Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 23–36, 2003
The confronted community
a
JEAN-LUC NANCY
Translated by Amanda MacdonaldFor Maurice Blanchot
The present state of the world is not a war of civilisations. It is a civil war: it is the internal war of an enclosed city, of a civility, of an ‘urbanity’, which arein the process of fanning out to the very limits of the world, and, because of this,spreading right to the extremity of their own concepts. At its limit, a concept breaks, a distended figure shatters, a yawning gap appears.This war is not a war of religions either, or else all so-called wars of religionare wars internal to monotheism, a religious schema of the West and a schemawithin that West of a division which, here again, takes itself to the edges and tothe extremities: on to the Orient of the Occident and right to the crack and thegaping hole in the very middle of the divine. For that matter, the West will havebeen nothing but the exhaustion of the divine, with respect to all forms of monotheism, and whether it be a case of exhaustion by atheism or by fanaticism.What is coming upon us is an exhaustion of the thought defined by the Oneand by a unique destination for the world: this thought is exhausting itself through a unique absence of destination, through an infinite expansion of general equivalence or, then again, and as a repercussion of this, in the violent convulsions that reaffirm the all-powerfulness and the all-presence of a Onebecome—or re-become—its own monstrousness.
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How, ultimately, to be seri-ously, absolutely, unconditionally atheist whilst able to make sense and truth of this One? How to, not so much exit religion—since, when it comes down to it,that is already done, and the imprecations of the fanatical can do nothing about it (they are, indeed, the symptom of it, like the ‘god’ engraved on the dollar)—but exit the monolithism of thought which has remained ours (simultaneously, History, Science, Capital, Man and/or their Nullity …). That is to say, how to goto the ends of monotheism and of its constitutive atheism (or what one might callits absentheism) in order to grasp, from the reverse side of its exhaustion,whatever might be extracted from nihilism, brought out of it from the inside? How to think the nihil without turning it back into an all-powerful and all-present monstrousness.The yawning gap that is taking shape is that of meaning, of truth, of value. All forms of fracture and rupture—social, economic, political, cultural—have, inthis gap, their condition of possibility and their fundamental schema. Thiscannot be ignored: the primordial stake must be taken to be a stake in thought,including those times when it is a question of its most material implications (of death through AIDS in Africa or of poverty in Europe or of struggles for power in Arab countries, for example, among a hundred examples). Political and
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/03/010023–14
2003 The Institute of Postcolonial StudiesDOI: 10.1080/1368879032000080384
JEAN-LUC NANCY
military strategy is necessary, as is economic and social regulation, and as isobstinacy in making demands for justice; resistance and revolt are too. But it isnevertheless also necessary relentlessly to think a world that abandons, in asimultaneously slow and brutal way, all its established conditions for truth, for meaning and for value.The enormous economic disequilibrium, that is to say the disequilibrium of life, of hunger, of dignity, of thought, is the corollary of the development of aworld that is no longer reproducing itself (that no longer renews either its ownexistence, or its own meaning) but that produces an illimitation of its ownworldness, in such a way as to appear able only either to implode or to explode:because at the centre of the illimitation a deepening rift is appearing which isnothing other than an unequalness of the world to itself, an impossibility of endowing itself with meaning, value and truth, a precipitation into generalequivalence that is progressively becoming civilisation as a work of death. Not only a form of civilisation, but Civilisation, the history of humanity perhaps, and perhaps with it the history of nature. And no other form on the horizon, either new or old.From this quarter and that comes the wish to dress the wound with theusual tatters of worn-out finery: god or money, petrol or muscle, informationor incantation, which always ends up signifying one form or another of all-powerfulness and all-presence. All-powerfulness and All-presence, this is what one always asks of thecommunity or what one seeks in it: sovereignty and intimacy, presence to self without flaw and without any outside. One wants the ‘spirit’ of a ‘people’ or the‘soul’ of a gathering of ‘faithful’, one wants the ‘identity’ of a ‘subject’ or its‘propriety’. It is not enough—it is far from enough—to denounce here an imperialism and there a fundamentalism (designations that can, moreover, be placed in achiasmatic relation). These denunciations are right and fair, just as it is right and fair to denounce—as a first step—the effects of an exploitation and ahumiliation of entire peoples, who are thus made available for other exploita-tions and instrumentalisations. But, in the end, since 1939, wars no longer take place as confrontations inside a world that makes a place for them (althoughthis place may be disastrous): war has become the war of a world that is tearingitself up because it yearns to be or to invent what it must be: a world, that isto say, a space of meaning, be it one of lost meaning or empty truth.
2
To speak of ‘meaning’ and of ‘truth’ in the middle of military agitation,geopolitical calculations, suffering, the grimaces of stupidity or else of lies is not ‘idealistic’: it is to get to the very nub of the thing.On this side and that of the gaping hole of the world, hollowed out in thename of ‘globalisation’, it is indeed the community which is separated from and confronted with itself. In times past, communities were able to think of them-selves as distinct and autonomous without seeking their assumption in a generichumanity. But once the world completes the task of becoming global and onceman completes the task of becoming human (it is in this sense, too, that hebecomes ‘the last man’), once ‘the’ community sets itself to stammering astrange uniqueness (as if there should only be the one, and as if it should possess
24
THE CONFRONTED COMMUNITY
a unique essence of the common), then ‘the’ community takes in the fact that it is the community itself that gapes—yawningly open to its unity and to its absent essences—and that it confronts within itself this break. It is community against community, foreign community against foreign community and familiar com-munity against familiar community, each rending itself in rending the others that are themselves lacking the possibility of communication, of communion too. Monotheism in itself confronted with itself—like theism and like atheism—is, for this reason, the schema of our present condition.That this confrontation with self may be a law of being-in-common and itsvery meaning, this is what is on the task sheet for the work of thought—immediately accompanied by this other project of thought: that the confron-tation, in grasping the fact of itself, grasps the fact that mutual destructiondestroys all the way along to the very possibility of confrontation, and with that destruction the possibility of being-in-common or being-with.For, if the ‘common’ is the ‘with’, the ‘with’ designates the space lackingall-powerfulness and all-presence. In the ‘with’ there can be none but the forcesthat confront one another because of their mutual play, and the presences that part from one another because they must always become something else apart from pure presences (given objects, subjects comforted in their certainties, aworld of inertia and entropy). How to enable ourselves to look squarely at our gaping lack, our confron-tation, not in order to sink into it, but in order to draw from it, despiteeverything, the strength to confront ourselves: first, with utter awareness; then,in such a way as to really scrutinise ourselves—without which scrutiny theconfrontation is nothing but an indistinct and blind shoving match?The challenge of this duly acknowledged, to look squarely at a gaping chasmand to confront oneself with an intense gaze are not without grounds for comparison, if the other’s gaze never opens upon anything but the unfathomable:upon absolute strangeness, upon a truth which cannot be verified but which must nevertheless be clung to.Threefold strangeness: that of the distant other, that of the withdrawn same,that of history turned toward the un-encountered, perhaps the unbearable. It isnecessary, against an ‘altruistic’ morality too blandly recited, to hold onto therigour of the relationship to the stranger, wherein strangeness is a strict condition of existence and of presence. And it is necessary to hold onto that which, out in front of us, exposes us to the sombre, radiating dispersal of our own future and of our own fissure. It is neither a question of making theOccident guilty nor of reasserting a mythic Orient: it is a question of conceivinga world that is in itself and of itself broken, by a break that comes forth fromthe furthest reaches of its history and that really must, by one means or another, for the worst and perhaps—who knows?—for the least worst, establish itsobscure meaning; not an obscured meaning but one where the obscure iselemental. It is difficult, it is necessary. It is our need in the two senses of theword: it is our poverty and our obligation.
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"The Confronted Community" by Jean-Luc Nancy
LA COMMUNAUTE´ AFFRONTE´ E
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2001
"for Blanchot" from Jean-Luc Nancy
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