Replaying the Question

One of the most interesting claims made by Jean-Luc Nancy is that ‘politics and philosophy have an original feature in common: both are born from the disappearance of the gods’. With the disappearance of any figure that could occupy the place of power, found community or a totality of being-together in the form of the One, thereby re-inscribing another onto-theology, it becomes possible to retrace the political or put it into question yet again. If it is not a matter of reinstalling another figure, foundation or representation, which would ensure what he has referred to with Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe as the closure of the political, then, it is a matter of, as he says, going ‘deeper into the nihil of nihilism’; the nihilism opened up by the flight of sense, which must now be rethought as a separate domain in relation to power according to Nancy. The political is born from this disappearance as it suspends us upon a void, the horizon of the political from which point we must retrace it, or from which point the political must itself be put into question. This question of the political, or the political put into question, is suggestive of the absence of any predestined project, design or end to which the political would be addressed. By going deeper into the nihil of nihilism, we can only anticipate so far that the question of the political arises with the event as an always renewed questioning. As Roberto Esposito notes after Walter Benjamin, it is nihilism which constitutes ‘the method of world political action’, perhaps precisely because each time it is its own ‘struggle for a world’ without a predetermined response to the question. This is why we must replay the question and rethink the political along with Nancy, all the while taking great care not to displace the act of its opening.

When raising the question of the political, the recognisable question, one that has been posed in myriad ways, is never far behind: What is to be done?