Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy

Dialogue on the Philosophy to Come

[The following dialogue began as a result of prefaces Nancy and Esposito wrote for each others works: Nancys preface to the French edition of Communitas (Conloquium, translated in this volume) and Espositos preface to the Italian edition of The Experience of Freedom (Lesperienza della libert).] Esposito The first question cannot be about anything else but the meaning and destiny of that activity which, regardless of everything else, we can and still must call philosophy. This is particularly the case when philosophy ends, in the sense of a coming to an end as well as what is always already finished, namely what is constitutively incapable of reasoning its own proper reason for being. The question then becomes what does a philosophy after philosophy mean, how is it to be thought, or, better, how is a philosophy of non-philosophy to be thought? On the one hand, it is a question which brings us to Heidegger and his interpretation of the end of philosophy as the very task of thought. On the other hand, the end of philosophy marks a radical distancing from Heidegger and from the inevitably dialectic modality in which even that thought of the end winds up being captured in the philosophy of what announces the end. Without being able here to linger over the reasons for such an internal folding in Heideggers discourse, the reason for the end of philosophy, I believe, needs to be laid at the doorstep of its most radical meaning: a finished philosophy is a philosophy that lies outside philosophy. From this perspective a phrase from George Canguilhems The Normal and the Pathological can provide us with a possible direction: Philosophy is a reflection for which all unknown material is good, and we would gladly say, for which all good material must be unknown (7). This means that every philosophical practice that is self-referential, endogamic, and selfcentered has been exhausted, which is to say that every philosophy that demands to take philosophy as its own object or that demands that its object be proper to philosophy rather than common is exhausted. It also means that this is the case in which such selfreflexive behavior is given and still continues to be given, be it in philosophy, historiography, metaphilosophy, or the philosophy of philosophy. Canguilhem, in speaking against these forms, wants to tell us that what lies within philosophy is precisely philosophys outside.

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All of which brings to mind another proposition, this one from Deleuze, and it too centers on the constitutive relation of philosophy to non-philosophy: The philosopher must become nonphilosopher so that nonphilosophy becomes the earth and people of philosophy (109). With the reference to the earth and the continual movement of territorialization and deterritorialization to which our tradition of thought is assimilated, it seems that Deleuze provides us with a further clue vis--vis the epochal meaning of the end of philosophy and perhaps an explanation as well of the profound reason for how the end of philosophy seems to outstrip Heideggers thought. Heidegger, when speaking of the end, continues to treat philosophy in the dimension of time, while what is probably needed today is to bring the end in line with a spatial semantics. This is how Deleuze puts it: Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and earth (85). Although this would expose philosophy to the risk of circumscribing it within a fixed earth, it would also certainly open philosophy to the possibility of making itself, as you argue, the thought of the world in the subjective and objective senses of the expression. Nancy On the question of space that you raise, if you will allow me I would like to take up a theme that I already touched on in the preface I wrote for my friend Benoit Goetz on the architecture of thought. What we are dealing with here is really space. For more than forty years now we have known that we are living in the epoch of space (Foucault was one of the first to tell us this in the 1960s). More often than not, this epoch of space is juxtaposed against the epoch of history that would have come earlier, which then died out little by little in the second half of the twentieth century. There can be no doubt that this century will be remembered for the suspicions it raised against history, since history was at the center of the previous centurys attention. Yet it is not enough merely to diagnose the succession and the substitution of a spatial model for a temporal one given that there are deeper and more complex reasons that account for putting forward the spatial schema (or that of spacing) in a horizon such as the present one. The history in which Enlightenment thinkers, Romantics, and proponents of industrial progress recognized themselves was for the most part the history of the conquest of space: the completion of the process of the colonialization, independence, and development of the Americas; territorial realignments in Europe; and immigrations that were the effect of the two preceding phenomenaall accompanied by a growing technical mastery of maritime and terrestrial distances

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(steam, air, pistons), of electric communications either underwater or above, and of the spaces of urban and interurban circulation. In that epoch the streets, the railroads, the cables, and the cities in which we live acquired their present configuration. The surface of the planet no longer has any terrae incognitae, maps no longer contain blank spaces: Timbuktu and Lhasa, the deserts and the North and South Poleeverything has already been explored. Expeditions to far-off territories have achieved their mission and now give way to a conquest of interplanetary and interstellar space that does not have the same rhythm or meaning. This is because we are no longer dealing with uncovering the secrets of the earth but rather of coordinating the extension of transmissions in the confines of a reciprocal surveillance and the intimidations of economic and political powers [ potenze]. Therefore in some measure what we have lived was really the history of a progressive saturation of terrestrial space. What some have referred to as the end of history corresponds to this complete occupation of space. It is as if the historical impetus was made possible by the fact that what was once called the known world could still grow. Yet, once all of space became knownour space, that in which we effectively live and that which extends in conjunction with our steps, our gazes, and our armsthere was a diminution of the knowledge of conquest, expansion, and discovery that wound up coinciding with the self-knowledge of the West. It is perhaps no accident that the two terrible shocks of the last century fascism and communismwere joined together by a sort of will to spatial power. On the one hand there was the idea of a vital space that needed to be conquered in order to set up a thousand year Reich of a superior race. On the other hand we have the domination and exploitation of an immense territorial expanse that remained unsubjected to industrial conquest. In different ways, both the fascist and communist empires ended either in smoke or in the mud. Their spaces imploded. Yet, in a certain sense, the entire space of humanity and of nature imploded. Now completely conquered in every dimension (the four dimensions of Euclidian space-time, non-Euclidian dimensions, and the dimensions of the infinitely large and the infinitely small for size, mass, force, velocity), space has ceased to be an extendable volume in which one rises up or, better, in which the explorer himself widens the expansion. The extension has ceased to be expansive and has now, if anything, become intensive: forces conjoined; powers [ potenze] condensed, compressed and concentrated in small particles or fibers; billions of bytes of energy and information conveyed in a space-time

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that is practically nothing [nullo]. Yet from all of this extension space has emerged disoriented: space, folded in on itself, has lost its own propensity to spaciousness and opening. It no longer appears as a place of unfolding and traversing, of passage, of paths, or of sojourn. In some ways space is no longer properly dimensional: the earth is reduced to a point, to a point without dimensions. It is the anguished knowledge of this refolding that in turn generates a thought of spacea thought that is at the same time anguish and a struggle against anguish, that is a point of departure for another history or, better, another spacing. It is no longer a question of philosophy; it is no longer a question of taking up a view or of sharpening our visionthe view [veduta] required by the history of artof the world, of being or a meaning. Rather it is a question of opening a space that was not visible initially, of opening a space for a view or a space of viewing that will no longer be a space in front of a gaze. If in the past philosophy had the meaning of contemplating and gazing [fissare], today it means to open the eyes, eyes which until now had remained shut. Stated differently, in its beginnings philosophy was the effect of a novel experience of the worldnew, difficult, troubling, and exciting. And it is this reality of experience that we find today. Perhaps it was never destroyed. But let us say that today philosophy can no longer cover that experience over or have something else come before it, not even philosophys own history inasmuch as it is precisely out of this history that philosophy needs to rebuild its experience. Esposito I agree that we cannot substitute the dimension of space for timehow could webut that the dimension of space can be crossed with it, spatializing time, but also apparently historicizing space. Space, which is anything but subtracted from real relations of force and power (and also of resistance and liberation), is made one with them, and together they define their position, imposition, and exposition. Furthermore, it was Heidegger himself to whom we referred critically before, who also wrote that only when space makes space and makes free a what of freedom, space accords, thanks to this, the possibility of lands, of nearness and distance, of directions and limits, the possibilities of distance and size (13). Especially in The Experience of Freedom, you yourself have insisted on the connection between space and freedomfreedom as that form of sharing that unites by separating. Without wanting to take up that theme directly, I would like to raise a more general question about the relation between philosophy and politics. It is ultimately a different perspective with which to examine the same

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question of the endof philosophy, but also in some way the end of politics. How are philosophy and politics related in the space-time of their end? I would begin by considering that we are not concerned here with a simple relation (that is of a relation between different things) and that from the arising of the polis philosophy and politics intersect in a point of originary indistinction that precedes the constitution of the separate languages of the philosophical and the political. This common element precedes every other consideration that has signified the failure of every form of functional subordination: the imposition of a philosophy on the part of politics and the directing of politics on the part of a philosophy. I believe that this is the reason both for the withdrawal of the political proposed by you as well as by Lacoue-Labarthe in France and for the perspective of the impolitical which was elaborated during much the same time in Italy. Both developments made this point quite clearly, namely the need to take up distance from all forms of political philosophy based on the subjective primacy of one of the two terms with respect to the other, which afterwards is reduced to a simple predicate. Yet now that this necessary work of deconstruction is done, it seems to me that this is the time to underline more forcefully than ever the affirmative side of the withdrawal of the impolitical, and that is the objective superimposition of the question of philosophy onto that of the world. Beware that this does not mean that philosophy has the hermeneutic role of interpreting the world, nor that it has the operative role of being realized in the world, but rather that in some way philosophy is the world if by world one understands the singular plural finiteness of an existence abandoned to the absence of sense. Philosophy today needs to have the force to see itself in this flight from sense, in this non-sense that is the sense of a world that has been given to the world alone. Obviously, such a judgment immediately raises the theme of nihilism and the problem of what nihilism means not only for philosophy but also for politics. How do you see the relation between nihilism and politics and, more precisely still, between nihilism and community? My feeling is that one needs to excavate different levels of nothing. On the one hand nothing is what we share, the munus that links all of us in a reciprocal non-identity, in a necessary alteration; on the other hand nothing is what continually tends to annihilate the same sharing. What do you think? Nancy Politics and philosophy have an orginary feature in common: both are born from the disappearance of the gods. This seems obviously to be the case for philosophy but it is true as well for politics. The city had its own divinities, but these were precisely its

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own divinities. As such, these divinities take the place of others that were true, effective, and efficacious presences of animals, springs, trees, or clouds. The gods of the city are no longer presences, places, or phenomena but rather are metaphors of the city. They are also subordinated to the city, especially perhaps in the case in which the city is something that cannot be found, is something lost, or is not up to that which it should be. Philosophy and politics are founded together in the field of an essential withdrawing: that of the gods, that of being-together (the gods were custodians of the totality and the totality was assembled by their own gods), or, to put it better, in the withdrawal of presence. If one can define metaphysics as a metaphysics of presence, the sense given to it by Nietzsche and then by Heidegger (a definition that as such is to be attributed of course to Derrida), then we also need to understand that the presence of metaphysics is the effect of a relation of loss with regard to an originary or divine presence. Metaphysics (philosophy, monotheism, the West) affirms presence as a Vorhandenheit (objective presence) of being [essente] against the backdrop of the eclipse of presence that could found this being (that would have founded it, that should have founded it, etc.). Politics affirms the co-presence of the members of a body politic against the background of the eclipse of sovereign and hierarchical (a term that contains the root hieros, sacred) presence that would have founded it, that should have founded it, etc. We are therefore always in mourning for the loss of a true or originary presence. How are we to take leave from such a mourning, or better how are we to take leave of nihilism? It is on this point that we need to open our eyes, eyes that until now have not been opened, although they are perhaps the same that are opened in all epochsin every new epoch and in every new dayto configure a new, novel world. Eyes for seeing a sense that is no longer the sense that we understood (that we understood to affirm or reject it, being Hegel or his opposite, who is still Hegel). Or ears. Certainly, in such a situation it cannot be enough to affirm the null of the relation, the interval between the ones and the others or between being [essere] and being [essente], the anguish and the withdrawal of every god. But there is no need to restore the gods. We restore the pictures but not the sense. Therefore we need to excavate nothing [nulla] and by this I mean that we need to go deeper into the nihil of nihilism, in order to glimpse what separates, what dislocates and what at the same time binds anew, what reconstitutes a link and a place.

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Esposito You also propose that there is a need to rethink the question of nihilism. This is a task that we have tried to take up together in the recent Nichilismo e politica [Nihilism and Politics], which brings to mind Walter Benjamins enigmatic proposition that nihilism constitutes the method of world political action. Beyond all of the many possible interpretations of the passage, it is clear that Benjamin is alluding to the end of political theology, namely the paradigm that identifies, refigures, and represents the beingtogether in the form of the One or, in other words, the paradigm that presupposes a subjectivity imperative to the relation among human beings according to the modalities typical of onto-theological tradition. When you make reference to the eclipse of sovereign and hierarchical presence as the transcendental foundation of the social body, you are clearly alluding to the possibility of a politics that is no longer founded on the sacrificial model, a model that has marked world history for so long. In this regard it is remarkable that an impolitical thinker such as Maria Zambrano could speak of absolutism as the sacrificial structure of society, opposing it to a democracy that cannot be represented by a sovereign principle (93). Nevertheless, here lies the problem and in a double sense: first because it is difficult to think any political form without figure and representation and that is ultimately without myth, and second because the simple inversion of political-theological into its oppositethat is, an absolute technical neutralization risks remaining captured by the same metaphysical fold that it intends to eliminate. Is this not secularization political theology turned inside out? Or, to look at it from another point of view, is deconstruction not the mechanism of recharging that is internal to the same Christianism, as you underscored recently in another text? This is the reason why one cannot sacrifice the sacrificial paradigm without falling again into the dialectic of subjection [soggezione] and subjugation [assoggettamento]. The other choice would be to change the language itself in which all of this is offered. In this way one would evade not only positive and negative political theology but also secularization. There would not be any kind of residue of substance and subjectivity superimposed over the definition of being together (though it would be better to say over experience). Once again we have to think politics in the revocation of its founding presuppositions, in the withdrawal of its mechanisms of sovereign totalization. Nancy Perhaps we need to stop thinking that everything is political. In political-theological discourse, whereby the sovereign assumption, the mystical political body, love, and glory are the

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guiding principles of everything, everything is political. Everything is political as well in the apparent reversal of such a discourse (the diminishing of the political distinctionthe Statethat touches every sphere of social existence as Marx says). Today too this more or less declared axiom circulates, more or less consciously, in every discourse on the left. It is true that it responds to the necessity to struggle against the presumed depoliticization of a globalization that is desired as exclusively technical and economic. Yet at the same time it is also true that mondialisation demands the deconstruction of the axiom according to which everything is political. This because mondialisation cannot be reduced to mere capitalist globalization. As I have written elsewhere, in the logic of a political metaphysics, everything is political is the basic assumption from which one deduces that to be actualized politics itself, understood as a separate sphere from an institution or a knowledge (or an art) with its own specificity, can tend only towards the suppression of politics own separation. This accounts for the natural totality that politics expresses or initially announces. In that sense, there really is not a difference between everything is political and everything is economic. This is how democracy and the market take turns in the process that we call mondialisation. Everything is political means affirming that there exists a self-sufficiency of man, understood in turn as the producer of his own nature and, with it, of all of nature. Today, the indistinct representation of self-sufficiency and of this self-production dominates from top to bottom all representations of politics, whether these be on the right or on the left, or at least dominates those that set out a political global project that is either in favor or against the State, consensual or revolutionary, etc. One does find as well a weak version of politics, understood as the mere regulative act, which is to say the correction of dis-equilibria and the reduction of tensions; however, the setting for this social-democratic bricolage, which is for the most part respectable even when it is often the result of compromises, always remains the same. Against the backdrop of what we today call the crisis or the eclipse or the paralysis of politics, the only authentic question to be posed is that of the self-sufficiency of man and of nature. Yet it is because of this self-sufficiency that day after day the present seems to be inconsistent. Mondialisationthe general oiko-logicization of the polis increasingly makes visible with a growing violence the non-naturality of the same process of mondialisation, and also, over the long term, the non-naturality of the supposed nature. We have never found ourselves immersed to such a degree in the sphere of a meta-physis. Politics is portrayed as totality and totalization. In that sense everything is not political.

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But politics is redefined as the place for exercising power [ potere] with a view towards an incommensurable justice, or as the place of a claim for an in-finity of the being-human [essere-uomo] and being-in-the-world. By definition, politics does not reabsorb in itself all other places of existence. The other places are those where the incommensurability is in some way formed and presented. Incommensurability can call itself art, religion, thought, science, ethics, conduct, exchange, production, love, war, lineage, or exhilaration, and it can have an infinite number of other names. Their reciprocal distinction and circumscription (which does not diminish in any way their relations of contiguity and co-penetration) always describes the occurrence of a configuration in which a certain presentation takes place, even if afterwards such a presentation gives form to an impresentation or to a withdrawal of presence. In any event, non-political spheres are not those of the private juxtaposed against the public: each sphere is public and private, if we are forced to use these terms. Each one is divided in the double sense of the word. Among these different configurations (and again without excluding contacts and contagions among them) there is incommensurability. It is here that politics once again appears, as the place from which we need to keep open this incommensurability and to keep open in general the incommensurability of justice, as well as of value. Contrary to what is affirmed by theological-political as well as economic-political discourse, but not without a relation to what was put into play in the polis before politics if we may put it thusly, politics is no longer the place of the assumption of a uni-totality. Consequently, neither is it any longer the place of a putting-into-form or a putting-into-presence of incommensurability or of any other kind of unity of origin and end nor, in other words, of a humanity. Space and spacing lie with politics but not with the figure. Politics becomes precisely a site of detotalization, or we could risk saying that if everything is political (but with a different meaning from that of theology and/or political economy) then it is in the sense in which everything can no longer in any way be total or totalized. Esposito When you say that the idea of producing the proper communal essence has dominated and frequently continues to dominate representations of both the political left and right, you touch on the question which, more than any other, joins our respective itineraries, which is to say the question of the community with all its risks but also with the potentialities contained therein. Above all,

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not only risks which are evoked by the tragic history of the century that we are leaving behind but also risks which are present and operative both defensively and aggressively in how a certain practice of community takes place in a large part of the world. In one of your texts you point out how the intercommunitarian violence that from Indonesia to the Congo, from Ireland to the Balkans confers on the name of community the sound of death (Conloquium 103). Nevertheless, in this same text, as in all your others, you repeat that this drift in meaning establishes the need to rethink the cum as that which and to which we above all respond. Here you say cum referring to Descartes ego sum which you translate as ego cumthe same I cannot be thought except in relation to others. Therefore, rather than referring to a body, an essence, or a common subject, community refers precisely to this game of relation and distinction, to the proximity of the interval and of proximity. This is the reason that, despite an account of the failure of all communisms and the danger of all communitarianisms, the community remains our question. One might even come to the point of posing our own unique questions, that which makes the escape from sense still our sense, the sense of we. This is why I found it a little strange, given the theoretical force and extraordinary semantic sensibility of your thought, to find Derrida expressing a certain diffidence with respect to the category of community (above all in The Politics of Friendship but also subterraneously in On Touching, in which he does not cite, not even once, The Inoperative Community) in favor of the category of friendship which is in some way more subjective or intersubjective. It is true that Derrida attacks an idea of substantialist community that is not yours (nor, clearly, mine either), but precisely for this reason he gives the impression of fearing a term that already opens to another sensethe proof of which will be found in your own writings. Nancy You should ask Derrida the same question about his diffidence or hostility to the theme of community. But Ill agree to sketch a response that will obviously be mine and not his. First we need to remember that Derrida is not the only one to have raised objections about the term community. To cite other examples, both LacoueLabarthe and Badiou also reject this word, while Rancire and Agamben both use it. Generally, a clear division with regard to the term emerged immediately after I published the first version of The Inoperative Community. It concerned a division between those who recognized the need for such a theme and those who condemned the weight of its past (both its Nazi past, for which at the time I was rebuked in Germany, as well as its Christian or Judeo-Christian

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past; Derrida, for example, is much more guarded with respect to the Jewish community). Can we separate the theme of community from its past? Certainly not completely. The communitarian and/or communal premise, the Gemeinschaft against the Gesellschaft, all of it contains the terrible germs that we know so well and that today can be used again for the flags of diverse ethnic and ethno-religious identities. I completely understand these kinds of reservations and I share them, since with the definition of an inoperative community I wanted precisely to speak of a community that does not put into effect any community. This is why I have continued to let the lexicon that I had been using slide from being-in-common, being-together, and separation, arriving at being-with or the pure and simple with, as one will see in Being Singular Plural. I should note in passing how all these words and expressions, perhaps with the exception of being-with and with, which are rather bare in Francewere frequently to be rediscovered in circulation in public discourses, at least in France; it was almost as if there was a need to master the terms in order to design a reality as obscure and ambiguous as that of co-existence. All of these small linguistic phenomena taken together indicate something and that is a poverty of words and thought for the principal question: the co-, etc. Please note that one could just as well say the subject, a word that is often relegated to a metaphysical and/ or subjectivist lexicon, but a word also claimed by Lacanians as the name of he who finally has a place only in the division from self and a word that, having place, opens for the post-Lacanians the problem of subjectivization (that is, in some way, an appropriation without an identitarian subject and a process rather than a substance). We are still concerned here with the same difficulty and the same poverty I mentioned above. I would even dare to say that these are the refracted and diffuse effects of the dissolution or the dis-identification of man: neither the generic human [uomo], nor a human [uomo], nor for that matter humans [uomini] themselves make sense any longer or constitute a clear reference for this world that continues to call itself humanistic even in the most banal of discourses. When you in your most recent works interpret the community in its classic and metaphysical sense as immunity, you too are diffident with regard to community. And your semantic and etymological analysis of communitas and immunitas is of course spot on. One could only add that community in our languages is even weightier and more substantialist than immunity, which designates a quality, a property, while community comes to designate a being, a subject (a suppositum, in the scholastic sense).

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Esposito On this score we agree. We need to be ever on the lookout for every substantialist lapse of the idea and the practice of community. But I believe that in Derridas rejection there is something else at work that has to do with what one could call in abbreviated fashion choosing ethics over ontology. It is as if his understandable reluctance with respect to Heidegger moved Derrida progressively to Levinas, despite the distance that separated them on other grounds (for example the relation between Judaism, Christianism, and Greek antiquity). You know of course that personally I lean more towards the other side, in the sense that I consider the ontological question the greater priority both in radically post-Heideggerean terms and with regard to ethics. Nevertheless, I am not hiding the problem: beginning with ontology, how can one respond to the question posed by ethics? You have tried to overcome this difficulty by evoking an originary ethics that is one with ontology, which in turn is subtracted from the presupposition of Being and leads back to the singular plurality of existence. Yet it seems to me that the problem does not disappear. This because it is undeniable that breaking with a politics of sacrifice is, in addition to being an epochal necessity, always as well a prescription of the ethical kind, as it appears here and there in your own texts, even on the level of expression. For example, you write in Being Singular Plural that the thought of us [...] is [...] a praxis and an ethos: the staging of co-appearance, the staging which is co-appearing. We are always already there at each instant. This is not innovationbut the stage must be reinvented: we must reinvent it each time, each time making our entrance anew (71). What meaning needs to be given to that must [il faut] if not that of an ethical demand and therefore a demand that is inevitably normative? In other words, beginning with the coincidence without remains between world and sense and therefore with the refusal to postpone meaning to something that is not the present condition of existence itself, how is political activity thinkable? Does it not wind up being reduced to a simple function of keeping the world as it is? What distinguishes this position from the Heideggerean one of abandonment to the destiny of being-as-is of being [essere-cos dellente]? I know full well that one can respond that the originary ethics consists of a decision to allow space for existence in all its infinite fragments of sense and that therefore a desirable politics is one of constructing the conditions for such an ontological ethics or for such an ethical ontology. But is this definition sufficient and of course it is a question I also ask myselfto be a response to the infinite pain, hunger, war, and death that are checked and also

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expanded by the present sense of the world? I am sure that on this point one needs to think something that still escapes us, but which is tied to a radical practice of democracy. Nancy Keeping the world as it is? No certainly not, seeing as how the world is such only when and to the degree to which the world is or makes sense. And sense means: that which makes it such that humans and the rest of being [essente] refer one to the other without making either subservient to a first or ultimate moment. One resolves nothing by dividing the world between famine and indigestion, informatic perversion and illiteracy, AIDs and organ transplants, ethnic myths and democratic indifference; this much is clear. There is no ethics without morality! The holding to [tenuta] demands respect for justice and for all those values that are perfectly traditional, provided that it is really clear that : 1. humanist ideology in its totality has always and categorically devalorized these values in the practical sense; and 2. justice, dignity, man himself, the human in the first instance (but also nature if we prefer to give it that name) are values that are beyond any possible valuation. They are absolutes the measure of which remains open and always to be invented. The holding to is also the holding to of a language that is the match of the incommensurable. If you want, we could even say that we need to fight against all exploitation, wars, etc., but always at the same time through and in the name of a language that does not cede anything with regard to thought, poetry, mysticism, songwhatever name you might wish to give them. I would like almost to say that the ethos is 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 of the question, and that is from the side of technology [tecnica]. From the very beginning an unbreakable link was notedjust read Plato in this regardthat joins technology to politics. All discourses (including Habermas but also Arendts) that begin with the categorical juxtaposition between praxis and poiesis, between politics and technology, are not only missing a foundation, but are also condemned to come up short with regard to our own time in which the complementary origineity of technology and politics is disclosed. There is also, as you have emphasized, a similar complementary origineity of techne and physis: technology is precisely the element that specifies human nature, just as the great German philosophical anthropology explained it before Derrida. The essence of man lies in his inessentiality, as what is most proper lies in the improper, and therefore, I would add, in the common.

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Technology, techniques, or the arts (the name which encapsulates them, and here one would need to develop a broader reflection on the meaning of art that you have already begun in Muses) exposes us to the finiteness without limit of existence, naturally with all the risk implicit in every type of unlimitedness. This is precisely the paradox of a technology which, constructed for our mastery of it, always appears stronger than we are. Nevertheless, in this instance, as in mondialisation, there can be no doubt that every road back is blocked; every return to the natural origin is impossible since, as we have seen, the origin does not exist per se. The problem consists in knowing how to proceed with and within the technologization of the world (or, and it is the same thing, the mondialisation of technology). Technology breaks every control, command, and sovereign power, and it marks the end of the same category of sovereignty. But in this way at the same time technology destroys politics, which until now had been linked to such a category in favor of the economy or, better still, financial flows without a name. This means that we can face technology affirmatively only when we will be capable of thinking a politics outside of sovereignty but also outside politics obsessive auto-immunitarian duress. On this score, Giorgio Agamben speaks of a politics of pure means, which is a suggestive formula but also very indeterminate. One could speak as well of a politics of pure finality, of a finality without goals [ fini]. But perhaps it would be better to say a politics not of the cause (of the means and of the goal) but of the thing. Nancy Technology completely remains to be thought. We register beforehand the sense of the word technology within the semantic grid that prescribes its subordination to science, to thought, to art, to ethics, etc. We are dealing with a double subordination: first of the means to the end and then of the instrumental to the liberal (in the sense of liberal arts). Nevertheless, one cannot think of reversing this subordination in some infantile way. Utensils remain utensils, and my program for writing does not contain a program for thought or for poetry. But to think the instrument or to think the programnow that is something different. This something different is not simply non-technology. It is a technology as well, a knowledge whose objectives [ fini] are not defined. If you prefer, I am in agreement about the finality without goals, or a goal that one could define as a non-fulfillment similar to that of art, of eroticism, or of love: not the satisfaction, being satiated, or entropy, but the further branching out of energy, including falls and absences, suspensions and losses. A goal without a telos; can we define it that way?

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Man [luomo] is the technology that nature produces as if to denaturalize him. Such a goal, as long as we define it by terms like monstrous or absurd, cannot be overturned by having recourse to the magic of some theodicy, but must be understood differently. We need different categories, another thought, beginning with technology, that art instituted strangely by the same denaturalized existence. Esposito The contiguity between nature and artifice as the arena for defining technology brings us to the decisive question of the body, a question which for some time now you have made the center of your work in a way that I find both original in its approach and problematic in its results. I am especially perplexed by your idea that the body is in some way communitarian, as if the community always has something to do with the body. This thesis is tied to what seems to me to be a topos that goes unreflected upon in our culture (psycho-analytic, feminist, progressive), which is to say that the body would always be the repressed and the rejected element of Western civilization, that the West has always hated the body (as you say in the opening of Corpus). It seems to me that this is not really the way things stand. At the center of the imaginary, of theory, of Western practice, there is nothing more than the body, which is unified precisely by a metaphor, that of the State-body that has lasted more than two thousand years and which in some way is still standing. In additionand this is something that Foucault saw with extraordinary claritynever more than today has the body become the very object of knowledge-powerpolitical, juridical, medical, mediatic, etc. My thesis is that this is not the result of the relation that you sketch between the body and community, but rather between that of the body and immunity. The body is the same place in which the immunitarian dispositif finds its supreme synthesis between bio-medical language and juridical language. This happensdespite the possible technical connections that the body resists thanks to its apparatus of self-defense (as you so intensely recount it in L intrus)because the body is in its essence the very site of the proper, of the organic, of the enclosed, of that which we are less disposed to allow to be altered, crossed, or allowed to be infected by the other. Rather, it seems to me that the principle of alteration or contamination evokes instead the semantics of flesh understood exactly as the opening of the body, the bodys expropriation, its common being. On this score I believe that we need to rediscover a subterranean line of discourse in our tradition which today current French phenomenological research has taken up againthat sees in flesh the space opened, uncovered, and lacerated

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by community, just as the body was always that of immunity, enclosed and compact. Flesh refers to the outside as body does to the inside: it is the point and the margin in which the body is no longer body but is its reverse and its base sundered, as Merleau-Ponty had intuited. This explains the communitarian power [ potenza] of the figure of the incarnation with respect to that of the immunitarian, of incorporation, and of corporation (which, not accidentally, is typical of all fascisms): in the incarnation, Christ escapes from his properly divine nature to become other from himself. I would say that the metaphor of incarnation is the element that explains the enduring vitality of Christianism at the end of Christian religion. The element that resists its own self-deconstruction because it touches most profoundly and originally the question of the common munus: we ourselves as the infinite flesh of the world. I believe that the first task of a philosophy to come is above all that of replacing terms like earth, body, and immunity, with terms like world, flesh, and community. Nancy Can one really argue that I am proposing a communitarian body? This seems foreign at least in part to my way of thinking, perhaps because I have not explained myself sufficiently. It is clear that as long as body designates an organic body, body also designates a mystical body that is nothing other than the speculative truth of the organic body. But I wanted precisely to subtract the body from this schema, from the idea of a mystical assumption united to the image of the living that develops and grows by way of intussusception, as Kant says. For me, body designates the separated piece, the thing extended that breaks off from the others and that can touch them, avoid contact with them, bang into them, graze them, and that perhaps are joined to them, but that are also let loose, so as to roll up alone in a corner. Above all, body means in the presence of other bodies. Distinction of bodies: everything that is distinct is in this sense a body. A concept distinct from another concept is a body, a body that measures its own proper weight of sense (certified meaning, possible meaning, a meaning to invent, figural meaning, etcetera). In the first instance, body is the distinct and the distinct-from-itself; to the degree of itself it is outside itself. The body is the opening to the world and the opening to a world, the there 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-Pontys use of it (will this perhaps be the weak trace of an affiliation?). It is a word of the in-itself and not of the outside-itself. It is a word of the

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relation to self, of the enjoyment or the mortification of the self. It is a word of depth while body is a weak wordof dance! All of this creates divergences among the words, while our respective thoughts have the tendency to converge around a common point. Perhaps what is required is that each one of us go deeper into his reasons for advancing the discussion. All of which proves, and I repeat it again, that the terms and concepts that we are using reveal themselves as fragile and uncertain once we take up the reality of the common without discussing the common in the sense of vulgar (vulgus, the crowd) and of banal (the ban, the circumscription of jurisdiction). Vulgar and banal are two words that merit a long discussion of their respective traditional uses and respective (de)valuations. From here there emerges the entire problem of the one [si], of Heideggers Man (or one [man] depending upon whether one considers him a substantive subject or an impersonal one) and this precisely because Heidegger has the impropriety [Uneigentlichkeit] of Dasein and Mitsein fall in the banal-common. Yet all of us know well enough this act of debasement and of suspicion, this aristocratic contempt for the common; that is, all of us who are not part of the people [ popolo], given that effectively we are not a part. As university professors, intellectuals etc., we surely are not a part, and yet, if we look closely, are we really exempt from banality? Do we not perhaps like bread just like everyone else, and are not we passionate about a soccer match? Perhaps we have not looked enough at this aspect of things. When all is said and done, if politics and ethics (but aesthetics as well) have a meaning, it has to do with daily life and the daily possibility for each of usfor people [ gente]to be in meaning [di essere nel senso], which is to say for all of us to take part in the exceptional, in discord, and in what is distinctive. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Originally appeared as Dialogo sulla filosofia a venire in Jean-Luc Nancy, Essere Singolare Plurale (Torino: Einaudi, 2001), vii-xxix. Published here for the first time in English with the kind permission of Einaudi. Works Cited
Canguilhem, Georges. On the Normal and the Pathological. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978. Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burcell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

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the minnesota review Derrida, Jacques. On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. Christine Irizarry. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. ---. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 2006. Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. ---. Introduction. Lesperienza della libert. By Jean Luc Nancy. Trans. Davide Tarizzo. Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Esposito, Roberto, Carlo Galli, and Vincenzo Vitello. Nichilismo e politica. Preface by 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. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. OByrne. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. ---. Conloquium. the minnesota review n.s. 75 (Fall 2010): 101-108. ---. Corpus. Trans. Richard A. Rand. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. ---. The Experience of Freedom. Trans. Bridget McDonald. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. ---. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, et al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991. ---. L intrus. Paris: Galile, 2000. Zambrano, Maria. Persona e democrazia. Milan: Mondadori, 2000.