This is the long version of an essay that was first published on November 20, 2015 in L’humanité. Translation by Philippe Theophanidis with the help of Marie-Ève Morin and Marc James Léger. We would rather remain silent. In the face of the horror and emotion. In the face of the effects of proximity – since what…
The people in Maidan, without a clearly articulated leader, without a clear aim and vision of the future, are the exscription of politics. The events in Ukraine have caused many to wonder what sparked the protests in November and why things unfolded into such violence this February. How do we understand European and Russian interest…
Today, political correctness demands that we say in French droits humains [human rights] when we used to say droits de l’homme [rights of man]. This demand, which also occurs in other areas, is made because the French homme, like man in English, does not distinguish between the human race and the male gender. German is better equipped, differentiating between Mensch and Mann. Latin distinguishes between vir and homo, Greek between anèr and anthropos, etc. We could discuss the reasons for this. However, it is also important to note the introduction of another ambiguity. The adjective ‘human’ in French has a value that corresponds to the usual meaning we now give to the term ‘humanist’ and, more generally, to the moral qualities of ‘care’ (a word which has recently been imported unchanged from English into French), ‘compassion’ or ‘charity’.
Key Concept In his distinctive concern for etymology, Nancy notes that abandonment contains the semantic unit bandon, which is ‘an order, a prescription, a decree, a permission, and the power that holds these freely at its disposal.’ (Nancy 1993, 44) A ban in this context should be understood as a general proclamation of the sovereign rather…
Key ConceptJean-Luc Nancy notes three ways that fictions have been associated with law: 1) jurisprudential exercises that require imagining the extent of the applicability of the law, 2) the mysterious ground of the constitution, and 3) in Roman law, the extension of the law to cases it did not cover. (Nancy 156) Beyond this, Nancy…
Key Concept Nancy repeatedly rejects the banal politico-legal insistence on human rights as the solution to every answer, suggesting that such a move is intimately bound to the ‘withdrawal of the political’ (See Politics/ The Political). However, he does not reject rights out of hand. In a recent text entitled ‘From the Imperative to Law’,…
In 2003 Nancy gave a brief, basic philosophical radio talk in which he discussed the question of politics and the political. Reprising his early work with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe at the Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur la Politique (the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political), he explained that excessive use is often made of the…
Spare a thought for Alain Badiou. He must be busy tending to the sensitive instruments of his evento-graph. As with the seismographs of late – all ‘revolutionary event’ detectors have had a busy time. The anticipation must also be difficult to bear. Syria is unraveling. The Road to Damascus might soon yield another Paul, or…
In times of confrontations between explicitly material interests, and in the absence of any real public debate involving the Italian Government (busy protecting the orgy of power), what could be better than a proper exchange between internationally-renowned philosophers, on the alleged necessity of a military intervention in Libya? In an article published on the 28th…
In Alain Badiou’s open reply to Jean-Luc Nancy, he chides Nancy for falling into the trap that the NATO attacks on Libya were in any way designed to rescue the insurgents of Benghazi. Badiou is amazed that someone so informed about geopolitics, and the covert agenda of the French government along with the other NATO…
The following is Alain Badiou’s full reply to Jean-Luc Nancy’s “What the Arab peoples signify to us“. With many thanks to Verso Books UK. Yes, dear Jean-Luc, the position you adopt in favour of ‘Western’ intervention in Libya was indeed a sorry surprise for me. Didn’t you notice right from the start the palpable difference…
The Arab peoples are signifying to us that resistance and revolt are with us once again, and that history is moving beyond History. They are doing it, as is appropriate, with all the fortune and misfortune that it involves. At the very least they have sent an irreversible signal whose effects we can expect to…
This presentation is a few notes on a question. The question being: What does it mean to say: the free space of thinking? As my title suggests, I would like to relate the free space of thinking to what one might simply call nomadic thinking. To this end, I will draw upon Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology…