archive : s0metim3s

As we turn to the question of names (or figures) and the common, and continuing the series of discussions on zoon politikon, the sense of the political and the triumph of economics over politics, J-L Nancy’s “Is Everything Political?” (trans. P. M. Adamek, CR, 2:3, 2002).

An oft-heard claim hovers at the horizon of our thoughts, pronouncing that everything is political [tout est politique]. The claim can be proffered or received in several different ways: on certain occasions, according to a thought of distribution (the moments or diverse elements of shared existence all in some way belong to the moment or element called the “political,” to which falls a privilege of diffusion or of transversality); on others, in a domineering gesture (in the first or last instance, the “political” sphere is that which determines or controls the activity of the other spheres); and, on other occasions still, in a form of integration or assumption (the essence of existence as a whole is of a political nature). In each of these cases, the tone of the enunciation or of the reception can be resigned, disconcerted, affirmative or contentious.

This claim, before ever simply and vaguely “hovering” at the horizon, served as the axiom of an entire modern elaboration. It most certainly constituted and consolidated the horizon itself during a long period — perhaps, one could say, from 1789 to the present time — and may continue to do so without our being able to say whether the “present time” is still or no longer circumscribed by the horizon. (In particular, the claim served as a maxim or slogan as much for the various forms of fascism as for those of communism: it was even most likely, notwithstanding all their differences, their true point of contact.)

(So as not to delve, in this brief remark, into that which preceded modernity, we will make do with the following formulation: politics was not “totalizing” for Antiquity, which no doubt invented politics but conceived of it only within the condition of a city of “free men”: of an essentially differential and “non-totalizing” city. By itself, slavery, with its economic corollaries, prevents one from understanding, on the basis, for example, of an “everything is political,” the “architectonic” place of politics within Aristotle. In this particular political space, the free man benefits from the polis for other ends than those of political administration (for example, the biostheoretikos, the leisure of the contemplative life), in the same way that the polis subsists on infra-political bases (slavery and subsistence primarily by family-based unities). The politics of sovereign nation-states, for its part, was upheld by a relation to a common, religious, or symbolic destiny that always, in one way or another, disregarded politics—while, from another perspective, the same sovereignty led towards a “politics in totality” that became the politics of the moderns.)

* * *

If it is sometimes said today that politics is held in check or at bay by economics, this happens only as the result of a hasty confusion: what is thus called the “economy” is actually nothing other than what was once called “political economy”: that is, the functioning of the administration of subsistence and prosperity, less at the level of the relatively self-sufficient family (the oikos, the household), than of the city (polis). “Political economy” was nothing other than the consideration of the polis as an oikos: as a collective or communitarian reality presumed to belong to a natural order (generation, kinship, inherited property: land, goods, slaves). It followed logically that if [End Page 16] the oiko-nomia took on the dimensions of the polis, the displacement could not be simply one of size, but implied as well that politeia, the knowledge of the affairs of the city, had itself been reinterpreted as an oika-nomai. But the latter was itself reinterpreted, simultaneously, no longer simply in terms of subsistence and prosperity (of the “good life”), but in terms of the production and reproduction of wealth (of “having more”).

Indeed, it is always a question of how one interprets the grouping of men, which can be understood as “wholly political” [tout politique] only insofar as the “political” itself is determined as total, totalizing, or all-encompassing. And that is exactly what happened, in a major way, when the political was determined as the global nature of an oikos: or, more precisely, as an oiko-logical globality, that of a contest or a competition—in the first sense of these terms—for the natural resources of its members. This was at first called “physiocracy” (”government by nature”).

At the same time, it was necessary to determine the “natural” nature of the members of the political oikos: this was done by constituting the city itself, no longer on the basis of an autonomous and transcendent order with respect to the oikoi (founding or federating them, while being of a different essence), but on the basis of a presumedly originary “oikology,” an originary familiarity of men both among themselves and with nature. Thus, the institution of a “social body” or “civil society” (in the first and exact sense of the term: a citizen-based or political society) was given as being fundamentally, ideally, or originarily identical with the institution of humanity itself—the latter having, moreover, no ultimate purpose other than to produce itself as a second nature or as an entirely humanized nature (assuming that such a concept is not contradictory, which is perhaps precisely one of the nubs of the question . . . ).

According to this logic, “everything is political” is assumed outright as a matter of principle, and from this it follows that “politics” itself, as an order severed from an institution or a particular expertise (or art), must tend towards the suppression of its own separation in order to bring about the natural totality that it expresses or indicates from the outset. In this way, there is ultimately no difference between “everything is political” and “everything is economical.” It is thus that democracy and the market act in concert and for one another’s sake by clearing paths before them in a process that, today, is called “globalization.” “Everything is political” thus amounts to asserting that “man” is self-sufficient in the sense that he produces his own nature and, therein, nature as a whole. Until now, the vague representation of this self-sufficiency and this self-production have entirely dominated the representations of politics (be they from the “right” or the “left”), or at least all of those representations that appear under the banner of a global, political “project,” whether it be “pro-state” or “anti-state,” “consensual” or “revolutionary,” etc. (There also exists a weak version, one of politics as regulatory action, as a corrective to inequalities and a lowering of tensions: but the background of this “social-democratic” hybrid that, incidentally, at times merits respect (but, at others, appears bogged down by compromises), is no less the same.)

* * *

The only question raised by what today is called a “crisis,” an “eclipse,” or a “paralysis” of politics is thus, in the end, that of the self-sufficiency of man and/or of nature in him and by him. Yet it is precisely the inconsistency of this self-sufficiency that the present time seems to demonstrate a little more every day. This is so because the globalization—the general oiko-logization of the polis — also reveals, ever more vividly, or violently, the non-naturalness of its own process (but also, ultimately, that of so-called “nature” itself: we were never more in the realm of a meta-phusis).

“Man,” who freed himself through “eco-politics as a whole” — this man whose social-market represents simultaneously and symmetrically the universal form of “rights” and the planetary proliferation of injustices, extortions, and exploitations — turns out less “alienated” (in the sense whereby such a term designates the “proper” with respect to which one could determine and measure an “alienation”) than devoid of identity, of propriety, of an end, and of measure. Man bears witness foremost to a lack in being. On the one hand, the exploited, who are subjected to a fight for survival, are forbidden to exist (it is thus more a prohibition than a lack); on the other, the affluent are always more aware of the fact that — even outside of all forms of compassion — neither their well-being, nor the malaise of others that is its corollary, produce human-being or world-being.

But in this way, it seems — and this is the most recent lesson, one that is still nearly inaudible, and, in many cases, unheard-of — this “lack” itself reveals, at the same time, the insufficiency of a simple logic of lack: such a logic, analogous to a logic of alienation, assumes an absence of lack as a terminus a quo or ad quem. Yet if there is no terminus — neither end nor origin — this is because there is a paradoxical logic of a complete incompleteness or of an infinite finitude. This logic then turns out to form “man,” and with him (and by him) “nature” as well as “history.”

However, the invention of politeia is perhaps also revealed, in the singular light of this paradox, to have already been, itself, the revelation of such a logic. The man of logos, who is properly the zoon politikon, is the existent whose own measure is incommensurable and inappropriable. The polis was simultaneously represented as a common measure that was given — the self-giving of a common measure — and as an indefinite instability and a permanent reworking (though rare and episodic in its manifestations) of the measure of the incommensurable. (The index of the “common measure” should thus be understood both in a transversal sense: measure making a connection — and in a distributive sense: a measure belonging to everyone.)

This measure has a name: justice. Justice involves, wherever it is not simply given, the exercise of power (and thus of counter-forces, of reversals of power, of alliances of power, etc.). The exercise of such power, in whatever sense of the term, is at first glance incompatible with identification on the basis of an oiko-nomie, that is, of a natural self-sufficiency. But it has become patent that there is no oikonomie: there is, in every respect, only an ecotechny: that is to say, a common ground or a habitation in the production, invention, and incessant transformation of ends that are never given. The domination of “political economy” was perhaps never as overwhelming, but the fundamental inconsistency of its purported self-sufficiency was never more apparent. It was never more apparent than now that value, understood absolutely (the value of “man” or of the “world”), is absolutely incommensurable with all other measured (evaluated) values. (Commensurability is another word for “general equivalence.”)

* * *

Politics has been withdrawn as giveness [donation] (be it self- or hetero-giveness, human or divine) of a common essence and purpose: it has been withdrawn as a totality or as a totalization. In this sense, not everything is political.

But politics is retraced as a place where power is exercised with a view towards an incommensurable justice — that is, as a place where one asserts an in-finity of human-being or of world-being. By definition, politics no longer reabsorbs into itself all the other spaces of existence. The other spaces are those where the incommensurability is in some sense formed and presented: these can be called “art,” “religion,” “thought,” “science,” “ethics,” “conduct,” “exchange,” “production,” “love,” “war,” “kinship,” “intoxication,” and can, indeed, be given an infinite number of names: their mutual distinctions and circumscriptions (that prevent neither contiguities nor co-penetrations) define in each case the occurrence of a configuration according to which takes place a certain presentation—even if this presentation itself must give form to an “impresentation” or a withdrawal of presence. (Nonetheless, the non-political spheres are both public and private, if one must use such terms. All are, in the double sense of the word, partagées [imparted or shared out; divided].)

Among these configurations (and, again, without excluding their contacts and contagions), there is incommensurability. Politics is redrawn at the place where one must keep open this incommensurability, whether that means, generally, the incommensurability of justice, or that of value. Contrary to the assertions of both theological politics and political economy—but not without relation to what was at stake in the “pre-political” polis (if one can put it that way)—politics is no longer the place of an assumption of a unitotality. Neither is it the place where the incommensurability of whatever type of unity of origin or of end—in short, of a “humanity”—is given shape or brought to presence. Politics is in charge of space or spacing (of space-time), but not in charge of figures.

Certainly, politics is the site of an “in-common” as such — but only in the manner of the incommensurability that is kept open (and along the two axes that we have just outlined). It does not subsume the “in-common” under any type of union, community, subject, or epiphany. Everything that is of the “common” is not political, and all that is political is not in every respect “common.” But at the same time, neither the sphere of the in-common nor that of politics allows for a distinction between a “society in exteriority” and a “community in interiority.” (The dualism is no more valid for the social body/soul than for the individual body/soul.)

Politics should now be understood as the specific site of the articulation of a non-unity — and of symbolization of a non-figure. The names of “equality” and of “liberty” are only indeterminate, problematic names under which one must maintain (would one dare say: keep wide open?) the necessity of not accomplishing an essence or an end of the incommensurable, and nonetheless, and precisely, of maintaining the (im)possibility: a necessity of shaping power — the force that must hold together the non-organic non-unity — on the model of incommensurable “justice.” A demand, thus, to conform to a universal (not one that is given, but that is to be produced). At this site, politics is far from being “everything” — even though everything passes through it and thereby comes across and encounters everything else. Politics becomes, precisely, a site of detotalization. Or, if one could so risk the formula: if “everything is political” — but in another sense than those of theology and/or political economy — it is so only where “everything” is in no way either total or totalized. Can democracy be thought at this height, and with this intensity?