HOW (NOT) TO PROPERLY ABANDON THE IMPROPER?

Abstract

Today, the improper is not only a philosophical issue; it is also a political question. In particular, striving to abandon the improper is central to the contemporary political agenda in many Western countries. Given the risks of a political agenda abandoning the improper in a proper way and realizing a “closed community,” contemporary philosophers such as Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy have thought about the relationship between the proper and improper. It is remarkable that Martin Heidegger is an exemplary figure in the analyses of both philosophers. I will analyze Heidegger's line of thought on this issue and how Esposito and Nancy have responded to it. Both Esposito and Nancy state that it is “impossible to abandon the improper in a proper way” in their writings on community. Every proper existence is always marked by impropriety, Nancy and Esposito argue; there is no “original” or “proper” commonality that would liberate us from all things improper. Even before one can appropriate one's property, it is already traversed by the improper. The question “how not to abandon properly the improper?” is in fact one of the imperatives behind their arguments: if indeed the proper is always already, in one way or another, related to or contaminated by the improper, it is indeed an illusion to think we can simply leave the improper behind.

• destiny
• improper
• immunity
• community

Notes

1 Heidegger uses the verb “Ent-spannen” (Heidegger, Metaphysische). Nancy elaborates on this in The Sense of the World.

2 See, among others, “Il y a donc bien, dans Être et Temps, un phénoménologie surtout négative de l'être-avec, laquelle ne débouche à aucun moment sur une phénoménologie positive de la sociabilité politique” (Janicaud, “La Politique introuvable” 346–47). See also Polt; Critchley 198–210; and Olafson.

3 In this way, Being and Time cannot be separated from Heidegger's political commitments, as Frederik Olafson seems to be claiming in his study of the Heideggerian Being-with: “How can Heidegger's implication in Nazism dictate a judgment on Being and Time?” (Olafson 14). If the author is saying that Heidegger's Nazism need not be deduced from Being and Time, I would agree, for Being and Time cannot be described as a crypto-fascist book, as is shown by the introduction to this problem by Polt. It would nevertheless be mistaken to sever Heidegger's commitment from his philosophy. This, in fact, is what Žižek claims: “Heidegger did not engage in the Nazi political project ‘in spite of’ his ontological philosophical approach, but because of it” (Žižek 14).