Thinking the Political with Jean-Luc Nancy

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Thinking the Political with Jean-Luc Nancy © 2021 ЕУСПб Published version Mihkelsaar, Janar Mihkelsaar, J. (2021). Thinking the Political with Jean-Luc Nancy. Stasis, 11(1), 16-38. https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-21-11-1-16-38 2021 16 © ЕУСПб, 2021. ISSN 2310-3817. Vol. 11, No. 1 с. 16–38 The Death DThinking the Political with JeanLuc Nancy Janar Mihkelsaar PhD Candidate, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, The Unit of Political Science University of Jyväskylä, Opinkivi, Keskussairaalantie 2, PO Box 35, Finland E-mail: [email protected] Thinking the Political with Jean-Luc Nancy 1 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 archeteleological 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 1 My research was supported by the KONE foundation. 1 eng 17 Nature and Philosophy 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. Keywords: Democracy, Nancy, relation, sovereignty, subject, the people, the political In 1980, with Jacques Derrida’s encouragement and support, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe founded the Center for the Philosophical Research of the Political at the École Normale Supérieure. Over the next few years, the center provided an avenue for philosophico-political discussions on the subject of what was called the retrait du politique, the retreat of/from the political (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997). 2 Considered in conjunction with the retreat, “the political” (das Politische, le politique) has the shape of what has lost its philosophical founding, its specificity and retreated into the domination of, for example, the technical, the social; and also of what is to be subjected to a retreatment by way of retracing it back from its oblivion and its obfuscations. What has specifically retreated, and what needs a retreatment, is the politico-philosophical realization of the political in accordance with the schema of a subject. 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). No matter what form this actualization takes, a subject is that which is always already preor post-supposed, meaning it is constituted as an arche-teleological unity. When this presupposition that constitutes the subject is pushed to its extreme conclusions (e.g., racism) and starts to crumble, we may catch a glimpse of what is buried under a subject’s hypostases: that is, 2 See also: Fraser (1984); James (2006); Dejanovic (2015). 18 Janar Mihkelsaar into the question of relation. 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). Today, 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. Even though the relationality of the political in Nancy is closely associated with the much-discussed theme of community, Ipropose to examine the issue of relation with a view to confronting the two extreme configurations of the political. One extreme concerns a subject’s sovereign auto-position, insofar as it is in danger of turning out to be totalitarian and suicidal (e.g., Nazi racism); and the second concerns the democratic de-substantialization, or “spacing” of a subject, insofar as it is in danger of turning out to be without any collective identification, “without any demos or kratein of its own” (Nancy 1997: 108–10). In view of such dangers, any attempt to absolutize the schema of sovereignty at the expense of democracy (orvice versa) threatens to end with a deadlock. In contrast to those well-versed studies that tend to highlight Nancy’s conceptions of democracy (e.g., Prozorov 2018), sovereignty (e.g., Eaghll 2014), and their abstract identity (e.g., Raffoul 2015), Iargue for a thesis that suggests Nancy’s retreatment of the political must involve the articulation of sovereignty with democracy. To make the case in point, Iread Nancy’s “The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch” (1993), which sets out to retrieve the problematic of relation from Hegel’s dialectical actualization of the state (orthe people) as the monarch, that is, from the “closure” of the political as an absolute subject.3 Having reactivated the problematic of relation concealed under the hypostases of the monarch, Nancy ends his article with a call to invent “an affirmation of relation” (1993: 142). Responding to this call, Iput forward a thesis that this affirmation involves two distinctive moments: “the establishment of a relation,” and the retracement of separation (Ibid.). By the for3 This reading is an interpretative study influenced especially by the Hegelian and Heideggerian themes. Ido not aim to present the intellectual evolution of Nancy’s thinking over the course of years, but rather to substantiate the main thesis of the article. The problem of relation needs to be discussed in a wider context that takes into account Nancy’s references to, e.g., Lacan and Spinoza. 19 Nature and Philosophy mer, Iargue in the second section, Nancy understands sovereignty as that which is initially devised to solve the modern problem of institution, more precisely, the self-institution of the people. By the latter, Iargue in the third section, Nancy understands democracy as that which in the spirit of ’68 reveals the incommensurability of the people. At first, it looks as though the logic of sovereignty is diametrically opposed to that of democracy: the first establishes the identity of the people, whereas the second annuls or disfigures it; the first points to “the precipitation of the infinite in finitude,” whereas the second insists on the openness of a finite self to infinity (Nancy 2010b). However, between the two heterogeneous logics of the political, the relation is not that of reciprocal exclusion, because the political is that site where people open up to themselves as a people and, at the same time, exhibit themselves through being separated from itself. Sovereignty and democracy, as I argue in the fourth section, are the two heterogeneous — and yet inseparable — faces of what constitutes the nonsubstantial self of the people. In the fifth section, I defend a claim that the double movement of the political enables the people to get a glimpse of its own “reality” as a non-given relation that needs yet to be tied. Last, but not least, Iargue that the affirmation of relation is political par excellence, insofar as it gives and keeps free the place for the infinite inscription of the people. 1. The Political as the Question of Relation Historically, 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. The decapitation of King Louis XVI especially severed the link between the religious and the profane (Nancy 1997: 91, 105; cf. Lefort 1988). When monarchic sovereignty transformed into popular sovereignty, modern society lost its grounding and legitimization in the divine transcendence of God. But as the history that followed proved, the birth and diffusion of democratic ideas did not lead directly to an abrupt cancellation of political theology. Quite the contrary: the old, sacred theology was replaced with “a laicized theology, or if one prefers a romanticized theology, of the ‘people,’ ‘history,’ and ‘humanity’” (Nancy 1997: 105). The inauguration of modern democracy reshaped and re-inscribed the theologico-political paradigm in accordance with the schema of the subject. 20 Janar Mihkelsaar Modern politics strives toward the realization of subject, whether it be the form of an individual, a community, or a state. Departing from Descartes, the subject is envisaged as “a subjectivity present to itself, as the support, the source, and the finality of representation, certitude, and will,” as a kind of a substantive being, which — like a god — founds the totality of all beings in their own being-ness (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1990: 294). In the philosophico-political tradition, Nancy maintains, subject is considered to be something that is already out there (e.g., identity, God); or, alternatively, it is conceived as an imperative, a historico-political task to be taken up and accomplished. Whether it is primordially established or will be given in the future, the subject is always already preor post-supposed (Nancy 1997: 106). The arche-teleological structure of this presupposition is crystalized in the hypostases of an “individual,” a “party,” a “race,” a “nation,” a “state,” and a “people.” In that regard, “the myth of the Arian race” in Nazism and the revolutionary proletariat class in the Soviet Union illustrate that the postulation of the subject tends to end with the production of death. That is why it is urgent to pose anew the question: What is the “essence” of the political? To show how Nancy responds to this problem, in this section Isummarize the idea of his “The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch.” My goal is to show two things: first, that Hegel’s actualization of the state as the monarch opens and, simultaneously, forecloses the question of the political; and, second, that the irreducibility of relation deconstructs from within the dialectical idea of the monarch. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel (1996) depicts the dialectical unfolding of the “objective spirit,” which culminates with the idea of the state. The end of the state is not simply to protect private property, administer social relations, and arbitrate civil conflicts, but to realize the ethical totality of individuals, the ethical co-belonging of people (Ibid.: 112). Put tautologically, the true end — or truth — of the state (orsocial union) is the actualization of “union as such” (die Vereinigung als solche) (Ibid.: 240). With saying that, Hegel distinguishes the domain of the state from the private realm of family and, more importantly, from the sphere of civil society where particular, individual interests and needs reign and are in conflict with one another. The spirit of the state, insofar as it realizes “the relation between individualities to Spirit and relation of Spirit to the self” (Nancy 1993: 112), is qualitatively different from the particularistic dispersion of civic life. As Hegel thinks about the state as transcending civil society, he opens an inquiry into the specificity of the political. 21 Nature and Philosophy But according to Nancy, the moment of this very opening yields simultaneously to that of the closure. To understand this claim, we need to discern how the actualization of the state takes place. As for Hegel, the non-actual idea of the state would be a mere conception without any hold in actuality, that is, a “bad” idea. The true idea of the state comes to “exist in its truth only as a subject” — as a monarch (Hegel 1996: 286). But this monarch is not a mere individuality, an idiosyncratic particularity (i.e., a despot), a superior individual, a mere symbol (e.g., a flag), or a representative (e.g., parliament). The monarch’s truth converts the subjectivist idea of the state “into the unity of a real person,” the essence of an “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) into the will and voice of this existence, the concrete living willing of free social union (Nancy 1993: 117). The personal unity of the monarch neither re-presents nor symbolizes, but rather presents the organic unity of civil society, government, courts, military, and people. The monarch personifies the existence of the people, “the Da-sein of the political existing, of the essence of the political existing in and as this zoon” (Ibid.: 115). The unity of the monarch, insofar as it actualizes the relation of people to one another as a spiritual whole, incarnates the subjectivist idea of the state as this subject. The monarch is thus nothing but the state itself as this person. The concrete living person of the monarch has to be erected to actualize the spiritual fulfillment of relation to itself of a social union, but this kind of actualization substantivizes the “as such” of social union, with the result of closing back again the question of the political. But in the manner that Hegel conceives the actualization of a social union, the question of relation remains visible everywhere, even though it is not addressed as such. Nancy is convinced that “the determination of the monarch is precisely what makes this presupposition come forth and renders it problematic” (Ibid.: 121). For, between the ontological necessity of a dialectical deduction and the sensible certainty of the “this,” the true subjectivity of the state and the individuality of the monarch, there is not only a dialectical link but also an unbridgeable gap. What becomes apparent when this gap is opened is that the monarch “actualizes union by not completing relation, by inscribing it in the space of separation” (Ibid.: 140; emphasis added). This non-completion, inscribed in the actualization of a social union, is legible upon the monarch’s body as a distance between the dialectical concept of the monarch and the sensible contingency of individuality, an institution’s jurisdiction, and the monarch’s naturally aging body, the monarch as “the 22 Janar Mihkelsaar subject of enunciation” and what it enunciates (e.g., the state / the people) (Ibid.: 132, 138–41). This point transpires in Hegel’s depiction of the monarch as “the summit,” but s/he is the summit not in the sense of an end point or a top; rather, it is “the perfection of the edifice realized for itself”: the height or altitude in and for itself (Ibid.: 116). This supreme height is detached from the bottom, which means s/he is separated from conditions, foundations, hierarchical gradations. When we contemplate the monarch’s singularity in the space of separation, we contemplate a gap between social union and itself, this subject and a subjectivity. That is why the monarch not only actualizes but also deconstructs social union. How the idea of the monarch deconstructs itself sheds light on modernity’s entire strategy to embody the indivisibility, unicity, and identity of the state / the people in a subject’s hypostasis, and, by doing so, to tame and appropriate a socio-juridico-political union’s transcendence. When such figurations enter from within into the phase of deconstruction, the question is neither that of mourning the moment of fulfillment, nor that of celebrating a substantiated transcendence being nullified, nor that of seeking to fill in the empty place of the monarch with epigonal substitutes. Instead, the task is to glimpse how non-completion discloses the limits internal to what goes under the name of “actualization.” At the limits of actualization we undergo an excess of a social union over any ordering, representation, or management of sociopolitical affairs. The experience of this excess is what the theologico-political transcriptions of the subject seek to obliterate and repress. This excess brings back the question of relation before relation is fulfilled in the hypostasis of subject, and so it discloses the impossibility of relation closing in on itself as an enclosed circle and forming a self-identical subject. That is why, Nancy maintains, “[t]he Being–or modality–of the relation as such should be questionable before its absorption, its reabsorption, its solution, or its relief in the monarch’s subjectivity” (Ibid.: 121). To pass into the position of a subject, it is first necessary to pass “through the presentation of a self to a self–through relation as such” (Ibid.: 120; emphasis added). Considered like that, the subject is a self that consists in the activity of relating itself to itself. The subject springs forth from the activity of “relating-to-oneself.” The activity of “relating-to-oneself,” which precedes and exceeds every fulfillment and (re-)presentation of a subject, is generative. That a subject arises from the movement of relation that cannot be completely extinguished means that a subject is not that which 23 Nature and Philosophy can be preor post-supposed but is that which shows itself now as a political issue. Having retrieved the question of relation, we more clearly glimpse the political. By the political, Nancy does not circumscribe one sphere — particularly a political system — of society, but “a ‘place’ of the ‘symbolization’ of relation itself” (Ibid.: 142). Expanding on this concise formulation, in what follows Iargue that the “symbolization,” or actualization of relation as such, consists in affirming the two heterogeneous but intertwined moments of the political: “the establishment of relation” and the retracement of separation. 2. Sovereignty, or, the Establishment of Relation If we follow Nancy’s path of reactivating the question of relation that is buried underneath the closure of the subject, we are congruently contesting the theologico-political features — such as unicity, indivisibility, identity — of sovereignty. If so, it is not so clear in what sense (ifany) the affirmation of relation must involve the establishment of relation as one of its constitutive moments. Beginning with examining the retreat and distorted persistence of sovereignty, this section shows how Nancy thinks about the concept of sovereignty. Quite often Nancy alludes to Georges Bataille’s phrase: “Sovereignty is NOTHING.” If anything is certain, it is that Bataille’s sentence “most certainly does not mean that sovereignty is death,” but rather perhaps that sovereignty is dead, or, as shown further on, it likes to present itself as the thing of the past (Nancy 2000: 139). Thus, for a start, this loaded and provocative sentence may be interpreted to mean: the place of sovereignty is empty, which means there is the absence of supreme ends, the absence of good, the absence of essence, the absence of foundation, or the absence of finality (Ibid.: 137). The upshots of this assertion are in accord with the spirit of a time: when “no one can believe that economics has its own, universally legitimated finality anymore” (Ibid.: 110); no one can claim to grasp the telos of science and technological advancement; no one can be absolutely certain of having grasped the ultimate meaning of social totality. Therewith, it looks as if our juridico-economico-techological or, put simply, disenchanted world, the world without finality opens a straight way out of what has been called sovereignty. In his article “War, Right, Sovereignty — Techne,” Nancy argues, things are not that simple. For whenever it seems as though the era of sovereignty has come to an end and has been replaced with the (cost-)effective manage- 30 Janar Mihkelsaar Urbinati 2019), or, at another extreme, the substance of the people is wholly dissolved into the ever-expanding multiplicity of life-forms. When taken separately and pushed to their logical conclusions, sovereignty moves toward the finish of the people’s self-constitution in the absolute finish of a figure; and a post-68 democracy is at risk of collapsing into an abstract infinitization of social differences and the veneration of a pure multiplicity. Sovereignty is therefore in danger of substantializing separation — democracy undoing the space of separation in favor of the immanence of the social (cf. Hardt and Negri 2004; Biglieri and Perelló 2012). If the worst comes to the worst, sovereignty finishes with the imposition of a totalitarian subject, while “democracy without identification turns out to be without any demos or kratein of its own” (Nancy 1997: 108). A way out of such impasse, Ithink, goes through a simultaneous affirmation of the two logics.4 What is at stake in the affirmation is that limit point at which the affirmation of separation passes through the figurative inscription of the self; and how the affirmation of sovereignty is forced — in spite of itself — to retrace itself in the space of separation. The two logics subvert (without cancelling out) one another. If that is in fact the case, the subject of enunciation cannot be fully obliterated in what is enunciated; sovereign figurations annulled in the erection of a finite figure; and an order as such ossified in an actually existing order. Which means: the self of the people is tensed to its limits, because every positing is tied with the countermovement of de-positing. Insofar as the emergence of the people plays out in the field of such tensions, the self is unable to take the shape of a substantial subject. The people tends toward the modality of its being, however, without ever arriving at the grasp of itself as the final finish of a subject; or, on the other extreme, without finding itself wholly scattered in the particularistic ways of living. The interplay of the two logics means that democracy and sovereignty should not be thought of outside of their relationship, since it is their relationship that constitutes them. Outside of the relationship we have only either pure heterogeneous multiplicity or 4 This thought seems to run contrary to the claim, in Nancy’s latter book The Truth of Democracy, that affirmation can occur only in art, science, love, ad infinitum, but not in politics: “Politics does not affirm; it accedes to the claim of affirmation” (Nancy 2010a: 26). Giving place to pursue the ends of fulfilment in the multiple areas of life, democratic politics itself is not the place “where a signification is achieved, realized, and reified” (Ibid.; cf. Prozorov 2018: 6–10). Granting the importance of this insertion, Ibelieve we may still think about politics as involving a distinctive sort of affirmation, which does not start from the point at which is anything given; and which is not carried forward by the assumption of an end point. 31 Nature and Philosophy pure homogenous identity. The relationship is for that reason more primary than that which it constitutes and differentiates. The primacy of relationship means, first, that the truth of sovereignty is democracy. This is so for no other reason than that it is in the power of the democratic spirit to grant access to the abyss in every sovereign opening of the people to itself. The sovereign act of establishing relation is an abyssal act, insofar as the people’s position of relation to self is not conditioned upon the legitimacy of anything already established (e.g., the law of nature, God). In this regard, every sovereign figuration and fulfillment of relation points beyond itself. As the sovereign, the people must reckon and learn to thrive in an unsurmountable gap between this subject and a subjectivity, the concrete figural actualization of relation and relation as such, the sovereign and a sovereignty (e.g., Nancy 1993: 116; 2007: 96–107). By disclosing this gap, the democratic spirits let sovereignty be what it is: the infinite self-institution of a finite self. But the relationship’s primacy means that the reverse is also true: the truth of democracy is sovereignty. This is so because the experience of separation is inherently implicated in the fact that the people recognizes itself in the finish of a figure but, and more importantly, it is unable to identify itself completely with any figure. That is why there is always room for hesitations, doubts, and dissent. To recap: the site of the political is that site where people open to themselves as a people and exhibit themselves in being separation. The people is thus itself only in a difference or gap between the people and itself. What the actuality of this dehiscence conveys is this fact: that there is the people, or as shown below, that there is relation. 5. Relation as the “Reality” — or Nothing — of the People Having established that the experience wherein a people undergoes itself passes through the double economy of the political, my next aim is to argue that the site of the political is that of a “stage” (scène) on which is enacted and displayed what is real in the self: that is, relation as the “reality” — or nothing — of the people. When speaking about the “reality” of what makes the self of the people, one thing should be made clear at the outset: neither people who come together nor the sense of the common is given prior to the proclamation of the people (see Nancy 1998: 92–3, 111–15). The people, if it structured like a self, does not “have” a relation with itself as something that is (orwill be) given, be it in the objectivized 32 Janar Mihkelsaar forms of the ideal or the factual. This renunciation of a pre-given identity (oridentities) implies that Nancy rejects the mimetic idea of representation, which is ultimately animated by “the frantic desire for a “pure” symbolization,” that is, for separating a “bad,” “distorted” representation from a “good,” “authentic” one (Nancy 2000: 58). What drives this desire, as Nancy’s critical take on Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle in Being Singular Plural (2000) illustrates, is a view that the task of political representation is to break through the spectacle of distorted representations to the “objective” truth of a social reality and reproduce it as accurately as possible. Against this mimetic account, Nancy suggests envisioning the being of the social as rotating exclusively around its symbolic axis. Once the intelligibility of the social is in the order of the symbolic, the “reality” of the people consists in articulating the mode of being together and sharing a space-time, setting up a figural symbol in accordance with which people are with one another (Ibid.: 65). To elucidate this claim, Nancy refers to Rousseau “who stipulates that the best spectacle, and the only one that is necessary, is the spectacle of the people itself, assembled in order to dance around the tree they have planted as their own proper symbol” (Ibid.: 68–69; emphasis added). The planting of a tree, or the making of a social contact, is envisaged as a “stage,” on which multiple singularities enter into a contract with one another to establish the identity of self. Whether acknowledging and rejoicing it, or alternatively, rejecting and repressing it, the presence to itself of the people in the spectacle is not that of fullness but of separation. This deprived form of presence, as shown above, arises from how the logic of sovereignty is intertwined with that of a post-68 democracy. This intertwinement undercuts one-sided attempts to appropriate the presupposition of self by itself or, alternatively, to celebrate (orcondemn) the dissolution of a substantivist subject. This tension within the political is more significant because it provides an opportunity to discern a difference between the people and itself as “the différance of being or, more exactly, the différance being is,” that is to say, to discern the actuality of existence: “that there is the being,” or in terms of what concerns us here, that there is the self of the people (Nancy 1997: 27–28). This “that there is” brings to light self as tending toward the form or modality of its own being, toward the being-such of every self and thing. As a kind of form, the being of self presents itself as what it is as such before every concrete fulfillment of self (Nancy 2000: 94–95). But as such, self has no specific content; it is in excess over its determinacy. 33 Nature and Philosophy Such exposure to an excess is an exposure to something in the order of negativity.5 The negativity of which the self of the people is made of is not an origin or material of the creation (theology). But nor are we dealing here simply with a substantialized nothing (i.e., nihilism), nor with a pure negativity (i.e., the negation of a popular identity), nor with the negativity of nothingness (i.e., the negation of the people as a being), nor with a dialectical negativity (i.e., the appropriation of exteriority). Instead, it is the question of negativity that is not at work and can be affirmed in itself (Nancy 2000: 91). But what does Nancy mean by affirming the negative in itself or self as such? The sense of this negativity becomes somewhat more comprehensible if we grasp that the people’s self-constitution depends upon nothing external, namely, it “is entirely delivered over to itself, insofar as precisely, the “itself” neither precedes nor founds it but is the nothing” (Nancy 2007: 103). Nothing, Nancy adds, is “the very thing of the reality of the people: its nature as nonfoundational, nontranscendent (atleast in the usual sense), nonsacred, non-natural, etc.” (Ibid.: 104). This is what is silently passed over and repressed in the theologico-political glosses of founding figures such as “originary violence, the founding hero, the royal race, imperial glory, the soldier’s sacrifice” (Nancy 2000: 132). When founding acts are no longer justifiable with reference to the traditional authority of any outside power like a church, “people” are wholly autonomous in creating themselves as a people. In contrast to theology, where a creator, a god, produces ex nihilo (i.e., still out of “something”) and where the creator is opposed to the created, nothing — including nothing itself — pre-exists the self-determination of the people (Ibid.: 16). If we want to get nearer to the negativity of nothing, we need to pursue the inquiry further and observe what takes place in the staging of the people. Staging is a spectacle, but one that neither reflects some “deeper” truth or idea, nor produces the mimetic representation of an objective reality, nor moves toward the appropriation of a proper self by itself. Nor does the spectacle function as a mirror, in which people can recognize themselves as a subject that runs the show behind the scenes. The reality of the spectacle resides not so much in the end product of tying the social tie, as in “the act that brings it [the people] to be — not in the sense that it produces it (as a result), but rather in the sense that “Being” remains wholly within the act and in the exposition of the act” (Nancy 2000: 69). Thus, it becomes possible for the people to exhib5 On the history of negativity as a concept in Western thought, see Magun (2013). 34 Janar Mihkelsaar it what it is as such: that it is nothing but the very act of relating itself to itself. The experience of relation concerns the very fact that something like the “people” takes place or appears. The sense of this appearing is not rooted in the space of substantiality and subjectivity. The spectacle conveys nothing but that: appearing. The staging of the people is for that reason the staging of the nothing (rien). The negativity of this rien is for Nancy the res, the “thing itself,” which means the passage, the void of an opening, whence the people emerges (Nancy 2007: 102). 6. The Political as the Site of the Actualization of Relation as such Looking back at the previous section, an alluring impression may arise in one’s mind that the experience of relation pushes the political to the extreme point of completion and exhaustion. For if it is true that self is deprived of substantiality and conceived in the modality of appearing, it looks as if people come to symbolize themselves in accordance with the consummated figure of all foregone figures: with the figure of nothing. With that respect, the emptied-out site of the political becomes absolutely full of its emptiness. This is one possible way in which the voided site “remains occupied, encumbered by this very void” (Nancy 2000: 135, 138–40; 1997: 110). To contest this reading, this section explains how Nancy distances himself from Claude Lefort’s view on the political. What is at stake in their debate is a strategy of how to relate to and hold out the emptiness as such. Let us begin our inquiry with Lefort’s article “The Question of Democracy” which addresses the symbolic mutation of power resulting from the transition from monarchy to democracy. In the ancien régime, Lefort claims that the body of the monarch unified the realm of the worldly with that of the otherworldly and, in doing so, incarnated the substantial unity of the kingdom, “in such a way that the hierarchy of its members, the distinction between ranks and orders appeared to rest upon an unconditional basis” (Lefort 1988: 17). As a result of democratic revolutions, things are taken to change fundamentally: there is no longer any figure that can embody the “natural” unity of community. Symptomatically this is visible in the “flesh” of a democratic society, for example, in how: political conflict is ineradicable; socio-political processes are temporalized; political power is dispersed, distributed. Such signs point toward one thing: the “locus of power becomes an empty place,” which means democracy is symbolically unpresentable, formless or “infigurable” 35 Nature and Philosophy (Ibid.). In political modernity, there is no figure especially suitable for incarnating and “naturally” actualizing society. Claiming that, Lefort does not mean to say that this “disincarnation” undoes power and gives away to anarchy. Even though the figure of the monarch is effaced, the place of power remains, and it remains as a vacant site. While modern democracy is considered by Lefort as emerging from the disincarnation of society, Nancy argues that, as shown above, the figure of the monarch can also deconstruct itself from within and thus gestures in the direction of democracy. The different relationship to the monarch has significant ramifications for the strategy of how to hold out in the emptied-out site of the political or in the voided place of self. In an interview with Peter Engelmann, published under the title Democracy and Community, Nancy rejects Lefort’s solution, his “very American way” of speaking about democracy that demands dispensing “with the symbolic presence of democracy in the same way one dispenses with a cult of personality” (Nancy and Engelmann 2019: 59). With a comparison like this, Nancy suggests that there is no straight way to do away with the injunction of figuration. The manner in which Lefort is anxious about the need of political representations turns democratic society into something unrepresentable, infigurable, untouchable, and ineffable. In theology, such syntagmas are tied up with “an entire economy of the sacred, sacrificial, hierarchical, and hierophantic” (Nancy 2000: 48). If this is so, Lefort overcomes this by inverting the tradition of political theology by inverting the satiated presence of figures into the absence of all figures; by inverting the fetishism of a figure into that of an empty place. Such inversion remains trapped on the horizon of what it seeks to escape, and thus reinstates political theology in the mode of negative theology (Ibid.: 138; see also Devisch 2011). In response, Lefort retorts that he is interested not in reinstating the political form of negative theology, but in endorsing — like Nancy — the structural non-coincidence of the people. As the symbolic identity of the people is never fully transparent to itself in the presence of a figure, people are faced with an exigency to figure out who (orwhat) is here and is now called the people. Notwithstanding the this retort’s plausibility, Nancy continues insisting that the manner in which Lefort speaks of democracy sets up the “interdiction of representation” as the sort of law, the law of the infigurable. As this law denies or covers over the point of its emergence, it is prone to run “the risk of revealing itself as completely oppressive and terrifying, if not terrorist” (Nancy 2000: 48). What may come to be tauntingly oppressive in this interdiction is that it can be without any trouble, and perhaps even without it being noticed, applied 36 Janar Mihkelsaar to establish, sustain, and justify the forms of domination in the disguises of, for example, humanitarian moralism or exploitative capitalism. The naïve renunciation of building any monument in the empty place of power is paradoxically in danger of facilitating the ruses and machinations of power. By elevating the infigurable into the position of the law, Lefort’s relationship with the empty place of power takes an aporetic turn, in that he is at the risk of filling in the void with emptiness and, in doing so, blocking access to the emptiness as such. Democratic society is realized in the infigurable, but in such a manner that the infigurable is delimits the presentable from the outside. To distinguish the order of the infigurable from that of the presentable and, further, to make the first into the negative foundation or law for the second is to turn the structural absence of an intelligible representation into the condition of im/possiblity for the incessant foundation of social formation (cf. Laclau 2007). To counter this strategy, it seems to me that the key question to ask is: What is the status of the infigurable? From my point of view, Nancy envisages the unpresentable as presentation itself, the ineffable as saying itself, the infigurable as figuration itself (e.g., Nancy 2000: 62). What is at stake here is not, as in Lefort, the need to uphold and safeguard the infigurable as the law, but the structural non-coincidence of every figuration and a political representation. The urgent task is not to separate the infigurable and elevate it to the status of law, but to let the infigurable attain the form of presence, to let people take satisfaction from the infigurable as their own presentability or figurability as such. To undergo the experience of presentability as such, one cannot favor, as Lefort does, the logic of democracy over that of sovereignty. While Lefort shies away “from erecting a monument to democracy on the Champ de Mars or making reference to it in a positive fashion,” Nancy takes an opposite route by arguing that the finish of an infinite self-constitution through the erection of a finite figure is structurally necessary (Nancy and Engelmann 2019: 60). This means: it is through — and only through — the figural fulfillment of relation that it is possible to catch an insight into the non-coincidence of every people, the difference between the people and itself. Or, more precisely: it is impossible to conceive democracy outside of the relationship with sovereignty (and vice versa). It is through the double movement of positing and depositing that it becomes possible for the people to grasp what is real in it, that is, to grasp the actualization of relation as such. The actuality of relation displays representability as such. Hence, for the people to hold out in the 37 Nature and Philosophy empty place of the political and assume responsibility for what is real in it means to engage in the movement of establishing relation to self and retracing itself in being separation. Contrary to what one is inclined to assume, relation’s actualization is unlike any other theologico-political actualization of an enclosed subject that has come before, in that it does not desire to set up the latest addition to the succession of figures; nor can it be reduced to the completion and exhaustion of the philosophico-political tradition in the nihilism of nothing. 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