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THINKING EQUALITY TODAY: BADIOU, RANCIE ` RE, NANCY

CHRISTOPHER W ATKINMONASH UNIVERSITY

Abstract Recent work on Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere has rightly identied equality both asa central theme in their own thinking and as the key notion in contemporary radical pol-itical thought more broadly, but a focus on the differences between their respectiveaccounts of equality has failed to clarify a major problem that they share. The problem isthat human equality is said to rest on a particular human capacity, leaving Badious axio-matic equality and Rancieres assumed equality vulnerable to the charge of having a blindspot for some of societys most vulnerable. This article introduces an alternative under-standing of equality drawn from the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, an equality that doesnot rely on a human capacity to guarantee or verify it but rests on Nancys notion of sense. The article explores the advantages of Nancys account of equality in relation tosense over and against an alternative reading that focuses on Nancys evocation of thesuffering human body, before addressing, in conclusion, the problems with whichNancys idea of equality will have to grapple, and why, despite these problems, it is still preferable to the Badiouian and Rancierian approaches.

There has been much recent interest in the question of equality in contemporary French thoug ht, in the main clustering around the work of Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou.1 Indeed, the question of equality is at the heart of the political thought of these two gures of the left.2 Central to the current debate are not somuch the arguments for equality of opportunity over equality of outcome, or vice versa, nor even how equality fares in democracy or Communism, but rather theprior and more fundamental issue sometimes labelled moral equality. This prior

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1 The past decade has seen a proliferation of such publications in French studies and beyond, most notably:Peter Hallward, Badious Politics: Equality and Justice, Culture Machine , 4 ( 2002 ), , http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/ 271/ 256 . [accessed 23 May 2013 ], and his Staging Equality: On Rancieres Theatrocracy, New Left Review , 37 ( 2006 ), 109 29; Nick Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancie ` re: Rethinking Emancipation (London: Continuum, 2007 ); Todd May, Jacques Ranciere and the Ethics of Equality, SubStance , 36.2 ( 2007 ),20 36; Gert Biesta, Toward a New Logic of Emancipation: Foucault and Ranciere, Philosophy of Education Yearbook ( 2008 ), 169 77; Jeff Love and Todd May, From Universality to Equality: Badious Critique of Ranciere,Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy , 12.2 ( 2008 ), 51 69; Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancie ` re: Creating Equality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008 ); Nina Power, Which Equality? Badiouand Ranciere in Light of Ludwig Feuerbach, Parallax , 15.3 ( 2009 ), 63 80; Charles Barbour, Militants of Truth,Communities of Equality: Badiou and the Ignorant Schoolmaster, Educational Philosophy and Theory , 42.2 ( 2010 ),251 63; and Oliver Davis, The Radical Pedagogies of Francois Bon and Jacques Ranciere, French Studies , 64( 2010 ), 178 91.

2 For Badiou, in LE tre et le ve nement (Paris: Seuil, 1988 ), legalite est la politique, de sorte qua contrario tout enonce inegalitaire, quel quil soit, est antipolitique ( p. 82 ); and, in Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992 ), equality is the best term philosophically to seize the current state of the politics of emancipation (p. 226 ). For Ranciere, in Aux bords du politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2004 ), equality is lafrmation juridico-politique fondamentale (p. 91 ); it is also, forhim, a starting point for any denition of politics (Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancie ` re , p. 2 ), and the central themeof his political thought (May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancie ` re , p. 119 ). For Nina Power, equality operates as a vital presupposition (perhaps the most vital presupposition) for [Badious and Rancieres] intellectual and political projects as a whole (Which Equality?, p. 64 ).

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issue can be framed in terms of the question who has a claim to equal treatment?In other words, when it is held as in Aristotles foundational account of equality that we should treat like cases alike and different cases differently,3 on what basis is it decided that two or more cases are alike, or that two or more cases aredifferent? Or, to put the question at its simplest: who is equal, and why?

Recent work, because it has failed so far to tackle this question head on, has not adequately crystallized the problems inherent in thinking equality today.Furthermore, a propensity to focus on the differences between Badiou andRanciere has served to elide those points on which they agree but which, nonethe-less, remain problematic. My intention here is to build on this recent work by clari-fying the important question who is equal?, by demonstrating why this questionbrings to light a serious problem for both Badiou and Ranciere, and by drawing on the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy to suggest an approach to the question of equality that avoids the problem.

The appeal to human capacity The framework within which the debate has hitherto been conducted pitsBadious account of equality as an axiom or maxim that is declared against Rancieres framing of equality as an assumption that is veried. For Badiou, equal-ity must be understood in terms of truth and the subject, notions he elaboratesrst in LE tre et le ve nement and then in the second volume of this work, Logiques des mondes .4 In the latter Badiou introduces the idea of the egalitarian maxim. In orderto illustrate how the maxim works he gives the example of Spartacus and theRoman slave revolt, under the egalitarian maxim Nous, esclaves, voulons et pouvons, comme tout le monde en a le droit, retourner chez nous (p. 78 ). Agroup of individuals is incorporated as a subject of such a maxim when they declare and live faithfully in accordance with it in the present. This temporality isimportant: the egalitarian maxim is neither a programme of social reform nor anaspiration for a future society, but an unequivocal declaration in the present. ForBadiou, a political situation either has this egalitarian axiom or it does not, andequality is therefore not an empirical claim about an actually existing state of

affairs (it is not an equality of statutes, of revenue, of opportunity, and so on); it isdeclared by a subject (singular or plural the term is ambiguous in Badiou) asthe truth of a present situation: Legalite politique nest pas ce quon veut ou pro-jette, elle est ce quon declare au feu de levenement, ici et maintenant, comme cequi est, et non comme ce qui doit etre.5

It is important to stress here that this declaration of equality rests on andrequires a particular human capacity on the part of those who would be incorpo-rated as its subject. For Badiou, equality rests on the capacity to think and, inthinking, to be seized by a truth (in the language of LE tre et le ve nement ) or to be

3 See Aristotle, Politics , I II .13 and V .1; and Nicomachean Ethics , V .3.4 Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes: le tre et le ve nement, 2 (Paris: Seuil, 2006 ). (Page numbers for quotations from

the works of Badiou, Ranciere, and Nancy are, where necessary, given in parentheses in the text.)5 Alain Badiou, Abre ge de me tapolitique (Paris: Seuil, 1998 ), p. 112.

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incorporat ed into an Idea (in Logiques des mondes ) or a hypothesis (in LHypothe ` se communiste

6 ). He makes this point in the Abre ge de me tapolitique :Egalite signie que lacteur politique est represente sous le seul signe de la capacite proprement

humaine. [ . . .

] La capacite proprement humaine est la pensee, precisement, et la pensee nest riendautre que ce par quoi le trajet dune verite saisit et transit lanimal humain. Ainsi une politique dignedetre interrogee par la philosophie sous lidee de justice est-elle une politique dont lunique axiomegeneral est: les gens pensent, les gens sont capables de verite. Ainsi une politique touche-t-elle a la verite pour autant quelle se fonde sur le principe egalitaire dune capacite au discernement du juste,ou du bien, tous vocables que la philosophie apprehende sous le signe de la verite dont le collectif est capable. (p. 111 )

It is clear that, in Badiou, equality and human capacity are intimately interwoven.It is an axiom that people think and that we, as thinkers, are capable of (being thesubject of a) truth.

It is not the case for Badiou, however, that all people without exception areequal, but rather that those incorporated as the subject of an Idea are equal in sofar as they remain faithful to that Idea. Before he or she is incorporated into anIdea, an individual is a human animal governed by desires and opinions, andamong human animals there is only inequality. For such a human animal to beincorporated in a truth, it must possess a certain capacity, namely a capacity tothink, to be traversed by a truth. In short, to be equal, human animals must becapable of truth, and, even if we allow that there are collective subjects with a gen-eralized capacity to think, it is hard not to see such human animals as second-class

citizens. This raises the question: do all human animals without exception or do all groups of human animals have the capacity to be incorporated into an egalitar-ian maxim? Given the requirement of the capacity for truth, it is by no meansclear that Badiou can sustain his specic claim from Logiques des mondes that [a]tout animal humain est accordee, plusieurs fois dans sa breve existence, la chancede sincorporer au present subjectif dune verite (p. 536 ). But what of those without the capacity to think sufciently to apprehend a truth and be seized by it,for example the senile, those with severe mental disabilities, or those who die very

young? Can they ever, on this model, be equal?In order to understand the problem that Badiou has at this point, we need todifferentiate between the Idea of equality and the fact of equality. Badiou has noqualms with the principle that all are equal, precisely because the afrmation of universal equality need bear no relation to any actually existing state of affairs: Pasde politique liee a la verite sans lafrmation afrmation qui na ni garantie nipreuve dune capacite universelle a la verite politique ( Abre ge , p. 112 ). Universal equality is simply afrmed as a hypothesis, a truth (in Badious sense), or an Idea.Badious problem, then, is not de jure that some human animals cannot be equal,because he has no need to prove his afrmation of the universal capacity for polit-ical truth. He does, however, have a de facto problem created by the double

6 Alain Badiou, LHypothe `se communiste (Paris: Lignes, 2009 ).

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assertion ( 1 ) that equality pertains only to the subject of a truth, not to humananimals, and ( 2 ) that a decision is necessary, and in each life possible, that wouldtake a human animal from being merely a human animal to being incorporatedinto a truth. A subject requires the capacity to hold itself to a truth, to be faithful to the truth, but some human animals simply do not possess such a capacity.

Rancieres account of equality is substantially different, but it nds itself saddled with the same problem. Equality for Ranciere is not an axiom to be declared but an assumption to be veried. Whereas Badious maxim of equality is declared in-dependently of any currently existing state of affairs, Ranciere claims to verify anactually existing equality using as his only tool the very claims to inequality that seek to deny it. His argument is that inequality is self-contradictory because equal-ity is the hidden assumption of any claim to inequality:

Il y a de lordre dans la societe parce que les uns commandent et que les autres obeissent. Mais pourobeir a un ordre deux choses au moins sont requises: il faut comprendre lordre et il faut comprendrequil faut lui obeir. Et pour faire cel a, il faut deja etre legal de celui qui vous commande. Cest cetteegalite qui ronge tout ordre naturel.7

Ranciere is saying that any slave who has the capacity to understand and obey anorder is de facto equal with the master giving the order, because he or she isequally able to comprehend and respond to instructions. What this exposes forRanciere is the contingency of the current order and legalite de nimporte quel etre parlant avec nimporte quel autre etre parlant ( La Me sentente , p. 53 ). This as-sumption of equality is important for Ranciere not l east because it creates a space where equality can stake its claim and be veried.8 In other words, acting on thebasis of assumed equality shows that assumption to ha v e been correct. Equality isneither given nor demanded; it is practised and veried.9 So Rancieres vericationfollows a reasoned argument about inequality presupposing equality, whereasBadious declaration seeks to seize an as yet inexistent universal equality.

Methodologically, Ranciere works closely with certain privileged examples. Ishall briey sketch two of the most important in order to demonstrate his pro-blems with human capacity. First, in La Me sent en te Ranciere discusses the revolt of the plebeians on the Aventine hill in 494 BC E.

10 The patricians refuse any discus-sion with the plebeians, considering that they make noise, not words, being incap-able of rational discourse. However, Menenius Agrippa goes to speak with theslaves in order to convince them of the justice of their inequality, which forRanciere is already to have conceded their equality:La chose est simple a formuler: du moment que les plebeiens pouvaient comprendre son apologue lapologue de linegalite necessaire entre le principe vital patricien et les membres executants de laplebe , cest quils etaient deja, tout aussi necessairement, egaux. (p. 47 )

7 Jacques Ranciere, La Me sentente: politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilee, 1995 ), p. 37.8 Ranciere, Aux bords du politique , p. 65.9 Jacques Ranciere, Le Ma tre ignorant: cinq lec ons sur le mancipation intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 2004 ), p. 227.10 Ranciere, La Me sentente , pp. 45 47.


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The plebeians can understand and respond rationally to the argument put to them,demonstrating their equality as speaking beings. The second example is from Le Ma tre ignorant , where Ranciere appeals to the innovative educational methods of Joseph Jacotot ( 1770 1840 ). Jacotot demonstrated that even pupils who are con-sidered stupid and to have little or no capacity for learning can be shown to be re-markably intelligent. His method, as Ranciere reconstructs it, hinges on assuming equality of intelligence, for admitting any inequality of intell ig ence will always leadto the intelligent caste shepherding the stupid multitude.11 The assumption isadopted in turn by Ranciere je fonctionne toujours sur le principe jacotiste quelegalite est une presupposition et non un but a atteindre12 and is pursued tothe point where he declares equality and intelligence to be synonymous terms: [i]l en va de la raison comme de legalite qui lui est synonyme. Il faut choisir de lattri-buer aux individus reels ou a leur reunion ctive ( Le Ma tre ignorant , p. 221 ).

What or rather whom these examples exclude, however, are those withan impairment sufciently grave to bar them even from participating in a linguisticor educational context in the rst place, a context where methods such as Jacototsor Menenius Agrippas can be deployed. This framework does not engage withthose who cannot speak or understand orders (because of severe disability, senility,or extreme youth, for example), and therefore we can see that there are not simply two groups (say, the patricians and the plebeians) but three: in addition to thepatricians who argue for inequality, and the plebeians who demonstrate theirequality by speaking and understanding, there are those who have no share in theexample as Ranciere presents it, those without the capacity to enter a dialogiccontext in the rst place. Furthermore, it will not do to say that Ranciere does not intend to address such cases, for this merely conrms the invisibility of those without a share, a position that he criticizes when the patricians refuse to recognizethe plebeians.

Ranciere, however, is quick to defend himself against the objection that he isunveriably assuming a universal equality of intelligence:Mais jamais nous ne pourrons dire: toutes les intelligences sont egales. Il est vrai. Mais notre pro-bleme nest pas de prouver que toutes les intelligences sont egales. Il est de voir ce quon peut faire

sous cette supposition. Et pour cela il nous suft que cette opinion soit possible, cest-a-dire quau-cune verite inverse ne soit demontree. ( Le Ma tre ignorant , p. 79 )

This is an important clarication, but it does not let Ranciere off the hook. As wasthe case with Badiou, the problem is not with the de jure assumption that all areequal, but with the de facto restriction of the discussion of equality, as demon-strated in the examples of the Aventine revolt and Jacotots teaching methods, tothose with the capacity to speak and to obey. Even given Rancieres deployment of equality as an emancipatory tool and not an exhaustive theory of the polis , it still remains that some of those least able to defend themselves against unequal

11 Ranciere, Le Ma tre ignorant , p. 218.12 Jacques Ranciere, Les Democraties contre la democratie: entretien, in Giorgio Agamben and others,

De mocratie: dans quel e tat (Paris: La Fabrique, 2009 ), pp. 95 100 (p. 98 ).


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treatment are overlooked: precisely those who have no share in the examplesRanciere chooses, who do not have a voice to speak in their own defence, and who cannot understand and follow orders.

So both Badious and Rancieres accounts of equality are problematic to theextent that they rely on a particular human capacity, respectively the capacity tothink, or the capacity to understand and speak. For Badiou, the problem lies in thede facto incapacity of some human animals to deploy the necessary intelligence ac-tively to hold themselves to a truth, and for Ranciere the problem is in overlooking the de facto incapacity of some to speak and understand orders. In both cases thecapacity is necessary for equality, and so in both cases it is far from clear that all can be equal. Some of those least able to assert their own equality are off the radar.

Nancy, equality, and capacity In light of the foregoing analysis, it is important that the current debate aroundequality confront the capacity problem and move towards a thinking of equality that is less susceptible to the charge of having a structural blind spot for some of societys most vulnerable and least able to argue their corner. It is in this vein that Inow turn to an examination of equality in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. AlthoughNancys account of equality is not without its own problems, he does point the way to a compelling and much-needed alternative to the reliance on capacit y.

Nancys engagement with equality begins as far back as LAbsolu litte raire ,13 but Ipropose here to set out his avoidance of the capacity problem by focusing mainly on ideas of general equivalence and incommensurability from E tre singulier pluriel and on the extended discussion of equality in relation to sense in LAdoration , therecent second volume of his deconstruction of Christianity.14 Nancys treatment of equality in E tre singulier pluriel is explicitly independent of any determinatequality or capacity shared by the equal singulars, a term that roughly equates(though not without some confusion, as we shall see below) to human beings intheir irreducible plurality.15

In preparation for his own account of equality, Nancy closes off two possibleunderstandings. First, singulars are not equal in some abstracted, capitalo-

democratic regime of equivalence generale where anything is exchangeable withanything else; any good, any value, any idea, or any person can be substituted forany other according to the universal equality of market exchange.16 Secondly,

13 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, LAbsolu litte raire : the orie de la litte raire du romantisme allemand (Paris: Seuil, 1978 ).

14 Jean-Luc Nancy, E tre singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilee, 1996 ); LAdoration: de construction du christianisme, 2 (Paris:Galilee, 2010 ).

15 The plurality is not secondary for Nancy but equally coeval with singularity, ineradicably present in the plural singulars. Singulus, he notes, does not exist. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Sens du monde (Paris: Galilee, 1993 ), p. 109.

16 Nancy shares this rejection of general equivalence with Badiou, who dismisses democracy and capitalism,along with Plato, as the equivalence of the equivalent and the non-equivalent: Legalite instituee entre linegal et legal nest autre, pour nous, que le principe monetaire, lequivalent general qui barre tout acces a des differencesreelles, a lheterogene comme tel, dont le paradigme est lecart entre une procedure de verite et la liberte des opi-nions; see Alain Badiou, LEmbleme democratique, in Agamben and others, De mocratie: dans quel e tat , pp. 15 25(p. 20 ).


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singulars are not equal because of something they have in common, be it a sharedintelligence, a shared capacity to understand and follow orders, or anything else.Singulars have nothing in common and are, in fact, incommensurable with eachother. It is this very incommensurability, rather than any shared capacity, that serves as the basis for their equality. What singulars have in common is nothing other than their singularity itself, their incommensurability:Il y a une commune mesure qui nest pas un etalon unique applique a tous et a toutes choses, maisqui est la commensurabilite des singularites incommensurables, legalite de toutes lesorigines-de-monde, lesquelles, en tant que les origines quelles sont, chaque fois, sont strictement insubstituables en ce sens, parfaitement inegales , mais ne sont telles que pour autant quellessont toutes egalement les unes avec les autres. Cest une telle mesure quil nous revient de prendre.( E tre singulier pluriel , pp. 98 99 )

Nancys singular plurality, then, is a way of asserting equality among those with nocommon measure, among those who have no common quality to act as the bearerof their equality. To have recourse to any such quality would create community ascommunion, a closed circle of insiders sharing a common trait who inevitably exclude those who do not share their unifying quality. But for Nancy the plural of singular plurality is not a communion; it is nothing but the exposure ( exposition ) of singulars each to the other, an exposure that can never itself be substantialized andmade into one further quality or capacity. It is not and cannot be a property ortrait that any of the singulars possesses. In Martin Crowleys elegant phrase, it iscette exposition quen commun nous navons pas.17

In so far as Nancys account of equality makes no reference to any determinateproperty, quality, or capacity, it avoids the problem identied above with Badiousand Rancieres approaches. In contrast to Badious egalitarian maxim, equality forNancy is a fact, a feature of singular plural ontology. It is therefore not contingent on any decision or on any incorporation into a subject for it to be effective. Nancy has no equivalent for Badious distinction between the subject of a truth andhuman animals. In contrast to Ranciere, the fact of equality for Nancy is not a fact about any human capacity, so it does not and cannot exclude anyone, either expli-citly or implicitly. These differences mark Nancy out as occupying a distinctive

position in the debate around equality, but his account is not, however, free fromdifculties of its own.One important difculty is that, in moving away from a capacity for intelligence

or for following orders to the broader, indeterminate notion of incommensurabil-ity, Nancy is unable, on the basis of this incommensurability alone, to distinguishbetween humans and animals, or indeed between humans and all living things, oreven between human beings and any other thing at all. All things are, rigorously,singular; none can be exhaustively substituted for any other. So why, on the basisof incommensurability, would the equality of singulars not extend beyond the

human, animal, or even plant kingdoms? This might be called the problem of

17 Martin Crowley, LHomme sans: politiques de la nitude (Paris: Lignes, 2009 ), p. 95.


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equalitys unlimited expansion. If Nancys account of equality is to assert itself inthe space opened by Rancieres and Badious difculties with capacity, how will it respond to this objection?

Nancy is alive to this difculty, and he gives it its fullest expression to date inLAdoration . He begins, perhaps surprisingly given what has been shown from E tre singulier pluriel , with what looks like a retreat to asserting a human capacity as thebasis for equality. Human beings, ces etres de langage que nous sommes (p. 10 ),are equal as a function of our capacity to use language: Cest en tant quetres par-lants que les hommes sont libres et egaux (p. 13 ). Indeed, Nancy argues that equality and language are coeval in a way that seems very closely to echoRancieres argument about the capacity to understand and obey orders:il faut penser que les debuts de lhumanite concident avec le debut de legalite et que le sens de lajustice est present tout de suite, indissociable des hommes. [ . . . ] Une chose montre simplement queles premiers hommes, tout autant que nous, sont dans le juste et linjuste: cest le langage. Lhumanitese denit par le langage. Des quil y a des hommes, il y a le langage. Et ne pourrait-on pas dire que lelangage est veritablement la chose la plus juste du monde? Pour que le langage apparaisse, pour quenous puissions nous parler, il faut quil y ait la reconnaissance des uns par les autres. L e langage signi-e que lon se comprend les uns les autres, et pour se comprendre, il faut etre a egalite.18

So Nancy has a response to the problem of unlimited expansion, namely that equality is a particularly human, indeed a quintessentially human, feature, and that the expansion of equality therefore stops with those who use language. But surely this lands him with exactly the same problem identied above in Badiou and

Ranciere: if human beings are equal by virtue of possessing a command of lan-guage and an ability to recognize that command in others, what of those humanbeings who, for one reason or another, lose or never possessed such a capacity? And a second, larger question also needs to be asked: what is new here? what if anything differentiates Nancys position at this point from the identication of man as the speaking being going back through Heidegger at least as far as the zo on logon echon of Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics ? The answer to both of these questionsis found when we consider the way in which Nancys specic account of languageis part of his more general treatment of sense.

At the point where Nancy identies human beings as beings of language, hecontinues with a telling parenthetical remark: Cest en tant quetres parlants queles hommes sont libres et egaux (et cest du langage que peut eventuellement sesaisir une extension plus large de ces proprietes) ( LAdoration , p. 13 ). It is our useof language that makes us human and makes us equal, but it is also by virtue of language that this equality is not limited to speaking human beings. We know assoon as we speak, Nancy argues, that language addresses itself (and indeedaddresses us) to the outside of homogeneous signication and communication.19

It addresses us to what, in Le Sens du monde , he calls the sens , or the signiance , of

18 Jean-Luc Nancy, Juste impossible: petite confe rence sur le juste et linjuste (Paris: Bayard, 2007 ), pp. 45 46.19 LAdoration , p. 10.


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signications : the meaningfulness of the world that will always be in excess of any determinate signications we choose to give it.20

In LAdoration Nancy develops this thinking by arguing that all language isaddressed to sens , to the excess of meaningfulness over any determinate meaning.Human beings, to be sure, do have a unique place as beings of language, beings with a particular role of making sense of the world, but all human language is anadoration of sense, where adoration is understood etymologically as ad-oratio , aspeaking towards. Crucially and this is why Nancys account is not merely areworking of the zo on logon echon motif this excess of sense to which language isaddressed is not the property or preserve of human beings alone:La parole sadresse ainsi a ce qui lexcede souverainement; elle vaut, cette parole, comme acces a cet exces, acces ouvert a travers lhomme a la totalite des existants du monde et au dehors qui lespartage, quils ont en partage; lhomme, le parlant, existe au nom de, en faveur de, on pourrait memedire en raison de la totalite des existants du monde: il en recoit sa raison detre comme celui qui doit rendre raison du monde. ( LAdoration , p. 100 )

To recap: language addresses ( ad-ores ) the excess of la totalite des existants, and al-though language comes through (a travers) human beings, sense is not an exclu-sively human property. In fact, in this frame we cannot speak of language(understood as the adoration of sense) as a capacity at all. As Nancy explains inHegel: linquie tude du ne gatif , to speak of human beings as beings of sense need not imply any capacity or property:

Si Je surgit, chaque fois, comme lidentite de luniversel et du singulier Je netant rien dautrequun surgissement, un jet de sens en soi, sans contenu determine , cela na lieu que pour autant que Je est partage entre tous egalement. Non seulement comme une propriete egale de tous lesparlants-et-pensants, mais comme cette propriete qui ne va a rien dautre qua se supprimer commepropriete distincte du parler et du penser, comme propriete dune conscience-en-face-de, pour se re-trouver hors delle-meme, hors des consciences et des signications.21

Sense, then, is anything but a human property or capacity; it is that which decen-tres the human, turns us outside ourselves to be addressed by and to adore theexcess of the totality of existents. This is the difference between those who seelanguage as a human capacity and Nancys account of the adoration of sensethrough human language.

Equality is intimately connected to language, but not in the sense that all beings who have the capacity to speak and/or understand and/or think thereby verify their equality or are seized by its maxim; rather it is through (human) language that the excess of sense over the signication of any existent is manifested. The excessof sense is not something we possess but something to which we are exposed: Tel est lincommensurable auquel nous sommes exposes: non seulement incommensurable a nous et a tout autre etant, mais incommensurable a lui-meme. Telles sont la chance et la jouissance de la

20 Sens for Nancy is the condition of possibility of any determinate signications , any determinate meanings, what-soever. He explains that sens is anterieur a toute signication, quil les pre-vient et qui les sur-prend toutes, tout autant quil les rend possibles, formant louverture de la signiance generale (ou du monde) dans laquelle et selonlaquelle il est tout dabord possible que viennent a se produire des signications ( Le Sens du monde , p. 21 ).

21 Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: linquie tude du ne gatif (Paris: Hachette, 1997 ), p. 54.


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pensee: quelle est essentiellement rapport a lexcedence en soi, a lexcedence absolue qui est celle dece quon peut nommer letre aussi bien que le monde ou le sens. ( LAdoration , p. 23 )

It is humans who are beings of language, but language manifests the innite excess

of the sense of being or of the world, not just of human beings. This difference between language as capacity and language as adoration of sense also points to an important distinction between our present reconstructionof equality in Nancy and an approach that would take another path through histhought, building a reading of equality around the motif of the suffering humanbody. This alternative approach is tempting but fails to address the capacity problem. The reading would proceed by rejecting the founding of equality onsome human activity (speech, thought. and so on) and would instead seek to arguethat we are all equal not because of our abilities but because of our limits, ourneeds, our incapacities our nitude. We cannot sustain ourselves without food, water, and air; we each have fragile, vulnerable bodies. In short, this approach would argue that our equality is a function of our capacity to suffer .22

There are two main objections to the suffering body approach, namely that it is an ethics of victimhood that reduces the human to the animal datum of its tor-tured body in an oppressive metaphysics of pity,23 and that it is internally compro-mised because it relies on the continued existence of the very inequalities that it purports to militate against: the resistance against inequality requires that there beinequalities to resist, and beyond this resistance such a position struggles toprovide a constructive political vision.

The rst of these charges stems from a misunderstanding of Nancys position,for the suffering body is no mere mass of tortured esh but an attestation of what Nancy calls the spacing of bodies, or in other words our singular plural being assuch. The point is not that the victim is a victim but that the victim is indelibly sin-gular and ineradicably human; far from reducing the human to the animal datumof its tortured body, the point is precisely that the human cannot be reduced to abody through suffering and torture. The charge that this position is internally com-promised is more difcult to dismiss, however. The demand for equality in theface of needs and suffering is indeed at some level parasitic on the apprehensionof inequalities, of unjust suffering, of unmet need, and this leaves the account of equality in question always taking a remedial, palliative, or reactive role with regardto inequality. Routing an understanding of equality in Nancy primarily through

22 This is a possible, indeed plausible, route through Nancys thinking about equality. In Juste impossible he arguessomething very close to this position in relation to human needs: Il faut que nous gardions en tete le fait que lonne peut pas se poser la question de legalite des personnes singulieres sans penser tout dabord a legalite des per-sonnes en tant quelles ont un certain nombre de besoins qui doivent etre satisfaits de maniere egale (p. 42 ).Furthermore, in Corpus (Paris: Seuil, 1992 ) he explicitly draws the link between equality and the suffering humanbody: Cest une condition commune: non les espaces mesures, mais les espacements sont tous egaux, tous dememe lumiere. Legalite est la condition des corps. Quoi de plus commun que les corps? Avant toute autre chose,communaute veut dire lexposition nue dune egale, banale evidence souffrante, jouissante, tremblante(pp. 44 45 ). It is my contention that this account of equality is, for all its merits, both signicantly different fromthe nexus of equality and sense I am elaborating here, and in addition less persuasive as a response to the capacity problem.

23 See Alain Badiou, Le Sie `cle (Paris: Seuil, 2005 ), pp. 246 47, 248 49.


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sense, as I am seeking to do here, however, furnishes a much more proactive pos-ition, one of the ad-oration and celebration of the excess of sense in all existents, which of course includes the suffering and those with acute unmet needs but doesnot stop with the ending of local suffering or the meeting of local needs.

Over and above these two objections, however, the suffering-body approachshares the capacity problem with Badiou and Ranciere The issue is this: althoughthis position may have replaced action with passion, it is still a question of our capacity to suffer. Just as there are some uncomfortable cases for Badiou and Ranciereof humans without the capacities for intelligence or for speech that they respect-ively privilege, so also are there those whose capacity to suffer (physically, psycho-logically, or otherwise) is greatly impaired or absent, and thus the problem of capacity remains. Nancys response to the problem of capacity must come not through turning to the suffering human body, but through the relation betweenequality and language.

Conclusion Where, then, does this understanding of equality from LAdoration t in the land-scape of current debate? First and most importantly I hope to have shown that it provides a compelling response to the uncomfortable complicity between humanequality and human capacity. While Badiou and Ranciere would, of course, want to resist the idea that their accounts of equality leave open the possibility that some vulnerable individuals or groups remain outside equalitys ambit, it is never-theless the case that, as long as moral equality is hung from the hook of a deter-minate human capacity, the de facto exclusion of some individuals or groups whofail to manifest the capacity in question cannot properly be guarded against. That this door has been left open is sufcient, in my opinion, to prompt us to seek analternative approach.

Whereas a certain capacity for Badiou and Ranciere is necessary at some level inorder to secure equality (whatever that may mean in practice), for Nancy thehuman capacity for language as the adoration of sense makes manifest the incom-mensurability not only of human beings but also, as we have seen, of all existents.

And given that Nancys account of equality is one of equality between incommen-surables, this means that there is no possible basis on which to restrict equality tothose existents who happen to be able to speak or think in a particular way. Inother words, while still acknowledging the specicity of human language, Nancy takes a decisive step away from an approach to equality that makes it contingent on a human capacity. In as much as it also takes a step away from the ambiguousposition in which Badious and Rancieres accounts leave some of the most vulner-able, this alone is enough for it to merit the same level of attention and scrutiny that their accounts have recently received. Secondly, thinking equality in terms of

sense avoids the problems attending accounts of equality (including the account from Nancy that starts from the suffering body) that focus on needs and deter-minate human weaknesses, avoiding thereby the telling criticisms often levelled at such an ethics of victimhood.


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If the account of equality I am commending avoids these problems, however, it is not without its own difculties. I have already drawn attention to the problemof unlimited expansion: if equality is not routed through a determinate capacity,then why stop at human beings? Why not then animals? And then plants? Andthen . . . .24 I showed why this was a problem for Nancy if we take only his equa-tion of equality and incommensurability into account, but now that Nancys insist-ence on the specicity of human language has been introduced, we have a morecomplicated situation, and a choice, to face.

Why stop at human beings? Because human beings alone are beings of sense?Nancys account of sense will not allow us to make sense into a property in this way. So are we to conclude that Nancys equality escapes the capacity problem(and those issues attendant on a focus on the suffering or needy body) and acrude formulation of the problem of unlimited expansion, only to be left with in-nite expansion via an afrmation of the specicity of human beings as beings of language through whom the excess of sense is addressed? There are two possible ways to deal with this second iteration of the problem of unlimited expansion, and we must choose one or the other. The rst would be to seek to work the humanspecicity for language itself into a solution. The argument would run something like this: all existents are incommensurable and their excess of sense is to beadored, but, because human beings alone are beings of language, they deservespecial treatment. In other words, all existents are equal (qua incommensurable),but some are more equal than others (qua language users). To my eyes this is adeeply unsatisfactory and problematic conclusion because it amounts to a reica-tion of adoration into a possession, into a capacity, in just the way that Nancy socarefully seeks to avoid, and so it reintroduces all the problems att endant on thecapacity approach that Nancy has laboured, rightly, to circumvent.25

The second way to respond to this position, perhaps less crisply conclusive but in my view overwhelmingly preferable, is to refuse to close down the problem of unlimited expansion if such a closing down comes at the price of reintroducing adeterminate capacity into the equation of equality. We must be careful not simply to see this problem of innite expansion as equivalent to the capacity problem,

such that to face one problem is much the same as facing the other. The capacity 24 I am grateful to Martin Crowley for his clarication of this problem in the course of a generous

question-and-answer session after his paper The Politics of Finitude at the Cambridge Twentieth and Twenty-First Century French Research Seminar, 23 November 2010, in which he reprised and developed themesfrom Nancys LHomme sans .

25 I am grateful to Dirk Baltzly for pointing out to me the similarities between this capacities approach andMartha Nussbaums capabilities approach as developed in The Quality of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1993 ), Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006 ), Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of Americas Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008 ), and Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011 ). Nussbaums con-strual of equality is more sophisticated in that it seeks to take into account ten different human capabilities ratherthan routing equality through one alone. As listed in Creating Capabilities (pp. 33 34 ), the Central HumanCapabilities are ( 1 ) life, ( 2 ) bodily health, ( 3 ) bodily integrity, ( 4 ) senses, imagination, and thought, ( 5 ) emotions, ( 6 )practical reason, ( 7 ) afliation, ( 8 ) relation to other species, ( 9 ) play, and ( 10 ) control over ones environment. Thegreat problem with the capabilities approach, however, is not in the particular capabilities that it chooses to fore-ground (although there are indeed problems with Nussbaums choices and exclusions), but, at a more fundamental level, that it focuses on central human functional capabilities at all. It has not escaped the capacity problem.


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problem seeks to draw the boundaries of equality, even despite itself, and it is in-herently conservative, policing equalitys borders. The problem of unlimited ex-pansion, however, follows quite the opposite dynamic: we begin with a riotous,excessive equality and then seek as Nancy is trying to do with his explorationof human beings as beings of sense to make sense of that equality. With thecapacity problem, the difculty is around those who are excluded those whocannot be seized by a truth, those who cannot access an educational or linguisticcontext of verifying equality. With the problem of unlimited expansion, the dif-culty is around those who are included animals, plants, all life . . . . The pro-blems of exclusion and inclusion are not, to say the least, the same problem, and it is for this reason that, in my opinion, Nancys approach to equality has much torecommend it over Badious and Rancieres. Given the choice between the capacity problem and the problem of unlimited expansion, it would be preferable tograpple with the latter: better to work on restricting an overabundant notion of equality than on expanding an overly narrow one. To adapt what jurisprudenceknows as Blackstones ratio, we might say: Ten times better that the unequal beaccorded equality than that the equal be denied it.26

26 The principle better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer is expressed by Sir WilliamBlackstone in his Commentaries: with notes of reference to the Constitution and laws of the Federal Government of the United States, and of the Commonwealth of Virginia , ed. by St. George Tucker, 5 vols (Philadelphia: W. Y. Birch and A. Small,1803 ), V , 443.


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