On the ‘inoperative community’ and social authority: a Nancean response to the politics of loss

Abstract

This article addresses how the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy might inform our understanding of ‘social authority’; an authority generated in everyday practices. It argues that the ‘governmentality’ approach, while drawing out the forms of power that fill the sphere of community-oriented politics, does not recognise the important role played by the loss of community. The article thus sets out how Nancy’s work, in re-framing this ‘loss’ as the constantly occurring fragmentation of the community, allows for a productive and augmentative approach to authority, highlighting its contingent production in moments of creativity and contestation. A final section sets out how, in light of these considerations, such a ‘social authority’ may be seen as essential to a democratic politics.

Keywords:

• Jean-Luc Nancy
• authority
• community
• governmentality
• democracy

Notes

1. While often translated to ‘legitimate domination’, I follow Uphoff (1989, p. 30) and others in translating Herrschaft to ‘authority’, a use signalled by Weber’s own suggestion of Autorität as a synonym for the term.

2. The major recommendation of the Morgan Report (The Home Office 1991), through which the term was given national prominence, was that crime prevention be considered a task for all in the community (3).

3. Nancy’s idiosyncratic approach to Castells (2000) analysis of the ‘network society’ is to posit in the emergence of networked life an exposure to the originary reticulation of being (see Armstrong 2009).

4. This observation would similarly re-frame the startling regularity of ‘golden age’ community accounts (see Pearson 1983).

5. An interesting illustration of this tension in community is given by Noorani’s (2013) account of the manner in which ‘experiences become more “weighty” as they collectivise over time, that is, as self-helpers identify similarities and differences in stories they share with one another’.

6. As Millner (2013) notes, the role of the researcher, in this light, may be conceived less as a documenter of ‘new forms of restraint’ than as one who participates in ‘a work on the forces which constitute us, within a broader project of multiplying possible forms of subjectivity.’

7. These examples, drawn from my doctoral research (Kirwan 2011), refer respectively upon the theoretical frameworks of Jacques Ranciere and Bernard Stiegler.