dialogue on the philosophy to come - roberto esposito and jean-luc nancy

7/27/2019 Dialogue on the Philosophy to Come - Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy

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72 the minnesota review

All o which brings to mind another proposition, this one romDeleuze, and it too centers on the constitutive relation o philosophyto non-philosophy: Te philosopher must become nonphilosopherso that nonphilosophy becomes the earth and people o philosophy

(109). With the reerence to the earth and the continual movemento territorialization and deterritorialization to which our traditiono thought is assimilated, it seems that Deleuze provides us with aurther clue vis--vis the epochal meaning o the end o philosophyand perhaps an explanation as well o the proound reason or how theend o philosophy seems to outstrip Heideggers thought. Heidegger,when speaking o the end, continues to treat philosophy in thedimension o time, while what is probably needed today is to bringthe end in line with a spatial semantics. Tis is how Deleuze puts it:Tinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor arevolving o one around the other. Rather, thinking takes place inthe relationship o territory and earth (85). Although this wouldexpose philosophy to the risk o circumscribing it within a xedearth, it would also certainly open philosophy to the possibility omaking itsel, as you argue, the thought o the world in the subjectiveand objective senses o the expression.

Nancy On the question o space that you raise, i you will allowme I would like to take up a theme that I already touched on in thepreace I wrote or my riend Benoit Goetz on the architecture othought. What we are dealing with here is really space. For morethan orty years now we have known that we are living in the epocho space (Foucault was one o the rst to tell us this in the 1960s).More oten than not, this epoch o space is juxtaposed against theepoch o history that would have come earlier, which then died out

little by little in the second hal o the twentieth century. Tere canbe no doubt that this century will be remembered or the suspicionsit raised against history, since history was at the center o theprevious centurys attention. Yet it is not enough merely to diagnosethe succession and the substitution o a spatial model or a temporalone given that there are deeper and more complex reasons thataccount or putting orward the spatial schema (or that o spacing)in a horizon such as the present one.

Te history in which Enlightenment thinkers, Romantics, andproponents o industrial progress recognized themselves was or themost part the history o the conquest o space: the completion o theprocess o the colonialization, independence, and development o theAmericas; territorial realignments in Europe; and immigrations thatwere the eect o the two preceding phenomenaall accompaniedby a growing technical mastery o maritime and terrestrial distances


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73Esposito / Nancy Dialogue

(steam, air, pistons), o electric communications either underwateror above, and o the spaces o urban and interurban circulation.In that epoch the streets, the railroads, the cables, and the citiesin which we live acquired their present conguration. Te surace

o the planet no longer has any terrae incognitae, maps no longercontain blank spaces: imbuktu and Lhasa, the deserts and theNorth and South Poleeverything has already been explored.Expeditions to ar-o territories have achieved their mission andnow give way to a conquest o interplanetary and interstellar spacethat does not have the same rhythm or meaning. Tis is because weare no longer dealing with uncovering the secrets o the earth butrather o coordinating the extension o transmissions in the conneso a reciprocal surveillance and the intimidations o economic andpolitical powers [potenze].

Tereore in some measure what we have lived was reallythe history o a progressive saturation o terrestrial space. Whatsome have reerred to as the end o history corresponds to thiscomplete occupation o space. It is as i the historical impetus wasmade possible by the act that what was once called the knownworld could still grow. Yet, once all o space became knownourspace, that in which we eectively live and that which extends in

conjunction with our steps, our gazes, and our armsthere was adiminution o the knowledge o conquest, expansion, and discoverythat wound up coinciding with the sel-knowledge o the West. It isperhaps no accident that the two terrible shocks o the last centuryascism and communismwere joined together by a sort o willto spatial power. On the one hand there was the idea o a vitalspace that needed to be conquered in order to set up a thousandyear Reich o a superior race. On the other hand we have the

domination and exploitation o an immense territorial expanse thatremained unsubjected to industrial conquest. In dierent ways, boththe ascist and communist empires ended either in smoke or in themud. Teir spaces imploded.

Yet, in a certain sense, the entire space o humanity and o natureimploded. Now completely conquered in every dimension (the ourdimensions o Euclidian space-time, non-Euclidian dimensions, andthe dimensions o the innitely large and the innitely small or size,

mass, orce, velocity), space has ceased to be an extendable volume inwhich one rises up or, better, in which the explorer himsel widensthe expansion.

Te extension has ceased to be expansive and has now, ianything, become intensive: orces conjoined; powers [potenze]condensed, compressed and concentrated in small particles or bers;billions o bytes o energy and inormation conveyed in a space-time


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that is practically nothing [nullo]. Yet rom all o this extension spacehas emerged disoriented: space, olded in on itsel, has lost its ownpropensity to spaciousness and opening. It no longer appears as aplace o unolding and traversing, o passage, o paths, or o sojourn.

In some ways space is no longer properly dimensional: the earth isreduced to a point, to a point without dimensions.It is the anguished knowledge o this reolding that in turn

generates a thought o spacea thought that is at the same timeanguish and a struggle against anguish, that is a point o departureor another history or, better, another spacing. It is no longer aquestion o philosophy; it is no longer a question o taking up aview or o sharpening our visionthe view[veduta] required by thehistory o arto the world, o being or a meaning. Rather it is aquestion o opening a space that was not visible initially, o openinga space or a view or a space o viewing that will no longer be a spacein ront o a gaze. I in the past philosophy had the meaning ocontemplating and gazing [fssare], today it means to open the eyes,eyes which until now had remained shut.

Stated dierently, in its beginnings philosophy was the eecto a novel experience o the worldnew, dicult, troubling, andexciting. And it is this reality o experience that we nd today.

Perhaps it was never destroyed. But let us say that today philosophycan no longer cover that experience over or have something elsecome beore it, not even philosophys own history inasmuch as itis precisely out o this history that philosophy needs to rebuild itsexperience.

Esposito I agree that we cannot substitute the dimension o spaceor timehow could webut that the dimension o space can be

crossed with it, spatializing time, but also apparently historicizingspace. Space, which is anything but subtracted rom real relationso orce and power (and also o resistance and liberation), is madeone with them, and together they dene their position, imposition,and exposition. Furthermore, it was Heidegger himsel to whom wereerred critically beore, who also wrote that only when space makesspace and makes ree a what o reedom, space accords, thanks tothis, the possibility o lands, o nearness and distance, o directions

and limits, the possibilities o distance and size (13).Especially in Te Experience o Freedom, you yoursel haveinsisted on the connection between space and reedomreedomas that orm o sharing that unites by separating. Without wantingto take up that theme directly, I would like to raise a more generalquestion about the relation between philosophy and politics. It isultimately a dierent perspective with which to examine the same


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own divinities. As such, these divinities take the place o others thatwere true, eective, and ecacious presences o animals, springs,trees, or clouds. Te gods o the city are no longer presences, places,or phenomena but rather are metaphors o the city. Tey are also

subordinated to the city, especially perhaps in the case in which thecity is something that cannot be ound, is something lost, or is notup to that which it should be.

Philosophy and politics are ounded together in the eld o anessential withdrawing: that o the gods, that o being-together (thegods were custodians o the totality and the totality was assembledby their own gods), or, to put it better, in the withdrawal o presence.I one can dene metaphysics as a metaphysics o presence, thesense given to it by Nietzsche and then by Heidegger (a denitionthat as such is to be attributed o course to Derrida), then we alsoneed to understand that the presence o metaphysics is the eecto a relation o loss with regard to an originary or divine presence.Metaphysics (philosophy, monotheism, the West) arms presence asaVorhandenheit (objective presence) o being [essente] against thebackdrop o the eclipse o presence that could ound this being (thatwould have ounded it, that should have ounded it, etc.). Politicsarms the co-presence o the members o a body politic against the

background o the eclipse o sovereign and hierarchical (a term thatcontains the root hieros, sacred) presence that would have oundedit, that should have ounded it, etc.

We are thereore always in mourning or the loss o a trueor originary presence. How are we to take leave rom such amourning, or better how are we to take leave o nihilism? It is on thispoint that we need to open our eyes, eyes that until now have notbeen opened, although they are perhaps the same that are opened in

all epochsin every new epoch and in every new dayto congurea new, novel world. Eyes or seeing a sense that is no longer the sensethat we understood (that we understood to arm or reject it, beingHegel or his opposite, who is still Hegel). Or ears.

Certainly, in such a situation it cannot be enough to arm thenull o the relation, the interval between the ones and the othersor between being [essere] and being [essente], the anguish and thewithdrawal o every god. But there is no need to restore the gods. We

restore the pictures but not the sense. Tereore we need to excavatenothing [nulla] and by this I mean that we need to go deeper into thenihilo nihilism, in order to glimpse what separates, what dislocatesand what at the same time binds anew, what reconstitutes a link anda place.


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Esposito You also propose that there is a need to rethink thequestion o nihilism. Tis is a task that we have tried to take uptogether in the recent Nichilismo e politica [Nihilism and Politics],which brings to mind Walter Benjamins enigmatic proposition that

nihilism constitutes the method o world political action. Beyondall o the many possible interpretations o the passage, it is clearthat Benjamin is alluding to the end o political theology, namelythe paradigm that identies, regures, and represents the being-together in the orm o the One or, in other words, the paradigmthat presupposes a subjectivity imperative to the relation amonghuman beings according to the modalities typical o onto-theologicaltradition. When you make reerence to the eclipse o sovereignand hierarchical presence as the transcendental oundation o thesocial body, you are clearly alluding to the possibility o a politicsthat is no longer ounded on the sacricial model, a model that hasmarked world history or so long. In this regard it is remarkable thatan impolitical thinker such as Maria Zambrano could speak oabsolutism as the sacricial structure o society, opposing it to ademocracy that cannot be represented by a sovereign principle (93).

Nevertheless, here lies the problem and in a double sense:rst because it is dicult to think any political orm without

gure and representation and that is ultimately without myth,and second because the simple inversion o political-theologicalinto its oppositethat is, an absolute technical neutralizationrisks remaining captured by the same metaphysical old that itintends to eliminate. Is this not secularization political theologyturned inside out? Or, to look at it rom another point o view, isdeconstruction not the mechanism o recharging that is internal tothe same Christianism, as you underscored recently in another text?

Tis is the reason why one cannot sacrice the sacricial paradigmwithout alling again into the dialectic o subjection [soggezione]and subjugation [assoggettamento]. Te other choice would be tochange the language itsel in which all o this is oered. In this wayone would evade not only positive and negative political theologybut also secularization. Tere would not be any kind o residue osubstance and subjectivity superimposed over the denition o beingtogether (though it would be better to say over experience). Once

again we have to think politics in the revocation o its oundingpresuppositions, in the withdrawal o its mechanisms o sovereigntotalization.

Nancy Perhaps we need to stop thinking that everything ispolitical. In political-theological discourse, whereby the sovereignassumption, the mystical political body, love, and glory are the


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guiding principles o everything, everything is political. Everythingis political as well in the apparent reversal o such a discourse (thediminishing o the political distinctionthe Statethat touchesevery sphere o social existence as Marx says). oday too this more

or less declared axiom circulates, more or less consciously, in everydiscourse on the let. It is true that it responds to the necessity tostruggle against the presumed depoliticization o a globalization thatis desired as exclusively technical and economic. Yet at the same timeit is also true that mondialisation demands the deconstruction othe axiom according to which everything is political. Tis becausemondialisation cannot be reduced to mere capitalist globalization.

As I have written elsewhere, in the logic o a politicalmetaphysics, everything is political is the basic assumption romwhich one deduces that to be actualized politics itsel, understoodas a separate sphere rom an institution or a knowledge (or an art)with its own specicity, can tend only towards the suppression opolitics own separation. Tis accounts or the natural totality thatpolitics expresses or initially announces. In that sense, there really isnot a dierence between everything is political and everything iseconomic. Tis is how democracy and the market take turns in theprocess that we call mondialisation. Everything is political means

arming that there exists a sel-suciency o man, understood inturn as the producer o his own nature and, with it, o all o nature.oday, the indistinct representation o sel-suciency and o thissel-production dominates rom top to bottom all representations opolitics, whether these be on the right or on the let, or at leastdominates those that set out a political global project that is either inavor or against the State, consensual or revolutionary, etc. Onedoes nd as well a weak version o politics, understood as the mere

regulative act, which is to say the correction o dis-equilibria and thereduction o tensions; however, the setting or this social-democraticbricolage, which is or the most part respectable even when it is otenthe result o compromises, always remains the same.

Against the backdrop o what we today call the crisis or theeclipse or the paralysis o politics, the only authentic question tobe posed is that o the sel-suciency o man and o nature. Yet it isbecause o this sel-suciency that day ater day the present seems

to be inconsistent. Mondialisationthe general oiko-logicization othe polisincreasingly makes visible with a growing violence thenon-naturality o the same process o mondialisation, and also, overthe long term, the non-naturality o the supposed nature. We havenever ound ourselves immersed to such a degree in the sphere o ameta-physis. Politics is portrayed as totality and totalization. In thatsense everything is not political.


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But politics is redened as the place or exercising power[potere] with a view towards an incommensurable justice, or as theplace o a claim or an in-nity o the being-human [essere-uomo]and being-in-the-world. By denition, politics does not reabsorb in

itsel all other places o existence. Te other places are those wherethe incommensurability is in some way ormed and presented.Incommensurability can call itsel art, religion, thought,science, ethics, conduct, exchange, production, love,war, lineage, or exhilaration, and it can have an innite numbero other names. Teir reciprocal distinction and circumscription(which does not diminish in any way their relations o contiguity andco-penetration) always describes the occurrence o a congurationin which a certain presentation takes place, even i aterwards sucha presentation gives orm to an impresentation or to a withdrawalo presence. In any event, non-political spheres are not those o theprivate juxtaposed against the public: each sphere is public andprivate, i we are orced to use these terms. Each one is divided in thedouble sense o the word.

Among these dierent congurations (and again withoutexcluding contacts and contagions among them) there isincommensurability. It is here that politics once again appears, as

the place rom which we need to keep open this incommensurabilityand to keep open in general the incommensurability o justice, aswell as o value. Contrary to what is armed by theological-politicalas well as economic-political discourse, but not without a relationto what was put into play in the polisbeore politics i we mayput it thusly, politics is no longer the place o the assumption oa uni-totality. Consequently, neither is it any longer the place o aputting-into-orm or a putting-into-presence o incommensurability

or o any other kind o unity o origin and end nor, in other words,o a humanity. Space and spacing lie with politics but not with thegure.

Politics becomes precisely a site o detotalization, or we couldrisk saying that i everything is political (but with a dierentmeaning rom that o theology and/or political economy) then it isin the sense in which everything can no longer in any way be totalor totalized.

Esposito When you say that the idea o producing the propercommunal essence has dominated and requently continues todominate representations o both the political let and right, youtouch on the question which, more than any other, joins our respectiveitineraries, which is to say the question o the community with allits risks but also with the potentialities contained therein. Above all,


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not only risks which are evoked by the tragic history o the centurythat we are leaving behind but also risks which are present andoperative both deensively and aggressively in how a certain practiceo community takes place in a large part o the world. In one o your

texts you point out how the intercommunitarian violence thatrom Indonesia to the Congo, rom Ireland to the Balkans conerson the name o community the sound o death (Conloquium103). Nevertheless, in this same text, as in all your others, you repeatthat this drit in meaning establishes the need to rethink the cumas that which and to which we above all respond. Here you saycumreerring to Descartes ego sum which you translate as ego cumthesame I cannot be thought except in relation to others. Tereore,rather than reerring to a body, an essence, or a common subject,community reers precisely to this game o relation and distinction,to the proximity o the interval and o proximity. Tis is the reasonthat, despite an account o the ailure o all communisms and thedanger o all communitarianisms, the community remains ourquestion. One might even come to the point o posing our ownuniquequestions, that which makes the escape rom sense still oursense, the sense o we.

Tis is why I ound it a little strange, given the theoretical

orce and extraordinary semantic sensibility o your thought, to ndDerrida expressing a certain didence with respect to the categoryo community (above all in Te Politics o Friendship but alsosubterraneously in On ouching, in which he does not cite, not evenonce,Te Inoperative Community) in avor o the category o riendshipwhich is in some way more subjective or intersubjective. It istrue that Derrida attacks an idea o substantialist community that isnot yours (nor, clearly, mine either), but precisely or this reason he

gives the impression o earing a term that already opens to anothersensethe proo o which will be ound in your own writings.

NancyYou should ask Derrida the same question about his didenceor hostility to the theme o community. But Ill agree to sketch aresponse that will obviously be mine and not his. First we need toremember that Derrida is not the only one to have raised objectionsabout the term community. o cite other examples, both Lacoue-

Labarthe and Badiou also reject this word, while Rancire andAgamben both use it. Generally, a clear division with regard to theterm emerged immediately ater I published the rst version oTeInoperative Community. It concerned a division between those whorecognized the need or such a theme and those who condemnedthe weight o its past (both its Nazi past, or which at the time Iwas rebuked in Germany, as well as its Christian or Judeo-Christian


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past; Derrida, or example, is much more guarded with respect tothe Jewish community). Can we separate the theme o communityrom its past? Certainly not completely. Te communitarian and/orcommunal premise, the Gemeinschatagainst the Gesellschat, all o

it contains the terrible germs that we know so well and that todaycan be used again or the fags o diverse ethnic and ethno-religiousidentities. I completely understand these kinds o reservationsand I share them, since with the denition o an inoperativecommunity I wanted precisely to speak o a community that doesnot put into eect any community. Tis is why I have continued tolet the lexicon that I had been using slide rom being-in-common,being-together, and separation, arriving at being-with or thepure and simple with, as one will see in Being Singular Plural. Ishould note in passing how all these words and expressions, perhapswith the exception o being-with and with, which are ratherbare in Francewere requently to be rediscovered in circulation inpublic discourses, at least in France; it was almost as i there was aneed to master the terms in order to design a reality as obscure andambiguous as that o co-existence.

All o these small linguistic phenomena taken together indicatesomething and that is a poverty o words and thought or the principal

question: the co-, etc. Please note that one could just as well say thesubject, a word that is oten relegated to a metaphysical and/or subjectivist lexicon, but a word also claimed by Lacanians asthe name o he who nally has a place only in the division romsel and a word that, having place, opens or the post-Lacanians theproblem o subjectivization (that is, in some way, an appropriationwithout an identitarian subject and a process rather than asubstance). We are still concerned here with the same diculty and

the same poverty I mentioned above. I would even dare to say thatthese are the reracted and diuse eects o the dissolution or thedis-identication o man: neither the generic human [uomo], nora human [uomo], nor or that matter humans [uomini] themselvesmake sense any longer or constitute a clear reerence or this worldthat continues to call itsel humanistic even in the most banal odiscourses.

When you in your most recent works interpret the community

in its classic and metaphysical sense as immunity, you too are didentwith regard to community. And your semantic and etymologicalanalysis ocommunitasand immunitasis o course spot on. One couldonly add that community in our languages is even weightier andmore substantialist than immunity, which designates a quality, aproperty, while community comes to designate a being, a subject (asuppositum, in the scholastic sense).


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Esposito On this score we agree. We need to be ever on the lookout orevery substantialist lapse o the idea and the practice o community.But I believe that in Derridas rejection there is something elseat work that has to do with what one could call in abbreviated

ashion choosing ethics over ontology. It is as i his understandablereluctance with respect to Heidegger moved Derrida progressively toLevinas, despite the distance that separated them on other grounds(or example the relation between Judaism, Christianism, and Greekantiquity). You know o course that personally I lean more towardsthe other side, in the sense that I consider the ontological questionthe greater priority both in radically post-Heideggerean terms andwith regard to ethics. Nevertheless, I am not hiding the problem:beginning with ontology, how can one respond to the questionposed by ethics?

You have tried to overcome this diculty by evokingan originary ethics that is one with ontology, which in turn issubtracted rom the presupposition o Being and leads back to thesingular plurality o existence. Yet it seems to me that the problemdoes not disappear. Tis because it is undeniable that breaking witha politics o sacrice is, in addition to being an epochal necessity,always as well a prescription o the ethical kind, as it appears here

and there in your own texts, even on the level o expression. Forexample, you write in Being Singular Pluralthat the thought o us[...] is [...] a praxis and an ethos: the staging o co-appearance, thestaging which is co-appearing. We are always already there at eachinstant. Tis is not innovationbut the stage must be reinvented:wemust reinvent it each time, each time making our entrance anew(71). What meaning needs to be given to that must [il aut] i notthat o an ethical demand and thereore a demand that is inevitably

normative?In other words, beginning with the coincidence without

remains between world and sense and thereore with the reusal topostpone meaning to something that is not the present conditiono existence itsel, how is political activity thinkable? Does it notwind up being reduced to a simple unction o keeping the world asit is? What distinguishes this position rom the Heideggerean oneo abandonment to the destiny o being-as-is o being [essere-cos

dellente]? I know ull well that one can respond that the originaryethics consists o a decision to allow space or existence in all itsinnite ragments o sense and that thereore a desirable politics isone o constructing the conditions or such an ontological ethicsor or such an ethical ontology. But is this denition sucientand o course it is a question I also ask myselto be a response tothe innite pain, hunger, war, and death that are checked and also


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expanded by the present sense o the world? I am sure that on thispoint one needs to think something that still escapes us, but whichis tied to a radical practice o democracy.

Nancy Keeping the world as it is? No certainly not, seeing ashow the world is such only when and to the degree to which theworld is or makes sense. And sense means: that which makes it suchthat humans and the rest o being [essente] reer one to the otherwithout making either subservient to a rst or ultimate moment.One resolves nothing by dividing the world between amine andindigestion, inormatic perversion and illiteracy, AIDs and organtransplants, ethnic myths and democratic indierence; this much isclear. Tere is no ethics without morality! Te holding to [tenuta]demands respect or justice and or all those values that areperectly traditional, provided that it is really clear that : 1. humanistideology in its totality has always and categorically devalorized thesevalues in the practical sense; and 2. justice, dignity, man himsel,the human in the rst instance (but also nature i we preer togive it that name) are values that are beyond any possible valuation.Tey are absolutes the measure o which remains open and alwaysto be invented. Te holding to is also the holding to o a language

that is the match o the incommensurable. I you want, we couldeven say that we need to ght against all exploitation, wars, etc., butalways at the same time through and in the name o a language thatdoes not cede anything with regard to thought, poetry, mysticism,songwhatever name you might wish to give them. I would likealmost to say that the ethosis morality with a holding to.

Esposito We have spoken about the relation between ethics and

politics. Let us try now to look at the other side o the question, andthat is rom the side o technology [tecnica]. From the very beginningan unbreakable link was notedjust read Plato in this regardthatjoins technology to politics. All discourses (including Habermas butalso Arendts) that begin with the categorical juxtaposition betweenpraxis and poiesis, between politics and technology, are not onlymissing a oundation, but are also condemned to come up shortwith regard to our own time in which the complementary origineity

o technology and politics is disclosed. Tere is also, as you haveemphasized, a similar complementary origineity otechneandphysis:technology is precisely the element that species human nature,just as the great German philosophical anthropology explained itbeore Derrida. Te essence o man lies in his inessentiality, as whatis most proper lies in the improper, and thereore, I would add, inthe common.


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echnology, techniques, or the arts (the name whichencapsulates them, and here one would need to develop a broaderrefection on the meaning o art that you have already begun inMuses)exposes us to the niteness without limit o existence, naturally with

all the risk implicit in every type o unlimitedness. Tis is preciselythe paradox o a technology which, constructed or our mastery o it,always appears stronger than we are. Nevertheless, in this instance,as in mondialisation, there can be no doubt that every road back isblocked; every return to the natural origin is impossible since, as wehave seen, the origin does not exist per se. Te problem consists inknowing how to proceed with and within the technologization o theworld (or, and it is the same thing, the mondialisation o technology).echnology breaks every control, command, and sovereign power,and it marks the end o the same category o sovereignty. But in thisway at the same time technology destroys politics, which until nowhad been linked to such a category in avor o the economy or, betterstill, nancial fows without a name. Tis means that we can acetechnology armatively only when we will be capable o thinkinga politics outside o sovereignty but also outside politics obsessiveauto-immunitarian duress. On this score, Giorgio Agamben speakso a politics o pure means, which is a suggestive ormula but also

very indeterminate. One could speak as well o a politics o purenality, o a nality without goals [fni]. But perhaps it would bebetter to say a politics not o the cause (o the means ando the goal)but o the thing.

Nancy echnology completely remains to be thought. We registerbeorehand the sense o the word technology within the semanticgrid that prescribes its subordination to science, to thought, to art,

to ethics, etc. We are dealing with a double subordination: rst othe means to the end and then o the instrumental to the liberal(in the sense o liberal arts). Nevertheless, one cannot think oreversing this subordination in some inantile way. Utensils remainutensils, and my program or writing does not contain a programor thought or or poetry. But to think the instrument or to thinkthe programnow that is something dierent. Tis somethingdierent is not simply non-technology. It is a technology as well, a

knowledge whose objectives [fni] are not dened. I you preer, I amin agreement about the nality without goals, or a goal that onecould dene as a non-ulllment similar to that o art, o eroticism,or o love: not the satisaction, being satiated, or entropy, but theurther branching out o energy, including alls and absences,suspensions and losses. A goal without atelos; can we dene it thatway?


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Man [luomo] is the technology that nature produces as i todenaturalize him. Such a goal, as long as we dene it by termslike monstrous or absurd, cannot be overturned by having recourseto the magic o some theodicy, but must be understood dierently.

We need dierent categories, another thought, beginning withtechnology, that art instituted strangely by the same denaturalizedexistence.

Esposito Te contiguity between nature and artice as the arena ordening technology brings us to the decisive question o the body,a question which or some time now you have made the center oyour work in a way that I nd both original in its approach andproblematic in its results. I am especially perplexed by your ideathat the body is in some way communitarian, as i the communityalways has something to do with the body. Tis thesis is tied towhat seems to me to be a topos that goes unrefected upon in ourculture (psycho-analytic, eminist, progressive), which is to say thatthe body would always be the repressed and the rejected elemento Western civilization, that the West has always hated the body(as you say in the opening o Corpus). It seems to me that this isnot really the way things stand. At the center o the imaginary, o

theory, o Western practice, there is nothing more than the body,which is unied precisely by a metaphor, that o the State-body thathas lasted more than two thousand years and which in some wayis still standing. In additionand this is something that Foucaultsaw with extraordinary claritynever more than today has the bodybecome the very object o knowledge-powerpolitical, juridical,medical, mediatic, etc. My thesis is that this is not the result o therelation that you sketch between the body and community, but

rather between that o the body and immunity. Te body is thesame place in which the immunitarian dispositinds its supremesynthesis between bio-medical language and juridical language.

Tis happensdespite the possible technical connections thatthe body resists thanks to its apparatus o sel-deense (as you sointensely recount it in Lintrus)because the body is in its essencethe very site o the proper, o the organic, o the enclosed, o thatwhich we are less disposed to allow to be altered, crossed, or allowed

to be inected by the other. Rather, it seems to me that the principleo alteration or contamination evokes instead the semantics ofesh understood exactly as the opening o the body, the bodysexpropriation, its common being. On this score I believe that weneed to rediscover a subterranean line o discourse in our traditionwhich today current French phenomenological research has taken upagainthat sees in fesh the space opened, uncovered, and lacerated


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by community, just as the body was always that o immunity,enclosed and compact. Flesh reers to the outside as body does to theinside: it is the point and the margin in which the body is no longerbody but is its reverse and its base sundered, as Merleau-Ponty had

intuited. Tis explains the communitarian power [potenza] o thegure o the incarnation with respect to that o the immunitarian, oincorporation, and o corporation (which, not accidentally, is typicalo all ascisms): in the incarnation, Christ escapes rom his properlydivine nature to become other rom himsel. I would say that themetaphor o incarnation is the element that explains the enduringvitality o Christianism at the end o Christian religion. Te elementthat resists its own sel-deconstruction because it touches mostprooundly and originally the question o the common munus: weourselves as the innite fesh o the world. I believe that the rsttask o a philosophy to come is above all that o replacing termslike earth, body, and immunity, with terms like world, fesh, andcommunity.

Nancy Can one really argue that I am proposing a communitarianbody? Tis seems oreign at least in part to my way o thinking,perhaps because I have not explained mysel suciently. It is clear that

as long as body designates an organic body, body also designates amystical body that is nothing other than the speculative truth othe organic body. But I wanted precisely to subtract the body romthis schema, rom the idea o a mystical assumption united to theimage o the living that develops and grows by way o intussusception,as Kant says. For me, body designates the separated piece, thething extended that breaks o rom the others and that can touchthem, avoid contact with them, bang into them, graze them, and

that perhaps are joined to them, but that are also let loose, so as toroll up alone in a corner. Above all, body means in the presenceo other bodies. Distinction o bodies: everything that is distinctis in this sense a body. A concept distinct rom another conceptis a body, a body that measures its own proper weight o sense(certied meaning, possible meaning, a meaning to invent, guralmeaning, etcetera). In the rst instance, body is the distinct andthe distinct-rom-itsel; to the degree o itsel it is outside itsel. Te

body is the opening to the world and the opening to a world, thethere inasmuch as it is spacing.Flesh, conversely, is not a word I use because it is too tied to

the Judeo-Christian tradition and to Husserl and Merleau-Pontysuse o it (will this perhaps be the weak trace o an aliation?). It is aword o the in-itsel and not o the outside-itsel. It is a word o the


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relation to sel, o the enjoyment or the mortication o the sel. It isa word o depth while body is a weak wordo dance!

All o this creates divergences among the words, whileour respective thoughts have the tendency to converge around a

common point. Perhaps what is required is that each one o us godeeper into his reasons or advancing the discussion. All o whichproves, and I repeat it again, that the terms and concepts that we areusing reveal themselves as ragile and uncertain once we take up thereality o the common without discussing the common in thesense o vulgar (vulgus, the crowd) and o banal (the ban, thecircumscription o jurisdiction). Vulgar and banal are two wordsthat merit a long discussion o their respective traditional uses andrespective (de)valuations. From here there emerges the entire problemo the one [si], o Heideggers Man (or one [man] depending uponwhether one considers him a substantive subject or an impersonalone) and this precisely because Heidegger has the impropriety[Uneigentlichkeit] oDasein andMitsein all in the banal-common.Yet all o us know well enough this act o debasement and osuspicion, this aristocratic contempt or the common; that is, all ous who are not part o the people [popolo], given that eectively weare not a part. As university proessors, intellectuals etc., we surely

are not a part, and yet, i we look closely, are we really exempt rombanality? Do we not perhaps like bread just like everyone else, andare not we passionate about a soccer match? Perhaps we have notlooked enough at this aspect o things. When all is said and done,i politics and ethics (but aesthetics as well) have a meaning, it hasto do with daily lie and the daily possibility or each o usorpeople [gente]to be in meaning [di essere nel senso], which is to sayor all o us to take part in the exceptional, in discord, and in what

is distinctive.

ranslated by imothy Campbell.

Originally appeared as Dialogo sulla losoa a venire in Jean-LucNancy, Essere Singolare Plurale (orino: Einaudi, 2001), vii-xxix.Published here or the rst time in English with the kind permissiono Einaudi.

Works CitedCanguilhem, Georges. On the Normal and the Pathological. Dordrecht: Reidel,1978.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?rans. Hugh omlinsonand Graham Burcell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.


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Derrida, Jacques. On ouching: Jean-Luc Nancy. rans. Christine Irizarry.Stanord: Stanord UP, 2005.

---. Te Politics o Friendship. rans. George Collins. London: Verso, 2006.

Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: Te Origin and Destiny o Community. rans.imothy Campbell. Stanord: Stanord UP, 2009.

---. Introduction. Lesperienza della libert. By Jean Luc Nancy. rans. Davidearizzo. urin: Einaudi, 2000.

Esposito, Roberto, Carlo Galli, and Vincenzo Vitello. Nichilismo e politica. Preaceby Jean-Luc Nancy. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2000.

Goetz, Benoit. La dislocation: Architecture et experience. Diss. Strasbourg, 1996.

Heidegger, Martin. Bermerkungen zu Kunst - Plastik - Raum. St. Gallen: Erker,1996..

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. rans. Robert D. Richardson and AnneE. OByrne. Stanord: Stanord UP, 2000.

---. Conloquium. the minnesota reviewn.s. 75 (Fall 2010): 101-108.---. Corpus. rans. Richard A. Rand. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

---. Te Experience o Freedom. rans. Bridget McDonald. Stanord: Stanord UP,1994.

---. Te Inoperative Community. rans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, et al.Minneapolis: U o Minnesota P, 1991.

---. Lintrus. Paris: Galile, 2000.

Zambrano, Maria. Persona e democrazia. Milan: Mondadori, 2000.

dialogue on the philosophy to come - roberto esposito and jean-luc nancy

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