Jean Luc Nancy "On Communism" July 3rd 2010, Birkbeck

Thanks to backdoorbroadcasting, we are able to listen to Jean Luc Nancy give his talk "On Communism", the same one he was supposed to give in Birkbeck last year if not for his bronchitis.

Nancy starts his talk by emphasizing the charge that the word communism has and states that the historical or real process of communism cannot shadow the philosophical-metaphysical-spiritual charge of the world communism. He refers to Heidegger's Dasein as "the new title for Man", which is always "mit Dasein" or being-with.

"Com" of the common finds its English equivalent in "with". With belongs to the existence, Nancy quotes Heidegger, (paragraph 25 of Being and Time) it is not categorical but existentiel. What is emphasized is an existential understanding of the "with", which is crucial for Nancy's defense of the word communism. According to Nancy, this proposition to take "with" as existential is the first step for a non-Humanist analysis, taking man as always being-with, being-there, opening a place in the world. Although Heidegger says that "with" belongs with existence, according to Nancy, he stops before the "How" question.

What Heiddeger does in paragraph 70, Nancy says, is to introduce people-community (Volksgemainschaft) as a sort of content of this being-with, where Dasein becomes able to have a history, or enters historical destiny. What Nancy points to is that the emphasis on the existential belonging of "with" dissapears in Heidegger's discussion of the Volksgemainschaft, where community finds its ontos in the people. Whereas according to Nancy, in the first part Heidegger dealt with the question of writing on "with" as such.

Then Nancy goes on to discuss the word common. (gemain in German) He points to the double meaning of the word as togetherness and also vulgar or profane. This divorce between two "common"s Nancy reminds the audience, is not Heidegger's invention but exists throughout the all heritage of Western thought. The question according to Nancy is; "How to be together with vulgarity?" or "Can we be together without being jeopardized of being vulgar?"

Nancy talks about two French phrases which he translates as "sir everybody" and "man on the street", which are figures presupposed as being always the bearer of ideology, of being vulgar and common sense, therefore low. The real experiences of communism in the last two centuries according to Nancy created a sort of suspicion, where communism was understood as vulgarity and low, with all the package of totalitarianism etc. This creates an understanding where "common does not belong to the high" but to the vulgar and low.

From hereon, Nancy briefly refers to Hegel, to point to a tradition of thought which understand the social bond as an exteriority of the relationships between individuals, where the individual always comes first. The word society appears exactly for this reason opposed to community. The sublimation of the state as high, is possible when the starting point is the individual which comes before. Even in Heidegger, Nancy says, "with" comes later, as being-with.

Nancy's question is to think a way which can present the "with", or common belonging without being political authority or without religious authority. He proposes the totem as the name of that way. The place of the totem is empty and this emptiness is the essential condition of democracy. (Nancy refers to Claude Lefort) This empty place appeared in the first part of Heidegger's Being and Time, where he dealt with the question of "with as such".

This empty place is the foundation for togetherness. Yet Nancy brings in Rousseau and his discussion of civil religion. He emphasizes two things. One is that the empty place as the foundation allows us to start with the contract rather than Man or Individual. (This is similar to E.Balibar when he says Man or Human is always mediated by citizenship as a third term)

Two is that the empty place has to be felt, it presents a possibility of feeling. The civil religion means that the contract and the empty place of the totem has to be sensible to the heart of the citizen, the contract has to be felt. There has to be something beyond law which makes the contract be felt. What is at stake in vulgarity (as gemain-common)is a feeling Nancy says, in that "we don't like vulgarity". Nancy relates this to Kant's "unsocial sociability" and an oscilliation between attraction and repulsion. (He probably refers to the psychoanalytical tradition). If am not mistaken, Nancy is talking about the impossibility of an equilibrium of forces where the force of feeling finds its ground. In contrast to money as general equivalence (capitalism) and/or individual as equivalence (liberalism-Human Rights), Nancy says that feeling is rooted in difference of value. "Power to" comes from the realm of feeling in a sort of impulse. Whereas in "liberal society", difference of value is reduced to the private sphere and its link with the common is not established.