Being Beyond Politics, with Jean-Luc Nancy

The work of Jean-Luc Nancy is consistently drawn to the site of an almost-encounter, to a line at once decisive and ever mobile. Writing on film, nuclear disaster, or the naked human body, say, Nancy returns to what we might think of as the line between determinate figures and a dimension that these figures imply, but by which they are by definition exceeded. Always attentive to the singular idiom of the phenomenon in question, Nancy situates the objects of his interest in relation to the broad horizon he calls “sense,” namely, the fact of existence, and our exposure to this fact, irreducible to any determinate signification, the opening to and of the world that is re-marked—but not appropriated—by any act of figuration.¹ The interface along which this exposure takes place is accordingly this line between determinate figures (forms, organizations) and what we might view as their ontological condition of possibility, which plays this transcendental role to the precise extent that it is itself unavailable for figuration as any kind of foundation or ground (and so is perhaps best thought of as “quasi-transcendental”).² My aim in what follows will be to explore the operation of this line in some of Nancy’s recent engagements with the question of politics, specifically, his comments on the proper place and responsibilities of political activity. Recently, Nancy has placed considerable emphasis on the distinction between the realm of politics (as the antagonistic realm of determinate sociohistorical situatedness) and its existential outside, arguing strongly that the former must not be allowed to colonize the latter. I want to examine here what is at stake in this distinction. Considering criticisms of Nancy’s position as minimizing the importance of politics in favor of ontological exposure, I will propose a response to these criticisms in which the realm of finite, situated beings, determinate figures, and political activity, on the one hand, and that of infinite ontological exposure, on the other, acquire equal primacy. Offering a response to criticisms of Nancy in this way, my argument will nonetheless force his hand somewhat. If Nancy has indeed increasingly emphasized the primacy of an ontological or existential “beyond” to politics, I will here suggest that the claims of ontology and politics, or existence and situatedness, may be thought of as equiprimordial, as pressing on each other from the very start.

“Politics and Beyond”

The distinction between politics and its outside has marked Nancy’s writings on politics from their earliest days. The work of the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique, for example, which Nancy directed with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in the early 1980s, emphasized what they called the “retreat” of the political, which they understood as a double gesture.³ Politics having abandoned its specificity in seeking to manage the whole of existence (as in the claim that “everything is political”), what is needed is the reinvention both of this specificity (first gesture) and of the “other” of politics (second gesture).⁴ The double movement of retreat is thus, as its authors explain, a gesture of Derridian clôture: of attending to the marking of a line that demarcates a determinate space while opening the inside of this space to the beyond it is constitutively unable to inscribe.⁵ This gesture accordingly asks us to think together the determination, delineation, and distinction reinvented by its renewed incision, and the empty, unidentifiable, unworkable space to which this cutting also points.⁶ And it is, indeed, in precisely these terms that Nancy has continued to address the specific demands of politics. Everything hinges, however, on the question of just how we should understand the relation between these two dimensions—between politics and what Nancy calls its beyond.

In his most recent interventions in relation to politics, Nancy has emphasized the indeterminate outside of any political figure, seeking to correct what he has consistently viewed as the hubris—the “everything is political” already identified in 1980—by which politics would claim jurisdiction over all spheres of activity. As in the early 1980s, Nancy argues that politics has extended...