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CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 2002,

pp. 15-22 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2002.0053

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Is Everything Political?
(a brief remark)

JEAN-LUC NANCY
Universit de Strasbourg

Translated by Philip M. Adamek, State University of New York at Buffalo

- , nouncing that everything is political [tout est politique].1 The claim can be
proffered or received in several different ways: on certain occasions, according to a thought of distribution (the moments or diverse elements of shared
existence all in some way belong to the moment or element called the political, to which falls a privilege of diffusion or of transversality); on others, in
a domineering gesture (in the first or last instance, the political sphere is
that which determines or controls the activity of the other spheres); and, on
other occasions still, in a form of integration or assumption (the essence of
existence as a whole is of a political nature). In each of these cases, the tone
of the enunciation or of the reception can be resigned, disconcerted, affirmative or contentious.
This claim, before ever simply and vaguely hovering at the horizon,
served as the axiom of an entire modern elaboration. It most certainly constituted and consolidated the horizon itself during a long periodperhaps,
Tout est-il Politique? originally published by ditions Galile, 2000. All rights reserved. English translation Michigan State University Press, 2002.

15

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I s Eve r y t h i n g Po l i t i c a l ?

one could say, from to the present time and may continue to do so
without our being able to say whether the present time is still or no longer
circumscribed by the horizon. (In particular, the claim served as a maxim or
slogan as much for the various forms of fascism as for those of communism:
it was even most likely, notwithstanding all their differences, their true point
of contact.)
(So as not to delve, in this brief remark, into that which preceded modernity, we will make do with the following formulation: politics was not totalizing for Antiquity, which no doubt invented politics but conceived of it
only within the condition of a city of free men: of an essentially differential
and non-totalizing city. By itself, slavery, with its economic corollaries, prevents one from understanding, on the basis, for example, of an everything
is political, the architectonic place of politics within Aristotle. In this particular political space, the free man benefits from the polis for other ends
than those of political administration (for example, the bios theoretikos, the
leisure of the contemplative life), in the same way that the polis subsists on
infra-political bases (slavery and subsistence primarily by family-based unities). The politics of sovereign nation-states, for its part, was upheld by a
relation to a common, religious, or symbolic destiny that always, in one way
or another, disregarded politicswhile, from another perspective, the same
sovereignty led towards a politics in totality that became the politics of the
moderns.)

If it is sometimes said today that politics is held in check or at bay by economics, this happens only as the result of a hasty confusion: what is thus
called the economy is actually nothing other than what was once called
political economy: that is, the functioning of the administration of subsistence and prosperity, less at the level of the relatively self-sufficient family
(the oikos, the household), than of the city (polis). Political economy was
nothing other than the consideration of the polis as an oikos: as a collective
or communitarian reality presumed to belong to a natural order (generation,
kinship, inherited property: land, goods, slaves). It followed logically that if

Jean-Luc Nancy

17

the oiko-nomia took on the dimensions of the polis, the displacement could
not be simply one of size, but implied as well that politeia, the knowledge of
the affairs of the city, had itself been reinterpreted as an oika-nomai. But the
latter was itself reinterpreted, simultaneously, no longer simply in terms of
subsistence and prosperity (of the good life), but in terms of the production and reproduction of wealth (of having more).
Indeed, it is always a question of how one interprets the grouping of men,
which can be understood as wholly political [tout politique] only insofar as
the political itself is determined as total, totalizing, or all-encompassing.
And that is exactly what happened, in a major way, when the political was
determined as the global nature of an oikos: or, more precisely, as an oikological globality, that of a contest or a competitionin the first sense of
these termsfor the natural resources of its members. This was at first
called physiocracy (government by nature).
At the same time, it was necessary to determine the natural nature of
the members of the political oikos: this was done by constituting the city
itself, no longer on the basis of an autonomous and transcendent order with
respect to the oikoi (founding or federating them, while being of a different
essence), but on the basis of a presumedly originary oikology, an originary
familiarity of men both among themselves and with nature. Thus, the institution of a social body or civil society (in the first and exact sense of the
term: a citizen-based or political society) was given as being fundamentally,
ideally, or originarily identical with the institution of humanity itselfthe
latter having, moreover, no ultimate purpose other than to produce itself as
a second nature or as an entirely humanized nature (assuming that such a
concept is not contradictory, which is perhaps precisely one of the nubs of
the question . . . ).
According to this logic, everything is political is assumed outright as a
matter of principle, and from this it follows that politics itself, as an order
severed from an institution or a particular expertise (or art), must tend
towards the suppression of its own separation in order to bring about the
natural totality that it expresses or indicates from the outset. In this way,
there is ultimately no difference between everything is political and everything is economical. It is thus that democracy and the market act in con-

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I s Eve r y t h i n g Po l i t i c a l ?

cert and for one anothers sake by clearing paths before them in a process
that, today, is called globalization. Everything is political thus amounts
to asserting that man is self-sufficient in the sense that he produces his
own nature and, therein, nature as a whole. Until now, the vague representation of this self-sufficiency and this self-production have entirely dominated the representations of politics (be they from the right or the left),
or at least all of those representations that appear under the banner of a
global, political project, whether it be pro-state or anti-state, consensual or revolutionary, etc. (There also exists a weak version, one of politics
as regulatory action, as a corrective to inequalities and a lowering of tensions: but the background of this social-democratic hybrid that, incidentally, at times merits respect (but, at others, appears bogged down by
compromises), is no less the same.)

The only question raised by what today is called a crisis, an eclipse, or a

paralysis of politics is thus, in the end, that of the self-sufficiency of man
and/or of nature in him and by him. Yet it is precisely the inconsistency of
this self-sufficiency that the present time seems to demonstrate a little more
every day. This is so because the globalizationthe general oiko-logization
of the polisalso reveals, ever more vividly, or violently, the non-naturalness
of its own process (but also, ultimately, that of so-called nature itself: we
were never more in the realm of a meta-phusis).
Man, who freed himself through eco-politics as a wholethis man
whose social-market represents simultaneously and symmetrically the universal form of rights and the planetary proliferation of injustices, extortions, and exploitationsturns out less alienated (in the sense whereby
such a term designates the proper with respect to which one could determine and measure an alienation) than devoid of identity, of propriety, of an
end, and of measure. Man bears witness foremost to a lack in being. On the
one hand, the exploited, who are subjected to a fight for survival, are forbidden to exist (it is thus more a prohibition than a lack); on the other, the
affluent are always more aware of the fact thateven outside of all forms of

Jean-Luc Nancy

19

compassionneither their well-being, nor the malaise of others that is its

corollary, produce human-being or world-being.
But in this way, it seemsand this is the most recent lesson, one that is
still nearly inaudible, and, in many cases, unheard-ofthis lack itself
reveals, at the same time, the insufficiency of a simple logic of lack: such a
logic, analogous to a logic of alienation, assumes an absence of lack as a
terminus a quo or ad quem. Yet if there is no terminusneither end nor originthis is because there is a paradoxical logic of a complete incompleteness or of an infinite finitude. This logic then turns out to form man, and
with him (and by him) nature as well as history.
However, the invention of politeia is perhaps also revealed, in the singular light of this paradox, to have already been, itself, the revelation of such a
logic. The man of logos, who is properly the zoon politikon, is the existent
whose own measure is incommensurable and inappropriable. The polis was
simultaneously represented as a common measure that was giventhe selfgiving of a common measureand as an indefinite instability and a permanent reworking (though rare and episodic in its manifestations) of the
measure of the incommensurable. (The index of the common measure
should thus be understood both in a transversal sense: measure making a
connectionand in a distributive sense: a measure belonging to everyone.)
This measure has a name: justice. Justice involves, wherever it is not simply given, the exercise of power (and thus of counter-forces, of reversals of
power, of alliances of power, etc.). The exercise of such power, in whatever
sense of the term, is at first glance incompatible with identification on the
basis of an oiko-nomie, that is, of a natural self-sufficiency. But it has become
patent that there is no oikonomie: there is, in every respect, only an
ecotechny: that is to say, a common ground or a habitation in the production, invention, and incessant transformation of ends that are never given.
The domination of political economy was perhaps never as overwhelming,
but the fundamental inconsistency of its purported self-sufficiency was
never more apparent. It was never more apparent than now that value,
understood absolutely (the value of man or of the world), is absolutely
incommensurable with all other measured (evaluated) values.
(Commensurability is another word for general equivalence.)

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I s Eve r y t h i n g Po l i t i c a l ?

Politics has been withdrawn as giveness [donation] (be it self- or hetero-giveness, human or divine) of a common essence and purpose: it has been withdrawn as a totality or as a totalization. In this sense, not everything is
political.
But politics is retraced as a place where power is exercised with a view
towards an incommensurable justicethat is, as a place where one asserts
an in-finity of human-being or of world-being. By definition, politics no
longer reabsorbs into itself all the other spaces of existence. The other spaces
are those where the incommensurability is in some sense formed and presented: these can be called art, religion, thought, science, ethics, conduct, exchange, production, love, war, kinship, intoxication, and
can, indeed, be given an infinite number of names: their mutual distinctions
and circumscriptions (that prevent neither contiguities nor co-penetrations) define in each case the occurrence of a configuration according to
which takes place a certain presentationeven if this presentation itself
must give form to an impresentation or a withdrawal of presence.
(Nonetheless, the non-political spheres are both public and private, if one
must use such terms. All are, in the double sense of the word, partages
[imparted or shared out; divided].)
Among these configurations (and, again, without excluding their contacts and contagions), there is incommensurability. Politics is redrawn at the
place where one must keep open this incommensurability, whether that
means, generally, the incommensurability of justice, or that of value.
Contrary to the assertions of both theological politics and political economybut not without relation to what was at stake in the pre-political
polis (if one can put it that way)politics is no longer the place of an
assumption of a unitotality. Neither is it the place where the incommensurability of whatever type of unity of origin or of endin short, of a humanityis given shape or brought to presence. Politics is in charge of space or
spacing (of space-time), but not in charge of figures.
Certainly, politics is the site of an in-common as suchbut only in the
manner of the incommensurability that is kept open (and along the two axes

Jean-Luc Nancy

21

that we have just outlined). It does not subsume the in-common under any
type of union, community, subject, or epiphany. Everything that is of the
common is not political, and all that is political is not in every respect
common. But at the same time, neither the sphere of the in-common nor
that of politics allows for a distinction between a society in exteriority and
a community in interiority. (The dualism is no more valid for the social
body/soul than for the individual body/soul.)
Politics should now be understood as the specific site of the articulation
of a non-unityand of symbolization of a non-figure. The names of equality and of liberty are only indeterminate, problematic names under which
one must maintain (would one dare say: keep wide open?) the necessity of
not accomplishing an essence or an end of the incommensurable, and
nonetheless, and precisely, of maintaining the (im)possibility: a necessity of
shaping powerthe force that must hold together the non-organic nonunityon the model of incommensurable justice. A demand, thus, to conform to a universal (not one that is given, but that is to be produced). At this
site, politics is far from being everythingeven though everything passes
through it and thereby comes across and encounters everything else. Politics
becomes, precisely, a site of detotalization. Or, if one could so risk the formula: if everything is politicalbut in another sense than those of theology
and/or political economyit is so only where everything is in no way either
total or totalized. Can democracy be thought at this height, and with this
intensity?


NOTES
1.

In the original text, J.-L. Nancy refers to everything is political as a phrase. The false
cognate phrase is either too grammatical a notion, or, as in the expression coin a
phrase, its denotation is that of an idiosyncratic or idiomatic expression. As J.-L.
Nancys discussion reveals, it is something that is said, without, however, commanding
the folkloric status of a proverb. It thus approaches the sense of a dictum; however,
it is neither a formal pronouncement or judgment, in the legal sense of the word, nor,
in its pejorative use, a mere saying. Finally, it is certainly a proposition and a type of

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I s Eve r y t h i n g Po l i t i c a l ?

statement, but its currency is situated outside the debates within propositional logic.
Since J.-L. Nancy is interested in interrogating the implications of saying everything is
political, rather than in denigrating the proposition from the outset, it appears that
claim is the least unhappy solution. [Trans.]