Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Sense, Praxis, and the Political
- Event of Sense: Being-With, Ethics, Democracy
- Everything is Not Political
- The Political Between Two Infinities: Evaluations
- 9 Im-mundus or Nancy's Globalising-World- Formation
- 10 Precarity/Abandonment
- 11 ‘A Struggle between Two Infinities’: Jean-Luc Nancy on Marx's Revolution and Ours
- Index
9 - Im-mundus or Nancy's Globalising-World- Formation
from The Political Between Two Infinities: Evaluations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Sense, Praxis, and the Political
- Event of Sense: Being-With, Ethics, Democracy
- Everything is Not Political
- The Political Between Two Infinities: Evaluations
- 9 Im-mundus or Nancy's Globalising-World- Formation
- 10 Precarity/Abandonment
- 11 ‘A Struggle between Two Infinities’: Jean-Luc Nancy on Marx's Revolution and Ours
- Index
Summary
In an attempt to make sense of the world, Jean-Luc Nancy writes in The Sense of the World, one of the most abyssal paragraphs possible:
I would like here to open up an exploration of the space that is common to all of us, that makes up our community: the space of the most extended generality of sense, at once as a distended, desolate extension– the desert that grows– and as a broadly open, available extension, one that we sense to be an urgency, necessity, or imperative. This common space is infinitely slight. It is nothing but the limit that separates and mixes at once the in-significance that arises out of the pulverization of significations and the archi-significance encountered by the need of being-towards-the-world. This limit separates and mixes the most common, most banal of senses– the evident inconsistency of the justification of our lives– and the most singular, the evident necessity of the least fragment of existence as of the world toward which it exists.
Let me begin by trying to make sense of this dense paragraph: on the one hand, there is a distended and desolate extension of sense and non-sense (‘in-significance’), created by the pulverisation of significations. On the other hand, as it were, there is an open and available extension (of) archi-sense (‘archi-significance’) stemming from the need to be towards the world. With this juxtaposition, Nancy is not interested in pitching one facet of the world (the insignificance of the world) against the other (the archi-significance of the need of being-towards-the-world). He is interested in thinking the common limit that paradoxically brings together and yet also separates the two apart. This common limit is not something that can be singled out, objectified, analysed, dissected, and discarded. It is a multi-faceted liminal operation that, as Nancy says, knows no stable referent and yet still manages to generate the world.
But what is the point of focusing on such an abyssal and liminal operation that, evidently, takes place every second of time? As is well known, Nancy's aim is not to provide yet another picture of the world, but to actually embody its making, its creation; that is, in one Heideggerian expression: to work out how the world ‘worlds’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nancy and the Political , pp. 219 - 244Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015