Is everything political?

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CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 2002,

pp. 15-22 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2002.0053

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15

Tout est-il Politique? originally published by ditions Galile, 2000. All rights reserved. English transla-tion Michigan State University Press, 2002.

Is Everything Political?

(a brief remark)

J E A N - L U C N A N C Y

Universit de Strasbourg

Translated byPhilip M. Adamek, State University of New York at Buffalo

- , -

nouncing that everything is political [tout est politique].1 The claim can be

proffered or received in several different ways: on certain occasions, accord-

ing to a thought of distribution (the moments or diverse elements of shared

existence all in some way belong to the moment or element called the polit-

ical, to which falls a privilege of diffusion or of transversality); on others, in

a domineering gesture (in the first or last instance, the political sphere isthat which determines or controls the activity of the other spheres); and, on

other occasions still, in a form of integration or assumption (the essence of

existence as a whole is of a political nature). In each of these cases, the tone

of the enunciation or of the reception can be resigned, disconcerted, affirma-

tive or contentious.

This claim, before ever simply and vaguely hovering at the horizon,

served as the axiom of an entire modern elaboration. It most certainly con-stituted and consolidated the horizon itself during a long periodperhaps,


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one could say, from to the present time and may continue to do so

without our being able to say whether the present time is still or no longer

circumscribed by the horizon. (In particular, the claim served as a maxim or

slogan as much for the various forms of fascism as for those of communism:

it was even most likely, notwithstanding all their differences, their true point

of contact.)

(So as not to delve, in this brief remark, into that which preceded moder-

nity, we will make do with the following formulation: politics was not total-

izing for Antiquity, which no doubt invented politics but conceived of it

only within the condition of a city of free men: of an essentially differentialand non-totalizing city. By itself, slavery, with its economic corollaries, pre-

vents one from understanding, on the basis, for example, of an everything

is political, the architectonic place of politics within Aristotle. In this par-

ticular political space, the free man benefits from the polis for other ends

than those of political administration (for example, the bios theoretikos, the

leisure of the contemplative life), in the same way that the polis subsists on

infra-political bases (slavery and subsistence primarily by family-based uni-ties). The politics of sovereign nation-states, for its part, was upheld by a

relation to a common, religious, or symbolic destiny that always, in one way

or another, disregarded politicswhile, from another perspective, the same

sovereignty led towards a politics in totality that became the politics of the

moderns.)

If it is sometimes said today that politics is held in check or at bay by eco-

nomics, this happens only as the result of a hasty confusion: what is thus

called the economy is actually nothing other than what was once called

political economy: that is, the functioning of the administration of subsis-

tence and prosperity, less at the level of the relatively self-sufficient family

(the oikos, the household), than of the city (polis). Political economy wasnothing other than the consideration of the polis as an oikos: as a collective

or communitarian reality presumed to belong to a natural order (generation,

kinship, inherited property: land, goods, slaves). It followed logically that if

I s E v e r y t h i n g P o l i t i c a l ?16


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the oiko-nomia took on the dimensions of thepolis, the displacement could

not be simply one of size, but implied as well that politeia, the knowledge of

the affairs of the city, had itself been reinterpreted as an oika-nomai. But the

latter was itself reinterpreted, simultaneously, no longer simply in terms of

subsistence and prosperity (of the good life), but in terms of the produc-

tion and reproduction of wealth (of having more).

Indeed, it is always a question of how one interprets the grouping of men,

which can be understood as wholly political [tout politique] only insofar as

the political itself is determined as total, totalizing, or all-encompassing.

And that is exactly what happened, in a major way, when the political wasdetermined as the global nature of an oikos: or, more precisely, as an oiko-

logical globality, that of a contest or a competitionin the first sense of

these termsfor the natural resources of its members. This was at first

called physiocracy (government by nature).

At the same time, it was necessary to determine the natural nature of

the members of the political oikos: this was done by constituting the city

itself, no longer on the basis of an autonomous and transcendent order withrespect to the oikoi (founding or federating them, while being of a different

essence), but on the basis of a presumedly originary oikology, an originary

familiarity of men both among themselves and with nature. Thus, the insti-

tution of a social body or civil society (in the first and exact sense of the

term: a citizen-based or political society) was given as being fundamentally,

ideally, or originarily identical with the institution of humanity itselfthe

latter having, moreover, no ultimate purpose other than to produce itself asa second nature or as an entirely humanized nature (assuming that such a

concept is not contradictory, which is perhaps precisely one of the nubs of

the question . . . ).

According to this logic, everything is political is assumed outright as a

matter of principle, and from this it follows that politics itself, as an order

severed from an institution or a particular expertise (or art), must tend

towards the suppression of its own separation in order to bring about thenatural totality that it expresses or indicates from the outset. In this way,

there is ultimately no difference between everything is political and every-

thing is economical. It is thus that democracy and the market act in con-

J e a n - L u c N a n c y 17


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cert and for one anothers sake by clearing paths before them in a process

that, today, is called globalization. Everything is political thus amounts

to asserting that man is self-sufficient in the sense that he produces his

own nature and, therein, nature as a whole. Until now, the vague represen-

tation of this self-sufficiency and this self-production have entirely domi-

nated the representations of politics (be they from the right or the left),

or at least all of those representations that appear under the banner of a

global, political project, whether it be pro-state or anti-state, consen-

sual or revolutionary, etc. (There also exists a weak version, one of politics

as regulatory action, as a corrective to inequalities and a lowering of ten-sions: but the background of this social-democratic hybrid that, inciden-

tally, at times merits respect (but, at others, appears bogged down by

compromises), is no less the same.)

The only question raised by what today is called a crisis, an eclipse, or aparalysis of politics is thus, in the end, that of the self-sufficiency of man

and/or of nature in him and by him. Yet it is precisely the inconsistency of

this self-sufficiency that the present time seems to demonstrate a little more

every day. This is so because the globalizationthe general oiko-logization

of thepolisalso reveals, ever more vividly, or violently, the non-naturalness

of its own process (but also, ultimately, that of so-called nature itself: we

were never more in the realm of a meta-phusis).Man, who freed himself through eco-politics as a wholethis man

whose social-market represents simultaneously and symmetrically the uni-

versal form of rights and the planetary proliferation of injustices, extor-

tions, and exploitationsturns out less alienated (in the sense whereby

such a term designates the proper with respect to which one could deter-

mine and measure an alienation) than devoid of identity, of propriety, of an

end, and of measure. Man bears witness foremost to a lack in being. On theone hand, the exploited, who are subjected to a fight for survival, are forbid-

den to exist (it is thus more a prohibition than a lack); on the other, the

affluent are always more aware of the fact thateven outside of all forms of



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compassionneither their well-being, nor the malaise of others that is its

corollary, produce human-being or world-being.

But in this way, it seemsand this is the most recent lesson, one that is

still nearly inaudible, and, in many cases, unheard-ofthis lack itself

reveals, at the same time, the insufficiency of a simple logic of lack: such a

logic, analogous to a logic of alienation, assumes an absence of lack as a

terminus a quo or ad quem. Yet if there is no terminusneither end nor ori-

ginthis is because there is a paradoxical logic of a complete incomplete-

ness or of an infinite finitude. This logic then turns out to form man, and

with him (and by him) nature as well as history.However, the invention ofpoliteia is perhaps also revealed, in the singu-

lar light of this paradox, to have already been, itself, the revelation of such a

logic. The man of logos, who is properly the zoon politikon, is the existent

whose own measure is incommensurable and inappropriable. Thepoliswas

simultaneously represented as a common measure that was giventhe self-

giving of a common measureandas an indefinite instability and a perma-

nent reworking (though rare and episodic in its manifestations) of themeasure of the incommensurable. (The index of the common measure

should thus be understood both in a transversal sense: measure making a

connectionand in a distributive sense: a measure belonging to everyone.)

This measure has a name: justice. Justice involves, wherever it is not sim-

ply given, the exercise of power (and thus of counter-forces, of reversals of

power, of alliances of power, etc.). The exercise of such power, in whatever

sense of the term, is at first glance incompatible with identification on thebasis of an oiko-nomie, that is, of a natural self-sufficiency. But it has become

patent that there is no oikonomie: there is, in every respect, only an

ecotechny: that is to say, a common ground or a habitation in the produc-

tion, invention, and incessant transformation of ends that are never given.

The domination of political economy was perhaps never as overwhelming,

but the fundamental inconsistency of its purported self-sufficiency was

never more apparent. It was never more apparent than now that value,understood absolutely (the value of man or of the world), is absolutely

incommensurable with all other measured (evaluated) values.

(Commensurability is another word for general equivalence.)



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Politics has been withdrawn as giveness [donation] (be it self- or hetero-give-

ness, human or divine) of a common essence and purpose: it has been with-

drawn as a totality or as a totalization. In this sense, not everything is

political.

But politics is retraced as a place where power is exercised with a view

towards an incommensurable justicethat is, as a place where one asserts

an in-finity of human-being or of world-being. By definition, politics no

longer reabsorbs into itself all the other spaces of existence. The other spacesare those where the incommensurability is in some sense formed and pre-

sented: these can be called art, religion, thought, science, ethics, con-

duct, exchange, production, love, war, kinship, intoxication, and

can, indeed, be given an infinite number of names: their mutual distinctions

and circumscriptions (that prevent neither contiguities nor co-penetra-

tions) define in each case the occurrence of a configuration according to

which takes place a certain presentationeven if this presentation itselfmust give form to an impresentation or a withdrawal of presence.

(Nonetheless, the non-political spheres are both public and private, if one

must use such terms. All are, in the double sense of the word, partages

[imparted or shared out; divided].)

Among these configurations (and, again, without excluding their con-

tacts and contagions), there is incommensurability. Politics is redrawn at the

place where one must keep open this incommensurability, whether thatmeans, generally, the incommensurability of justice, or that of value.

Contrary to the assertions of both theological politics and political econ-

omybut not without relation to what was at stake in the pre-political

polis (if one can put it that way)politics is no longer the place of an

assumption of a unitotality. Neither is it the place where the incommensu-

rability of whatever type of unity of origin or of endin short, of a human-

ityis given shape or brought to presence. Politics is in charge of space orspacing (of space-time), but not in charge of figures.

Certainly, politics is the site of an in-common as suchbut only in the

manner of the incommensurability that is kept open (and along the two axes



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that we have just outlined). It does not subsume the in-common under any

type of union, community, subject, or epiphany. Everything that is of the

common is not political, and all that is political is not in every respect

common. But at the same time, neither the sphere of the in-common nor

that of politics allows for a distinction between a society in exteriority and

a community in interiority. (The dualism is no more valid for the social

body/soul than for the individualbody/soul.)

Politics should now be understood as the specific site of the articulation

of a non-unityand of symbolization of a non-figure. The names of equal-

ity and of liberty are only indeterminate, problematic names under whichone must maintain (would one dare say: keep wide open?) the necessity of

not accomplishing an essence or an end of the incommensurable, and

nonetheless, andprecisely, of maintaining the (im)possibility: a necessity of

shaping powerthe force that must hold together the non-organic non-

unityon the model of incommensurable justice. A demand, thus, to con-

form to a universal (not one that is given, but that is to be produced). At this

site, politics is far from being everythingeven though everything passesthrough it and thereby comes across and encounters everything else. Politics

becomes, precisely, a site of detotalization. Or, if one could so risk the for-

mula: if everything is politicalbut in another sense than those of theology

and/or political economyit is so only where everything is in no way either

total or totalized. Can democracy be thought at this height, and with this

intensity?

N O T E S

1. In the original text, J.-L. Nancy refers to everything is political as a phrase. The false

cognate phrase is either too grammatical a notion, or, as in the expression coin a

phrase, its denotation is that of an idiosyncratic or idiomatic expression. As J.-L.

Nancys discussion reveals, it is something that is said, without, however, commandingthe folkloric status of a proverb. It thus approaches the sense of a dictum; however,

it is neither a formal pronouncement or judgment, in the legal sense of the word, nor,

in its pejorative use, a mere saying. Finally, it is certainly a proposition and a type of



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statement, but its currency is situated outside the debates within propositional logic.

Since J.-L. Nancy is interested in interrogating the implications of saying everything is

political, rather than in denigrating the proposition from the outset, it appears that

claim is the least unhappy solution. [Trans.]


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