The disclosure of a metaphysical horizon, or how to escape dialectics more

The disclosure of a metaphysical horizon, or how to escape dialectics Ignaas Devisch Artevelde University College and Ghent University. Lange Boomgaardstraat 8 9000 Ghent Belgium + 32 498 574801 Email: Ignaas.Devisch@UGent.be or ignaasdevisch@scarlet.be Abstract In a footnote to The Inoperative Community French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy wonders how to escape Hegelian dialectics. Because Nancy in his later work often returns to this attempt of a ‘disclosure of our metaphysical horizon’, we not only consider this note as a crucial one in his attempt to ‘disclose’ our metaphysical horizon; on top of that, we think this note is really worthwhile considering for our philosophical era in general: how to think after the so called ‘end of metaphysics’? Nancy’s work is an explicit confrontation with this horizon. Therefore, in this paper we prefer to reconstruct his line of thought in this, from the influence of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, over Friedrich Hegel up to Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. We focus on the way attempts for the disclosure of our metaphysical horizon out from the problem of community, one of the central topics in his work. We conclude with a discussion why Nancy’s ontological framework has the potential to break up the metaphysical horizon of our philosophical era. Introduction In a footnote to The Inoperative Community French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “There are two ways of escaping the dialectic (that is to say mediation in a totality) – either by slipping away from it into immanence or by opening up its negativity to the point of rendering it ‘unworked” [‘désoeuvrée’] as Bataille puts it” (Nancy 1991a: 156n.40). In this note, Nancy wonders if the way Georges Bataille elaborates the Hegelian ‘workless negation’ as a way of escaping the dialectic, is of real philosophical and metaphysical significance. Because Nancy in his later work often returns to this attempt of a ‘disclosure of our metaphysical horizon’, we not only consider this note as a crucial one in his attempt to ‘disclose’ our metaphysical horizon; on top of that, we think this note is really worthwhile considering for our philosophical era in general: how to think after the so called ‘end of metaphysics’? Nancy’s work is an explicit confrontation with this horizon. Therefore, in this paper we prefer to reconstruct his line of thought in this, from the influence of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, over Friedrich Hegel up to Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. We focus on the way he attempts for the disclosure of 18 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2010, 29(1) our metaphysical horizon out from the problem of community, one of the central topics in his work. We conclude with a discussion why Nancy’s ontological framework has the potential to break up the metaphysical horizon of our philosophical era. 1. The Workless Negation: Bataille and Blanchot Nancy devotes a number of texts to Bataille, such as ‘L’excrit’ and ‘L’insacrifiable’ – both published in La pensée finie.1 In addition, there are a number of texts where Bataille can be detected in the background, such as in The Experience of Freedom. One of Nancy’s earliest books, The Sharing of Voices, showed already that he was far more than just one of Bataille’s more stimulating interpreters. To understand Nancy’s work properly, it is important to expand on the Bataillean and Blanchotian background of his work. We will limit myself to what is necessary for clarifying the philosophical-political stakes of our survey. Any discussion of Bataille and Blanchot must, however, begin with Hegel. For both Bataille and Blanchot, Hegel—or more specifically, the Hegelian dialectic—is the reference par excellence. Hegel’s dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit is driven in the first place by negation. For Hegel, the becoming of reality stems from a negation. History is enacted insofar as, in the logic of the dialectic, everything constantly opposes itself to everything else, as well as to itself, with the result that the opposition is always sublated or Aufgehoben to a higher plane, which is then negated in its turn. This eternal work of the negative drives history forward, in search as it is for self-consciousness. Reality ‘works’ in this way, through the continual opposition of everything to everything else. The unrelenting activity of the negative comprises a process of ever-increasing (self-)consciousness which is at the same time the ‘work’ of reality. In Hegel’s philosophy, history becomes conscious of itself. Consequently, the apotheosis of Hegelian dialectics is when the negativity has worked out, so to day. In Hegelian terms: the self-transparent Spirit then needs no longer lose itself in what is other than itself in order to recognize itself in the other. Once negation has become conscious in and for itself, it has been transformed into universal positivity and becomes workless. This Hegelian thesis struck Bataille, so much so that in the nineteen-thirties he carefully took it into himself, fascinated as he was by Kojève’s Hegel seminars, and finally turned it against himself. In a letter to Kojève, ‘Lettre à Kojève X’2, Bataille asks the following question: “If action is – as Hegel says – negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has ‘nothing more to do’ disappears or remains in a state of ‘workless negativity’. Personally, I can only decide in one way, being myself precisely this ‘unemployed negativity’.[…] I imagine that my life – or, better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life – constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel’s closed system” (Botting and Wilson, 1997: 296). 3 Here, Bataille pushes Hegel against the limit he had himself encountered: the transformation of the negative into universal positivity, the moment when the dialectical structure of reality becomes self-transparent in Hegel’s thought, the moment when the 1 Nancy, 1990b, Une pensée finie. Paris: Galilée. The English title The Finite Thinking is unfortunately not a translation of this book as a whole, but only of some texts, combined with others; of the two texts I mentioned above, only ‘L’insacrifiable’ is translated - see Nancy, 2003, A finite thinking. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 51-77), as well as to Bataille and Sartre in “La pensée dérobée” (Nancy, 2000:88-106) not to be confused with the book La pensée dérobée published in 2001. This letter is also part of Hollier 1979: 75-82. We prefer to translate ‘sans emploi’ as ‘workless’ instead of ‘unemployed’. 2 3 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2010, 29(1) 19 negative has nothing more to do and has become inoperative and unemployed. Bataille acknowledges the power of the negative but, in contrast to Hegel, he starts out from the position that the negative does not have the unceasing ability to sublate itself up to the point where it reaches the positivity of reality. Bataille’s critical stance pertains to the negation as such at the moment of its supposed reversal. If nothing in history can really be lost because every moment is preserved in the on-going Aufhebung of every opposition, this is just as true for the negative itself. Nothing can escape the operation of negation. This enables the Hegelian system to reach the totality of everything that is, with the proviso that this system closes only in its negation. Negation can absorb everything, except its own operation with which it encapsulates the whole system. In short, according to Bataille, the negative can accommodate everything but itself. The negation remains, and is itself the remainder, over and against the universal positivity of self-transparent Spirit that it constitutes. According to Bataille, the way the negative escapes the Hegelian reality reveals itself in the singular existence of every self-consciousness, including, for example, that of his own. With the awareness that one could potentially have not existed, and that the Hegelian reality at that moment would have lacked nothing, the unsublatable lack of the singular negation discloses itself within the Hegelian universality. This is why Bataille can say that his life in itself forms the rebuttal to Hegel’s closed system. Negativity as such (as singularity) refutes the Hegelian system and makes a universal, self-transparent consciousness impossible. It pries the system open, creating a hole in it which it sustains itself as a gaping wound. Nobody less than Hegel himself, as a singularity, remains outside the self-transparent Hegelian system. He, too, comprises an unsublatable disruption of it. Similarly for Blanchot, it is this disruption, especially the idea that human beings constitute themselves from out of a pure auto-production, that lies at the heart of his literary criticism. Blanchot indeed invariably initiates his critique from the position of literature and of writing. According to Blanchot, literature reveals itself as a persistent negativity. To the extent that literature never ceases to speak, that its fiction can never articulate without remainder what it wants to say, and that the word never reaches its own death, the dialectical recuperation of the negative is in literature impossible. In words, the things are given over to their absence. They become ‘murmuring’, according to Blanchot in his text “L’espace littéraire”, translated as “Literature and the Right to Death” (Blanchot 1949: 291-331). The words keep on echoing because they never reach their final destination. (The act of) writing and the literary work stumble upon a fundamental indeterminacy. Since words never can attain a final and absolute meaning, they constantly are confronted with their own finitude. Although a word can signify an object, it can never really include that object in its meaning. Compare it with love: if two lovers say ‘I love you’, you are never sure what they mean exactly by it and to proof they not only are but keep on being in love, they will have to repeat it all the time. 4 4 This text is later taken up in Blanchot, 1981: 11-61. Taking the analogy between Bataille and Blanchot as her cue, Annelies Schulte-Nordholt remarks that it is no coincidence that Blanchot develops his critique of Hegel in his “L’expérience-limite” (see Blanchot, 1969: 300-354), a text on Bataille, see (Schulte-Nordholt, 1995: 45 n. 37). It is moreover in this text that is again clear that the stakes of ‘unworking’ and of the ‘negativity without emply’ are similar: “Man is the being that does not exhaust his negativity in action. Thus when all is finished, when the ‘doing’ (by which man also makes himself) 20 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2010, 29(1) For Blanchot, a work implies therefore not so much presence as the interruption of presence. For the writer, the work is a secret from which the writer is separated (Blanchot, 1955: 17). Writing a book is not so much the writer’s realization of him- or herself. Rather, writing is similar to an interruption, and requires a writing that is open to the indeterminate, the fragmentary and the subversive—as Blanchot himself does.5 When writing, it is only because the author is absent in his work, that others can read it. Consequently and inevitably, there is a caesura between what the author wants to say and the reading of it by others. The intention of the author is necessarily disrupted. It is consequently not that the author is present as such in what he or she writes, in his or her work. Rather, the author gets caught up in it halfway, very much like the words of the work themselves. Writing, then, is not a pure emanation of a self-sufficient, absolute consciousness; it is rather that which disrupts such a consciousness. In this way, Blanchot breaks through the dialectic role a book can play for its writer, namely that, in order to attain self-consciousness, I express myself in what is other than myself, so as to finally recognize myself in it, and reduce its otherness to the same, i.e. myself. Like Bataille, Blanchot thus also scrutinizes the Hegelian dialectic in an attempt to weaken its absolutist tendencies. The reason for this is not so much that Hegel regarded the negative as the motor of history, but rather that Hegel recognized the operation of the negative only insofar as it could be put to the service of positivity, that is, insofar as it could be put to work and insofar as its negative work can always be turned into a positive moment and elevated, taken up in, and maintained at a higher level. Blanchot problematizes this dialectical turn because it represses the negative as negative. Like Bataille, Blanchot discovers the surplus of nothing (‘surplus de néant’), which cannot be integrated in one or the other dialectical move. What Bataille calls a workless negativity (‘negativité sans emploi’), Blanchot coins the disaster without end (‘désastre sans fin’) or inoperativeness (‘désoeuvrement’). 2. A Constitutive Finitude Having devoted two books and several articles to the philosopher, for Nancy Hegel remains a force to be reckoned with today. In the first of these, La rémarque speculative (Nancy 1973), Nancy discusses Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung. In a more recent work, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (translation of L’inquiètude du négatif, 1977), Nancy is concerned with the unrest of the negative in Hegel’s system. In this way, Nancy aims to nuance the classical image of Hegel as the thinker of a closed system and of totality. According to Nancy, everything for Hegel is centered on the absolute disorder of becoming. The certitude of his rational system cannot be divorced from this disorder. Logos denotes precisely that there is no single identity that is given and that everything is always already in process. There is no foundation. It is always a question of movement, of identity as an act. Between these two books, Nancy published an essay on the jurisdiction of the Hegelian monarch, a number of whose ideas is done, when, therefore, man has nothing left to do, he must, as George Bataille expressed it with the most simple profundity, exist in a state of ‘negativity without employ’, (Blanchot, 1993: 205). See “L’absence du livre” in Blanchot, 1982. In a short passage in this text, Blanchot indicates what ‘désœuvrement’ means for the practice of writing: “Writing as unworking (in the active sense of the word) is the insane game, the indeterminacy that lies between reason and unreason” (Blanchot, 1982: 424). In his “The Work and the Absence of Work”, Paul Davies gives a clearer description: “‘Désœuvrement’ as the presentiment of the anonymity and the interminability of the work is both the name of what removes the work from all determinable relations to a writer, an interpretation, truth, etc., and the name of that which still insists that the work relate”, (Davies 1996: 91-107). 5 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2010, 29(1) 21 were further developed in Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative, but whose early outlines are to be found in the Italian text ‘La sovranità persona,’ later published in the journal Sapere e Potere.6 Finally, one must mention “The Surprise of the Event” (Nancy 1998: 91-104), an essay on Hegels’s notion of Geschehen, and which is a slightly modified version of the essay that appeared earlier in Being Singular Plural. In this context, Nancy’s footnote in The Inoperative Community on how Bataille’s elaboration of Hegelian negation without use is a way of escaping the dialectic (Nancy 1991a, 156 n. 4) is of real significance: “There are two ways of escaping the dialectic (that is to say mediation in a totality) – either by slipping away from it into immanence or by opening up its negativity to the point of rendering it ‘unworked” [‘désoeuvrée’] as Bataille puts it.” According to Bataille, nothing can be lost in the Hegelian dialectical system, including the negative as such, with the result that the dialectical transformation of the negative into universal positivity fails. From this escaping or unworking of the dialectic, Nancy proceeds to the problem of community. Like Blanchot in The Unavowable Community, Nancy imbues his reflections with Bataille’s negative determination of community: a community of those who have no community, a community without communality, a negative community. For Blanchot, this is the ultimate form of communal experience. According to Nancy, Bataille went the furthest in his investigation into the fate of modern community (Nancy 1991a: 46).7 Nancy develops this negative community as one that does not result in unification or total fusion, and thus shares Blanchot’s concern with how to understand Bataille’s concept of insufficiency (‘l’insuffisance’) (Blanchot 1983: 19 and Nancy 1991: 35). Nancy and Blanchot agree that such insufficiency constitutes the principle of every finite community. Note how this must be regarded as fundamental. It is not derived from an originary or still-to-be-constituted completeness nor from a lack that the community is designed to sublate. Rather, such incompleteness is something constitutive of both the community and of myself, because I am always exposed to others. Absence or insufficiency are never located in a sort of Verfallsgeschichte. For Nancy, insufficiency never stands for a lack, but for something that fundamentally cannot be perfected or finished (‘l’inachèvement’). Nancy is not trying to cultivate a purely absent or negative community. This is also the reason why Nancy distinguishes between the finite (‘finité) and finitude (‘finitude’). The finite always stands in relation to the infinite and is a form of finitude that is regarded as a lack, a non-infinity. Finitude in this case is thought from the position of infinity. This is what happens in Christianity for example. Christianity describes the human being as a finite, lacking and nugatory being that is always put in contrast to the omnipotence and infinity of the divine creator with whom human beings ultimately desire to be reunited. With the concept of finitude, on the other hand, Nancy aims to think finitude from precisely the position of finitude. This means finitude is a goals as such, not the precondition of the infinite. There is nothing but finitude. Finitude for Nancy, then, “does not mean a limitation which would relate to man—negatively, positively or dialectically—to another authority from which he would derive his sense, or his lack of sense. “Finitude” means precisely the non-fixing 6 7 For the Italian text, Nancy, 1984, La sovranita persona. Sapere e Potere, 1: 26-41; for the English translation, Nancy, 1982. Bataille’s expression served as inspiration for the title of one of Alphonso Lingis’ books: The Community of Those who Have Nothing in Common (1994). 22 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2010, 29(1) of such a signification: not, however, as the powerlessness to fix it, but as the power to leave it open” (1999: 18). Nancy says similar things elsewhere: “Finitude is not privation” (1998: 29) or “it does not consist in a limitation (sensible, empirical, individual, as one would like) which sets itself up dependent upon infinity and in an imminent relation of sublimation or of recovery in this infinity” (1990c: 246). This means, paradoxically, that we are “infinitely finite, infinitely exposed to our essenceless existence, to the otherness of our own ‘being’” (1990a: 259).8 It is not just our human existence but also the community that is a fundamentally finite happening for Nancy. This finitude, Nancy claims, is not posited to deplore the unreachability of infinity or to indicate human beings’ nullity in relation to the infinity of a higher Instance—God, the cosmos—nor even to escape this lack precisely through founding an immortal community (the Party, a Volk). A finite community, ‘being-in-common’ (‘être-en-commun’) as Nancy subsequently calls it, is the point of departure for thinking identity—both that of the individual and that of community—no longer from the position of self-sufficiency (‘l’autosuffisance’) or of auto-production. 3. Lost origins To expand on the problematic begun with his readings of Bataille, Blanchot and Hegel in the early 1980s, Nancy turns increasingly in the 1990’s toward a critical rereading of Heidegger. It is not that Nancy, at a certain moment, chooses Heidegger over Hegel or Bataille. But one can clearly see from the development of his oeuvre that Heidegger, in particular the Heidegger from Being and Time, becomes his focus for an elaboration of community as a non-appropriable immediacy, a plurality that does not imply the fusion of identities, as it is expressed in an interview with the Libération newspaper on February 17 20009. Community is not an object, a subjective property or a clear-cut, yet-to-be constituted private entity, but forms the condition of our existence, our being-in-the-world as such, as he claims in this interview. Of chief interest to him are the ontological conditions of this presupposition of every form of community. Nancy tries to gain insight into these ontological conditions through a Heideggerian-inspired existential-analytic– a fundamental analysis of the being of community. Nancy demands that we ask ourselves what it means that we are in common and always already together? Rather than speaking about the rehabilitation of an earlier ontic foundation of community in a being (God, the people, race, culture), Nancy begins from the condition of being in which we are placed. We are already in a relation with others, even before one can begin to speak of community. This ontological sociality, as Nancy describes human existence, is the condition of every concrete 8 Translation is ours, because this text, ‘L’histoire finie’, is not taken up in the translation of The Inoperative Community and because the English version of the essay (Nancy, 1999, ‘Des sens de la démocratie’, not published) is shorter than the French original and does not include the passage in question. Compare also the following quote from Nancy: “‘Finitude’ should therefore be attributed to what carries its end as its own, that is, what is affected by its end (limit, cessation, beyond-essence) as by its end (goal, finishing, completion) – and is affected by it not as by a limit imposed from elsewhere (from the outside of a supposedly essential, infinite immanence of the essence to itself, from the outside of an essentia absolute and null), but as by a trance, transcendence, or passing away so originary that the origin has already come apart there, the origin, too, it first of all entranced and abandoned,” (Nancy, 1983, L’impératif catégorique. Paris: Flammarion 31-32). Such a finite condition entails that “there is no question of an “end,” whether as a goal or as an accomplishment, and that it’s merely a question of the suspension of sense, in-finite, each time replayed, reopened, exposed with a novelty so radical that it immediately fails” (Nancy, 2003: 11). Nancy, 2000, Nancy, le cœur de l’autre. Recueilli par Jean-Baptiste Marongiu. Libération Livres. 9 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2010, 29(1) 23 meaning of communality, but it is by the same token a condition that is forgotten in many ontic determinations of community. Such forgetting is at work in the claim that community forms itself around a pre-existing foundation: a specific origin, a shared narrative, essence or destiny. When such a foundation disappears, one subsequently speaks of a crisis of community. This crisis is thus a crisis of a certain metaphysics rather than a crisis of community itself. What we need, therefore, Nancy suggests, is nothing less than a Copernican revolution. A revolution concerning ontological sociality itself, where the community no longer revolves around an ontic being.10 Being-in-common has nothing to do with the sharing of a specific essence or identity. For Nancy, it is precisely the attempt to found community in a higher being that has destroyed community and renders it inoperative. Nancy radically breaks with every essential interpretation of a particular ‘we’ as the basis for the thought of community, and frequently turns for this to explicitly Heideggerian language. We are already thrown into a place in the world, Nancy claims, but this situatedness does not necessarily place us in an exclusive social connection with a limited number of people with whom I am supposed to share an identity. The finite condition in which we are thrown places us precisely in a relation to others and to the world. This openness, this transcendence, is a condition of being that precedes the foundation of the community in being. The question is thus not whether but rather how we speak about community today. The falling away of specific political or moral foundations forces us to search for new horizons. It is with such a quest that the problem of community today is confronted. The simple fact that we live in the world must therefore be thought in all its consequences. We must investigate first and foremost what this means for the social bond, for community. Like the universe, community in this era of globalization is always “one single world, that is united but in which everything is distracted, wandering without direction, without goal, without destination”, Nancy claims in the above mentioned interview with Libération11. The fact that this world has no origin, direction or goal is not to be deplored but is precisely a great freedom and therefore also a great responsibility. The philosophical stance of Nancy is at best clarified when confronted with the contemporary debate on community. In contrast to Nancy’s call for a confrontation with the world without teleological goal or origin lies the communitarian complaint of a lost or disintegrated commonality. This led, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre to await a new Saint Benedict and to call for a return to a shared belief in the Supreme Good (Hauerwas and MacIntyre 1983: 8-9). Albeit it is often done, it is too easy to label this call a purely nostalgic lament over an originary community. MacIntyre’s lament deserves to be recognized for what it is, and it is only once we realize that nostalgia for community is accepted as a fact that any discussion of community can make sense. This realization is precisely where Nancy begins. He notes the centrality of the complaint over the loss of community in philosophical and political modernity since Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Nancy goes so far as to call this theme of the loss of community a philosopheme or a paradigm, an eternally recurring thematic of political 10 “ln fact, it might be that what is happening to us is just another sort of ‘Copernican revolution,’ not of the cosmological system, or of the relation of subject and object, but rather of ‘social Being’ revolving [tournant] around itself or turning on itself, and no longer revolving around something else (Subject, Other, or Same)” (Nancy, 2001: 57). 11 Nancy, 2000, Nancy, le cœur de l’autre. Recueilli par Jean-Baptiste Marongiu. Libération Livres 111). 24 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2010, 29(1) thought. The communitarian appeal is the contemporary counterpart of this philosopheme. From Rousseau to contemporary thinkers like MacIntyre, the call for “a lost age in which community was woven of tight, harmonious and infragible bonds” is a constant in philosophical discourse (Nancy 1991a: 9). 12 4. The Contemporary Call for an Originary Being-with There are many examples of this schema and it would take a separate study to see just how much the theme of the loss of community has penetrated our culture through the work of various historical figures.13 Nancy has never attempted to confirm the prevalence of this paradigm in modernity through an historical investigation. This is undoubtedly a shortcoming of his work. He refers occasionally to the Romantics, to the Hegel of the Phenomenology, to Mallarmé or Wagner, but these references are never worked through. One can find a similar schema, moreover, in the work of the contemporary communitarian MacIntyre. For MacIntyre, history is divided between a period of originary fullness (an Aristotelian community) and a period of alienation (moral decay). This division is invariably coupled with a hierarchical opposition between the two periods – the later period is always given a negative political or m oral judgment – and a clear chronological distinction: first, an originary community, then a (modern) alienated society that came into being through the loss of the originary (traditional) communal presence. Albeit, it is not as an historical study that Nancy’s work is at its most convincing. Nancy furthermore assumes few historical pretensions. His interest is in the contemporary question of community and the contemporary call for an originary community is for Nancy the departure point for investigating the general philosophical and metaphysical horizon out of which this call arises. Aside from the question of whether self-transparent or harmonious communal bonds can serve as an alternative for the “impersonal” space in which we find ourselves, Nancy’s work shows that this self-transparency is always traversed by something else, thus making any complete transparency impossible. It is in his deconstruction of this desire for transparency that Jacques Derrida’s work is most apposite here. In particular, his discussion of concepts such as return, originariness, authenticity, natural community enables Derrida to pose a number of questions regarding the plea for an originary community: how can one return to what has been lost? Where are we supposed to return to and what, precisely, has been lost? In Derrida’s analysis, the fact that every call for a return to an originariness must always be a ‘turning back’ and is thus already taken up in a repetition of something, makes the originary nature of this return already problematic. Is the return not always a supplement, needed to make an appeal to the recovery of an original self-presence? Consequently, it is precisely this supplement that ensures that the originary is always already traversed by an element external to the original communality. Through a repetition that comes ‘first’, the previous originariness is 12 See also Nancy, 1988: 17. 13 One could for example, and to name but one figure about whom Nancy remains silent, point to certain passages in Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral in which ‘Gemeinschaft’ functions as a sort of primal time in which justice can still find a clear expression and a proper place, and ‘Gesellschaft’ designates that moment in time where the ‘schlechtes Gewissen’ emerges becuase the free and sovereign will has definitely been substituted for the search for peaceful society. See for instance the second essay ‘Schuld, schlechtes Gewissen und verwandtes’: nr. 9 and 10 treat with the question of ‘Gemeinschaft’; nr. 16 begins with the contention against the ‘Gesellschaft und des Friedens’. S. Afr. J. Philos. 2010, 29(1) 25 marked by a non-originary moment. How can one speak of the return to an originary community, if the originary is always and already lost in the supposed return to it? This logic of the supplement is found everywhere. Each time, an artificial means, created by modern technology, is what is required for recapturing a lost naturalness, while it is precisely this artificiality that destroys all forms of naturalness in advance. I can return to my nature only through recourse to a non-natural supplement. 5. Breaking Open the Metaphysical Horizon The chief advantage of Nancy’s framework for thought is the way it breaks open existing registers and that it raises the issue of the metaphysical horizon out of which the question of community has until now been conceived. This is a central point in Nancy’s work. He calls for a community that no longer grants its own right to existence to the disappearance of a previous fullness or foundation. Today, it is no longer about saving an earlier community. More emphatically, it is a matter of shattering the horizon out of which the idea of an originary community was built. This horizon is what Heidegger calls onto-theology and Derrida calls metaphysics or philosophy of consciousness. Nancy describes it in various ways: immanentism, politics of destination, the metaphysics of auto-production, metaphysics of the ab-solu, ontotheology, metaphysics of signification, subjectivism, the scene of representation. Why must we break open this horizon? Why is necessary to ‘deconstruct’ it? Nancy’s reserve about metaphysics is comparable to the question mark Emmanuel Levinas puts in front of what he, in opposition to Derrida and Nancy, calls ontology. Nancy examines the philosophical and ontological presuppositions inherent in the ways one speaks of community. He concentrates primarily on the call for a return to the proper, the communal, the original. This is reminiscent of Levinas’ notion of the Economy of the Same. This is the ruse of Western reason, of logos itself that allows everything different only insofar as it can be reduced to the Same. Reason not only turns everything different back into the Same, says Levinas. Logos is so cunning that precisely at the moment one claims to be ethical, when one claims to respect the other as other, the other is incorporated into the totality of one’s conceptualization. To break through what he expresses in terms of the ontological imperialism of the logos, Levinas tries to think the relation between the self and the other as a radical heterogeneity, a fundamental division. The other transgresses every idea I can have of him or her and in this way radically transcends my conceptualization, my economy. Nancy, too, refers to the closed system of metaphysics to discover a comparable paradigm: the thought schema of an original, proper or authentic community that must be recovered. The claim behind this appeal is the idea that we previously shared a certain intimacy or communality and that this transparent presence subsequently became lost in our time of pure appearance, externality, absence and dislocation. Hence the call for the eventual recovery of this original and communal presence. Today, too, the question of the thought of community rears its head, and precisely because the call for a community of essence played a central role in the (Nazi and communist) terror of the political twentieth century, Nancy asks whether all striving for a substantial community, all thought of a collective appropriation of a specific essence of originality, does not run the risk of resulting in political terror? It is not that every striving for a specific origin by definition results in terror, but to call upon the very same metaphysical horizon to counter the ‘crisis’ of community does not seem a viable option either. If we wish to break through the paradigm of the lost community, we must take a closer look 26 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2010, 29(1) at what this horizon stands for, expose the logic of this terror and take a step towards another way of thinking the social bond. This must enable us to break through the current stalemate in the debate about community. This stalemate lies in the ways a communitarian will always plea for a collective whole, because this is what constitutes our identity, while a liberalist on the other hand will always protest about and contest this whole in the name of personal integrity. Liberal individualism will, in its turn, be contested by communitarianism because it shunts all forms of the social bond to the background, and so on. With Nancy, it is possible to find a way of breaking through this stalemate and of conceiving of a contemporary form of social bond that does not end up in a fusional or dialectical relation of identities. It is from this perspective the central thesis of Nancy’s thinking of community shows op: how to speak today of a we or a plurality without immediately turning it into a substantial and exclusive identity? In other words: what does it mean that we are always already in-common with others, that we always already are a ‘we’, when we are no longer able to think this we on the basis of a highest being? References Bailey, G.C.(ed.) 1996. Maurice Blanchot. The demand of writing. London and New York: Routledge. Blanchot, M. 1948. L’arrêt de mort. Paris: Gallimard. Blanchot, M. 1949. La part du feu. Paris: Gallimard. Blanchot, M. 1955. L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard. Blanchot, M. 1969. L’entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard. Blanchot, M. 1978. Death sentence. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York : Station Hill Press. Blanchot, M. 1981. ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’. De Kafka à Kafka, 11-61. Paris: Gallimard. Blanchot, M. 1982. The space of literature. Translated with an introduction by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska press. Blanchot, M. 1983. La communauté inavouable. Paris: Minuit. Blanchot, M. 1988. The unavowable community. Barrytown: Station Hill Press. 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