en

Greg Bird

2008

OpenAlex

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes notes I would like to thank my committee members Brian Singer, John O’Neill and Philip Walsh. Each has played a formative role in my studies that led to this article and each has also thoroughly commented on an earlier draft of it. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Thanks are also due to Salah el Moncef for his timely and pleasant correspondence during the final stages of this process. Finally, I would like to thank the rest of the editorial team at Angelaki, including the copy editor, all of whom keep this journal going. 1 All the translations for this text are my own. 2 for a pro-Levinasian defence of Blanchot see Bernasconi; Critchley; and Ingram. For a pro-Heideggerian account of Nancy's work see Gaon; George; Gratton; James, Fragmentary Demand and “On Interrupted Myth”; and Raffoul. 3 for an account of Nancy's discussion on this formula see Wagner. 4 for an account of Nancy's rejection of this formula see Critchley; Devisch, “Trembling Voice,” “La ‘négativité sans emploi’” and “Entre crochets”; Domanov; Gilbert-Walsh; Gratton; Ingram; James, Fragmentary Demand and “On Interrupted Myth”; Lysaker, “On What is to be Done”; MacKendrick; May; Norris; Raffoul; and Wagner. 5 for an account of Nancy's rejection of this formula see Devisch, “Trembling Voice”. 6 for an account of both Nancy and Blanchot see Bernasconi. For an account of Nancy see Devisch, “Trembling Voice” and “La ‘négativité sans emploi’”; Domanov; Gaon; Gratton; Ingram; James, Fragmentary Demand and “On Interrupted Myth”; Lysaker, “On What is to be Done”; MacKendrick; May; Norris; Raffoul; and Wagner. 7 This leads to the notion of a “political community,” which is juxtaposed to the “nation-State.” For an account of Nancy's rejection of this formula see Devisch, “La ‘négativité sans employ,’” “Being Mondaine” and “Entre crochets”; Domanov; James, Fragmentary Demand; and Norris. 8 This formula is very close to the latter one; sometimes it is taken up as an offshoot of it. There are a number of ways in which this topic is taken up; however, I have not yet found a reading that deals explicitly with how both Nancy and Blanchot compare and contrast on this account. Bernasconi has cited a passage where Blanchot affirms society vis-à-vis community, which I will take up in the following section (see Bernasconi). And Gaon claims that Blanchot operates within this logic, while Nancy moves outside of it; however, Gaon's paper also tends to fuse Nancy's readings of community within the confines of this hypostasis as well (see Gaon). For an account of how Nancy attempts to move beyond this framework see Gratton; James, Fragmentary Demand; Lysaker, “On What is to be Done”; May; Norris; and Raffoul. For an account that mixes these two spheres in Nancy, in a hypostasis, see Devisch, “Trembling Voice,” “La ‘négativité sans emploi’” and “Entre crochets”; Domanov; Ingram; and Wagner. Finally, for a Nancean-inspired account of how this hypostasis works, see Lingis, esp. 155–57. 9 This is really an extension to number 3. For an account of Nancy's rejection of this formula see Devisch, “Trembling Voice”; Gratton; Ingram; James, Fragmentary Demand; MacKendrick; May; Norris; and Wagner. 10 It should be noted that Blanchot's The Unavowable Community was written as a response to Nancy's essay “The Inoperative Community” which appeared in Alea (Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée”). Nancy republished his essay, with minor revisions, along with other essays under the same title. I will be using the English translation of the latter essay (Nancy, Inoperative Community) because this version does not substantially deal with Blanchot's critique. As Bernasconi has noted, “Nancy did everything he could to reinforce the impression that Blanchot accepted his position on community” (Bernasconi 6). Also, this will be the only translated text that I am using for this paper. Blanchot's text, as well as Nancy's later responses, build upon a technical vocabulary which can be missed when translated into English, so I will work on my own translations. 11 This is a curt account of Nancy's fundamental criticisms of what he calls the foundational logos of modern Western notions of community. It should also be noted that when I speak of “traditional notions of community” I am reproducing Nancy's vocabulary, which is supposed to be directed solely towards Western metaphysical accounts of community. Further, one could problematize this homogenizing account of the modern Western notion of community as sovereign by looking at it from a historical perspective (see Bernasconi; Critchley; and Norris); however, I will leave this aspect open because I have chosen to focus on the hypostasis. 12 In this text, Nancy claims that this is an “ontological ‘sociality’” (ibid. 28). This should not be confused with “social ontology,” which some commentators have claimed (see Critchley; and Devisch, “Trembling Voice”). Raffoul has taken up this point by claiming that it is an “ontology of ‘the social’ that is more originary than any society, any individuality, and any essence of Being” (37). I will further outline this position later in this paper. 13 In Bernasconi's defence, his article was published in 1993 right around the time that Nancy was starting to reconsider his use of the death of the other and communication–both topics I consider further below. Plus, Blanchot had posited these two as hard alternatives. 14 It is important to note that Blanchot consistently refers to relations in the current society as “associated relations.” This is a common theme that spans Western social theory. It can be found in the direct translation of T önnies’ description of “gesellschaft,” Weber's “vergesellschaftung” (associative relationships), Rousseau's Social Contract, Parson's “ordering society,” Durkheim's “collective consciousness,” Marx's description of social relationships in Capitalism, Foucault's “disciplinary society,” and Simmel's “blasé attitude,” as well as multiple phenomenological accounts of relationships within the everyday world, such as Lingis's description of social relations (op. cit.), Husserl's “passive genesis” that occurs within the natural attitude, Heidegger's “das Man,” Sartre's “seriality,” Schutz's mundane “We-relationship,” and so on. 15 Using Bataille's last attempt to articulate the exigency of community, Blanchot points to the double imperative that shows up in making community said. The “tear” or exposure of the subject to the other is undone when the subject attempts to “communicate” this relation. These moments destroy each other. We find this reflexive moment within the economy of the Same, which results in a productivist notion of the “negative community” (see ibid. 40–45). This is simultaneously a critique of Nancy on the level of the hypostasis that occurs through language. 16 It should be noted that Levinas does not take this precaution in Totalité et infini. He does attempt to break free from the communist exigency, but he only does so by criticizing the adequation between the “common” with property, while privileging the “social.” The latter is represented in the third, which acts as a space between the self and the other (see Lévinas). As it will become apparent below, Levinas's manner of addressing relationships could be read as a reformulation of associative, hence societal, relations. 17 It should be noted that this minute passage contains the only explicit reference to Ricoeur that I have found in all the texts written by Nancy that have been cited in this paper. As I will show in this section, however, this single remark directs us towards an extremely important referential point in Nancy. So we should note that most of the following is my attempt to fill in the details of the relationship between Nancy's theory with Ricoeur's, including the way in which Nancy's moves beyond Ricoeur's. 18 Without going into the minute details of Nancy's ontological argument here, I should point out that in The Sense of the World Nancy claims that the “insofar as” should not be understood in a significative sense, but acknowledged insofar as it is a sense of “signifiance.” Signifiance “indicates an order or register anterior to the order of signification” (Nancy, Sense of the World 172, fn. 11). It opens up a “third way” of the touch that “ex-propriates” beings from the significative sense of the world. Is this a new hypostasis? Possibly, but it is not so in the sense of significative understanding that is thought from a stance underneath the object. Following Agamben, he also employs a non-objective language by saying that it points to a “whatever” (ibid. 72–74; Agamben). So it is outside of language or beyond the hypostasis of language. 19 This text contains both an English translation (23–41) and a German edition (85–106). I will refer to both as I have elected to retranslate some of the English version.

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