Jean-Luc Nancy: Populism, Democracy, and Neofascism: Two Essays

Posted on August 28, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

LARB – the Los Angeles Review of Books (17/02/2019) presents two recent essays by Jean-Luc Nancy, translated from the French by Sarah Clift.

Populism and Democracy

Populism and democracy are an odd couple. The first, populism, rejects the pejorative connotation that its name represents for the second, democracy, which it in turn criticizes for being hypocritical. The second declares itself the sole form of legitimate existence. Both of them claim to be supremely popular. Their virulent opposition in the current discourse is matched only by the indecision that hangs over their respective meanings. What “people” are they talking about, both together and separately?

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Jean-Luc Nancy: Communism, The Word

Posted on August 28, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer (by virtue of some unknown decree or necessity, for we bear witness also to the exhaustion of thinking through History), is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community. Communism, as Sartre said, is “the unsurpassable horizon of our time,” and it is so in many senses-political, ideological, and strategic. But not least important among these senses is the following consideration, quite foreign to Sartre’s intentions: the word “communism” stands as an emblem of the desire to discover or rediscover a place of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical dominion, and thereby beyond such wasting away of liberty, of speech, or of simple happiness as comes about whenever these become subjugated to the exclusive order of privatization; and finally, more simply and even more decisively, a place from which to surmount the unraveling that occurs with the death of each one of us-that death that, when no longer anything more than the death of the individual, carries an unbearable burden and collapses into insignificance.

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community

A reflection on “communism” …

Communism, The Word

Notes for the London Conference Birbeck College

The following are the notes that Jean-Luc Nancy prepared for the conference ‘On the Idea of Communism’, March 2009. An edited version is available in Costas Douzinas & Slavoj Zizek (eds), The Idea of Communism (Verso, London 2010) 145–53.

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Jean-Luc Nancy: Of Being-in-Common

Posted on August 28, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

It is by no means a simple matter to choose a text which is representative of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy. One is spoiled by an abundance of wealth. However, The Inoperative Community (1986) is a central and fundamental text in his opus and in the reflection and debate on the nature of community.

Below, we share a chapter of this work entitled, “Of Being-in-Common”, which was also published in united states as a separate essay in a volume entitled, Community at Loose Ends (1991).

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For Jean-Luc Nancy 1940-2021

Posted on August 28, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

… il faut dire que la démocratie implique par essence quelque chose d’une anarchie qu’on voudrait presque dire principielle.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Démocratie finie et infinie

The french philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy died this last August 23rd. If the ideas of philosophers rarely have any direct translation into politics, or vice versa, their work, their concepts help not only to illuminate (and obfuscate) lived realities, but also create conditions for new realities.

The work of Jean-Luc Nancy has been a theoretical endeavour of this nature, and while his work will remain, his passing leaves us with one less friend or comrade in thought.

What follows are reflections, references and texts by and with Nancy, through a series of posts.

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Afghanistan: Readings of the fall of a political regime

Posted on August 24, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

Without sufficient knowledge of events on the ground, or of the broader context (historical, social, economic, geo-political, etc.), we share three texts on the recent Taliban overthrow of the U.S.A.-NATO regime in Kabul, with the aim of navigating beyond the obvious.

Our selection of texts does not necessarily assume a full agreement with the authors’ own political views. Nor does what is shared below exhaustively treat the matter. But in each case, we believe, some understanding of what is taking place is gained.

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Carrying the war into Africa? Anarchism, Morocco, and the Spanish Civil War

Posted on August 20, 2021 by Julius Gavroche
Riffian leader Kaid Sarkash with his son

(Originally published in two parts by Freedom News (23/11/2020; 30/11/2020), we share an article by Danny Evans)

I was approached by Jeff Stein to write up a summary of Abel Paz, La cuestión de Marruecos y la República española so that English-language readers might be made aware of the Spanish anarchist approach to Morocco during the civil war. I would like to thank Jeff for prompting me to write what follows, although he should not be held responsible for its contents or conclusions.

A lenient war is a lengthy war, and therefore the worst kind of war. Let us stop it, and stop it effectually […] stop it on the soil upon which it originated, and among the traitors and rebels who originated the war. This can be done at once, by “carrying the war into Africa.”

Frederick Douglass, “How to end the War”, 1861

The question of why the revolution that accompanied the Spanish Civil War did not result in independence for the Spanish protectorate in Morocco has long vexed its supporters. Guerrilla warfare in the centre of the region (the Rif) had plagued the Spanish authorities from 1909 and had only been suppressed in 1927 following joint military operations by the French and Spanish, involving the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons, and the arrest of the famous leader Abd el Krim. The military conspiracy against the Spanish Second Republic was incubated in this brutalising colonial environment, and Moroccan troops employed in the so-called Army of Africa were crucial to the war effort mounted by the conspirators when their attempted coup stalled in July 1936. Why then was no attempt made to cut off the conspiracy’s vital base by fomenting a recurrence of fighting in the Francoist rearguard? In particular, why hadn’t the anarchist movement, through the powerful union, the CNT, forced this issue during the months of its greatest influence?

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Remembering Spain: Fascism, Revolution and Colonialism

Posted on August 19, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

If we celebrate and/or recall moments and events, rebellions and revolutions, of the past, it is so that that past not be lost to the present and for the present to intervene in the past, such that it become present, contemporary and that we become its contemporaries, thereby revealing our present and its possibilities.

… the contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him. Darkness is something that more than any light-turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.

Giorgio Agamben, What is the Contemporary?

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South Africa: We Carry a New World in Our Riots

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

From the CrimethInc. collective (13/08/2021), reflections on the looting and unrest of July 2021 in south africa …

Beginning on July 9, 2021, when the Pietermaritzburg High Court upheld the conviction and sentencing of former South African president Jacob Zuma, looting and unrest broke out in two provinces in South Africa for nine days. The unrest has been attributed to a power struggle between factions of the ruling class and to anger about the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic; it has been associated with fears of ethnic violence. What’s certain, at least, is that it was a response to widespread poverty and desperation. The following reflections appear in dialogue with this assessment of the events by Abahlai baseMjondolo, a landless people’s movement based in direct democracy. We encourage you to read the aforementioned assessment and the following text together in order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the questions at play.

The following text is a contribution to the ongoing dialogue concerning the most incendiary wave of revolt to hit South Africa since the official end of apartheid. The author is a South African currently living in Spain who has collaborated with members of the landless people’s association Abahlai baseMjondolo in Cape Town, is the producer of the (now moribund) Love Letters Journal, and has previously collaborated on the South Africa section of Dialectical Delinquents.

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Brazil: Only Revolt Can Bring Down Bolsonaro

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

From the CrimethInc. collective (12/08/2021) …

Ahead of the 2022 elections, Brazil is now reprising the same dramatic showdown that the United States faced in 2020. As the pandemic intensifies alongside corruption scandals and the unrestrained plundering of Indigenous lands, Jair Bolsonaro’s government faces pressure from the streets and the left wing of the state. But what will it take to unseat him and break out of the patterns that brought him to power?

The parallels between Brazil and the United States run deep. Both are settler colonial states founded on slavery. The United States has largely completed its frontier phase, while Brazil continues to expand extraction efforts into Indigenous territories. In both cases, the state has become a battleground between the far right, represented by Donald Trump and Bolsonaro, and a centrist technocracy seeking to transition to a slightly more “sustainable” and “inclusive” form of capitalism. Globally speaking, these represent competing models regarding how to preserve capitalism in the face of climate change and global economic crisis—barefaced violence versus the likes of the “Green New Deal.” Though Trump narrowly failed to hold on to power in 2020, it is entirely possible that the struggle in Brazil could turn out differently, setting a precedent for the spread of fascism in the 21st century.

Of course, neither of these models points the way out of the current nightmare of exploitation and police violence. If we want to have any hope of changing the world for the better, we have to build social movements outside the logic of reaction and reform. Had there not been four years of intense grassroots struggles under Trump, he would likely have succeeded in holding onto power one way or another—and if those struggles do not continue under Biden and whoever succeeds Bolsonaro, far-right politicians will once again be able to present themselves as the only alternative to the status quo.

In the following report, Brazilian anarchists frame the government’s genocidal approach to COVID-19 in the context of a legacy of military rule, explore the latest wave of combative protests, and show how the institutional left functions as the first line of defense to preserve the existing order. They make the case that the conditions they face can only be fundamentally changed by means of autonomous organization and revolt.

An earlier version of this text appeared in Portuguese here.

Anti-fascists in Belo Horizonte blockade the street in front of a burning barricade.
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Jacques Rancière: “The issue is to manage to maintain dissensus”

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Julius Gavroche
Jacques Rancière (Fotography by Lana Lichtenstein)

Interview with philosopher Jacques Rancière on the Covid-19 crisis, contemporary political upheavals the experience of art and film over the past year, and social media. [From the Verso Books Blog].

We met Jacques Rancière at his home in Paris with some tenacious questions in mind. Throughout his life, this thinker of workers’ emancipation, deeply attached to the idea of equality, has deconstructed authority figures and the haughtiness of the ‘knowers’. How, from this theoretical basis, does the philosopher view a historical sequence in which, under the effect of a virus, the words of experts stifle all others and cast precarious lives back into silence? How does the author of major works such as The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), Hatred of Democracy (2005) or The Emancipated Spectator (2008) see this radical repression of emancipation and dissent – a precondition for democratic debate and political action? In Les Mots et le Torts, a dialogue with the young Spanish philosopher Javier Bassas that has just been published, Althusser’s former student explains how he has always searched in his writing to ‘oppose to the identifications and distinctions of inegalitarian thinking a world of equality without borders’. It is an understatement to say that today the world of equality is faltering and that a handful of intellectuals and politicians have gained the upper hand in the war of words. From barricades to ‘safety measures’, Rancière X-rays the present time, seeking the possibilities of a new political moment.

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