. In this sense

myth has a foundational, structuring power in relation to communal life, it is:

“the name of a structuring logos …, the name of the cosmos structuring itself inlogos” (Nancy 1986, p. 125; 1991, p. 49). At the same time myth as structuring

logos, and here Nancy draws as much on Nietzsche as he does on Heidegger, is

also fictive or fictional: “Mythic thought … is in effect nothing other than thethought of a founding fiction, or of a foundation by fiction” (Nancy 1986,

pp. 133–134; 1991, p. 53). As a foundational fiction or narrative it constitutes the

order of the political and underpins the order of politics: “Myth communicates

the common, the common-being of what it reveals or of what it recites. Simul-

taneously with, and as a consequence of, each of its revelations, it reveals

community to itself and founds it” (Nancy 1986, p. 128; 1991, pp. 50–51). In this




sense, Nancy suggests, it is impossible to think of the existence of community

outside the appeal to myth, or rather it is necessary to think of the mutual impli-

cation or inevitable co-existence of one with the other: where there is commu-

nity there is myth and vice-versa.

It is important to note that the discussion of myth in The Inoperative Commu-nity invokes two different understandings of the term community, the traditional

notion of community as a sharing of identity or essence (requiring a foundational

myth), and the sense given to the term by Nancy, that of a shared finitude which

cannot be subsumed into any work of identity or project (and which is therefore

always without foundation). If community requires or necessarily appeals to myth

as a founding fiction it does so in order to articulate itself in the first sense, that

is, as a sharing of identity or essence. Yet, Nancy maintains, community exists

only and always already in the second sense, that is, as the non-identity of shared

finitude. Thinking these two moments together allows Nancy to address the wayin which the latter necessarily disrupts or, as he puts it, “interrupts” the former.

So just as the appeal to myth will found community as a shared identity, so the

existence of community as an unworked and unworkable finitude will always

interrupt any full assumption of identity or any total realization of myth within

finite historical existence. Indeed it is the insufficiency of myths and founding

narratives to properly account for existence in all its refractory and ungraspable

singular plurality which reveals the finitude of human community. Nancy, aligning

his own thinking with that of Blanchot, puts this in the following terms:

it is the interruption of myth which reveals to us the disjointed or withdrawnnature of community. In myth, community was proclaimed: in interrupted myth,community affirms itself as what Blanchot has called ‘the unavowable commu-nity’ … the unavowable community, the withdrawal of communion or communi-tarian ecstasy, are revealed by the interruption of myth. (Nancy 1986, p. 147;1991, p. 58).

Nancy’s account of myth implies, therefore, the constant interruption of myth

and a ceaseless instability within the experience of community. The affirmation

of community as shared identity is constantly interrupted by its lived existence

as shared finitude. This, I would argue, implies a relation between the politicaland politics which is always multiple and unstable and that one term is never

entirely reducible to the other. Since myth as the founding fiction of commu-

nity, and interrupted myth as the lived existence of unworked or inoperative

community mutually imply or necessitate each other, Nancy’s thinking implies

an always necessary interruption of community, which arises from the non-

identity of its lived existence, or as he puts it: “the interruption of myth is

therefore also, necessarily, the interruption of community” (Nancy 1986,

p. 145; 1991, p. 57).

If, then, Nancy sees myth and its necessary interruption as what one might

call in Derrida’s terms a quasi-transcendental condition of possibility and

impossibility of community, he does not do so in order simply to affirm or cele-

brate an aporia at the heart of the experience and existence of community.



342 JAMES

There is here, perhaps, a politics of interruption which would imply a certain

kind of responsibility toward, and productive engagement with, the world. It

might be noted, for instance, that the interruption of myth, for Nancy, is not

demythologization. Interruption here is not simply the tracking of paradoxes,

aporia or insufficiencies within discursive forms or belief systems in order todebunk their ideological underpinnings and show them to be without founda-

tion. The interruption of myth, in Nancy, is far more about tracing a passage to

the limit point of the forms of signification and pre-understanding with which

we make sense of our shared existence in the world, of our past and of our

future. “The stakes”, Nancy writes, “would then consist in a passage to the

limit of myth, in the passage onto a limit-point where myth would be not so

much suppressed as suspended or interrupted” (Nancy 1986, p. 119; 1991,

p. 47). In this passage to or onto the limit of myth, myth itself is certainly

shown to be without foundation, but this moment of interruption or suspensionis no staring into an abyss, it is, rather, an opening towards, an exposure to, or

a touching of, the shared world of finite existence (of inoperative community),

or what Nancy, in later works such as The Sense of the World , comes to call

finite sense (Nancy, 1993, 1997).

There is here, something like a realism, or what Derrida has called an “’irre-

dentist, post-deconstructive absolute realism” (Derrida 2000, p. 60), which

would suggest that the political occurs, as shared finitude, in excess of any logic

of identity and at the very limits of what we think we know and understand about

the world. Using Nancy’s later terminology one could say that the political occurs

as existence itself, in excess of, or at the limits of our representations, our

concepts, signifying systems and discursive forms; it occurs as the singular pluralbecoming of shared sense constitutive of any horizon of world or experience. This

is a realism insofar as sense itself is understood as the lived embodied material

stuff of the real: “the sense of life, the sense of man, of the world, of history,

the sense of existence; the sense of existence which is or makes sense, which

without sense would not exist” (Nancy 1990, pp. 10; 2003, p. 3). Sense here takes

on an ontological status, it is the sense which exists, or which produces existing,

without which there would be no sense: the world, our world, a press of multiple

bodies, concrete, material, mortal.Here there is no foundation or ground, no project or program but a philosophy

of existence in which the ontological, the political, and arguably the ethical are

necessarily co-originary and mutually imply each other. No foundation or ground

then, but a sense that henceforth sense itself is interrupted and in this interrup-

tion opened onto a shared world and a shared finitude. So the interruption of

myth articulates, for Nancy, that necessary moment when the fictions upon

which community, political relationality and, indeed politics, are based are

suspended or thrown into hiatus, by the very existence of community as inoper-

ative, as that which can never be subsumed into a shared identity or mythic foun-

dation. This interruption occurs as an exposure to, or opening onto, the shared

finitude of worldly existence. This exposure to, or opening onto, community

affirms (inoperative) community as such, and affirms even, as Nancy suggests




later in La Comparution, a renewal of the sense of the term communism (Nancy

& Bailly 1991, p. 100).

The motif of interruption such as is developed in The Inoperative Community gives a philosophical account of the manner in which “mythic” community, and

with that the realm of the political, are always unstable, always subjected tocontestation and the possibility of change, the ground of which is the very

absence of ontological ground within the experience of community itself. Here,

then, the politics of interruption gains its motivation and necessity, not from

a foundational philosophical project but rather from an originary ontological

structure of finitude which makes a demand upon political action, upon the expe-

rience of the world as a sharing of finitude.

It is here that a response to Critchley’s criticism might begin to be formulated.

Critchley, it should be recalled, suggested that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s

emphasis on an ontological questioning of the political passes over the ethicalmoment, the instance which would precede and therefore subsequently inform

all political practice or relation. Yet, as has been suggested, for Nancy the

ontological, the ethical and the political are co-originary . Levinas would situate

the ethical relation prior to ontology in a relation of the self to an instance of

transcendence or alterity which exceeds any horizon of being. The structure of

the ethical relation here is that of the face-to-face, of Self to Other, in which

transcendence precedes and exceeds any economy of finitude. For Nancy exist-

ence as shared finitude implies a relation, at once ethical and political, whose

structure is that of pre-subjective singularities positioned, as it were, “side-by-

side” in an exposure each to the other. If there is transcendence towards “the

other” here, it must be thought in terms of the essential finitude of transcen-

dence, as the originary excess or exposure of singularities, which constitutes any

horizon of shared sense or world.7 The ethical relation is not “passed over” in

Nancy, it is simply thought of differently as a relation of being side-by-side rather

than an “otherwise than being” of transcendence in the face-to-face. It is not

within the scope of this discussion to unfold a response to Levinassian ethics from

Nancy’s perspective.8 However, even this brief indication would suggest the

possibility of reading against Critchley’s Levinassian critique of Nancy on the

basis of a critical reading of Levinas himself. The question that poses itself mostinsistently here is as follows: if the originary yet foundationless structure of fini-

tude in Nancy is at once both ethical and political, how does the demand that is

made by this structure impose itself upon us? How might a politics of interruption

be articulated?

7. It is in this sense that Nancy, in The Sense of the World comes to speak of the ‘trans-immanenceof sense’ (Nancy 1993, 1997).8. Nancy would probably argue that Levinas, like Heidegger and Bataille, remains at some point

locked within a traditional economy of the subject. In an essay on “originary ethics” in La Penséedérobée Nancy suggests that Levinas does not escape the orbit of Heideggerian ontology as easily ashe might suppose and that Levinassian ethics would need to be reread taking Heidegger as a startingpoint (Nancy, 2001a, p. 112, n.1).



344 JAMES

Decision, Judgment

In order to answer, albeit tentatively, such questions the thought of shared fini-

tude, myth and its interruption need to be related to, or tied in with, Nancy’s

thinking around the question of decision and judgment. This thinking, it may berecalled, was found to be insufficient in the critical response given by Norris

(2000). Nancy’s account of judgment and decision is developed across his career

(in particular Nancy 1983 and 1988) but finds one of its richest expositions in his

more recent work, where it is perhaps more explicitly related to the question of

the political and of engaged politics (although this is certainly implicit in the

earlier work).

In the essay “De la creation” [“On Creation”] (Nancy 2002), the issue of

engaged praxis, decision and judgment is addressed in relation to Kant and

Lyotard. Crucially Nancy ties this issue of praxis, decision and judgmenttogether in the notion of the “creation of the world”, that is, the event of

world disclosure as such, the appearance (or what he calls “compearance”) of

the world as shared finitude or as a sharing of finitude. Here he takes pains to

differentiate his own understanding of the term “creation” from any theologi-

cal or monotheistic perspective. Creation here does not mean the production

of something from nothing, whereby “nothing”, as the material cause of

“something”, necessarily supposes a prodigious efficient cause and the prior

existence of a creating subject who would be the agent of this efficient causal-

ity (i.e. an agent who would create with a view to a certain end or purpose)

(Nancy 2002, pp. 86–87). Against this theological understanding of creation

Nancy opposes a conception which more radically conceives the absence of

origin or non-existence of the nothing. Whilst the theological conception must

maintain the being of an originary agency or subjectivity prior to creation (the

creator God), Nancy suggests, invoking Nietzsche, that the absence of origin

within being and the thinking of creation needs to be thought of in more abso-

lute terms:

There is nothing withdrawn in the very depths of the origin, nothing but the noth-

ing of origin … no longer is there the thing in itself nor the phenomenon, butthere is the transitivity of being-nothing. Is that not, in the end, what Nietzschewas the first to understand? (Nancy 2002, pp. 90–91)9

In this context Nancy’s thinking of creation emerges as both different from the

theological (and specifically Christian) understanding of the term and as an

intensification or radicalization of that understanding. It also emerges as a

post-Nietzschean affirmation of active production as opposed to any reactive

9. Nancy’s use of the term “nothing” is different from that of Heidegger’s use of the term in his famousessay “What is Metaphysics?”. Where Heidegger comes to view the nothing as the “origin of negation”,

i.e. as that originary nihilating of the “nothing” which makes negation as such possible in the firstinstance, Nancy, as is here indicated, views the nothing as the origin of creation. See Martin Heidegger“Was ist Metaphysik?” in Wegmarken, 103–121, in particular page 116; “What is Metaphysics” in DavidFarrell Krell, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 93–110, in particular page 105.




nostalgia for a lost ground or godhead, or a negative thinking of the absence of

foundation as that which needs to be mourned or lamented. As has been indi-

cated, this thinking of creation is focused specifically on the creation of a

shared world (of the world as shared finitude), and as that which is disclosed

only in and through its sharing.Most importantly this emphasis on the creation of the world itself opens onto

a thinking of engaged being-in-the-world, of decision and of judgment. Decision

such as is conceived here is not the decision taken in favor of one or other possi-

ble course of action or alternatives, it is not the kind of decision which can be

prescribed or verified according to specific criteria or established norms.

Decision in this context is a decision for: “that which is in no way given in

advance, but which is an eruption of the new, unforeseeable because without

figure [visage]” (Nancy 2002, p. 67).10 As such the question of decision is insep-

arable from that of judgment and from the way in which, through an act of judg-ment we might differentiate between a good and a bad decision and a desirable

or undesirable outcome. In this context Nancy (along with Lyotard and Derrida)

is seeking an understanding of the concept of judgment which does not rely on

the prior existence of a universal norm or prescription, what Lyotard, after Kant,

calls “reflective judgment”.11 Noting that, for Lyotard at least, the problem of

“reflective judgment” or absence of the universal has become the general

formula of “post-modernity”, Nancy adds: “if the universal is not given, this does

not mean that it should be mimed or dreamed of … but that it is to be made [à faire]” (Nancy 2002, p. 69).

This is important insofar as it indicates that, in untying the inter-related

questions of decision and judgment from established criteria or universal norms

Nancy does not aim to endorse any form of arbitrariness or relativism, nor to

promote decisions made for or in the name of this or that particularly againstthe notion of the universal. Rather he is aiming to think of the event of judg-

ment, the judgment of ends or of desired outcomes, as that which engages the

instance of void (the “nothing of origin”) from whence a world emerges or

arrives. Judgment here engages the creation of the world and of a sense of the

world in the absence of any prior model or already established end. In this sense

the absence of criteria or norms upon which judgment as judgment occurs is notsimple arbitrariness nor relativism, but rather the “nothing” from which the

world emerges as the singular plural arrival of sense. Thus what is engaged is not

this or that particular determination but rather the shared world of finitude as

such, the event of this sharing and the spacing of all those singular plural

10. In this respect Nancy’s thinking in this essay is close to that of Derrida’s account of decisionism.See for example Derrida (1994, pp. 50–63). Derrida has pointed out that a decision necessarily impliesthe absence of specific criteria or established norms, for, if these are appealed to in order to dictatea certain outcome the decision ceases to become a decision and affirms itself rather as calculation

or implementation of a rule, Derrida (1994, p. 53).11. See Lyotard (1983, pp. 189–191, 193–197, 214–216) and Derrida, Nancy, et al. (1985, pp. 9–54,pp. 87–139). See also Nancy (1983). For an account of Kant’s theory of reflective judgment from anAnglo-American perspective see Guyer (1998, pp. 29–59).



346 JAMES

instances of sense which are, or make, the world. It is in this sense that the

“universal” for Nancy is not presupposed but “made”, since a judgment is itself

made as an exposure to, and as a necessary engagement with, the non-totaliz-

able totality of singular plurality as such. This absence or void is that before

which judgment is placed. It is the absence of any originary intuition whichmight guide judgment according to a rule or law, or what Nancy also calls an

“inconstructible”.12 Judgment here:

finds itself placed before—or provoked by—an inconstructible, which responds toan absence of intuition … The inconstructible of an absence of intuition … definesthe necessity not to construct in the void … but to let void surge forth, or to makewith this void that which is in question, namely the end , an end which henceforthforms the stakes and the business of that which is more a praxis than a strictlyintellectual form of judgment. To put it succinctly: this is not an act of construc-

tion but of creation. (Nancy 2002, pp. 70–71)

As an act of creation or praxis, judgment is in effect conflated with decision

since both are removed from strictly theoretical concerns and orientated

directly with the creation of the world. The void of judgment, like that of

decision, is always also the void from which the world springs, the goal or end

of both is always the “creation of the world”. This needs to be understood not

as the creation of this or that particular world but rather as the creation of the

world of shared finitude as such, or in the language of Nancy’s later ontology,

the creation of sense as singular plurality and in the name of singular plurality

(Nancy 1996). In this sense Nancy’s understanding of judgment implies orrather necessitates a certain responsibility towards the singular plural. It artic-

ulates the need, in the act of judgment, to “Do justice to the multiplicity and

the coexistence of singulars, to multiply therefore and to infinitely singularize

ends” (Nancy 2002, p. 72). To a large extent this formulation recalls Derrida’s

thinking of justice such as it emerges in Force de loi (Derrida 1994, pp. 13–63).

Yet where Derrida appeals to justice as an experience of unpresentable and

absolute alterity, and as that which is always “to come” [à venir ] (Derrida

1994, pp. 60–61), Nancy more immediately and directly turns his understanding

of the term towards worldly engagement and the production or creation of theworld as such. The engagement of philosophy here is: “The judgement of ends

…of a destination or sense of the world” (Nancy 2002, p. 68). In this context

the universal which is “to be made” in an act of judgment such as Nancy

understands it is a “multiple universal”, one which imposes itself as a binding

to and by the singular plurality of shared finitude and therefore one

which necessarily obeys “the schema of a differential” or a “general absolute

12. Nancy emphasizes the extent to which the notion of an “inconstructible” (i.e. that which

always exceeds structure and structuration) has been a constant concern within the thought of deconstruction. Deconstruction has always pointed to “that which is not constructed nor construct-ible, but that which is withdrawn from structure, its ‘case vide’ and that which makes structurework or which traverses it” (Nancy 2002, p. 71).




incommensurability” rather than a general equivalence or logic of identity

(Nancy 2002, p. 75).13

Myth Interrupted

In the opening essay of La Création du monde, “Urbi et orbi”, Nancy, in the

name of creation, appears to affirm the need to: “immediately and without

delay … reopen every possible struggle for a world” (Nancy 2002, p. 63). The

invocation of “every possible struggle” might at first suggest that Nancy’s think-

ing gives us no means to differentiate between the relative value of different

struggles or to proscribe or counter those who struggle by means of violence

and terror for this or that particular view of the world (for instance those who

struggle in the name of racial or religious purity, or in the name of ideologieswhich justify economic and military oppression). Yet the qualification he imme-

diately adds to the invocation of “every possible struggle for a world”: “that is

to say for that which must form the opposite of a global injustice taking place

against the background of a general equivalence” (Nancy 2002, p. 63) necessar-

ily implies that the struggle invoked can never be one for this or that particular

world but must always be one for a world affirmed as shared finitude and for an

affirmed sharing of that finitude. The struggle, every possible struggle, which

Nancy invokes will always be a struggle bound by a certain responsibility

towards the making of a “universal multiple”, towards the creation of a worldof sense which would affirm the singular plurality of existence as such. It is

arguable then that Nancy’s account of decision and judgment, far from being an

empty formalism or an encounter with impasse or aporia, articulates both the

re-inscription of a certain kind of universal within judgment, and leads towards

an engaged notion of political practice as an experience of, and a demand for,

global (inoperative) community. This then would imply an ungrounded, or post-

metaphysical politics which would displace or rather ceaselessly work to

contest and suspend forms of politics premised on quasi-transcendental

fictional myth. It would also be a post-metaphysical politics of solidarity, in

which the fundamental demand of “being-with” would be a demand for acertain kind of justice and a different future. In Nancy’s own words: “Here the

historicity of our history emerges and with that the future/to-come [l’à-venir]

of the suspended sense of the old word ‘communism’” (Nancy & Bailly 1991,

p. 100).

13. It is arguable, therefore, that Norris (2000) entirely mistakes the force of Nancy’s theory of

judgment and decision (perhaps seeing it as indistinguishable from Derrida’s). According to thereading advanced here Nancy’s account of decision and judgment does bind itself to a criterion of sorts, that of the demand imposed by the creation of a world as always already shared, and there-fore as a demand to create a world in the name or as an affirmation of singular plurality.



348 JAMES

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