References for Theme: Nancy Citations
- Nancy, Jean-Luc
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.19) In his sense, Bataille is without doubt the one who experienced first, or most acutely the modern experience of community as neither a work to be produced, nor a lost communion, but rather as space Itself, and the spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self.
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.2) Not that totalitarianism was already present, as such, in Marx: this would be a crude proposition, one that remains ignorant of the strident protest against the destruction of community that in Marx continuously parallels the Hegelian attempt to bring about a totality, and that thwarts or displaces this attempt. But the schema of betrayal is seen to be untenable in that il was the very basis of the communist ideal that ended up appearing most problematic: namely, human beings defined as producers (one might even add: human beings defined at all), and fundamentally as the producers of their own essence...
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.31) This is why community cannot arise from the domain of work. One does not produce it, one experiences or one is constituted by it - the experience of finitude. Community understood as a work or through its works would presuppose that the common being, as such be objectifiable and producible (in sites, persons, buildings, discourses, institutions, symbols, subjects). Products derived from operations of this kind, however grandiose they might seek to be and sometimes manage to be, have no more communitarian existence than the plaster busts of Marianne. Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called " unworking," referring...
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.32) Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional. The unworking of community takes place around what Bataille for a very long time called the sacred. Yet he came around to saying, "What I earlier called the sacred, a name that is perhaps purely pedantic ... is fundamentally nothing other than the unleashing of passions"
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.35) Community is given to us- or we are given and abandoned to the community: a gift to be renewed and communicated. it is not a work to be done or produced.
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.39) But ecstasy comes at a price: at the risk of being nothing more than an erotic or fascist work of death, ecstasy passes through the inscription of finitude and its communication. Which is to say that it also presupposes, necessarily, works (literary, political, etc.). But what is inscribed, and what passes to the limit in inscribing itself, exposes and communicates itself (instead of trying to accomplish a meaning, like speech): what is shared is the unworking of works.
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.40) The political, if this word may serve to designate not the organization of society but the disposition of community as such, the destination of its sharing, must not be the assumption or the work of love or of death.
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.60) Absence of community represents that which does not fulfil community or community itself inasmuch as it cannot be fulfilled or engendered as ~ new individual. In this sense, " the appurtenance of every possible community to what I call ... absence of community must be the ground of any possible community." In the absence of community neither the work of community, nor the community as work, nor communism can fulfil itself; rather, the passion of and for community propagates itself, unworked, appealing, demanding to pass beyond every limit and every fulfilment enclosed in the form of an individual. It is...
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.72) It is here, in this suspension, that the communion less communism of singular beings takes place. Here takes place the taking place (which is itself without a place. without a space reserved for or devoted to its presence) of community: not in a work that would bring it to completion even less in itself as work (family, people, church. nation, party, literature, philosophy). but in the unworking and as the unworking of all its works. There is the unworking of the works of individuals in the community ("writers," whatever their mode of writing might be), and there is the unworking...
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.73) The work - be it what we designate as "a work" or be it the community presenting itself as work (and the one is always in the other, and can be made into capital, made profitable by the other, or else exposed again) - must be offered up for communication. This does not mean that the work must be "communicable": no form of intelligibility or transmissibility is required of it. It is not a matter of a message: neither a book nor a piece of music nor a people is, as such, the vehicle or the mediator of a message....
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.74) For the moment , we need not stop to evaluate the element of retrospective illusion in this interpretation, which represents for Marx the truth of "communal labor in its spontaneously evolved form as we find it among all Civilized peoples at the dawn of their history.'" What is important, beyond the nostalgic ideology that is common to Marx and to many others is the thinking of community that in spite of everything still comes through 'here-for it is a thinking, not merely an idyllic narrative ready to be transformed into a future utopia. Community means here the socially exposed particularity,...
- The Experience of Freedom (1993)
(p.160) I have tried to say that "we are the freedom of all things-and perhaps this expression should not be kept. At least its intention is in no way subjectivist. It docs not mean that we represent the entire world in our freedom. but rather that the freedom of being puts itself at stake as the free existence of the world and as our existence to this freedom - which also means that we are responsible for me freedom of the world. And this could not be without consequences for the question of technology (and on the at once open and...
- The Experience of Freedom (1993)
- The Ground of the Image (2005)
(p.56) A peasant is a worker who works time-and-place at the same time as the object of his work. It is in this sense that there can be a peasant in the city, a peasant in thought or in art: as the one who not only produces, but who above all cultivates, that is, who makes something come about and lets something grow. The peasant is also the one who is not at all in his work, the one who gives place and time to operations other than his own, to ripenings and stretches of waiting, to very ancient buried memories...
- The Ground of the Image (2005)
- The Creation of the World, Or, Globalization (2007)
(p.36) globalization makes world-forming possible, by way of a reversal of global domination consisting in the extortion of work, that is, of its value. therefore of value, absolutely.
- The Creation of the World, Or, Globalization (2007)
(p.39) Absolute value is, in fact, humanity incorporated in the product through work as human work. It is thus humanity producing itself by producing objects (or, I will return to this, creating itself by producing). But what is humanity? What is the world as the product of human beings, and what is the human being insofar as it is in the world and as it work this world? What is the "spiritual richness" of which Marx speaks, which is nothing other than the value or meaning of human labor as human, that is to say, also, "free," but free to the...
- The Creation of the World, Or, Globalization (2007)
(p.54) In excess or in deficiency with respect to its work does not mean outside of all labor, but means a labor whose principle is not determined by a goal of mastery (domination, usefulness, appropriation), but exceeds all submission to an end-that is, also exposes itself to remaining without end. Here it is art that indicates the stakes: the work of art is always also a meaning at work beyond the work […], as well as a work working and opening beyond any meaning that is either given or to be given. But the opening with-out finality is never a work...
- The Creation of the World, Or, Globalization (2007)
(p.89) One could also consider--and I cannot dwell on it as would be necessary - the possibility. indeed the necessity of determining the history of technologies up to our time without giving it another meaning in its fundamental contingency than the indefinite relation of technology to itself and to the escape of its denaturation. One would have to examine, in this respect. the succession of technologies of the immediate supplementation of the human body (tools, arms. clothing), of the production of subsistence (agriculture, animal husbandry). of exchange (money, writing). then. with another turn, of meaning and truth (sophistical, philosophical), of wealth...
- The Creation of the World, Or, Globalization (2007)
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