A plenary talk given at the ‘Thinking with Jean-Luc Nancy’ conference, University of Oxford, 29 March 2019.
1. Nancy against the emancipation narrative
It is not an uncommon view, and it is one fuelled in part by Nancy himself, that his thought is inimical to an agenda of emancipation and liberation. He treats the theme of liberation explicitly in a 2009 interview in Libération entitled ‘Le sens de l’histoire a été suspendu’[1] and a passage in La Possibilité d’un monde (2012), where he affirms that the modern narrative of ‘history represented as the emancipation of humanity’—the narrative that began with the Enlightenment, endured through the workers’ struggles of the nineteenth century and survived two World Wars—has now come to an end.
This ending, Nancy explains, has been brought about by three decisive blows.
- The first is the end of the idea of inevitable historical progress.
Allied to this idea of progress was a theory of linear historical ruptures, each one interrupting the smooth flow of history and creating a decisive ‘before’ and ‘after’. In Dis-Enclosure (121), Nancy calls these moments ‘Christmas projections’, modelled as they are on the divine incarnation: a decisive intervention in history that changes everything. I will call this the ‘progress as rupture’ thesis.
- The second blow to the emancipation narrative is that it is closed in on itself, elevating emancipation to the status of an ultimate meaning that cannot be questioned or modified,[2] and that it therefore participates in the very logic of closure to which it often tries to oppose itself.
In La Communauté désœuvrée Nancy explains how the autonomous individual and the community of those who have something in common are both cases of the auto-production of identity, and both deny singular-plural being.
- Allied to this logic of closure is the third and final death blow to the modern emancipation narrative: that it assumes the essence of the individual to be liberated.
In the Libération interview Nancy gives a concrete example of this assumption and the difficulties it encounters:
We assumed that emancipation would make people more fraternal, friendly, and dispose them to the free creation of forms of life and art. In The German Ideology Marx imagines a world where the worker can work in a forge in the morning and play the violin in the afternoon. That implicitly meant that there was an essence of man waiting to be discovered. This dream was in very small part realised with paid holidays. And yet, are we so sure about this human essence?[3]
The modern emancipation narrative assumes, indeed must assume, that it knows who is to be liberated, and therefore what sort of liberation is required, but for Nancy this is far from obvious.
So for Nancy the modern emancipation narrative stands under the threefold condemnation of promoting progress through rupture, entertaining a logic of closure, and assuming the essence of humanity. These arguments, combined with the relative scarcity of the explicit lexicon of emancipation and liberation in Nancy’s oeuvre, has led some to consider his thought anti-emancipatory.
For Alain Badiou, for example, Nancean finitude, or the refusal to embrace a closed essence of the human to be liberated and the refusal of a fixed meaning of emancipation, forecloses any emancipatory aspirations:
Let it be said and proclaimed : that with which we must urgently break, that with which we must have done, is finitude. […] In the motif of finitude are concentrated the renunciation of emancipation, the deadening reign of the present, the absence of peoples to themselves and the eradication of truths.[4]
For Badiou himself, emancipation must come by way of historical rupture, of decisive intervention, and in faithfulness to an unchanging idea that he calls communism, where ‘“communist” designates the transtemporal subjectivity of emancipation, the egalitarian passion’.[5]
2. Nancy’s lexicon of emancipation and liberation
In the remainder of this paper I want to offer a reading of Nancy’s position on emancipation that pushes back against some of the criticisms he has faced, while also highlighting new problems and complexities in his account.
Nancy does use the lexicon of emancipation and liberation and, what is more, he uses this language to justify his rejection of the closed idea of emancipation. One refrain running through his work from L’Expérience de la liberté (1988) to La Déclosion (2005) is that what we need to be emancipated from is emancipation itself, or rather a particular understanding of emancipation that shares the three features of progress as rupture, closure of the idea of emancipation and assuming the essence of the individual to be emancipated.
The call for an emancipation from emancipation is not a cute apolitical self-reflexivity on Nancy’s part, but a recognition of the totalitarianism of emancipatory ideology. In L’Expérience de la liberté he insists that we have the task ‘of delivering ourselves from the thought of ‘freedom’ as a property of the subjective constitution of being, and the property of an individual “subject”’.[6] One problem with the unquestioned concept of freedom is that it uncannily mimes its purported antagonists: ‘despotism and freedom form a couple : the former figures, in particular subjectivity, the ontology of the latter, whose benefits it simultaneously withdraws from other particular subjectivities’.[7] Nancy is not arguing that we abandon freedom, but that we abandon always knowing, from the outset, what freedom will mean.
He returns to this argument in La Déclosion, insisting that ‘[p]erhaps we should also emancipate ourselves from a certain thinking of emancipation’[8] that can see nothing but illness and shame in Christianity and nothing but sweetness and light in the rationality, freedom and autonomy that triumphed over the old religion in the ‘saga of the emancipation of the human race’.[9] In both these texts, Nancy affirms the value of liberation or emancipation but warns that it is not to be found through the means by which it is usually pursued. In the place of this inadequate notion of liberation, Nancy advances an alternative, more radical model articulated not in terms of rupture, closure and essence, but of in terms of ressourcement, dis-enclosure and self-surpassing.
From progress as rupture to ressourcement
Whereas the paradigm of emancipation as decisive historical rupture creates a simple schema of before and after and a relationship between an eternal idea and a specific historical context, the temporality of Nancy’s account of emancipation is more complex. Emancipation for Nancy is not simply emancipation-from, but emancipation-by-and-from, in what we might call a ‘hair of the dog that bit you’ approach, or an inflection of the Eckhartian maxim ‘I pray God to rid me of God’.
He explores this temporality at length in his account of the deconstruction of Christianity, which frames post-Enlightenment modernity both as an overcoming and as a culmination of Christianity. In his articulation of an argument he adopts and adapts from Karl Löwith, Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet among others, Nancy insists that Western secularisation is—in a carefully chosen term—‘the unfolding of Christianity’.[10]
This is of course neither a straightforward continuity of, nor a rupture with Christianity, but a complex dynamic of non-linear continuity. Modernity IS liberation from Christianity, but it is ALSO the culmination of Christianity, with ‘Christianity’ carrying two different meanings in these two propositions. It is on the nature of the difference between these two meanings that Nancy’s account of emancipation hangs.
Let us come at this crucial question of the difference between the Christianity that is overcome and the Christianity that finds its culmination through Nancy’s account of what it is in Christianity that persists in modernity. He wants to ‘find again what has been hidden at the heart of the Christian construction itself’ by ‘asking if there is not, down there, a resource that is not religious, but deeper than that, neither philosophical nor religious, but that perhaps could be the grand opening of Western thought’.[11] The key term for our purposes here, the term Nancy uses to describe the ‘something in Christianity deeper than Christianity itself’ is a ‘resource’, a return to the source that will free precisely this gesture of ressourcement itself from the historically contingent Christian forms it has taken.
This ‘ressource’ is not an object of thought but a gesture of thought, a gesture of ‘turning back on our Christian origins’ in order to find something deeper than that manifest tradition, and liberating that ‘something’ from its contingent historical expression. There is a clear hierarchy in Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity of gesture over historical expression: ‘it is necessary, if possible, to extract from a ground deeper than the ground of the religious thing that of which religion will have been a form and a misrecognition’,[12] and ‘“God” is only the name adopted by a pure excess—indeed vain, indeed exorbitant—of the world and existence over themselves, or in themselves? Of a purely and simply infinite relationship to infinity?’[13] So Christianity is the contingent historical husk, the ‘front-man’, for a gesture that is deeper than Christianity, a gesture that provides the essence and truth of Christianity, and which Christianity itself misunderstands.
This gesture is a continuation and even culmination of Christianity to the extent that Christianity performs it repeatedly:
- For example, for the New Testament there is ‘something in Moses deeper than Moses himself, which Moses misunderstands’, namely that Moses is a type of Christ;
- Nancy argues that the crucifixion shows that there is something in pagan sacrifice, deeper than that sacrifice itself, that paganism misunderstands, such that for Christ (and for Socrates as well) ‘the ancient sacrifice is reproduced—up to a certain point—in its form or its scheme; but it is reproduced so as to reveal an entirely new content, a truth hitherto hidden or misunderstood, if not perverted’,[14]
- and the new form of sacrifice is ‘a higher, truer mode of sacrificial logic’.[15]
What Christianity does to sacrifice here, what it does to liberation in making the exodus a shadow of salvation in Christ, is precisely, for Nancy, what secular modernity does to Christianity itself. So we are now in a position to draw a distinction: When Nancy says that there is ‘something in Christianity deeper than Christianity’, he means that there is a gesture of ‘transfiguration’ or of ‘ressourcement’ in Christianity deeper than the contingent historical details of Christian doctrine and religion; there is an excess of the truth of sacrifice deeper than the historical forms of sacrifice, an excess of the truth of the exodus over the historical exodus narrative in the Pentateuch.
From closure to dis-enclosure
Secondly, and more briefly, Nancy’s radical emancipation is not one of closure, but of disenclosure. In L’Expérience de la liberté he sets himself against ‘a ‘liberation’ whose principle and end would themselves be established’, which would amount to ‘the material destruction of all freedom’ .[16] Freedom becomes that from which we need liberation when it becomes an ‘infinite foundation or finality’ with an ‘infinite projection to infinity’: unchanging, unimpeachable, and closed[17] and so the task of politics is therefore a liberation of liberty.
The mistake is to think that there is one and only one way of thinking freedom, an emancipatory pensée unique if you like. In the movement from closure to dis-enclosure we can also once more discern the privilege of gesture over content that we discerned in Nancy’s treatment of ressourcement. The closure of freedom and reason fix those concepts with a determinate content, but dis-enclosure is a gesture that overflows any particular content.
From essence to self-surpassing
Thirdly, Nancy’s radical emancipation rejects a determinate essence of the human in favour of understanding the human as a gesture self-surpassing, emancipating the human from any constraining, essential concept of the subject.
This key gesture of self-surpassing structures both Nancy’s account of Christianity, and of the human. In terms of Christianity, ‘Christianity, as such, is surpassed, because it is itself, and by itself, in a state of being surpassed [en état de dépassement]’:[18] a ‘movement’ or ‘gesture’ of self-surpassing. Christianity, in other words, is never more itself than when it goes beyond itself. In fact, ‘[t]hat state of self-surpassing may be very profoundly proper to it ; it is perhaps its deepest tradition—which is obviously not without its ambiguities’,[19] not least the ambiguity of the distinction between gesture and content itself. In self-surpassing, the gesture of Christianity surpasses its content. So when we say that Christianity is in a state of self-deconstruction, we mean that its gesture deconstructs its content at any given moment.
Self-surpassing is not the preserve of explicit theology, however. In terms of the human, Nancy regularly returns to Pascal’s phrase ‘l’homme passe infiniment l’homme’ [man infinitely surpasses man], a phrase with which he identifies the inauguration of the modern West.[20]
The phrase indicates that man is ‘in an infinite relation with himself’,[21] and it frames the human as ‘the being fundamentally unfinished’.[22] Which is to say that it puts the concept of the human at any given moment in relation to the characteristic gesture of the human as self-surpassing, denying to the human any abiding determinate essence. This is an emancipation of ‘man’ from any determinate content of the human.[23]
So when Christianity or the figure of the human are described in terms of a self-surpassing, it is only a surpassing of determinate content, not of the repeated gesture that characterises them. Indeed, it is an affirmation of the gesture itself as the essence, the truth, both of Christianity and of the human.
3. Four questions to ask of Nancy’s account of emancipation
The important distinction between gesture and content gives rise to four questions about Nancy’s account of emancipation.
The first is this: is a constant and unchanging gesture just as closed and essential as a constant and unchanging content? Why is the gesture of self-surpassing, qua gesture, not as closed as humanism’s essence of the human? It could in fact be argued that a gesture is more pervasive, constraining and inescapable than any determinate content, precisely because it can operate on any given content. It is relatively easy to see how we might overturn or surpass an oppressive definition of the human; it is much harder to see how we might surpass the gesture of surpassing. Nancy has relocated the thorny problem of the relation between oppression and emancipation from content to gesture, but he has by no means got rid of the problem.
A second question we should pose to Nancy’s account of emancipation is that this relocation of the problem from content to gesture also risks falling into an awkward Platonism that he is elsewhere at pains to resist. If the gesture is, as Nancy says, ‘deeper’ than any determinate content, and the ‘truth’ of any given historical instantiation of it, then there is a risk of devaluing the historical, the particular and the material. Nancy’s gesture of self-surpassing draws heavily, via Gauchet, on a kenotic understanding of incarnation, but I think here we have a sense in which it might not take the Christian figure of incarnation seriously enough. In the assertion that Christianity ‘misunderstands’ self-surpassing or that it is merely a ‘front-man’ for a figure of excess, Nancy risks delegitimising the determinate and therefore emasculating the power of action in any specific, determinate historical political context in favour of an always trans-temporal and therefore always non-immediate gesture. The focus on the ‘something in Christianity deeper than Christianity’ risks a hierarchy of (enduring) gesture over (ephemeral) material and historical support.
This brings me to my third question to Nancy’s position. If we allow Nancy his distinction between content and gesture, between ‘Christianity’ and ‘something in Christianity deeper than Christianity’, then his thought does not operate after the end of the modern emancipation narrative at all; it merely transposes this narrative into another key, in just the same way that it has been transposed throughout its history.
The gesture Nancy performs is precisely the same gesture performed by the modern emancipation narrative he ostensibly rejects, and it is the gesture of turning the means of emancipation into that from which emancipation is sought.
- Secular modernity took the deity that had been the means of emancipation in the exodus and new testament narratives, and made God into that from which emancipation was to be sought, by means of reason (‘1’ in the table above).
- Nancy similarly takes reason, the means of emancipation in modernity, and makes self-enclosed and self-sufficient reason that from which emancipation must be sought (‘2’ in the table above).
Understood in this way, Nancy’s thought is not the end of the emancipation narrative, but the next iteration of its repeated gesture.
My fourth and final question to Nancy’s account of liberation as self-surpassing is this: if the gesture of self-surpassing is deeper than Christianity, to what extent is that gesture itself a ‘Christian’ gesture; to what extent does Christianity ‘own the copyright’ on self-surpassing? I can’t answer this question here as it would take too long (in fact I hope to give it a chapter-length treatment in the future), but let me indicate the terms in which I think any response should be framed. We need to distinguish between different degrees of identification between Christianity and the gesture of self-surpassing. Let me propose a four-fold schema:
- Coincidence: self-surpassing happens to have been identified with Christianity, but this is a historical contingency that could well have been otherwise.
- Derivation: self-surpassing draws directly on explicitly Christian themes such as the critique of idolatry, though it is conceivable that it might have emerged independently of these themes.
- Internal necessity: Self-surpassing is logically unthinkable outside a Christian or post-Christian frame. This is a necessary reliance of the gesture on its context.
- External necessity: The West is unthinkable without the gesture of self-surpassing. This is a necessary reliance of the context on the gesture.
To claim, for example, that Christianity is ‘coextensive’ with the West, as Nancy does,[24] could fall into any of these four very different categories. The all-too common assertion—not from Nancy but from others—that some concept or other has ‘Christian roots’ could similarly encode any one of these four claims.
So in conclusion, Nancy is a thinker of radical emancipation, but his account of emancipation is more in continuity with the modern emancipation narrative than he explicitly acknowledges.
Response by Jean-Luc Nancy
After many of the papers at the conference Nancy very generously gave a detailed extemporised reply. Here is a transcription of his words in response to my paper, which he delivered in English.
“Emancipation is the Latin word to make a slave free. And of course you are right in the schema of taking the Exodus as the beginning. But besides this, the end of slavery—the spiritual end of slavery—belongs precisely to Christianity, and I remember that before, when I objected to a quotation of Philippe [Lacoue-Labarthe], Philippe said that, in the Greece of Heidegger, there are no slaves. No no, I said, there are. Frequently, frequently I have to repeat and to repeat—because everybody forgets it—that in Athenian democracy there are slaves, there are not [only] citizens, which is very important if we think about what we want through the word “democracy”.
But first, emancipation could be properly Christian, at least the gesture belonging to this actual time. And maybe it is parallel to something in Buddhism but I have to speak under the control of the Buddhists present. Because with Buddhism as well there is something not about slavery but about the caste system which can be compared. It is very interesting that there is some simultaneity of things, that [there is] this emancipation, from slavery on one side, from the caste system on the other side, despite the fact that there are other kinds of slavery today, and not other kinds but the same kind of caste.
So this is a sign of course, but a sign of what? That it has been a time of the emancipation of man from the human, and even at the pure historical, empirical level it is said that maybe people could have been a lot of slaves going away from some destroyed palace of empire etc. etc.
So I would say that maybe the time we are accustomed to think of as [that of] the ends of the gods or the departure of the gods has been the time of the will to transform or suppress human domination, which of course anyway used religion. But I think that any small Egyptian or Sumerian farmer did believe in his gods, and the sacrifice he made could make sense. But maybe no single small Egyptian pagan believed in the divinity of Pharaoh, because it was obviously too clear, because it was not only Pharaoh but the army, the priests etc. Without such consciousness we could not understand the possibility precisely not only of Christianity but of what came before Christianity, like the very strange story of the people of the sea etc.
Then that means for me that maybe we don’t know enough what I call the pre-Christian in Christianity itself. Because I am convinced that Christianity, again like Buddhism—or if you prefer, and it would be more precise, like Judaism—and then Judaism in a way with philosophy, because philosophy as well wants an emancipation…
But besides this, there between Greek philosophy and politics, and Judaism, that mix in Christianity, comes the question of what it is to be emancipated. It is the auto– of the logos? Or like the Jew: the Jew is emancipated but at the same time he looks to other people like a slave of his God and he is not, no. And this is what made possible Christianity.
But besides this auto-, the auto makes me return to Badiou. When Badiou defines communism, he says it is the self-determination of mankind. Badiou is a very good and a very strong philosopher, but he dwells in the auto. And this is precisely it: there cannot be an auto-emancipation. And there I agree with you by another means: when I write about self-surpassing this is ambiguous because it can be a self-surpassing only by another, and not by the self.
That’s all. But I think that maybe we could start to understand in a new way the whole history of what happens there, and why there is such a strong desire and realisation of emancipation: from where did it come, for what reason, etc.? Maybe we could tell a bit more about that.”
[1] See https://next.liberation.fr/livres/2009/06/04/le-sens-de-l-histoire-a-ete-suspendu_561906
[2] See Nancy, ‘Le sens de l’histoire a été suspendu’.
[3] ‘On partait du principe que l’émancipation rendrait les hommes à la fraternité, à l’amitié, à la libre création de formes de vie et d’art. Dans l’Idéologie allemande, Marx imagine un monde où le travailleur pourra forger le matin et jouer du violon l’après-midi. Implicitement, cela signifiait qu’il y avait, en attente, une essence de l’homme à retrouver. Ce rêve a été en – petite – partie réalisé avec les congés payés. Et pourtant, est-on si sûr de cette essence humaine ?’. Nancy, ‘Le sens de l’histoire a été suspendu’. See also L’Adoration 13.
[4] ‘Disons, proclamons : ce avec quoi il est pressant de rompre, ce avec quoi il faut en finir, c’est la finitude. […] Dans le motif de la finitude se concentrent le reniement de l’émancipation, le règne mortifère du pur présent, l’absence des peuples à eux-mêmes et l’éradication des vérités.’ Alain Badiou, ‘L’Offrande réservée’, in François Guibal and Jean-Clet Martin (eds), Sens en tous sens: autour des travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 13-24, 15.
[5] Alain Badiou, D’un désastre obscur : Droit, État, Politique (Paris : Nouvelles éditions de l’Aube, 2013) 13.
[6] Nancy, The Experience of Freedom 7. de nous délivrer de la pensée de la « liberté » en tant que propriété d’une constitution subjective de l’être, aussi bien qu’en tant que propriété d’un « sujet » individuel’ (L’Expérience de la liberté 47).
[7] Nancy, The Experience of Freedom 6. ‘le despotisme et la liberté font couple : le premier figure dans une subjectivité particulière l’ontologie de la seconde, dont il retire du même coup les bénéfices aux autres subjectivités particulières’ (L’Expérience de la liberté 47)
[8] Nancy, Dis-Enclosure 9. ‘Peut-être faut-il savoir aussi s’émanciper d’une certaine pensée de l’émancipation’ La Déclosion 19.
[9] Nancy, Dis-Enclosure 19.
[10] La Déclosion 143.
[11] ‘retrouver le caché au cœur de la construction chrétienne elle-même’ by ‘se demandant si par là, il n’y a pas une ressource qui n’est pas religieuse, mais encore plus profonde que ça, ni philosophique, ni religieuse, mais qui peut-être serait la grande ouverture de la pensée de l’Occident’. Silvia Romani, ‘Il faut remettre l’homme dans un rapport infini avec lui- même’, Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, anno. 99, fasc. 4 (Oct-Dec 2007) 771-794, 784. Se also La Déclosion 208-9.
[12] Nancy, L’Adoration 26; ‘il faut, si c’est possible, extraire du fond plus profond que celui de la chose religieuse ce dont la religion aura été une forme et une méconnaissance’, L’Adoration 40.
[13] L’Adoration 20. ‘« Dieu » n’est que le prête-nom d’un pur excès – vain en effet, exorbitant en effet – du monde et de l’existence sur eux-mêmes, en eux-mêmes ? d’un pur et simple rapport infini à l’infini ?’, L’Adoration 31-2.
[14] Nancy, ‘The Unsacrificeable’ 21. ‘le sacrifice ancien est reproduit, jusqu’à un certain point, dans sa forme ou dans son schème, mais il est reproduit de manière à en révéler un contenu entièrement nouveau, une vérité jusque-là enfouie ou méconnue, sinon pervertie’, Une Pensée finie 71.
[15] ‘un mode plus élevé, plus vrai, de la logique sacrificielle’, Une Pensée finie 78.
[16] The Experience of Freedom 79. ‘une « libération » dont le principe et la fin seraient eux-mêmes acquis’
‘l’écrasement matériel de toute liberté’, L’Expérience de la liberté 106.
[17] The Experience of Freedom 13-4.
[18] La Déclosion 141/Dis-enclosure 206.
[19] Dis-Enclosure 141. ‘Cet état d’autodépassement lui est peut-être très profondément propre, il est peut-être sa tradition la plus profonde, ce qui ne va évidemment pas sans ambiguïtés’ (La Déclosion 206).
[20] ‘Connaissez donc, superbe, quel paradoxe vous êtes à vous-même. Humiliez-vous, raison impuissante! Taisez-vous nature imbécile, apprenez que l’homme passe infiniment l’homme et entendez de votre maître votre condition véritable que vous ignorez’. Available at http://www.penseesdepascal.fr/Contrarietes/Contrarietes14-moderne.php
[21] ‘dans un rapport infini avec lui-même’, ‘Il faut remettre l’homme dans un rapport infini avec lui- même’ 790.
[22] ‘l’être d’un fondamental inachèvement’. ‘Il faut remettre l’homme dans un rapport infini avec lui- même’ 789.
[23] Nancy, ‘Le sens de l’histoire a été suspendu’.
[24] La Déclosion 207-8.
