Doing Justice to Existence: Jean-Luc Nancy and The Size of Humanity

Transcription

1 Law Critique (2011) 22:1 13 DOI /s Doing Justice to Existence: Jean-Luc Nancy and The Size of Humanity Ignaas Devisch Published online: 14 December 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V Abstract Jean-Luc Nancy has not written a single work dedicated entirely to the problem of justice or related themes, but nevertheless, topics such as right, justice, judgement or law appear in various places in Nancy s work. Besides Lapsus judicii and Dies irae, the theme of justice particularly comes up and in two small texts: Cosmos Basileus and Human Excess. These texts are crucial to understand Nancy s point of view in juridical matters but are largely left aside in secondary literature, probably because of their enigmatic character. In this article we explore the cluster of juridical questions in Cosmos Basileus and Human Excess and argue why today, for Nancy, an ontological perspective is needed to cope with juridical questions. For him, justice is in the first place bound up with the fact of our co-existence, with what is unique about every existence in its co-existence with other creations. He claims, first, that freedom is responsibility and the act of doing justice to existence and, second, that sharing the world is the law of the world. We will discuss these two claims and conclude with Nancy s plead for ontological reflection within juridical topics. Keywords Judgment Justice Co-existence Measure Humanity Jean-Luc Nancy Justice and Humanity In Law and Critique attention has already been given to the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and its relationship to law. In particular, the texts Lapsus judicii (Nancy and Sparks 2003) and Dies irae (Nancy 1985) are already I. Devisch (&) Philosophy of Medicine and Ethics/Social Work, Artevelde University College and Ghent University, Campus Heymans (UZ) 3B3, De Pintelaan 185 BE, Ghent, Belgium Ignaas.Devisch@UGent.be; ignaasdevisch@scarlet.be

2 2 I. Devisch discussed by Nancy scholars or philosophers of rights. These texts are also the result of a discussion between Nancy and Jean-François Lyotard. 1 The attention for Nancy s writings on law and justice is surprising because until the present, Nancy has not written a single work dedicated entirely to the problem of justice or related themes. Nevertheless, topics such as rights, justice, judgement or law appear in various places in Nancy s work. Besides Lapsus judicii and Dies irae, the theme of justice particularly comes up in two small texts: Cosmos Basileus and Human Excess (Nancy 2001). These texts are crucial to understanding Nancy s point of view in juridical matters but are largely left aside in secondary literature, probably because of their enigmatic character. Since philosophy s task is to enlighten enigmas, in this article we want to explore the cluster of juridical questions in Cosmos Basileus and Human Excess and argue why today, for Nancy, an ontological perspective is needed to cope with juridical questions. For him, justice is in the first place bound up with the fact of what he calls our co-existence, with what is unique about every existence in its co-existence with other creations. According to Nancy, we always stand in a relation not only to ourselves but also to the world and to others. Existing thus means co-existing. For Nancy, it was Heidegger who, in Being and Time Nancy s chief reference in his reading of Heidegger most radically articulated the condition of sharing or being-with. Existence, for Heidegger, is always being-in-the-world and, hence, being-with. In Being and Time, Heidegger makes it clear that our ontological thrownness, the there of every individual being, means that no individual can place him- or herself over and against the world. Rather, the world is the horizon to which every individual existence is always and already related (Heidegger 1993; Heidegger and Macquarrie 1962). The individual is not a worldless entity but a Dasein that is always already thrown in-the-world, as Heidegger emphasizes repeatedly in Being and Time. In more radical fashion than Heidegger, Nancy posits a primordial being-with to clearly demonstrate how the self I am thrives only because it is always placed in a situation of plurality, of being-with-many (others). This always and already beingwith-many is the point of departure of his ontology. If existence is always co-existence, if being-with-others is our ontological condition, Nancy writes, then being-with-others not only must constitute the departure point of all ontology; also, the juridical questions have to be thought out of this perspective, Nancy says. Therefore, he addresses juridical questions such as (the day of) judgement, being judged and judging, being summoned, the law, covenant, rights and justice or being responsible in a way that enables him to demonstrate the pre-political or ontological 1 For an elaboration of this, see Ghetti (2005), Pryor (2004), Zartaloudis (2005). In Lapsus judicii, Nancy wants to make clear that the law feeds off proclaiming justice, off its juris-diction, and that the law thus always presupposes the particular case, a lapsus (fall, faulty). The law needs to fictionalize (from the Latin fictio: forming, manufacturing, and from fictum: lie, fantasy) its fall in order to install its universality. In this way, jurisdiction is always and already juris-fiction. Law and case come before right only if they are modeled, shaped, fashioned fictioned in and through one another. The implications of this necessity are quite radical, however: the installation or inauguration of right must of itself be fictioned (Nancy and Sparks 2003, p. 157). For an elaboration of this, see Zartaloudis (2005).

3 Doing Justice To Existence 3 conditions of rights and justice politics. This permits him to claim, first, that freedom is responsibility and the act of doing justice to existence and, second, that sharing the world is the law of the world. We will discuss these two claims and conclude with Nancy s plead for ontological reflection within juridical topics. Nomos and Cosmos Let us start with a close reading of Cosmos basileus, the (small) text where remarkably Nancy s most coherent explanation of justice is to be found. Here he discusses justice through a reflection on the unity of the world and explains this by falling back upon two central concepts of his oeuvre: world and co-existence. For him, existing is first of all living in a world with others (Nancy 2008). Existence is co-existence and the world is always a plurality of worlds. Existing begins with the exposure to plurality, and therefore to the sharing of a world. Since sharing partage in French means to share and to divide, the so-called unity of the world we share in fact Nancy ironizes the word unity is nothing other than the diversity and, hence, the world s non-unity (Nancy 2001, p. 185). The sharing of a world or co-existence is according to Nancy also the law of the world. For Nancy, world always means co-existing, being shared and divided at once. As the world is never an undivided unity or a totality, the law of the world cannot be equated with the accomplishment of one or the other unity or totality. This rather enigmatic thesis is at the same time the main thread of Cosmos Baliseus. The world has no other law than the fact that we share it, Nancy writes; it is not subject to one or other sovereign authority than the world itself. When it comes down to justice, already in the opening sentences of Cosmos Basileus Nancy describes the nomos of the world as the dissemination, the division and the allocation of sharing of everything (Nancy 2001, p. 185). Although writing down a firm statement, Nancy s explanation of this is just as brief as the description of it. Things to be distributed or disseminated, he writes very briefly, can be places, but just as well portions of food or rights and duties. And to the question of the just measure of such a distribution what one could call the question of distributive justice Nancy answers that the measure of covenant, of the law of law or of absolute justice lies nowhere other than in this sharing itself, and in the exceptional singularity of everyone with everyone else that this sharing offers (Nancy 2001, p. 185). The Right Mean and a Just Measure To unpack these sequences and the juridical implications of co-existence, interpreted as the law of the law, the measure, the covenant, or absolute justice, Nancy himself gives a number of careful indications, not in Cosmos Basileus itself, but in some of his earlier texts. In The Experience of Freedom, for example, he offers an interesting suggestion. Justice, he writes, can no longer be that of a right environment presupposing of a given measure (Nancy 1993, p. 75). By this, Nancy

4 4 I. Devisch refers to the ontological order of an (ancient) world that gave a central function to the idea of a just measure. Again, without much further ado, the reader is presupposed to understand the implications of these statements. Since things are not that easy, we attempt a brief philosophical sketch of the idea of a just measure. First of all, the collapse of the idea of a just measure and environment implicitly refers to Aristotle s doctrine of the Mean. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes it as the task of the excellent person to discover the right mean and to keep to the just measure (Aristotle 1994, pp. 1105b b1125). All excellence or virtue lies in the middle of two extremes and it is necessary to keep mid-way between the too much and the too little, to retain the middle. The right mean is not an arbitrary choice of a free individual but a pressing task. To act virtuously is to act in accordance with the stable order of being: we must do good in accordance with the good which is. Keeping the middle path is therefore never a matter for the individual alone. As a polis, citizens must strive together for the mean and comply with the superior structure that is the cosmos. The right mean and just measure are never purely moral matters but always questions of being ontological matters. Every digression from the right mean is a detour from the unfolding of being and therefore always an ontological excess. The (right) mean is, as it were, the covenant of finite being, of the closed cosmos that is the ancient world. Or put differently, justice ( dikè ) is a question of the right modality of being. 2 Next to that, a just measure is also central in Christian feudality, although different from the ancient Greek order. When Christianity introduces the notion of infinity, and thereby indirectly paves the way for the infinite modern world, things change substantially (Nancy 1993). Christianity institutes a remarkable relation between finitude and infinitude, between measure and excess. Insofar as creation is created, its mode of being is one of finite dependence, but insofar as creation is the result of a Creating Act that comes into being ex nihilo, its covenant is that of immeasurability, infinity. What finite creation measures itself against is the universe, the All, the infinite expansion of the universe that seventeenth century philosopher Blaise Pascal brought into such turmoil. Nevertheless, such a notion of infinity still maintained a supreme theological limit by which every right and wrong is finally judged. God is not only the maker of earthly things. God also adds a cosmic dimension with his promise of another kingdom from which wrong will be banished. Measure for Humanity The question is: what does the modern era still have to do with this just measure? With the withdrawal of God in the modern era, creation is thrown back increasingly 2 In the Aristotelean sense, dikè refers to the general term for law and justice. In the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between different forms of specific justice: distributive and reciprocal justice, civil and domestic justice, law and natural law, and fairness.

5 Doing Justice To Existence 5 on itself, Nancy writes (Nancy 1993). Lacking any criterion or limit point, it becomes its own measure, with the proviso that in this order all measure is absent, which now will come to mean that excess comes to constitute measure. Creation can measure itself against nothing other than itself. One can therefore no longer properly speak about creation: it is now purely being that is its own measure. It is precisely for this reason that all former measures no longer hold. Aristotle s world of right mean and just measure is miles away from here. The question is therefore: what is left to us? What if there is no measure at all in the modern world? What would this mean for the question of justice and law? It took six years for Nancy s above-mentioned suggestion from The Experience of Freedom to acquire more specificity. Nancy s main entry point for Human Excess (1994) is keeping measure (the text appeared in the journal Epokhè and was later published in Being Singular Plural (Nancy 2001, pp )). In this essay, Nancy reflects on a form of excess or immeasurability that would be proper to our modern order. More specifically, he describes our time as a period of vast numbers. Of course one does not require Nancy in order to make this claim. Our time sustains itself with enormous numbers, imposing records and dizzying figures. These immense numbers initially seem to refer to a form of immeasurability or excess proper to our time. Everything is going faster and is expected to grow exponentially, and whereas from an optimist side we are told to be fascinated with this immeasurability, from the side of the pessimists we are warned for the uncanniness of it all. This alternative is precisely what Nancy puts into question. Both positions, one can infer from Human excess, fail to make a crucial step when thinking the place of this excess in modernity. Excess is, according to Nancy, found not so much in always greater and greater numbers (Nancy 2001, pp ). Although certain things are immeasurably large, we are still able to measure them and put the results into figures. One can, for example, measure how many millions of grains of sand there are in a handful, how many miles of books there are in a shop rack, or how many individual letters can be found in the collected works of Hegel. In our modern era, the immeasurable is always measurable: there is thus not something like a measure a priori given from which the immeasurable is said to diverge. Excess, therefore, does not lie in huge numbers. Whether the world population is now four or five billion makes no difference to the excessive. There is no fixed criterion against which we could measure these billions, and it is precisely the lack of this criterion that shows how excess lies elsewhere. The ever-greater dissemination of vast numbers in our culture, such as computer memory, the price of a nuclear submarine, indicates not so much an aberration from certain established measures or norms but rather an exponential growth of our responsibility for the world and existence (Nancy 2001, p. 179). Numbers that measure the stock market or world population point in the first place to a certain connectedness or commitment, an engagement. For example, the risks and consequences of the growing impact of multinationals on our economy or of the ever-increasing world population.

6 6 I. Devisch Excessive Responsibility If the just measure has collapsed, does it not mean that we are the only ones left to be responsible for the world? And if the excess of the above figures lies not so much in the size and degree of their divergence from one or the other criterion, but rather in the responsibility that conceals itself precisely in the lack of such a criterion (Nancy 2001, p. 179), how then to understand this responsibility? In our era, the humanitas of man reveals the excess and the immeasurability as the measure of all things, and by which human being must measure itself. It is not without significance, for Nancy, that figures of genocide and other forms of extermination have become the semantemen or signifiers of modernity. Six million is, for example, inseparably linked with the six million dead of the Shoah. The number, six million does not simply mean a lot or an immeasurable amount. This figure in itself is not immeasurable and does not indicate that a specific limit has been transgressed. Furthermore, how do we measure the deaths of ten Jews, or the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Armenians? Rather than a sort of excess, such types of figures indicate a specific order, a proper register of engagement and responsibility. Extermination is literally an exhaustion of numbers, the counting out of a people to its existence as a totality. With this, Nancy indicates that the excess of numbers that our world population posits as an absolute fact, as something that exists fully in itself and so Nancy calls for another covenant of being. More precisely, excess is its own proper covenant. The world is measuring itself, that is, as excess; it forms the measure of an unheardof measure. That the world measures itself means that it is engaged as a whole. Nancy gives the example of the big bang which, for him, is not a matter of something very large but of certain greatness [ grandeur ], in the sense of being its own measure. There is no measure against which the being of the big bang could be measured. This implies a different ontological order, a different status of what is. The magnitude that is its own excessive measure indicates equally the criterion for an absolute responsibility. Once we take the measure of the big bang, our responsibility for the universe is total and immeasurable. Man as the measure of all things thereby acquires a new dimension, namely, the immense responsibility for every existence existing, precisely, without a given measure (Nancy 2001, pp ). Take the Shoah, usually regarded as a form of excessive violence, as an example; it no longer suffices to name the correct measure from which this excess would diverge. Responsibility must take on the posture of a similar excessiveness. In this way, human beings receive their proper measure as an absolute, limitless responsibility. In The Experience of Freedom, Nancy describes this total responsibility as an established or prevailing just measure in the name of the incommensurable (Nancy 1993, p. 75), and in Responding for existence he calls it an archi-responsibility (Nancy 1999, p. 5). By this, he understands the fact that our responsibility does not stem from a just measure or from a self that is responsible only for its own legal obligations. Archi-responsibility precedes all

7 Doing Justice To Existence 7 measures and laws and even exceeds every self (Nancy and Sparks 2003, p. 146). 3 This does not mean that one always and for all time, ontically, has to bear an unlimited responsibility, or that political or moral, juridical responsibility is not to be assessed in concrete situations. This assessment is also a responsibility but once the measure for it is no longer given in advance, all assessment of responsibility always and already starts from this archi-responsibility. Nancy s archi-responsibility is a profoundly Kantian principle. It does remind us of Kant s categorical imperative which exists even before we can obey it, so to say. Within Kant s discussion of the categorical imperative, we will always fail to fulfill our formal duty because the law prescribes nothing other than its own obligatory character. The categorical imperative is constitutively unrealizable and always imbues our conformity to the law with a sense of guilt, a Schuldgefühl (Kant 2005). The categorical imperative transcends every empirical possibility of obeying it, every possible representation of it and every measure concerning our actions. Consequently, as Nancy writes in Le katègorein de l excès (his commentary on the categorical imperative), respect for the law is aimed at its heteronomous character (Nancy 1983, p. 27). As a rational being I am called before the law; as an existent creature, always failing to answer this call, I am confronted with my limits. My limits are revealed as finite precisely where they push up against the infinite demand of the categorical law. The law constitutes and transcends me because it reveals to me in Kant s words my noumenal destination in the reign of finalities. According to Nancy in Dies irae, Kantian autonomy is fundamentally marked by an irreducible heteronomy, namely the infinite demand of the law itself (Nancy 1985, p. 44). This heteronomy is also at work within archi-responsibility. Existing, Nancy emphasizes, is not only being open but also being responsible. To be responsible means that we are always already in relation to something, before we are autonomous beings. We are always already thrown into existence and must always be able to answer for our existence. In this responsibility, we are judged because our appearance is in the sharing that we are with and in respect to others. Such responsibility has no pre-given measure that would precede it. To give another example, let me mention the population explosion. The question is not only how many people the earth can sustain; it is also a question of which people, and which existences. The grandeur of the number turns simultaneously into a moral grandeur: the size [ taille ] of humanity becomes indissociable from its dignity (Nancy 2001, p. 180). In short, the problematic Nancy lays before us is how justice is to be thought from a global perspective and from a world that has become its own measure, and is 3 Nancy cites Emmanuel Levinas in his commentary upon the categorical imperative, interpreted as the law of the law and which focuses on the immeasurable duty accompanying it. More specifically, Nancy stresses the ethical resistance of the Face, which Levinas emphasizes in his oeuvre. In this respect, further research into, on the one hand, the similarities between the stress on the immeasurability of existence in Nancy and the excess, immeasurable as well, of the Infinite in Levinas, and on the other hand, into the differences of their conception of otherness, seems very much necessary. My research here, however, will have to limit itself to just pointing to the existence of such analogies between Levinas and Nancy.

8 8 I. Devisch thus simultaneously without measure. This global perspective leaves us open to an engagement without measure and it is this that constitutes our existence. Sharing of the World After all, given his ontological perspective, Nancy s discussion of justice needs to be related to what he writes about co-existence in Being Singular Plural. Because the world is not given once and for all, there is no perfect divide through which everyone would be assigned a fixed place. On the contrary, because the world arises in and through the taking place of every singular appearance, its division and its divide are at stake time and time again, that is within everyone of us, with each appearance, and each time something or someone appears. Sharing or division [partage] is thus precisely that which connects the theme of the world or existence and that of justice (van der Walt 2005). In this way, the covenant is thus also nothing other than co-existence. Co-existence is not something added to existence, as a phenomenon in itself. Co-existence is existence existing as dividing-sharing. As a consequence, justice means therefore doing justice to what must be given, what belongs to every unique, singular creation in its co-existence with other creations (Nancy 2001, p. 187). Justice is not in the first place a matter of a singularity and only later the relation of this singularity to others. That which makes the singular unique is at once that which puts it into relation. To do justice to the singular absoluteness of one s proper being is thus simultaneously to do justice to the plurality of the singular. Although, as Nancy describes it in Cosmos basileus (Nancy 2001, p. 188), the demand of this justice is infinite, how it is implemented is far from clear, since it seems to unfold, ultimately, as an unbearable injustice. There are natural disasters, deadly viruses, crimes, and so forth. These things do injustice to existence existence always taken as the singular plural co-existence. There is no answer to the question of why there would be such injustice. The theological instances justifying it have disappeared. Justice no longer enters from outside the world to recuperate the world s injustice or to sublate it, but is a given with the world, as the law of its act of donation. The world is itself the supreme law of justice. Not the world as it is but that the world is, that it always surges forth again, always plural singular. The Day of Judgement Nancy s strategy in his discussion of justice is no different to the way he approaches other questions. He takes a number of already existing motifs or concepts and gradually unpacks them so as to introduce them into his own vocabulary with new meanings or changes in their meaning. We can perhaps clarify Nancy s point by making a parallel with the problematic of sense. Here too, he claims that it is no longer a question of whether the world has a meaning or makes sense, but that the world is meaning, is (as) sense (Nancy 1998). In the same way, the world in which we live no longer

9 Doing Justice To Existence 9 has a measure, but is measure. The new way of being demands a new covenant. Furthermore, the world itself becomes that which institutes what is just and what is not. Justice does not come into the world from the outside the world lacks nothing and is not given as a fixed measure: the world has no foundation or overall aim. The world is itself the sharing and the dividing of justice and injustice such that justice is no longer a matter of a (theo- or socio-)dicy or a dikè, says Nancy in The Sense of the World: Neither dike nor dicy : this is a call neither for despair nor for hope, neither for a judgement of this world nor for a just world but for justice in this world, for justice rendered unto the world: that is, for resistance, intervention, compassion, and struggle that would be tireless and oriented toward the incommensurability of the world, the incommensurability of the totality of the singular outline, without religious and tragic remuneration, without sublation, and thus without discourse (Nancy 1998, p. 148). Precisely because dikè and -dicy have vanished, we need an ontological reflection on justice. Something at the level of existence itself has appeared, and could profoundly influence our vision of justice. In light of this, Cosmos basileus begins with a reflection on the unity of the world (Nancy 2001, p. 185). For Nancy this unity or totality is not a whole but a co-existence that as such is not, but which comes into being through the plural co-existence of singularities. This is why justice is that which must be awarded to every existence according to its unique, singular creation in its coexistence with all other creations (Nancy 2001, p. 187). This is also why Nancy speaks of a total responsibility that, once there is no longer any single -dicy or dikè to measure or limit it, precedes all laws. Thinking justice without a pre-given dicy is also distancing ourselves from the way theodicy solved the problem of evil in this world. Theodicy legitimated the existing evil of the world by proclaiming a future good in an afterlife. Theodicy heó1 (theós: God) and di9jg (díkē: justice) literally means the justice of God. As Leibniz discussed in his Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l homme et l origine du mal (Leibniz 1969), evil in this world is in a way solved by the goodness of God. For Leibniz in particular, notwithstanding its many evils, the world is the best of all possible worlds. Whatever Leibniz particular stance results in, the main thread of theodicy is that it explains evil and justice from an ontological (or theological) given, a measure. Our world, Nancy writes, lacks such a given and therefore has to find another register out of which problems such as justice and evil are tackled. No wonder that in the context of justice, the concept and motifs Nancy starts from are frequently religious in their origin: the day of judgement, being summoned or put on trial, the (second) coming, the absolutely Other. As with the question of the sense of the world, Nancy expands these religious motifs to existential matters, to the ontological conditions of possibility of existence. These conditions are central to his oeuvre in its entirety. Nancy s emphasis, in the context of justice as in all the other cases, is on the real multiplicity in which our existence takes place.

10 10 I. Devisch Compearance To illustrate Nancy s strategy, let us elaborate his discussion of a concept which has religious and juridical connotation, the concept of compearance. This concept first appears in Nancy s short text The Forgetting of Philosophy (Nancy 1997). In 1991, a book co-authored with Christophe Bailly appeared, La comparution. Politique à venir. Nancy s essay is titled La comparution. De l existence du communisme à la communauté de l existence (Nancy 1991, pp ), translated in 1992 as La comparution/the compearance. From the existence of communism to the community of existence (Nancy 1992). La comparution/ The compearance was written on the occasion of the fall of communism. In this text, Nancy repeatedly talks about an ontology of being-in-common as the alternative to an ontology of community as substance or as origin (Devisch 2000). It was only in 1996 that Nancy develops compearance as a fully fledged concept. It occupies a fairly central place in one of the thirteen chapters of Being Singular Plural (Nancy 2001, pp ). Compearance is the juridical concept for becoming a defendant, appearing before a judge. A comparant is someone who appears before a judge. Compearance also has the general meaning of a gathering or meeting. Moreover, it is a linguistic relative of the Greek parousia, the anticipated (second) coming of the Lord and thus also with dies irae, the day of the Last Judgment. The meaning of compearance thus circles around the appearance or arrival of something, on the one hand, and around the multiplicity of that arrival, on the other. It is literally a coming-together of a plurality, a coming not from but as a plurality, a coming that comes to pass as nothing other than com. It is, according to Nancy, never a matter of appearance itself, but about an existential condition for every appearance. There is no appearance, no coming to the world and to being in the world that does not take place as withness. Nancy not only employs the meaning of comparution in order to lay bare the ontological structure of the social, but also to clarify the structure of our responsibility and our being judged, arising from the fact that we are compearance (Nancy 1992, p. 372). We appear as com, and through this we are summoned by the co-existence that we have to be. We advene and such an arrival is never on its own, but is always both a sharing and a dividing, that is, a shared and divided being singular plural. According to Nancy, we are always already exposed to existence, always already summoned. We are already responsible even before we assume our responsibility. We must always already answer for our existence. This archiresponsibility summons us; we are exposed to it as a result of co-existence. The day of judgement is thus not a final judgement but, as Nancy puts it in La comparution/ The compearance, conveys one s being exposed to existence at every moment of every day: There would thus no longer be a court to which we should compear. However, we find ourselves still in judgement. The Day of Judgment dies irae, the day of divine wrath is no longer a day at all [ ] This day is thus an instant always in suspense, always a differed judgment that cannot be appealed. This judgment (justly) reaches a verdict in the name of the end. This is not an End

11 Doing Justice To Existence 11 set up as an Idea on the horizon; it is rather how we approach our own final horizon and how we do (or do not do) justice to that horizon. This is a simple judgment, without appeal; it is not subject to any superior law (droit) for it proceeds from that which precedes law. Have we done right (droit) by that which still has no right? Right by our existence itself or since this word is subject to misuse in the singular by our existences, by their community? Before this law without law we have never ceased to compear. In the end we compear there naked (Nancy 1992, p. 372). In the above quotation, one can find a number of important aspects that touch upon the core of Nancy s conception of justice. Once again co-existence is the central point of reference. Here, too, Nancy begins from the radical idea that we can no longer think on the basis of any dicy. With respect to justice, this means the bankruptcy of the idea of justice as a final settling of accounts: the undoing of all evil or injustice in an ultimate destination or aim. Such a conception of justice is, moreover, an indirect justification of today s evil or suffering. Such justice is infinite in the sense that its aim lies in an order that lies beyond jenseits every finite order, whether as a transcendent city of God, or the realization of a free society in the future. To avoid thinking justice through a dicy, Nancy explicitly conceives of it on the basis of a finite order of existence. What one, in an infinite sociality, still regards as a final judgement or ultimate destination is in Nancy s thought reduced to the everpresent and eternally arriving judgement within the finite horizon that is our existence. Indeed, not only has this infinite sociality become bankrupt, but the entities that formerly summoned us and functioned as the supreme law-giver, together with this sociality, have likewise lost their social ground and legitimacy. To think after -dicy thus also means finishing first and foremost with every ontological foundation or principle that justifies evil. This is why Nancy speaks of a naked justice that no longer strives for the teleological sublation of all injustice in a society yet to come. The day of judgement takes place within the finite horizon of Nancy s co-existence, and is therefore always a judgement without a summoning entity (be it God, We, or the Other). This does not mean that henceforth all criteria for justice lie in me, in the sense of stemming from a literally autonomous subject that separates good from evil. If so, Nancy would be just another defender of an accomplished humanity while it is precisely against this position that his critique is directed. Nancy grants theoretical primacy not to a law-making subject but to existence, to being exposed, to our appearance to and with others in the world. Put differently, nomos is not the entity that founds the autos and its existence but, on the contrary, the law to which every autos is exposed. Such exposure means being hic et nunc summoned and judged. Or, again: there is no longer any theological judge before whom we must appear. Dies irea, the day of judgement, is not a day that could ever occur in history but is the tribunal of co-existence before which we appear at every moment. Being exposed to co-existence is the law without law before which we continuously appear. The law without law is the command literally to do justice to the coexistence that is ours, a criterion before all criteria (Nancy and Sparks 2003,

12 12 I. Devisch pp. 146,169; Nancy 1992, p. 372). In answering for it, in the archi-responsibility in which we are always placed, we must do justice to existence, although it is never the existence but always singular existences to which one does justice (or not). It is precisely by not reducing the law without law and co-existence to an ultimate (infinite) day of judgement that we do justice to existence. We live in a world that has become responsible for itself, as Nancy says in Responding for Existence (Nancy 1999, p. 9). And What About Democracy? From the foregoing one might draw the conclusion that Nancy is happy with merely contemplating the world as it is. After all, if discussing justice, should we not obtain a better world or at least sketch the conditions of it? Nancy indeed might appear to limit himself to a description of the existence and of the world as such, so as to be able to avoid, from out of ontology s ivory tower, choosing for or against any particular social or political regime. Nancy, however, is well aware of this potential misunderstanding of his work. Although certainly a fervent democrat, Nancy is by no means satisfied with what one could call a moralistic defence of various democratic or humanist self-evidences. By such self-evident instances, we understand, for instance, proclaiming the importance of a number of values such as freedom, pluralism, democracy, mother earth, human rights, and so forth, without ever putting common sense into question. This would not only make all work of thought superfluous are we moreover not all relatively in agreement about these values? It would crowd out a critical questioning of democracy itself. If Nancy builds in a certain reserve against democracy or against human rights, this is, so to say, always in the name of that very democracy. This is why Nancy is never simply against human rights, but regards the conception of them as insufficient. Democracy is too precarious to limit politics to a plea for human rights, and is similarly an inadequate philosophical basis for thinking co-existence. Nancy s reserve about human rights does not prevent him from taking a stance, publicly, on precisely the application of these rights. He thus does not contest the fact that human rights fulfil necessary functions of political and moral urgency, but rather that the thought of community, democracy, justice, politics might become limited to that. Human rights form rather a minimal condition without which one would not even be able to speak of community, or of globalization. In an interview in Le Monde (dd. 29/03/94), he puts it as follows. Human rights express rather a degree zero of politics and philosophy, a supporting point, a base (Nancy 1994). Although democracy may imply a relation to an empty place, Nancy claims, it involves a lot more than this. The relation to this empty place is just as much a problem as that of sense and of existence. It is a matter of, as Nancy claims in the text, Of being-in-common, bringing democracy into relation with its own place of expression and revelation, with the in-common of this people who bear the name without perhaps any longer having found the way and voice of its connection (Collective 1991, p. 11).

13 Doing Justice To Existence 13 Ontological descriptions of our being-in-common are thus never just a temporary contemplation of the status quo of the world. It always means investigating the problems confronting our time. Thought is always and already exposed to these problems and these demands, which is why Nancy does not and cannot limit himself simply to a plea for democracy, justice and human rights. Thinking about justice is different from defending moral values but does not exclude it. References Aristotle Nicomachean ethics. Collective, M.T Community at loose ends. Minneapolis, Oxford: University Of Minnesota Press. Devisch, Ignaas A trembling voice in the desert. Jean-Luc Nancy s re-thinking of the space of the political. Cultural Values 4(2): Ghetti, Pablo Laws of Deliberation: From Audaciousness to Prudence and back. Law and Critique 16(3): Heidegger, Martin Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Max Niemayer Verlag. Heidegger, Martin, and John Macquarrie Being and time/martin Heidegger (trans: Macquarrie, John). New York: Harper and Row. Kant, Immanuel The moral law: Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. London: Routledge. Leibniz, Gottfried W Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l homme et l origine du mal. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Nancy, Jean-Luc The sense of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc The being-with of being-there. Continental Philosophy Review 41(1): Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Simon Sparks A finite thinking/nancy, Jean-Luc, ed. Simon Sparks. Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc L impératif catégorique. Paris: Flammarion. Nancy, Jean-Luc Dies irae. In La faculté de juger, ed. J.F. Lyotard, Paris: Minuit. Nancy, Jean-Luc La comparution/the compearence from the existence of communism to the community of existence. Political theory 20(3): Nancy, Jean-Luc The experience of freedom (trans: McDonald, Bridget. with a forword by Peter Fenves.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc Un entretien avec Jean-Luc Nancy. Le Monde. 29. Nancy, Jean-Luc The gravity of thought (trans: Raffoul, François, and Gregory Recco). New Jersey: Humanities Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc Responding for existence. Studies in Practical Philosophy 1(1): Nancy, Jean-Luc Being singular plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc with Jean-Christophe Bailly La comparution (politique à venir). Paris: Bourgois. Pryor, Benjamin S Law in abandon: Jean-Luc Nancy and the critical study of law. Law and Critique 15(3): van der Walt, Johan Interrupting the Myth of the partage: Reflections on sovereignty and sacrifice in the work of Nancy, Agamben and Derrida. Law and Critique 16(3): Zartaloudis, Thanos The case of the hypocritical. Law and Critique 16(3):