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retreat of the political

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Shoah

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thinking

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is given before all our projects, volitions or enterprises. It is impossible for us to lose it.

Nancy, on the other hand, has pointed to the unavoidability of using the concept of community. He explains: 'Community is given at the same time than Being and as Being, before all our projects, volitions or enterprises. It is impossible for us to lose it. . . . We cannot not co-appear' (1990: 87). (net)

is a community living to share the absence of common being. What we have to share is the very fact that there is no common property we share.

I would say the community of love is a community living to share the absence of common being. Not the absence of being-in-common, but the absence of common being. There is no common property, and that is what we have to share. That's the first extension of this idea of love. The second is that there is then a way from this idea to understand what Christianity meant by 'loving one's neighbor'.

is the privileging of presence and proximity over absence and distance.

Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) defines haptology as metaphysical privileging of presence and proximity over absence and distance.

is an act. It is not something permanent, given, or substantial that one has, but is something one has to become, to seek out in an open process of exposure to others and to internal difference.

Ultimately, for Nancy, one does not have an identity but has to become one. One can never return to a self-same identity but can only seek to locate oneself within difference and singularity. Nancy shows the impasse of a certain conception of identity that he calls the 'identity of the identifiable,' which refers to some permanent, given, substantial identity. In opposition to such identity, Nancy offers the identity of whatever or whoever invents itself in an open process of exposure to others and internal difference. Hence, an identity is never given but 'makes itself by seeking and inventing itself.' One does not have an identity, but is an identity.Identity is an act, not a state.

is entering that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as towards me.

To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as towards me: it opensme inside me as well as outside, and it is through such a double, quadruple, orsextuple opening that a 'self' can take place. To be listening is to be at the same time outside and inside, to be open from without and from within. '(Nancy 2007, p. 14)

The Other implies its nonrepresentability. In a theological realm, this can give rise to an 'interdiction of representation' that supposes the sacred nature of the Other and, along with it, an entire economy of the sacred, sacrificial, hierarchical, and heirophantic, evenwhere the theophany and theology are negative. Access to Presence, and even to a 'super-presence,' is always preserved. But within an atheological realm, this interdiction becomes a denial of representation... the alterity of the law either retrieves, represses, or denies its origin, and ends in the singular presence of each one to the others. In this sense, something 'unrepresentable' or 'unfigurable' runs the risk of revealing itself as completely oppressive and terrifying, if not terrorist, open to the anguish of an originary Lack. (nancy being singular and plural)

is a problem of keeping open the exercise of questioning, the primacy of the question.

With regard to the first point for Nancy philosophy is mainly a problem of keeping open the exercise of questioning... the stress is therefore always on the possibility of retaining in philosophy the primacy of the question. The work of philosophy is that of questioning acquired significations in the name of a reopening of sense, whose consequences cannot be completely calculated. Finite thinking must retain a completion in incompletion.

is a division into a network or into small [spaces] with intersecting lines.

also called a retculated multiplicity, reticulation refers to 'a division into a network or into small [spaces] with intersecting lines (oxford dic). Existence is thus constituted, according to Nancy, by the criss-crossed borders (or surfaces of contact) at which relationally defined entities emerge. Put simple, Nancy's co-existential analytic views the world as a network of relationships a series of borders from which entities unfold not as the realisation of a particular substance. There is no such thing as a self-contained individual identity that exist prior to any relations, no such thing as a community that exist withotu relation to its others. The notions of community that, through figuration, attribute a substantial basis to being-in-common try to effect an understadning of politics in which the community (or the individuals who make up community) are conceived as having a self-contained substantial basis (i.e. the possibility of existing without relation to others.). And yet, Nancy notes that at a fundamental, ontological level, this is impossible. Figuration achieves the fiction of such being-with-out-relation only by disavowng difference. In reality, therefore, figuration can merely obscure the reticulated multiplicity, the relational being-with that is the co-existential condition.

is that which happens only insofar as it is thinking about the incomprehensible. 'Thinking is always thinking on the limit' as the very operation of this limit.

Every thinking is therefore a thinking about freedom at the same time that it thinks by ftcedom and thinks in freedom. It is no longerexactly a question here of the limit between the comprehensibleand the incomprehensible. Or rather, what happens here, in thefree arising of thought, happens precisely on this limit, as the player very operation of this limit. Thinking is always thinking on thelimit. The limit of comprehending defines thinking. Thus thinkingis always thinking about the incomprehensible about this incomprehensiblethat 'belongs' to every comprehending, as its ownlimit. Yet this does not mean that thought is a kind of 'supracomprehension'(regardless of how we would like to sec it, themystics' impasse including what remains of the mystical in Heidegger-is always presented in this way) and this also does notmean that it is a Schwiirmerei (the entirely rationalist definition ofthis notion produces in Kant an impasse symmetrical to that ofthe mystics}. Thinking docs not push comprehension beyond what' it comprehends, and neither docs it prophesy. Thinking chinks chelimit, which means there is no thought uni it is carried to the limitof thought. Insofar as it 'comprehends,' it docs not comprehendits own limit, and it comprehends nothing insofar as it docs notcomprehend... neither is it mediated in a 'comprehension of incomprehensibility.'Yet it is no longer a question of comprehensibilityand incomprehensibility. Both emerge from necessity, andthinking is delivered to freedom. It is not subjected to comprehensionand its opposite. If we must say that thinking is subjected to anecessity, this will be in such a way that the necessity of freedomwould not be the ftccdom of necessity. The ficcdom of necessity is realizedin the Hegelian concept to the extent that the Hegelian conceptis itself realiuid. The necessity of freedom is 'neccswy' only inthe sense that it unleashes itself in its abyss and from its abyss. (Nancy The Experience of Freedom 54)

is comparable to an image. Just as a violent act competes for presence with the system it attacks, so too does the image compete for presence with the thing it is intended to represent, rivaling the thing.

In both force and form, violence, in Nancy's conception, is comparable to the image. Just as a violent act competes for presence with the system it attacks, so too does the image compete for presence with the thing it is intended to represent: 'Violence and truth have in common a self-showing act... both the core of this act and its realization take place in the image. The image is the imitation of a thing only in the sense in which imitation emulates the thing: that is, it rivals the thing, and this rivalry implies not so much reproduction as competition, and, in relation to waht concerns us here, competition for presence' (Nancy 2005: 21).

is not able to transform what it assaults, it can only take away from and meaning.

The aggression remains outside the system even after its interruption and never seeks integration into the larger whole that it so desperately attacks. 'It denatures, wrecks, and massacres that which assails,' Nancy writes. 'Violence does not transform what it assaults... rather it takes away its form and meaning' (Nancy 2005:16).

is nothing other than the creation of chaos. Performed for its own sake and for its own effect... to be violent and to picture violence, nothing more.

Violence is performed for its own sake and for its own effect, to be violent and to picture violence, nothing more. But because violence calls into question and disables the established order by presenting only its own disorder, 'violence exposes itself as figure without figure, as . . . an ostentation of something that remains faceless' (21). The brutal and cruel effect of violence thus is an indissociable from the act of violence as it is from its own image, the image of violence.(Nancy 2005: 21)

is the disruption of an established system, situating it it as an outside warning that is unable to be part of the system.

the disruption of the established system or the natural law, thereby situating it in the order of the monster.' 'The image is, essentially, a 'monstrative' or 'monstrant.' Each image is a monstrance (or pattern) -what in French is called ostensoir. The image is the order of the monster... the monstrum is a prodigious sign, which warns (money, monstrum) a divine threat (Nancy 2005:22).

Jean Luc Nancy

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Jean Luc Nancy