The question of relation is the question of the passage to community, but it is equally the question of the passage to the subject.
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.
Abstract
The present essay reconsiders Georges Bataille’s politics of the impossible in light of Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s collaborative work conducted at the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political. In particular, my submission critically assesses Nancy’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s concerted effort to displace the problematic of the subject to make room for a new ground of the political derived from Bataillean conception of community. While Bataille’s philosophy proved to be decisive to Nancy’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s exploratory research at the Centre, it also constituted a source of profound ambivalence insofar as Bataillean thinking of relation necessarily leads back to the question of the subject. The paper argues that Nancy’s admitted failure to develop the unprecedented Bataillean politics is rooted in persistence of the subject in Bataille’s philosophy. At the same time, it maintains that what Nancy perceived as a failure must be grasped as success since Bataillean determination of the political necessitates not so much an eradication of the problematic of the subject, as its re-elaboration. If, as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe suggest, construction of the subject throughout the development of Western metaphysics has determined philosophical thinking of political community, then Bataillean sovereignty (with its presupposition of the acephalic subject freed from subjection to symbolic authority) allows for a new and non-identitarian conception of community not bound to the destiny of the state.
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Notes
Hollier (1989, p. ix).
Foucault (2003, p. 445).
Foucault (2003, p. 448).
Nancy (1991, p. 21).
Bataille (1985d, p. 181).
Bataille (1993, p. 16).
For a thorough exploration of this thesis, see Butler (1997, p. 66). In her discussion of Nietzsche, for example, Butler characterizes subjection “not merely as the subordination of a subject to a norm, but as the constitution of a subject through precisely such a subordination.”.
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997b, p. 115).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997b, p. 116).
Heidegger (2009, p. 114). “The three bonds—through the people to the destiny of the state in its spiritual mission—are equiprimordial aspects of the German essence.”.
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997b, p. 116).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997d, pp. 130–1).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997d, p. 127).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997d, p. 130).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997d, p. 130).
Hollier (1997, p. 34).
Hollier (1989, p. 12).
Bataille (1985d, p. 179).
Toscano (2010, p. xxi).
Bataille (1985b, p. 203).
Bataille (2001, p. 25).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997a, p. 139).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997a, pp. 139–40).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997d, p. 131).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997b, p. 118).
James (2006, p. 160) argues that, for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, the tradition of Western metaphysics consistently conceives of political community on the basis of the subject: “What Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe are demanding is a recognition of this attempt to provide figures of the human within the tradition of Western metaphysics and a lucid account of the manner in which these figures are then proffered as a basis for political community within specific historical formations.”.
This problematic of the subject is developed in Nancy (2002).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997b, p. 116).
Besnier (1990, p. 178).
Quoted in Surya (2002, p. 218).
Bataille (1985a, p. 162).
Hollier (1988, p. xxi). Hollier, however, also insists that the Bataillean ‘group’ must not be approached as a collective subject.
Hegel (1967, p. 191).
Hegel (1967, p. 188).
Hegel (1967, p. 183).
Nancy (1993, p. 129).
Nancy (1993, p. 116).
Nancy (1991, p. 12).
Nancy (1991, p. 15).
Prior to reappearing in The Inoperative Community, the concept of the Subject-State is developed in Nancy (1993, pp. 124, 137).
Nancy (1991, p. 23).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997c, p. 30).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997c, p. 5).
Laclau (2005, p. 53).
Laclau (2005, p. 56).
Freud (1955, p. 108).
On this point see Stavrakakis (1999, p. 78). “In Freud’s view, what can unite thousands or millions of people is the relation—and the libidinal investment of this relation—of each one of them to a leader (political, religious or military) or an idea occupying the position of a point de capiton, a common point of reference. When the leader disappears (when for example the general is killed in battle) the mass disintegrates. It is the point de capiton then which creates unity.”
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997c, p. 8).
Borch-Jacobsen (1988, p. 133).
Lacan (2006, pp. 89–98). In particular, see Thesis IV entitled “Aggressiveness is the tendency correlated with a mode of identification I call narcissistic, which determines the formal structure of man’s ego and of the register of entities characteristic of his world.”
Freud (1955, p. 102).
Lacan (2006, p. 95) draws on Freud’s “Group Psychology” as well as Totem and Taboo to underscore “the ‘pacifying’ function of the ego-ideal: the connection between its libidinal normativeness and a cultural normativeness, bound up since the dawn of history with the imago of the father.”
Freud (1955, p. 100).
Badiou (2012, pp. 45–7).
Badiou (2010, p. 258).
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997c, p. 14).
Hegel (1967, p. 288).
Hollier (1989, p. xii).
Bataille (1985c, p. 198).
Bataille (1985c, p. 199).
Bataille (1988, p. 27).
Badiou (2010, p. 243).Without conflating the concept of the event and the Lacanian concept of the real, Badiou himself calls attention to “the intrinsically real aspect of the event.”
Nancy (2009, p. 21).
An attempt to argue Bataille’s relevance to Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Badiou’s philosophy is at the heart of my unpublished follow-up to the present essay, “The Acephalic Subject: Bataille’s Politics of the Impossible and the Exigency of Separation.”
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Gordienko, A. The acephalic community: Bataillean sovereignty, the question of relation, and the passage to the subject. Cont Philos Rev 52, 75–90 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-017-9414-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-017-9414-8