Drew Pollhammer

Jean-Luc Nancy’s Political Praxis of Thinking-Possibilising

“From now on, politics must be understood as the specific place for the
articulation of a nonunity—and for the symbolization of a nonfigure … Politics
becomes precisely a place of detotalization.”
-Jean-Luc Nancy (The Truth of Democracy 51).1

The scholarly reception of Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on the ‘political and/or politics’2

is thoroughly diverse. It ranges from critical (in varying degrees) (Dow 1993; Hand 2012;

McQuillan 2012) to sympathetic (Morin 2012; Smith 2012, 2015; Raffoul 2012; Watkin 2012)

to the claim that Nancy does not, in fact, offer any more than a few “small indications” of what

“his thought about the political might be” (Devisch 65). In the present paper I wish to put

forward yet another positive reading of the potential political significance of Jean-Luc Nancy’s

writings, by emphasizing the extent to which his thought of a praxis of thinking and of

struggling to ‘keep open’ the access to world-forming sense and to the exposure of true
                                                                                                               
1
Hereafter cited as TD.
2
Here I am alluding to a recent short essay by Nancy entitled “The Political and/or Politics”
which has been an important resource here for my comprehension of Nancy’s politics; and I
propose that he does offer a politics. There is not enough space here to adequately delve into
the significance of the, sometimes important, distinction between ‘the political’ [le politique]
and ‘politics’ [la politique]. Suffice it here to say that I think Nancy offers both something
political and something akin to a politics. I thus use the terms interchangeably here. In doing
so I am following the arguments offered up by Jason Smith for such a practice—arguments
which are to be found in his excellent essay “Nancy, Justice, and Communist Politics”, see pp.
187-188.  
   2  

democratic/communistic/an-archic, and incommensurable, ‘being-singular-plural’, offers

valuable resources toward resisting the Identitarian threats of totalitarian regimes of sense, as

well as the homogenizing of sense by Capitalism’s drive to convert all sense to ‘general

equivalence’.

The impetus in Nancy’s thought, for some sort of political praxis, stems from a

question that he and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe posed early in the 1980s within the context of

the set of problematics driving the discussions and debates at the ‘Centre for Philosophical

Research in the Political’ (which they co-founded), namely: “What is to be done?”3 The

question was posed in such broad terms inasmuch as ‘the Centre’ was less concerned with the

implementing of recognizably political strategies within the then currently operational registers

of what it meant to be ‘doing something’ politically, than with rethinking the very nature of the

political itself. The problem, for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, vis-à-vis the question “what is to

be done?”, when posed within the context of a dedicated ‘Centre for Philosophical Research in

the Political’, is that to answer the question in some recognizably political way, would amount

to submitting to the all-pervasive totalitarian logic responsible for the very flattening out of

what it means for things to ‘be political’, which the question, by not posing itself as question

concerning either ‘politics’ or ‘the political’ is attempting to avert. The problem of ‘the

political’, then and now, is that what it means to be ‘doing something’ political is

unfortunately all-too-often hegemonically determined in advance by some one dominating

regime of sense. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe deem any such dominating regimes of sense

‘totalitarian’.

                                                                                                               
3
Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy’s short note by the same name in Retreating the Political, pp. 157-158.
   3  

The totalitarian regime of sense infiltrates every register of daily life to the point where

‘everything becomes political’ and the very opening up of the question of possible new senses

of the political is foreclosed. On this point, Francois Raffoul notes that “the expression

‘everything is political,’ with its implicit reference to totality, is for Nancy a fascistic or

totalitarian formulation” (Raffoul 41). And yet it remains the case that such formulations are

still ever-present—in the media, in hackneyed ‘political’ speeches, and in the day-to-day

exchanges of the average citizen—to the degree to which such formulations, due to their very

ever-presentness come to lose all signifying power. Hence, one problem with the reality of a

closed-off totalitarian immanence which would foreclose on the possibility of new senses of

the political is the danger that ‘the political’ itself might, at a time when ‘everything is

political’, lose all power to signify anything meaningful. Indeed, such a reality, for Nancy and

Lacoue-Labarthe, amounts to the fact of the retreat of the political, in the sense that what ‘the

political’ is, or means, has retreated.

The political, in its simultaneous closed-off obviousness and ubiquitousness, comes to

be so saturated with sense as to lose all sense, and thereby escape from any possible

questioning of its, (i.e., the political’s) essence (for “everyone already knows” what the

political is, due to its ever-present obviousness). On this point concerning the over-saturation

and retreat of the political, B.C. Hutchens’ comments are helpful. Hutchens notes that if we

become “blinded by the platitude that ‘everything is political’”, then “it might prove to be that

everything is saturated with political values, to the extent that it is difficult, or even impossible,

to think the political itself” (Hutchens 128).4 Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe point out the

                                                                                                               
4
Indeed, Nancy describes the way this kind of totalitarian saturation of sense whereby
“everyone already knows” (what is ‘right’, ‘true’ etc.) applies to the way the sense of modern
democracy “becomes murky”: “When it is taken for granted in every discourse that
   4  

deleterious reality of the over-saturation of the sense of ‘the political’ in terms of its sense

being restricted to the inside of an all-too-pervasively accepted, and closed-off, ‘ideological

phraseology’, culminating in the,

fact of the disappearance of all ‘political specificity’ in the very domination of the
political, the fact of the political ceaselessly merging with all sorts of authoritative
discoveries (in the first place, socio-economic, but also technological, cultural,
psychological etc.), and, despite the ‘media’ circus of the spectacularization of an
absent public space, everywhere converting itself into a banal management of
organization. In the totalitarian phenomena thus understood, nowhere do even the least
of specifically political questions come to be asked, do new, political questions
(corresponding to transformations of the world) have the chance to emerge, if not from
inside an accepted ideological phraseology (Retreating the Political 126-127).

The problem then, for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, is to broach the question of how to pose

new political questions without reverting to an incorporation of any ‘accepted ideological

phraseology’ of ‘the political’.

Sonja Dejanovic’s comments on the significance of Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s

posing of the question “what is to be done?” —a question, it must be recalled, which Lacoue-

Labarthe and Nancy pose within the context of ‘research in the political’ but which does not

seek to be posed within any ‘accepted ideological phraseology’ of what ‘the political’ means—

are helpful on this point. Dejanovic writes that, normally, “the question, what is to be done, is

perceived as posed from the position of knowledge”, before going on to cite Nancy’s own

critical statements on this point concerning such a ‘position of knowledge’, from which one

might claim that “one already knows what is right to think” and thus “the only issue is how

one might then proceed to act” (Dejanovic vi; Nancy, Retreating the Political 157).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
‘democracy’ is the only kind of political regime deemed acceptable by a humanity that has
come of age, that has been emancipated, and that has no other end than itself, then the very
idea of democracy loses its luster” (TD 37).
   5  

Thus, the problem concerns how to answer the question “what is to be done?” in such a

way that does not involve simply replaying ‘what is right to think’, in the sense that ‘what is

right to think’ would be what is right for all time, and would be dictated as such by some

dominant totalitarian regime of sense; rather the task would be to answer the question, or at

least to problematize it, in such a way as to take into account the fact that such politically-

oriented questions spring from no transcendently given ground. And therefore, the task would

be to acknowledge that such questions would need to remain perpetually open—to be

perpetually asked again. Now, it is for this very reason of keeping open the question “what is

to be done?” that some critics, for example Fraser (1984), charge Nancy with a kind of

political quietude inasmuch as he might be said to be not muddying his hands with pressing

questions of politics by not offering ‘concrete’ engagements with, or solutions to, such

problems. However, such criticisms, I contend, do not really touch Nancy’s politics.

Such criticisms as those of Fraser do not really engage in an acknowledgement of the

extent to which Nancy’s aversion against ‘doing something’ recognizably political is, on his

part a political move, inasmuch as they do not acknowledge the extent to which, for Nancy, to

actually ‘do something’ political(ly) would be to simultaneously restrict the reach of politics

such that it, i.e., ‘politics’, does not oversaturate every other realm of sense-making, as does

any totalitarian politics. For example, in a recent essay, Nancy writes: “Politics must order—in

all senses of the word—in such a way that the passage towards the beyond of its order remains

free of obstacles” (“The Political and/or Politics” 11). Nancy’s politics then, is a politics of

disallowing the complete saturation of all sense to a strictly closed-off and totalizing sense

(whether political or otherwise). “Our politics”, he writes, “[must] keep open the access to

what it does not contain: the essential infinite flight of sense” (13). I thus wish to contend that
   6  

Nancy’s politics is a politics of “keep[ing] open the access to what it does not contain”, i.e,

that which exceeds the realm of the political. On this point, Dejanovic helpfully claims that,

for Nancy,

it is not a question of doing without politics, rather, the political question itself arises
along with … evaluative affirmations which are not political as such … [P]olitics, for
Nancy, is the opening up of the space for such [non-political] affirmations … but it
[i.e., politics] does not itself create sense as such (xiv).

Dejanovic thus accurately grants the role of politics for Nancy one of facilitating the ability to

create senses not restrained to a totalizing reduction of all sense to political sense. However,

her remarks that politics does not actually create sense itself are problematic inasmuch as, for

Nancy, what is at stake in political praxis is thinking, and thinking cannot but ‘make sense’

(TD 31). It thus must be said that the thought/act of (politically) allowing for the creation of

non-political sense(s) is itself a sense-making—namely a political sense-making. Nevertheless,

Dejanovic aptly describes the workings of this political sense-making when she writes: “what

is at stake in the question of the political, for Nancy, is … not some definite form or end, but

doing justice to the incalculable value of each singular being-with by making possible the

weaving of sense” (xv –my emphasis).

Indeed, Nancy himself describes the role of politics for him as one of ‘possibilising’:

“Politics is the possibilising of a we, a we that could then not be possible, that itself lacks

evidence and givenness. Yet the ‘we’, which has been made possible, is nevertheless not a

completed ‘we’: on the contrary, the ‘we’ opens up onto its own impossibility” (“The Political

and/or Politics” 12-13). ‘The political’ for Nancy then is the possibilising of the possibility of

the (im)-possible, which is precisely to say that in its possibilising of a ‘we’ and of a world (as
   7  

he puts it in The Creation of the World)5, that we-world, “must not be the object of a

programmatic and certain calculation … It must be the possibility of the impossible (according

to a logic often used by Derrida), it must know itself as such, that is to say, know that it

happens in the incalculable and the unassignable” (CW 49).

Now, why claiming that politics is the possibilising of a ‘we’, of a world, and thus of

the (im)-possible, is a political move as opposed to say a strictly ethical or ontological move is

due to the fact that such a possibilising, or the ‘keeping open’ of access to possible new

sense(s), is actively resistant to any and all totalitarian regimes of sense, as well as to the

concomitant impetuses toward ‘general equivalence’ by any globalizing industrial-capitalistic

regimes of sense. For Nancy, Capitalism works on a logic similar to that of totalitarianism

inasmuch as both regimes of sense flatten out all possible registers of sense-making to some

one closed immanential field. Both regimes of sense, it can be said, collapse sense into one

closed immanential register by way of the logic of ‘general equivalence’. On this point, Jean-

Paul Martinon offers a helpful analysis of the logic of general equivalence, writing that there is

a “general equivalence when one symbol or one commodity is excluded from all others and is

subsequently used in order to regulate what is left behind and unelected” (Martinon 115). For a

capitalist regime of sense, it is money which is used to regulate the value of all that is not

money; it is the one “abstract value which supersedes all others” and which thus serves as the

referential ground by which all other things “express their value” (Martinon 115).

For Nancy, such a deleterious flattening out of sense to some one closed immanential

register is akin to the totalitarian reduction of sense whereby ‘everything is political’ (as was

discussed above). The logic of general equivalence, like that of totalitarianism, works by way

                                                                                                               
5
Hereafter cited as CW.
   8  

of a “levelling of all distinctions” (Martinon 115). Inasmuch as such a ‘levelling out’ amounts,

in both cases, to the foreclosing on the irruptions of new senses, Nancy’s politics of “keeping

open” the possibility of creating new senses, of possibilising a ‘we’, actively resists, or

struggles against, them. On this point, Nancy writes:

To create the world means: immediately, without delay, reopen each possible struggle
for a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of global injustice against the
background of general equivalence. But this means to struggle precisely in the name of
the fact that this world is coming out of nothing, that there is nothing before it, and that
it is without models, without principle and without given end, and that is precisely what
forms the justice and the meaning of the world (CW 22).

The reason why such a struggle is political is, I believe, evident in the fact that, for Nancy,

such a struggle amounts to the active resistance against dominant regimes of sense, of

totalitarianism and Capitalist/globalizing general equivalence. However, it is important to note

that such a struggle is not premised on the idea that there is some Nancean political agenda

which collectives could then plaster on telephone poles or emblazon upon banners—

“possibilise a ‘we’”!— with which to march and rally around, as if such an imperative (i.e.,

“possibilise a ‘we’”!) could amount to more than its being subsumed into the dominant

regimes of sense.6 Or perhaps it is better to say that, as long as political resistance restricts

itself solely to ‘political action’ such a resistance is following the same ‘closing-off’ logic of

totalitarianism and capitalistic general equivalence.

One of the challenges of Nancy’s politics then is that to think with it is to think beyond

it, which is what Nancy is alluding to when he says that

the political question can no longer seriously be asked except by considering what
democracy engages as a sort of principial going beyond of the political order—but a
going beyond that takes place only by starting from the polis, from its institutions and
struggles as we are called to think them sub specie infinitatis humani generis (TD 29).
                                                                                                               
6  I  will  expand  on  these  points  below.    
   9  

To the extent that such a thinking can itself open a new sense not dictated by the logic(s) of

closed immanence, such a thinking, I contend, would in greater or lesser degrees, be by its

very nature simultaneously political and ‘beyond the political’. It is in emphasizing the extent

to which such a thinking is potentially more powerful than the kind of conventional protests

which I mention above that I find Nancy’s politics to be so politically forceful. Nancy stresses

that simply—though it is by no means simple, (and this is part of the political challenge, or

struggle, begun at the ‘Centre for Philosophical Research in the Political’)—thinking being-

singular-plural as the real condition for identity, and therefore of any possible Identitarian

politics, and doing so in such a way as to possibilise a ‘we’ is to engage oneself politically. To

this end, Nancy writes: “To enter into this thought is already to act. It is to be engaged in the

praxis whereby what is produced is a transformed subject rather than a preformed product, and

infinite subject rather than a finite object” (TD 31).

Here it is important to stress that for Nancy such a transformed subject is precisely not

the atomistic liberal ‘individual’, which would, for him, be something like a preformed product

to the extent that the preformed product’s being what it is is just its remaining hypostatically

what it is, i.e., preformed, in the sense that its identity is given to it once and for all—and as

such it is a product of its givenness. However, and conversely, a ‘transformed subject’ (and

here it would be better to avoid the avoid the term ‘subject’ with all of its metaphysical

baggage and opt for Nancy’s own term ‘singularity’) is that singularity which does not allow

itself to be given to itself, nor its world to be given (‘once and for all’) for itself. It is because

Nancy thinks that ‘literature’, ‘art’, and ‘love’ are better at exposing singularities to the

groundless nothing, the an-archē, of sense/world-forming/being-singular-plural that, for him,

political thinking is primarily a conduit for the opening up of the possibilising of greater and
   10  

manifold aesthetic and amorous senses (TD 33).7 However, as noted above, contrary to

Janevic, this is not to say that the political does not have a sense of its own, the thinking of

which is a necessary condition for the praxis of ‘keeping open’ and “‘possibilising a we’” and

hence a ‘world’. “This praxis”, Nancy writes, “is the only one—coming before any reform,

any reformatting, any risk management—that might engage something more than a protest and

more than a revolt, namely, the dislodging of the very foundation of general equivalence and

the putting into question its false infinity” (TD 31).

The false infinity which Nancy speaks of here is the seemingly infinite process by

which eco-technics’/Capitalism’s ends are the endless production of capital and new

technologies driven toward these same ends (TD 23). These ends (capital and new

technologies) become the means (capital and technologies) to the same ends (capital and

technologies) ad infinitum.8 Against this ‘bad infinite’ of the stultifying repetition of the Same,

Nancy counterposes his ‘good infinite’ of the ceaseless reopening of the possibility of the (im)-

possible. Nancy often speaks of the good infinite as the incommensurable and as an

“incommensurable justice” (TD 51). Whereas the logic of the bad infinite and of general

                                                                                                               
7  Importantly,  Nancy  also  includes  “thought”  within  this  list  of  possible  ways  of  exposing  

singularities  to  the  groundless  ground  of  their  being  (TD  33).  It  is  for  this  reason  that  I  
wish  to  contend  that  for  Nancy’s  politics,  or  praxis,  thinking  possibilising  might  be  held  to  
have  the  same  or  similar  powers  of  exposing  singularities  to  the  incommensurable  as  the  
powers  of  ‘love’  ‘art’  and  ‘literature’.  I  thus  contend  that  inasmuch  as  for  Nancy’s  politics  
to  be  a  politics  it  must  also  be  ‘beyond  politics’,  it,  by  itself,  is  simultaneously  both  a  
conduit  and  more  than  a  conduit  for  ‘the  opening  up  of  possibilising’.  It  is  for  these  same  
reasons  that  I  take  issue  with  Dejanovic’s  claim  (above)  that  Nancy’s  politics  does  not  
itself  create  sense.  An  extended  discussion  of  these  problems  would  need  to  pay  special  
attention  to  these  complex  issues  of  a  ‘politics  beyond  politics’.  Moreover,  it  seems  to  me  
that  there  is  required  at  the  moment  a  greater  critical  engagement  with  the  problematics  
surrounding  the  role  of  possible  imbrications  or  interplays  between  ‘art’,  ‘love’,  
‘literature’,    ‘politics’  and  ‘thinking’  in  light  of  these  remarks.  
8  Cf.  Bernard  Stiegler’s  excellent  discussion  of  this  process  in  the  film  essay  The  Ister  

(David  Barison  and  Daniel  Ross,  Icarus  Films,  2009).    

   11  

equivalence is grounded in a closed-off tautological principle of identity—“money = money …

and nothing can effectively equate, replace, or disturb the worldwide reign of money”—the

good infinite is openness of spacing akin to Derrida’s ‘différance’, and every singular-plural

within such a spacing is precisely that which is incommensurable in the sense that it is not

identical to either itself or to anything else (Martinon 115). There is no equivalence of value

which could, on an ontological level, amount to one singular-plural being commensurate with

another inasmuch as each spacing is precisely its own radically novel value, opening onto a

perpetually new and unforeseeable sense.

The bad infinite, for Nancy, is that which is grounded in the possibility of measuring

the value of all things according to its general equivalence. In contrast, the good infinite, as

Nancy notes, is that which goes “infinitely beyond itself … is neither given nor to be given”

and is therefore that which is precisely not “of the order of the measurable or even the

determinable in general” (TD 19). The trouble for Nancy, following Heidegger, is that the

industrial-capitalist takeover of globalization (bad infinite) obscures the true ontological

groundlessness (spacing/good infinite) upon which it foists itself as the One all-dominating

sense, i.e., that of general equivalence (or ‘standing reserve’ as Heidegger puts it). And like

Heidegger, Nancy too is acutely aware of the fact that the dominance of this globalizing

process has culminated in the near-destruction of the earth. For example, in a recent interview,

Nancy states: “It’s possible that today we are before a very concrete, very close possibility

(even if this means a century or more) of the destruction of the world, and the passing to an

uninhabitable, unliveable world, as much ethically as physically (“The Commerce of

Thinking” 235). As I have been showing, Nancy contends that the political exigency is to
   12  

struggle against such a globalizing dominance by “rethink[ing] completely the idea of the

political itself” (Ibid.).

To rethink the political in such a way as to “take leave of horizons” and thereby

“enable the appearance” of other senses, for example, senses of ‘love’, ‘art’, and ‘literature’,

amounts, for Nancy, to a politics which does not “assume for itself the truth of existence”

(Ibid.). Thus, as Marie-Eve Morin notes, Nancy rigorously opposes the dominance of a

“metaphysical politics”, a politics of immanentially closed horizons, and hence a politics in

which “existence is referred to a good outside itself that the polis aims to realize” (Morin 12-

13). Morin then goes on to aptly describe the positive significance of Nancy’s writings on a

politics, or praxis, which would struggle against the foreclosure of sense into its possible

subsumption into the immonde/(non)-sense of totalitarian hegemony and globalizing general

equivalence. She writes that, for Nancy, “politics ought to open a space for the affirmation of

existence, an existence that is … always exposed to itself and the world” (13).

That the possibility of opening a space outside of totalitarian and globalizing regimes

of sense is often fraught with immense difficulty is not overlooked by Nancy. Indeed,

sometimes the creating of a sense which one intended as resistant to any subsumption into

general equivalence, often loses its original force and gets reterritorialized (to borrow a term

from Deleuze and Guattari) as part of the regime it was intended to resist. Here one need only

recall to mind the mass production of Che Guevara t-shirts or the commercialization of once

subversive genres of music. Indeed, the very thinking of political praxis which Nancy offers is

transformed into book-products churned out by a capitalistic drive to commodify thinking into

products the value of which it can then subsume within general equivalence. (In fact, Nancy

wrote a short book about this phenomenon, entitled On the Commerce of Thinking). Above, I
   13  

referred to something similar with respect to a hypothetical protest group rallying around a

slogan which has become so clichéd and semantically saturated as to risk closing up a thinking

praxis anew. However, in Nancy’s politics, the very strength of a praxis of thinking as he

conceives of it, pertains to the fact that by struggling to “keep open the access” to the

“essential infinite flight of sense”, it must ceaselessly resist the becoming-totalized of sense,

and must therefore reinvent itself at all times: “praxis neither can no should be programmed.

Besides, no praxis could come of it. For if ‘praxis’ designates an action that produces the

proper subject of an action … then this subject in permanent transformation modifies praxis,

reinventing it to the extent that it ‘acts’” (“The Political and/or Politics” 13; “The Commerce

of Plural Thinking” 254). As noted above (p. 8), such ‘acts’ of praxis are acts of thinking

which must struggle so as to keep the incommensurable open; and any such struggle must go

beyond politics to the very groundlessness of the incommensurable which is the groundless

ground of our ‘being-with’.

It is in such a ‘going beyond politics’ that Nancy’s politics are so powerful, in that this

politics of struggling to ‘keep open’ the incommensurable is ceaselessly on guard against

Identitarian regimes of sense which would seek to collapse sense into the (non)-sense/immonde

of general equivalence. Nancy’s political praxis of ‘thinking-possibilising’ is ever open to the

sense(s) that we are, that is, as long as we are open to such possibilising—as long as we are

open to “becom[ing] what we are” (incommensurable ‘being-with’) (TD 54).

To conclude, I began this paper by citing the question posed by Nancy and Lacoue-

Labarthe in the early 1980s: “what is to be done?”. At that point in time it was too early to

entertain the possibility of offering some new political praxis, hence the very posing of the

question in the first place. In the more than three decades since originally posing this question
   14  

I, following Morin (2014), Smith (2012, 2015), Watkin (2012) and others, contend that Nancy

now offers something in the way of a ‘democratic/communist/an-archic’ politics (beyond

politics), which might be better described as a praxis of thinking the “dislodging of the very

foundation of general equivalence” in whatever ways, and to whichever degrees, this might

prove possible (TD 31). Such a praxis would involve “not accomplishing an essence or an end

of the incommensurable”, but of “sustaining its [i.e., the incommensurable’s ‘end’ or

‘essence’] impossibility (TD 51).

*  

To think such a praxis would be to already think it anew. Thinking anew, both

politically and therefore beyond politics, is the struggle …

   15  

Works Cited:

Dejanovic, Sanja. “Sense, Praxis, and the Political”. In Nancy and the Political. Ed. Sanja
Dejanovic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Devisch, Ignaas. “Thinking Nancy’s ‘Political Philosophy’”. In Nancy and the Political. Ed.
Sanja Dejanovic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
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