Nothing but the World: An Interview with Vacarme

Abstract

An interview with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (first published in 2000 in the French journal Vacarme) discusses the relation between a new political field articulating new social movements and his philosophical work. It explores three questions of particular urgency to Nancy: the relation today between philosophy and politics, the future of the Marxist and communist legacies, and the relation between globalization (mondialisation, or becoming-worldwide) and the concept and possibility (or impossibility) of a “world.”

Keywords:

• The Political
• Value
• Communism
• World
• Globalization

Acknowledgements

This interview first appeared in the French journal Vacarme, under the title “Rien que le monde,” in spring 2000.

Notes

¹Or what in French is written with a masculine article: le politique. This use of the masculine article is very recent and now widely used, even if what is implied by this article is rarely perceived.—JLN. [Le politique is often rendered “the political,” la politique as “politics.” In Nancy's work, this distinction attempts to mark the difference between politics understood as a determined set of institutional mechanisms for organizing power and the essence of the political as such, an essence still to be decided. This decision is, for Nancy, political through and through. The distinction is developed at length in a set of texts collected and published in English (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997).—Trans.]

²Rousseau wrote, “If there were a people of gods, it would govern itself democratically. Such a perfect government is not suited to men” (1993, 404).—Trans.

³See Bailly and Nancy (1991). Only one section of this book, the text entitled “La comparution” (47–100) and attributed to Nancy alone, has been published in English (see Nancy 1992).—Trans.

⁴Cf. Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: “In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity [Würde]. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits no equivalent has a dignity. What is related to general human inclinations and needs has a market price … but that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not merely relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth, that is, dignity.” See Kant (1996, 84).—Trans.

The term mondialisation has been left untranslated in order to underline the necessity of not confusing it with what is called, in Anglo-American discourses (and, as a consequence, the rest of the world), “globalization.” In La création du monde ou la mondialisation, Nancy attempts to distinguish between globalization and mondialisation, characterizing the first as being largely reducible to a technoeconomic phenomenon and therefore consisting in an agglomeration: “conglomerate, piling up … an accumulation on one side … of the well-being that was formerly urban or civil, while heaping up on the other what bears a quite simple and pitiless name: poverty” (2002, 14, cf. 20n). The globe is therefore no longer anything other than its “doublet”: glomus.—Trans.

⁶The French word contrôle gathers together the senses of testing, verification and monitoring, inspection, and even censorship, checking, checkpoints, and so on; perhaps the notion of a machine's “controls” is important here as well, to regulate its functions. The term “comptroller” gives one aspect of the term: the one who audits, oversees, checks, verifies, regulates an accounting process.—Trans.