Abstract
In March 2011 Jean-Luc Nancy published an article entitled ‘What the Arab Peoples Signify to Us’ in the Libération newspaper. The article supported the NATO-led military intervention in Libya that followed the anti-government protests of 15–16 February 2011. It is in the name of ‘political responsibility’ that Nancy makes his intervention. I want to explore the question of ‘political responsibility’ in light of Nancy’s work, and his Libération article in particular. I do this by first assessing one of the distinguishing features of the uprising in Libya: the emergence of the National Transitional Council (NTC). By setting Nancy’s response against Derrida’s work on spectrality and his critique of the founding declaration (in ‘Declarations of Independence’) we can more clearly appreciate the scope that Nancy’s account of responsibility entails. I suggest that Derrida’s logics of spectrality help not only critique Nancy’s response but also understand the conditions that make his account of political responsibility possible.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Most recently, Jacques de Ville’s offers a lengthy and valuable contextualisation of many of the issues discussed in Derrida’s essay, particularly the relevance of Derrida’s approach to speech act theory, the signature and différance (De Ville 2008).
Derrida notes in his essay ‘The Time is Out of Joint’ that ‘the question of mourning… is at the very heart of deconstruction’ (Derrida 1995, p. 21).
Implicitly referring to the final proposition of The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’), in ‘The Force of Law’, Derrida himself suggests: ‘I take the use of the word mystical in a sense that I would venture to call rather Wittgensteinian’ (Derrida 2010b, p. 242).
For a thorough assessment of the ways in which the work of both Derrida and Rancière can be used to deconstruct the notion of ‘the people’ see Illan rua Wall, Human Rights and Constituent Power: Without Model or Warranty (Wall 2012, pp. 77-92).
The NTC’s claim to represent all of Libya perhaps falls into the latter categorisation: at the time the declaration was made, Libya was in the throes of a civil war with rebel forces not even controlling half of the country. But performative speech acts in their saying, do something and this bold assertion perhaps is what gave the NTC its sought-after effect and partly what cajoled many countries into recognising its authority.
For a brief assessment, and condemnation, of Nancy’s position in relation to Badiou’s response to the Libération article, see Gianni Vattimo, ‘Philosophers at War’ (2011).
See in particular Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Derrida, 2005, pp. 254–258) where Derrida emphasises the aporetic structure of sovereignty and its autoimmunity. But Derrida is never content with the absolute rejection of sovereignty, maintaining that: ‘sovereignty can… become an indispensable bulwark against certain international powers’ (Derrida 2005, p. 157). Particularly important in the opening passages of Rogues is the figure of the ‘rota’ where democracy is bound to a turning wheel that returns democracy to the figure of ipseity and thus tied to a certain expression of sovereignty (Derrida 2005, pp. 10–11).
This distinction is seen in the German das politische and die Politik and the Italian il politico and la politica (Christodoulidis 2008, p. 192). Since founding the Centre de Réchereches Philosophiques sur Le Politique Nancy’s thinking has been concerned with a certain ‘withdrawal from politics’ in favour of a philosophical thinking of the political. For commentary and critique on this distinction see Simon Critchley’s Ethics of Deconstruction (Critchley 1992, pp. 200–219).
Nancy was due to give a plenary address at the Derrida-Konferenz in Frankfurt, Germany 14 March 2012. Due to ill health, he was unable to attend. His presentation, ‘The Political and/or Politics’ was distributed to those present (Nancy 2012). My thanks go to Anastasia Tataryn who passed the paper on to me.
Nancy distinguishes between ‘communion’—a being-together conceived as a unity—and ‘(inoperative) community’—a being-together orientated around difference that does not posit a unitary sense of togetherness. For Nancy, what is often referred to as ‘community’ reveals the totalising and unifying work of ‘communion’. The Inoperative Community works to reveal the constitutive sense of inoperative community covered over by communion’s unifying logic (Nancy 2008, p. 12).
The sense of responsibility suggested here is particularly sensitive to the acoustic effect of the declaration. This approach departs from the reading proposed by Kas Saghafi who argues that the ‘gaze is the best “paradigm” for responsibility’ (Saghafi 2010, p. 61).
In his reading of Schmitt’s attempt to formalise a ‘pure’ conceptual theory of the political, Derrida suggests that the spectre ruins Schmitt’s concepts in advance (Derrida 1997, p. 137). This spectralising work is seen, in particular, in Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. The friend-enemy distinction is, for Derrida ‘doomed to failure [because] every time, a concept bears the phantom of the other. The enemy is the friend, the friend the enemy’ (Ibid., 92).
References
Abraham, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. 1986. The wolf man’s magic word: A cryptonymy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Badiou, Alain. 2011. Open letter reply to Jean-Luc Nancy’s “What the Arab peoples signify to us”. http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=2899. Accessed online 21 May 2012.
Christodoulidis, Emilios. 2008. Against substitution: The constitutional thinking of dissensus. In The paradox of constitutionalism: Constituent power and the constitutional form, ed. Martin Loughlin, and Neil Walker, 189–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Critchley, Simon. 1992. The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell.
De Ville, Jacques. 2008. Sovereignty without sovereignty: Derrida’s declarations of independence. Law and Critique 19: 87–114.
Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Fors: The Anglish words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. In The wolf man’s magic word: A cryptonymy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Deconstruction is/in America: A new sense of the political. New York: New York University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1997. The politics of friendship. London: Verso.
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Declarations of Independence. In Negotiations: interventions and interviews 1971–2001, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg, 46–54. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Rogues: Two essays on reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2010a. Spectres of Marx: The state of debt, the work of mourning and the New International. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 2010b. The force of law: The mystical foundation of authority. In Acts of religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, 230–298. London: Routledge.
Douzinas, Costas. 2007. Human rights and empire: The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge-Cavendish.
Georgy, Michael. 2011. Who can unite Libya if Gaddafi falls? Reuters News Report 22 August, 2011. See http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/22/us-libya-rebels-personalities-idUSTRE77K2AR20110822. Accessed online 21 May 2012.
Hanafin, Patrick. 2001. Constitutive fiction: Postcolonial constitutionalism in Ireland. Penn State International Law Review 20: 339–362.
James, Ian. 2006. The fragmentary demand: An introduction to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Motha, Stewart. 2011. The end of sovereignty, in north Africa, in the world. http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=3007. Accessed online 21 May 2012.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1997. The sense of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. War, right, sovereignty—techne. In Being singular plural, 101–143. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008. The inoperative community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2011. What the Arab peoples signify. http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=2793. Accessed online 21 May 2012.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2012. The political and/or politics. Trans, Christopher Saunder. This text was distributed at the ‘Derrida-Konferenz,’ Frankfurt Germany, 14 March 2012.
NTC. 2011a. The founding statement of the Interim Transitional National Council. http://ntclibya.org/english/founding-statement-of-the-interim-transitional-national-council/. Accessed online 21 May 2012.
NTC. 2011b. Introducing the Council. http://ntclibya.org/english/about/. Accessed online 21 May 2012.
Oxford English Dictionary. 1992. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Saghafi, Kas. 2010. Apparitions—Of Derrida’s other. New York: Fordham University Press.
Shakespeare, William. 1998. The tragedy of Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vattimo, Gianni. 2011. Philosophers at war. Trans. Andera Pavoni. http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/2011/04/11/philosophers-at-war/. Accessed online 21 May 2012.
Wall, Illan rua. 2012. Human rights and constituent power: Without model or warranty. London: Glasshouse.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Costas Douzinas, Chris Lloyd, Illan rua Wall and Anastasia Tataryn for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this piece.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Matthews, D. The Question of Political Responsibility and the Foundation of the National Transitional Council for Libya. Law Critique 23, 237–252 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9104-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9104-y