Nancy Jean-Luc - Philosophical Chronicles

Philosophical Chronicles

Series Board

Francis J. Ambrosio

Michael D. Barber

Jeffrey Bloechl

Ilse N. Bulhof

Thomas W. Busch

Trish Glazebrook

Kevin Hart

Karl Jaspers

Richard Kearney

James H. Olthuis

Michael Strawser

James Swindal

Mark C. Taylor

Edith Wyschogrod

Philosophical Chronicles

These eleven chronicles were broadcast on the radio between September 2002 and July 2003, on the last Friday of each month, as part of France Cultures program Philosophy Fridays. The broadcast was directed, on behalf of the Collge International de Philosophie, by Franois Noudelmann, whom I thank for his invitation.

The texts published here correspond almost exactly to the texts that were actually delivered (and recorded for the Web site and the archives of France Culture). In each case, the context of speech led to some improvisation; some of these changes were written down and are reproduced here, others remain only in the spoken version.

The musical accompaniment for the chronicles, suggested by Franois Noudelmann, was the aria In lagrime stemprato il cor qui cade, from Antonio Caldaras Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo.

Some of these chronicles have been published in several issues of Rue Descartes, the journal of the Collge International de Philosophie.

JEAN-LUC NANCY

Translated by Franson Manjali

Copyright 2008 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Philosophical Chronicles was originally published in French as Chroniques philosophiques, by Jean-Luc Nancy, Copyright ditions Galile, 2004.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nancy, Jean-Luc.
[Chroniques philosophiques. English]
Philosophical chronicles / Jean-Luc Nancy ; translated by
Franson Manjali.
p. cm.(Perspectives in continental philosophy series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2758-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Philosophy, Modern21st century. I. Title.
B792.N3513 2008
194dc22
2007046913

This work has been published with the assistance of the French Ministry of CultureNational Center for the Book.

Ouvrage publi avec le concours du Ministre franais charg de la cultureCentre National du Livre.

This book, comprising texts of monthly talks or chronicles presented over a period of eleven months on France Culture radio, connects up philosophy with several nodes of contemporary life. The chronicles of an old disciplineperhaps the oldest living disciplinecannot but relate the chronic problems and crises it faces in its very act of survival. Though philosophys very existence depends on its being unconditioned, in its course of development, philosophers tend to submit it to various conditionalities, including a cultural conditionality that is much in vogue today. However, philosophy lives and survives its crises by continually withdrawing itself from all given conditionalities, without ever being able to hook itself onto any permanent notion of the unconditioned. The rhythm or the pulsation of philosophy always takes it outside of itself, opens it toward what Nancy calls the time of thought, where it encounters the absolutely non-given. These chronicles point to a chronic opening up of philosophy toward the undecidable time to come.

The movement toward an unknown exterior that philosophy requires today is not merely of a temporal kind. Behind the current crisis (certainly not a clash, as it is claimed) of civilizations manifest in unprecedented religious and nationalist fervors or global capitalist maneuverings, Nancy identifies the aging of a culture of autonomy. As the autonomous form of life and the associated auto-motive techniques of this culture are approaching senility, philosophy may well suggest the reinvention of an entire mode of existence. Exonomy is the name that Nancy gives to this alternative law or mode of existence, distinct from heteronomy but conceptually akin to exogamy. The space of exonomy is outside the space of both self and other; it is an in-between space, always not yet given.

If philosophy can guide us into another time and another space, what, then, is it to life? Is philosophy a part of it, or outside? Does it guide the conduct of life or stand aloof as a conceptual guide? Is it of the order of actions or of reasons? All such questions and the tensions to which they give rise are internal to philosophy, according to Nancy, making philosophy something like an intimate form of life. It is not, however, a prior form, available either transcendentally or empirically, but it appears out of life itself as its possible formation. Philosophy inserts itself into and emerges from the space of discourses already given, whether of religion, of the quotidian, or of politics, science, or art; it is the spacing of these discourses. As spacing, its sense exceeds every given sense, not only in and of life, but even in death, and of death.

The question of philosophys response to religionone of the most ancient and most profound aspects of civilizational existenceis posed in the context of the renewed war cries in the name of religion in the contemporary world. Nancy analyzes the problem in terms of the very character of monotheism: in the name of a single and all-encompassing god, it abandons man to solitude in a state of godlessness. And then it seeks to gather these abandoned human beings into the totality and universality of a newly found truth. Even while colonial expansions and conquests are undertaken in the name of truth, the bogus assurance of religious salvation is still held forth, only reinforcing mans abandonment. Such is the context that demands a deconstruction of monotheism, in order to extract what is repressed in it, denied by it, and left outside its own totality.

The decline of the meaning of the word politics is not of a different kind. In the politically charged world of today, where every sphere of life has necessarily become political, nothing is seriously discerned as political, except in an overused sense of the word. The current critical sense of the word political, Nancy notes, was introduced recently in our languages, in order to understand the process behind what used to be considered the art of politics. In order to retrieve the specificity of a contemporary art of politics, we might well have to retreat from the current totalitarian notion of politics, as applying everywhere at all times.

The best example of a major philosopher going astray in his understanding of the conjunction between politics and history is Heidegger. Between politics call for justice, and historys call for action, where have philosophers, at least since Hegel, put their stakes? And with what consequences? Can the mechanism of history and the affirmation of its struggle, perceived from the given position of the philosopher, usher in justice without subjecting the other to the will of the self? On this question foundered, not only Heidegger the reactionary, but perhaps various Marxisms too, though in different ways. How can the necessity of a politics of justice cope with the unfolding of historical events?

Historys everyday events are even more difficult to interpret in a philosophical or political sense. Philosophers dilemma, that is, when they have to deal with the everyday, is in deciding whether mundane daily events are to be inscribed into a higher level ofphilosophical, historical, political, or aestheticsense, or left as insignificant. Though on occasion one can make some everyday events appear, nonappearance is the essential mode of the everyday. It vascillates between hiding in the open and chance appearances in creative works. Yet now and then the everyday makes an unintended appearance in catastrophic and mortal events, such as earthquakes and wars. It is in such situations that an unmarked life is in silent contact with the nonapparent lives of all those who are living and dead, without this event ever rising beyond the level of everyday appearance.