As the ‘sovereignty of its sharing’; Jean-Luc Nancy and the politics of

lost authority.

Samuel Kirwan

School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol,

United Kingdom

Samuel.kirwan@bristol.ac.uk

As the ‘sovereignty of its sharing’; Jean-Luc Nancy and the politics of

lost authority

This article addresses how the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy

might inform our understanding of changes to policing and the law introduced

under the 'Community Safety' agenda and more specifically under the term 'Anti-

Social Behaviour'. Having set out the 'governmentality' approach to this field it

argues that what is missing from these accounts is an attention to authority;

specifically the question of what it means to have lost authority, following

Hannah Arendt's claim that authority transcends the exercise of power. The

article proceeds by detailing Nancy's approach to politics, authority and

community in its re-working of Arendtian themes. Such an approach, I argue,

gives an alternative reading of how 'communitarian' ideas were represented in

these initiatives, and in particular how they were integrated into the criminal law.

The article concludes with a set of questions around which we might orientate a

politics of community, one that would be both critical of these changes as well as

retaining a productive and transformative approach. The key to such a balance,

the article argues, lies in inscribing an authority as community, rather than 'of' or

'against' it.

Keywords: community; Jean-Luc Nancy; authority; governmentality

As ‘the sovereignty of its sharing’: Jean-Luc Nancy and the politics of lost

authority

Introduction

Such behaviour is not being effectively checked by the community as a whole with

the backing of the police. I have in mind, for example, graffiti and criminal

damage. Those involved drift into disorder and drift further into crime.

(Jack Straw, speech to commons 14th November 1997, shortly before the

introduction of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) in the Crime and

Disorder Bill)

It’s time to move beyond the ASBO. We need a complete change in emphasis, with

communities working with the police and other agencies to stop bad behaviour

escalating that far.

(Theresa May, speech at Coin Street Community Centre, 28th June 2010)

Like many, such a juxtaposition displays the repetition of ‘New Labour’ themes,

promises and aspirations in the first months of ‘coalition’ government. That the latter

dream of a perfect co-operation between the community and the police, ensuring a

locally produced authority that would guarantee the moral formation of its citizens,

would one day be represented as a radical shift from the Anti-Social Behaviour Order

would no doubt have proved a shock to the Straw of 1997. Yet he need not have

worried; the proposed vehicle for this ‘move beyond’, the ‘Crime Prevention

Injunction’, with its promise to be “less bureaucratic” and as such “speedier’ and ‘more

effective” (Brokenshire, 2011), holds rigidly to the anti-statist tendency within criminal

justice reform for which, in the 1990s and 2000s, ‘Community Safety’ was the

established term.

This article follows Nikolas Rose in recognising this tendency to display the

orientation of Western neo-liberal democracies (principally the United States and

United Kingdom) towards “governing through community” (1999:192). Yet while

Rose’s primary focus therein is upon a distributed appeal to the ethical self – an ‘ethico-

power’ – the article examines a different aspect of this form of governing described by

Rose, namely the discursive foregrounding of the lost authority of the state, and its

accompanying project for authority to be returned to the community. In this change of

emphasis, the article seeks to respond to certain blind spots within Rose’s engagement

of this dynamic, most importantly to the lack of analysis of the nature of authority.

Through the concept of a ‘politics of lost authority’ I describe the pressing question of

this ‘government through community’ to be less the enticement of the ethical subject

than the drive to fill the loss of community with close-knit, neighbourly relationships

that would regulate behaviour in a more ‘intimate’ manner. This shift of emphasis

demands not only a reappraisal of community and authority, but also of political action.

The aim of the article is to provide a response to the failure within ‘governmentality’

studies to articulate a political approach to the terrain of community empowerment and

behavioural interventions beyond the negativity of critique.

The rejoinder posed however is drawn not from the communitarian tracts of

which Rose and others are directly critical, but from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (1991,

1993, 1997, 2000; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1997a, 1997b), alluded to without

being fully explored in Rose’s work (1999:195). I explore how Nancy’s approach both

re-configures our understanding of what is at stake in these political developments and

allows for the articulation, albeit in a very different form, of an alternative political

practice of community. Nancy’s work is presented in the article through its re-working

of two critical problematics taken from the work of Hannah Arendt; the exhaustion of

the political as a distinct sphere and the analogous exhaustion of authority as a specific

modality of power. Having presented Rose’s narrative and its relevance to the field of

Community Safety in Section 1, these separate considerations, of the political and of

authority, are explored in Sections 2 and 3, with the common form of Nancy’s re-

framing of these Arendtian themes being presented through the concepts of ‘retreat’,

‘unworking’ and ‘interruption’.

Having explored these re-workings of politics, authority and community in

Nancy’s work, the article argues that a different understanding emerges of the manner in

which, through the ‘communitarian’ accounts of Amitai Etzioni and others, the law is

made to ‘represent’ the community. Casting these accounts as an attempt to

‘hypostatise’ the excessive moment of subject formation, it argues that what is at stake

in the ‘Community Safety’ agenda is the closure of community as it is present in the

criminal law. Describing these socio-historical descriptions as articulations of the

‘politics of lost authority’, the article argues that the demand emerging from Nancy’s

work is to contest the desire for an intimate, or ‘immanent’, authority created and

executed within the community, instead inscribing the very failure of the community to

guarantee the morals of its members through an interruption or disruption of the

‘immanent figure’ such an ‘immanent authority’ implies. In a context in which authority

has become the terrain for the closure of the ‘intimate exteriority’ (Levett, 2005:430)

community is, it is in the name of another authority that this opposition must be formed.

Section 1: The politics of lost authority

As the term ‘community’ has become increasingly prominent in public discourse, the

‘governmentality’ canon has provided a compelling and widely circulated critique of its

tactical and strategic deployment. This critique centres on the extent to which, as a

direct result of its suggestion otherwise, community is intertwined with power, and is

operative in maintaining certain circuits of inclusion and exclusion. We will begin by

examining the historico-theoretical basis for this critique as it was elaborated in

Foucault’s (1991) short lecture on ‘governmentality’, and how it has been applied to

community in the work of Nikolas Rose (1999).

As a portmanteau for ‘governmental rationality’, the term governmentality

describes an “art of government” (Foucault, 1991:97) focused not upon rule but upon

the channelling and distribution of subjects’ own self-management practices; in short,

upon ‘the conduct of conduct’. Its increasing use as a critical analytic is due to the

emergence in the 1990s of an ‘Anglo neo-Foucauldian’ governmentality studies (see

Rose, 1999, Dean, 1999), for which the concept captured with particular acuity the

modes of ‘hollowed-out’ governance particular to the ‘neo-liberal’ or ‘New Right’

reforms begun in the Reagan and Thatcher eras, and their continuation in the centre-left

administrations of the ‘New Democrats’ and ‘New Labour’.

In Foucault’s (1991) account, as a historical moment governmentality defines a

dissolution, “from the middle ages to the 16th century” (134), of “the constants of

sovereignty” (143). For this ‘art of government’, enacted through various knowledges

for managing particular spheres of activity, progressively destabilised the division

between the governors and the governed located in the authority of the sovereign figure.

Governmental objectives were achieved not through direct sovereign intervention into

governed subjects, but through the constitution of the ‘governed’ as a population to be

shaped by these emergent bodies of knowledge. Thus Foucault noted how the division

proper to sovereign rule was superseded by an increasingly complex field of

governmental techniques, one in which the population was simultaneously an objective

and a space of intervention (102). As the term for this shift, ‘governmentality’

designates the saturation of the political by strategies and techniques for the

improvement of the productivity, wealth, longevity and health of the population. To use

the form of list typical to the contemporary governmentality approaches, the terrain of

government is henceforth the operation of “programmes, strategies, tactics, devices,

calculations, negotiations, intrigues, persuasions and seductions” (Rose, 1999:5).

In ‘governing through community’, then, we are dealing not with a direct

imposition of community policies, discourses and directives upon a subjected populace,

but a specific arrangement of this socio-technical terrain in which ‘community’ is a kind

of conceptual locus. The starting point for any analysis of this field, inasmuch as it

designates the transition of this concept into politics, or its being bestowed a certain

governmental force, is the turn, by both the ‘New Democrats’ and ‘New Labour’, to

‘communitarian’ social philosophies, most notably that articulated by Amitai Etzioni

(1995, 1998). While on a substantive level the existence of anything resembling an

‘Etzionian’ policy has been questioned (Hale, 2006), Rose is concerned with the manner

in which Etzioni’s focus upon the production of morals and values in the community, in

collaboration with Robert Putnam’s (2001) foregrounding of civic participation as the

site for the renewal of community, translated into a new programmes, strategies and

devices for enticing individuals towards a certain responsibility of conduct. As the

incorporation into government of such profoundly personal moments of ethical self-

formation, ‘governing through community’ operates, Rose argues, through an ‘ethico-

power’; a “micro-management” of subjects’ own “self-steering practices” (1999:193).

Now, at the time Rose was writing, the concept of ‘Community Safety’ was

fully established as a powerful critique of the management of behaviour by the state and

the criminal justice system traditionally conceived. Central to this critique was an

observation, articulated by the same communitarian authors, on the lost authority of the

community in the context of behavioural decline (see Reiner, 2007). The socio-

historical accounts of Etzioni, Putnam, Alisdair MacIntyre (1997) and others sought to

situate the rising levels of crime in the 1960s and 70s as part of a historical decline of

the community, and as such of its capacity to guarantee the morality of its members. In

short, the need to affirm the community, and to re-model the functions of the state in its

image, was driven by the very failure of the community as an effective moral authority.

In line with this thinking, the basis of Community Safety was the proposition that crime

and anti-social behaviour are to be combated through a greater level of communal

authority;1 a tightening of relational control, through a range of interventionary powers,

over the process of subject-formation.

Rose’s focus in this respect is upon how certain ‘authorities of conduct’ have

quietly assumed a dominant position within contemporary politics (1999: 187). It is a

questioning that finds resonance with the wider critique of community in which its

‘gated’ form is taken as emblematic of the exclusionary tactics that lie at the heart of all

1 The major recommendation of the Morgan Report (The Home Office, 1991), through

which the term was given national prominence, was that crime prevention be considered a

task for all in the community (3).

community practices (Bauman, 2004). Yet such critical perspectives fail to ask of how

authority itself is being changed in these initiatives. For what constitutes a breach of the

injunctive powers through which Community Safety was enacted, whether Anti-Social

Behaviour Orders, Dispersal Orders or others, is a breach of rules set out by the

individual order, rather than a breach of the law itself as it is applied universally. It is as

such not a breach of the formal structure that applies to all but of an interdiction

particular to that person or population, created, in the terms set out in the Crime and

Disorder Act (Great Britain, 1998:§1b) in which the Anti-Social Behaviour Order was

introduced, for the necessity of protecting those in the community from any further

harm. As Deleuze (1992:3) recognised, such forms of intervention are contracts from

which one can never leave; they preclude, in other words, any situated questioning or

contestation of their structure.

It is this particular aspect of New Labour’s community program, namely the

focus upon a community authority to be exercised through more supple and responsive

powers, that has been taken up by the current government under the name ‘The Big

Society’. For it is the argument of Phillip Blond, the principle thinker behind this

concept, that this focus upon strengthening the authority of the community was little

more than an undercurrent within New Labour’s community policy (Blond, 2009:§3),

whose focus, in concepts such as ‘The Active Community’ (ACU, 1999), was always

the individual; enticing, seducing and forcing that individual into community

participation. Indeed the most important step to be taken in this direction, one being

explored by the current coalition government, would be to significantly broaden the

bodies who can apply for the above described injunctive powers (Brokenshire, 2011),

currently available only to the police and social landlords.

In sum the politics described here in its difference from ‘ethico-power’ bears

three key characteristics; first the loss of community is presented as a grounding truth,

second its filling in by the newly empowered intimate relationships of the local is

offered as the immediate prescription, and third the product of this politics is a closure

of questioning regarding forms of intervention. At the risk of adding another label to a

burgeoning field, I wish to identify in this threefold form a ‘politics of lost authority’.

Now, on a purely substantive level Rose’s critique of the enticement of ethical subjects,

and the new authorities through which these tactics are routed, is poorly equipped to

deal with the very abandonment, in favour of close-knit communities, of the same

individuals within the Community Safety agenda and to a greater extent in ‘the Big

Society’. Indeed, such critiques have been incorporated into contemporary invectives

against New Labour’s community policy (see Cameron, 2009).

More importantly however, in its closure of contestation, the form of authority

in question here demands a political approach offering not only a critique of its

manifestations, but a questioning of what political action and authority are. For the

critique of community, in its clearing away of any questioning of what it means to live

and act together, precludes investigation of community in its very transgressive and

disruptive presence. If political action is reduced to capacities to form shared structures,

and authority to the capacity to direct them, our critical languages remain not only

powerless to contest the gradual closure of political contestation, but may also

contribute to its encroaching dominance. To affirm community not as the intimacy of

these tight-knit relationships, but as the very contestation of this intimacy, is to

articulate the possibility of another political practice, and of another authority, against

this ‘politics of lost authority’. The remainder of this article is given to articulating how

such a perspective is offered in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. We turn first to the

question of politics, looking at how Nancy’s collaborative work with Philippe Lacoue-

Labarthe re-framed Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the nature of political action.

An alternative politics

Thus the argument of this article is that to articulate a political alternative to the terrain

of political saturation and ‘government through community’, we must begin from

Hannah Arendt’s (1998) observation on the misunderstanding of political action that

subtends much of modern political philosophy, and of the sovereign authority to which

this action is directed. Arendt draws our attention to the difference between a political

stage, and sovereign authority, derived from a transcendent ‘outside’, and that for which

we have retained these terms yet which correspond to something else entirely; an

exercise of power proper to this management of the population through technical

arrangements. Arendt lays out, through this explication, a major critique of the

presumption that the answer to a destructive politics of community would be a more

egalitarian or humane arrangement of the political or authoritative basis that underpins

it.

For what Nancy’s continuation of Arendt’s work demonstrates is that there can

be no re-making or re-treating of this absented political stage or sovereign authority, or

rather that any such attempt will only lead to the closure of the originary relationality of

being; the presupposition through which we must re-configure our understanding of

‘community’. An alternative politics, on Nancy’s account, must be formed from an

alternative orientation to this ‘end’ or ‘exhaustion’ of sovereign authority, one whose

starting point would be the Heideggerian concept of Destruktion (and as such the whole

analytic of deconstruction). This would be a political practice that, in laying bare the

positive possibilities of a tradition in its historical construction, would expose it in its

contingency. Yet, as Sparks (1997) notes, it is what might be created by

Destruktion/deconstruction, rather than its critical purchase, that fascinates Nancy. For

Destruktion, as a repetition of what is possible, is an act of repetition that opens onto an

unknown, for; “[t]he repetition of the gestures through which philosophy reaches the

point of its own exhaustion is the gesture ... by which philosophy can be made to release

its unthought” (15).

The manner in which this ‘release’ might be articulated as an alternative politics

of community will be detailed across the course of the article. What is being argued is

that, when transposed to the end or exhaustion of political authority in ‘Community

Safety’ interventions, a political alternative is to be found in the ‘holding open’ of the

very withdrawal of meaning that forms the condition for this exhaustion, and that, in a

final movement, this exposure to contingency is to be described as the community. Each

of these stages are to be addressed in turn; the ‘saturation’ of the political as it is

detailed in Arendt and Nancy, the delineation of ‘authority’ drawn by these same

authors, and the description of an ‘inoperative’ community that would be the very

formation of authority and the social.

The oikos, and its retreat

Published in 1958, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1998) presented, through a

return to the public realm of political debate (polis) in ancient Greece, a radical

rethinking of the political, highlighting a constitutive misunderstanding of the term at

the heart of Western thinking. For the polis, and its corresponding subject (zoon

politikon), were concerned not with controlling and organizing the population, but with

the entirely separate practice of free debate. Participation in the polis was “freely

chosen” (13); it was as a sphere emptied of that necessity of governance proper to the

household (oikos).

Yet blurrings of this division between the oikos and the polis began to take hold

with the equation, in the Roman era, of the management of the household with the

management of the state; the good paterfamilias with the good King (27). The

expropriations of the peasant classes following the Reformation, and the accompanying

loss of meaning of private property,2 in further erasing the originary division between

public and private, brings this blurring to a full close, as the form of behaviour

pertaining to the household, the caring for and management of the life process (social

life), “has become the standard for all regions of life” (45). Man is no longer zoon

politikon but animal laborans; an entity occupied primarily with the material necessities

of life, whose accelerative growth under consumer capitalism, within which even items

for use become items for consumption, has outstripped any attachment to ‘natural’

necessity (124). Society, in this state of saturation, is a denuded terrain, comprised not

of plurality, and the capacity for a public stage that would bring together free men in

their constitutive differences, but a flattened terrain in which singular man makes

choices between technical options. For Arendt holds, as Dana Villa notes, “the strongest

2 Arendt notes another modern confusion here between wealth and property (1998:65-6).

possible conviction that our reality is one in which stable boundaries and distinctions

have been dissolved and rendered virtually impossible” (1992:302).

Now, at several points in Nancy’s oeuvre, Arendt’s illumination of the oikos and its

saturation of the political space has returned as a central organising problematic. For

Arendt poses the question, itself inexhaustible, of how we are to define a political

agenda, or political philosophy, when political argument and political meaning appear

to ‘withdraw’ before our very eyes. In other words, how is a political philosophy to be

outlined when any ‘political’ problem is integrated into the social economy of

necessity? It is this nagging flaw that for Nancy as for Arendt defines the stakes of

philosophical thought and political intervention. While following Arendt’s delineation

of this ‘saturation thesis’ however, Nancy will seek to give this ‘withdrawal’ of the

political a double meaning (a doubling present in the term retreat/re-treat), defining both

the exhaustion of the political and the political itself.

Nowhere is Nancy’s debt to Arendt stronger than in his early collaborative

works with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the ‘retreat’ of the political, describing “the

total immanence or the total immanentisation of the political in the social” (1997b:115).

Here, like Arendt, they observe ‘politics’ to be the play of discourses and techniques

which eradicate the political as a specific sphere, thus neutralising the possibility of true

political dialogue. They recognise the ‘victory of animal laborans’ and the saturation of

the public space by the socio-technical concerns of ‘management’ and ‘efficiency’ to be

the defining questions for contemporary political theory (129) (the third key question,

discussed in more detail below, concerns the loss of authority).

The use of ‘immanentisation’ in favour of ‘immanence’ is, however, instructive,

for seeking to open a contrast to Arendt they describe the ‘end’ or ‘exhaustion’ of

politics, and this ‘loss of authority’, as itself the site through which the ‘political’ as

such might be approached. This is indicated in their claim, pace Arendt, that “what

drew back perhaps itself never took place” (131). While this is not the space to pursue

such a discussion, it is questionable whether this is an adequate reading of Arendt, it

being the latter’s problematisation of political ‘action’, given the originary plurality of

‘men’, that lays the ground for this re-working of the ‘political’.3 Indeed, rather than a

critique of Arendt, Nancy’s approach might instead be seen as an attempt to pursue her

analysis of the oikos in a mode proper to this emphasis upon plurality. For in actively

reclaiming these Arendtian themes, Nancy’s work may instead be seen as a

problematisation of the assumption, widely made, that as The Human Condition

explores in a more or less positive fashion the role of the polis, it must be an argument

for actively restoring a deliberative form of democratic action in the present (see for

example Elster, 2002:15-16). For the polis, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue, is not to

be taken as a ‘past’ to be imagined and, in whatever limited fashion, recuperated, but as

an entity existing only in this ‘drawing back’, that is, in its ‘retreat’. ‘The political’, in

their account, is to be elaborated in the very condition of its ‘exhaustion’.

As such, the key distinction is not between the polis and the oikos, but between

different approaches or orientations towards the retreat of the polis. For Nancy, entities

such as the ‘community’ and ‘capital’ are essentialisations of the very conditions of this

loss of meaning, namely that being is respectively relational and ‘reticulated’ (2000:73-

3 Indeed Nancy later cites Arendt as being among a small coterie of individuals responding

to the forms of questions he seeks to set out (1991:156 n.2).

74).4 In short the withdrawal of political meaning gives way to borrowed figures, whose

authority, meaning or influence we barely understand. The force and productivity of the

‘governmentality’ approaches presented above was in their critical demonstration of the

play of these borrowed figures that seek to plug this loss of meaning. As a major step

beyond that tradition however, Nancy enjoins us to engage with the loss of meaning on

the very conditions of its retreat, and it is in this sense that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy

speak of a re-treating of the political.

As noted, with Arendt, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy claim that ‘political’

dialogue is finished. What they argue is shown by such an admission is the fact that ‘the

political’ must be re-engaged in discussion attentive to this being-already-finished.

Nancy will describe, throughout his work, the condition of politics as ‘finitude’; as a

being already-in-retreat. Again this is an approach deeply indebted to Heidegger. As the

latter displayed in his ‘destructive’ approach to metaphysics, to practice philosophy will

henceforth mean only to think at the end of philosophy, which means to ceaselessly (for

such a thought cannot lead anywhere, but only begin again) re-engage and re-consider

the completion of philosophy. What Nancy achieves is a transposition of this thought of

completion to the socio-political question of community; to think as community as the

completion or exhaustion of community, of which more later.

What is to be done?

4 Nancy’s idiosyncratic approach to Castells’ (2000) analytic of the ‘network society’ is to

posit in the emergence of networked life an exposure to the originary reticulation of being

(see Armstrong, 2009).

But what form, critics of Nancy’s work ask (see for example Fraser, 1984), would this

‘thought’ take? For there appear to be only negative delimitations: the retreat designates

a refusal of the injunction to submit to economic necessity, to the intrinsic reality and

danger of anti-social behaviour, to the organic truth of community as a positive force,

and so on. In pursuing a ‘finite’ politics, one is refusing, as Lacoue-Labarthe states, that

“intimidation which, because it is ‘regarded as sacred’, is exercised today by the

political and which forces anyone whatsoever ... to be accountable, to show their hand,

to intervene, to commit themselves” (1997:97). For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s work

pursues Heidegger’s recognition of theory as the “supreme realisation [Verwicklichung]

of genuine practice” (cited in Sparks, 1997:64). “What is to be done”, Nancy (1997)

argues, cannot be considered a separate problematic from theoretical determinations of

what the world is and what hopes one may hold for its transformation.

A positive, practical determination is as such precluded, as by necessity a

politics proper to the thought of the retreat must only be the retreat itself; investigating

and pursuing the withdrawal of political figures. This may nonetheless be proposed as a

foregrounding of the question, or moreover a holding open of the question of the

political. Such a proposal is not to be confused with critique (and it is here that the

distinction with ‘governmentality’ becomes further apparent); it implies rather the

inscription of figures as originarily uncertain. As Nancy notes;

What will become of our world is something we cannot know, and we can no

longer believe in being able to predict or command it. But we can act in such a way

that this world is a world able to open itself up to its own uncertainty as such.

(1997:158)

In other words, we might seek to pursue this thought of the retreat; to inscribe a thought

of withdrawal as the originary uncertainty of political figures. And we might also seek

to oppose those politics that would, in a move described presently, obscure or neutralise

this withdrawal in a ‘will-to-figure’ or ‘will-to-immanence’. Christopher Fynsk thus

describes, referring to the primary terrain of this practice that will be addressed in this

article, that of community and its withdrawal in the dispersal of communication, these

two aspects of ‘what is to be done’;

one can attempt to favour such communication, and one can attempt to engage in a

critique of the ideologies that dissimulate what Nancy calls the absence of

community (or of the fact of the impossibility of communion or immanence as it

appears to us today, after the closure of metaphysics). (1991:xi)

Thus in the next section we turn to this community, in its absence, exhaustion,

withdrawal or retreat, and to the authority it fails to possess.

Section 2: Authority

That the community would fail to possess authority would be anathema to the

‘communitarian’ adherents of a ‘politics of lost authority’. For it would be, in these

accounts, the defining feature of a strong, resilient community that it is able to regulate

the behaviour of its members in a manner that they recognise as legitimate. Inasmuch as

the criminal law is itself recognised in such a way, it is because it has been fully

internalised by the community as its own moral code (Etzioni, 1995:22).

Such an analysis echoes Max Weber’s (1978:212-5) definition of authority as

pertaining to those relationships in which the power held by one party, manifested in the

likelihood of their orders or commands being followed, is legitimated by those

following or subordinated by these acts. Yet Weber’s primary interest, among the three

ideal types of authority he discerned,5 in the charismatic (Riesebrodt, 1999), that is, in

the accumulation of authority through heroic or creative acts, highlights an aspect of

authority that contradicts this communitarian account. For in the charismatic, authority

is drawn not from the togetherness of its members and their achievement of a unified

consensus, but on the contrary, from the channelling of an excess. Such an account

raises the problematic of authority that will be pursued in this article; of the holding

together of community through the interiorisation of an outside to the discernible social

order. It is, again, to Arendt that we must turn in explicating this paradoxical assertion.

An outside, inside

Much as The Human Condition demonstrated the extent to which we cannot think the

political, Arendt’s earlier essay “What is authority” (1954) addressed our

misunderstanding of authority. The essay describes the form of authority that “came to

an end” (8) as modernity successfully challenged, and dissolved, every form of

authority pertaining to a transcendent relationship of exteriority. Arendt states that it is

principally Roman authority whose absence haunts us; an authority derived, in a manner

specific to the mythology of the city of Rome, from the “sacredness of foundation” (17).

An authoritative act was one that was connected with, and as such augmented (the

5 Namely ‘legal-rational’, ‘traditional’ and ‘charismatic’.

original meaning of authority is derived from augere, to augment) the transcendent

event of the founding of Rome (18).

Arendt is clear that the Roman model of augmentation and testimony, and of a

‘sacred’ source of authority, has definitively disappeared from our thought. To live

without the understanding that the source of authority ‘transcends power’, is to live in a

terrain denuded of political action, and to be faced with the elementary problems of

human co-existance (29). Totalitarianism, Arendt argues, which dispenses with the

pyramid-like authoritarian structure in favour of a network of power-relations operating

around an empty space (5), thrives upon such a terrain in which the authority of

government is no longer recognised (1).

Returning to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s above cited recognition of this “loss

of authority as a distinct element of power” (1997b: 129), if ‘totalitarianism’ denotes the

removal of any alternative frame of reference (1997a: 111), it is totalitarianism under a

‘new’ or ‘soft’ form, they note, that would denote the situation in which the exhaustion

of political authority has produced the total domination of ‘social’ concerns (1997b:128-

9). Combining this language of authority and power with the above description of the

political, the saturation of the political by the oikos may be seen to correspond to the

uninterrupted play of power; to the closure of an authority that might contest or disrupt

the play of techniques and strategies described by the ‘governmentality’ approach. Yet

from their perspective such an authority is not historically ‘past’, but rather in its

withdrawal is permanently at stake.

It was noted above that a significant blind-spot in the governmentality accounts

is the specificity of authority as a form of power. What this means, from this Arendtian

perspective continued by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, is that it continues the failure to

ask the following question; what does it mean to have lost authority? For while the

governmentality perspective draws out in a very productive fashion the forms of power

that fill this denuded space, it does not ask of how our response to this loss conditions

not only the shape of government, but also the potential for political action.

In short, the foregrounding of this question leads to two observations. First, that

the manner in which the communitarian accounts specifically targeted by Rose as

setting out the contours of ‘ethico-power’ might themselves be specific responses to this

loss.6 And second, that a holding open of this question, as the deconstructive exposure

to contingency described above, might itself be the site for contesting this domination of

social concerns. For in turning to the ascription to community, in the later text The

Inoperative Community (1991), of “the sovereignty of its sharing” (26) what we may

draw from Nancy, in contrast to the end of authority in Arendt’s account, is a political

possibility highlighted by this loss.7

Sovereign figures

Again, Nancy seeks to work through the implications of Arendt’s elucidation of Roman

6 This observation would similarly re-frame the startling regularity of ‘golden age’

community accounts (see Pearson, 1984).7 This is a possibility Arendt herself recognises in a later text on the American Declaration

of Independence (Arendt, 1977).

and Christian authority, paying particular attention to the manner in which the

‘sacredness of foundation’ is positioned by Arendt as existing only, for us ‘moderns’ at

least, in a state of withdrawal. And again, Nancy will take this proposition a step

further. Turning the focus to the crisis of this latter term, Nancy follows Arendt in

observing the impossibility of a transcendent authority around which subjects could

achieve a common union. Yet, if the figure of the sovereign presented itself as a

‘connection’, through the practices of testimony, to transcendence, and it is precisely

this sovereign figure of transcendent alterity that is in retreat, again for Nancy it is this

existence as retreat that must be fully engaged with. It is, again, in the retreat of the

sovereign figure that we will find a thinking, and practice, of authority proper to the

‘inoperative community’, as Nancy seeks, in his later work, to re-inscribe the term.

It is in this focus upon the loss of sovereign authority, as represented in the

absent figure, that Nancy’s work enters into a strange coalition with the ‘politics of lost

authority’. For in the focus upon a golden age, what the ‘communitarian’ authors testify

to, in Nancy’s view, is the existence of community as loss. To display what it is that

differentiates Nancy’s work from this tradition, it is necessary to detail the dual role of

the ‘figure’ in Nancy’s thought, as it gives an indication as to how this re-working of

sovereign authority is achieved in his work.

Nancy often introduces texts by defining a certain withdrawal of figures,

whether in the closure of “(Western) philosophy’s political programmes” (1991:xxxviii)

or in a lack, or loss, of ‘meaning’ (2000:1). Indeed, in the retreat of political and

religious authority, Nancy observes the withdrawal of “every space, form, or screen into

which or onto which a figure of community could be projected” (2000:47). At the same

time however, Nancy clearly adopts a critical stance with regard figures of community

as they are ‘at work’ in political discourse, a position encapsulated in the rhetorical

question; “does meaning not become ‘totalitarian’ as soon as it takes figure [prend

figure]” (Nancy, cited in Sparks, 1997:xxv).

It is as such important to stress the distinction, alluded to above, between the

immanent ‘figure’ and the ‘transcendent’ withdrawal of the figure. In the former case

‘immanence’ denotes a similarity, and simultaneity, of something to itself; the

immanent figure is the concept that forms its own ground, that provides its own cause,

that gives its own ‘essence’, that gathers its meaning within itself. In the case of

community, Nancy’s work has frequently returned to the immanent figure proper to a

‘golden age’, a figure for which;

always it is a matter of a lost age in which community was woven of tight,

harmonious, and infrangible bonds and in which above all it played back to itself,

through its institutions, its rituals, and its symbols, the representation, indeed the

living offering, of its own immanent unity, intimacy, and autonomy. (Nancy,

1991:9)

Enclosed, stable and unchanging, the immanent figure of community, as it is deployed

in the ‘communitarian’ literature, turns the originary relationality of the community, of

which more below, to an essence; a non-relational, unified community figure. Yet the

fact that this community can only ever be ‘lost’, in the communitarian literature as

elsewhere, is instructive. For “[c]ommunity has not taken place” (Nancy, 1991:11); or

rather, it has only taken place as this constitutive loss, as a retreat of immanent figures.

What the writing of Etzioni and others demonstrate is that the immanent figure, as it

immediately withdraws, betrays a transcendence at the heart of any thinking of the

figure.

Nancy is critical not of the figure as such, but rather a “will to absolute

immanence” (1991:12), doubling as Sparks notes as a “will-to-figure” (1997:xxiii),

which reacts to the withdrawal of figures by seeking to strengthen and solidify them or

to find in their absence a further reason to clarify and reiterate their importance.

Alasdair MacIntyre (1997) is indicative of this position, his work re-stating a need for

figures, it being only through a relation to a certain model of justice, practised and

embodied within a community setting, that the subject may acquire and practice a moral

subjectivity. Such a community, Nancy notes, could never actually ‘come about’ as

such; indeed in its immanent ‘union’ it would only present the death of community

(1991:12), if that is we re-think community, as Nancy states we must, as an originary

relationality.

In short, the community figure, Nancy states, is lost. Yet as loss, this same

figure exposes us to a transcendence; an exteriority experienced as the impossibility of

community. Its ‘presence’ is only the absence of any screen upon which a present

community could be projected. Thus, in the same manner as Lacoue-Labarthe and

Nancy (1997b) rejected the historical schema they took to be implicit in Arendt’s

account of the saturation of the political (131), Nancy argues that the sovereign figure,

as presented in Arendt’s ‘sacredness of foundation’, is not an ‘anterior’ space, whether

ontological or historical, but rather present only in its withdrawal. Nancy returns,

regularly, to Bataille’s assertion that “sovereignty is NOTHING” (cited in Nancy,

2000:139). Were we somehow to peel back the historical layers, we would find only the

non-figure of sovereign alterity, which would be ‘present’ to us only in its withdrawal

from presence.

Thus, while for Bataille, in the last instance sovereignty reveals itself to be an

‘empty’ place, for Nancy this empty place is only the space, or moreover the spacing, of

a ‘retreat’. To ask of sovereign authority, the specific form of authority observed by

Arendt in its absence, is for Nancy to ask of an authority specific to this retreat; an

authority that arrives not from an ‘outside’ but in the very retreat of this outside. It is an

authority present as the absencing of sovereign alterity, as the retreating movement

shown to us by the ‘crisis’ of political authority, and directly opposed to the efforts to

form stable and immanent forms of political authority to answer this crisis.

The key to understanding this re-thinking of the authority of community, in

which authority is the community itself in its originary being-in-common, is the focus

Nancy places on this latter modality of being in a re-working of Heidegger’s concept of

mitsein. “[T]he sovereignty of its sharing”, the line from The Inoperative Community

from which I have taken the title of this article, implies the thinking of a sovereignty,

and an authority, of plurality. It is the continuation, as an alternative language of

authority, of the very originary condition of ‘men’ proposed by Arendt, but which from

Nancy’s point of view her thought does not fully explore as itself the withdrawal or

retreat of immanent figures.

Section 3: The inoperative community

For lack of a better term, it is community that, despite its use as an ‘immanent’ figure,

denotes the space in which the retreat of sovereign authority takes place; it is the space

of the between, the relation, the with. Nancy opens his 1986 text The Inoperative

Community (1991) by stating the most urgent question for modernity to be “the

dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community” (1). All figures for

political community (nation and class being the most prominent), are, he notes, in

fragmentation. Given this crisis of community, the text takes up, again, the thought of

the retreat; against the ‘will-to-figure’, and its production of immanent community

forms, community must be thought as fragmentation.

Such a thought of community continues the critical assessment, detailed above

through the rubric of contemporary ‘governmentality’ studies, of the manner in which

the immanent figure of community allows a certain authority to gather around particular

groups and subjects. A failure to engage with the crisis of political authority and the

retreat of sovereign alterity is manifest in a terrain of ‘immanent’ authorities that elude

contestation, for which we have little analytic tools or critical purchase to question,

deconstruct or subvert. Yet Nancy attempts to explore this critical project not through

critique as such, but rather by attempting to re-inscribe the very meaning of community

(Fynsk, 1991:ix). If traditional concepts of community, relying upon such immanent

figures, deconstruct community only to re-construct it under a different figure (inter-

subjectivity, care, human rights, and so on) Nancy finds in Bataille an entirely different

experience of community;

The crucial point of this experience was the exigency, reversing all nostalgia and

all communal metaphysics, of a “clear consciousness” of separation – this is to say

of a “clear consciousness” ... of the fact that immanence or intimacy cannot, nor are

they ever to be, regained. (1991:19)

Fully engaging with the impossibility of regaining community means re-thinking the

experience of community as a pure ‘separation’, which is to say the relation in its most

original form. If the focus on ‘dissolution, dislocation or conflagration’ continues the

ontological schema from “The retreat of the political” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy,

1997b), through this particular focus upon the fragmentation of the ‘unified’ community

as a question of plurality, the text seeks to open a new set of questions pertaining to the

relation. Withdrawal takes the form of ‘communication’ and ‘contagion’; trangressions

of the limit between beings. For what community displays about being, Nancy asserts, is

that it must be a question of the with. If Heideggerian dasein denoted finitude as the

limit between the self and its absence in death (as being-towards-death), of equal, if not

more, importance to Nancy (and he is as such critical of Heidegger’s relegation of

mitsein to mit-dasein (2000:93)) is the limit between the self and the other. Being is

already being-with, and the retreat of the self-similar, stable community figure is the

retreat as the emergence of being-with.

Immanent community figures

Yet as noted above, the will-to-figure is the will to essentialise the with. It is a will that

manifests itself in the two immanent figures to which our thinking of community is

bound; of community as communion and community as work.

The former designates the intimacy of the community to itself in an ‘essence’ or

‘meaning’, and as such denotes a critical perspective upon any tendency to imagine the

community as a unity of component subjects. Thus where Nancy’s work is most

formulaically interpreted, it is as an anti-communitarianism; an opposition to any

replacement of the atomistic subject in favour of a similarly reified community subject

(Norris, 2000:273). For Nancy follows Bataille in recognising that such a concept, with

its inherent nostalgia, is a longing for death, as the closure of community in its

contingency.

This tension between communion and contingency, Nancy recognises, is the

very shift between the transcendent relationship with the outside and the withdrawal of

this outside. Thus following Arendt Nancy argues that ‘if there are no more gods’, by

which we may read the presence of a transcendent alterity, ‘there is no more

community’, as the community looks to itself, to its immanent communion around an

essence or destiny. Yet, in contrast again to the presupposition that the task of political

philosophy is to set out a desirable state of affairs in order to reconstruct it in the

present, Nancy firmly rejects the question of returning the community to its ‘face to

face’ relationship with the gods (that is, to the transcendent outside); “the less so in that

it is with the withdrawal of the gods that community came into being” (1991:134).

The second figure, that of community as work, denotes those instances in which

the term is put to the service of achieving certain goals. The exemplary articulation of

this figure, Nancy argues, is to be found in Marx, who in developing an admirably

critical perspective towards religious communion and its political role, nonetheless

envisaged its replacement by a no less ‘immanent’ community figure;

the true spirit and heart, the spirit and heart of the true human community at work

in the production of man himself, were to substitute their immanent authenticity for

the false transcendences of the political spirit and the religious heart. (2007:7)

In short, the Scylla of community as a unity of members is joined by its Charybdis; the

posing of community as an operative project. Returning to the ‘politics of lost

authority’, the reliance upon these two figures is immediately apparent. Community is at

once figured as a pre-existing togetherness of individuals (whose absence demands its

reclamation) and as the project of authoritative self-regulation they are expected to

complete. The product of these politics, as Rose notes, are newly configured circuits of

exclusion and inclusion operating through the everyday moral obligations to the self and

to others (188). Rose notes further the importance, within these circuits, of the

production of an authority, located in ‘the community’, proper to this power (1999:187).

Such an authority has become manifest in the significant changes to the law

implemented through the ‘Community Safety’ agenda that have presented significant

challenges to the model of the central authority of the criminal law.

If these two figures for immanent community are in themselves impossible (it is

indicative that community is always mobilised in political terms as something that is

absent, either a dimly visualised golden age or an area of the population that current

strategies are failing to engage), Nancy’s opposition is, as noted above, not the figures

themselves, but to the will-to-immanence implicit in communitarian attempts to remake

them in the present. This position stands in opposition to the tendency that dominates

critical perspectives on the politics of community; that the alternative to the exclusion of

individuals through community involvement programmes would be the proposition of a

model for community in which all can be included in its realm. Nancy’s response, in

contrast, is to pose the alternative to the circuits of inclusion and exclusion identified by

Rose and others to be the inscription of community as an ‘intimate exteriority’ (Levett,

2005:430); the exteriority of the retreat, now posed as the community itself in its

originary plurality, as the ‘intimate’ condition of our common existence.

Interruption

For in Nancy’s opposition to both communion and work, resting upon this ‘inoperative’

understanding of community, the common is itself a de-stabilisation of the immanent

figure; an originary uncertainty that opens the figure to its own contingency. The

inoperative community is ‘present’ only as ‘interruption’: the disruption of immanent

figures of community. It is an unworking, and any attempt to put it to work, whether

Marxist attempts to set the community to realising man, or communitarian attempts to

realise authority, is to neutralise this appearance of community as being-in-common.

This experience of community implies, in the context of authority, a re-thinking

of the relationship between community and authority in terms of a different thought of

sovereignty; not the sovereignty of the figure but the sovereignty of this plurality. For

on Nancy’s account “only a discourse of community, exhausting itself, can indicate to

the community the sovereignty of its sharing” (1991:26). If the community is

‘sovereign’ through the ‘intimate exteriority’ that is its interruptive presence, through its

very exhaustion as a figure, an authority of the community proper to this sovereignty

would not be an authority to compel in Weber’s sense, but an authority of being; the

authority that being-with is.

Bonnie Honig (1991:98) uses the term ‘weightiness’ to denote Arendt’s

description of authority, in Roman antiquity, as the ability to carry the connection to the

foundational event and all prior augmentations to it. In this authority that being is,

Nancy is describing the ‘weightiness’ of our shared, but different, existences. In

Nancy’s schema, by thinking the withdrawal or exhaustion of the community ‘figure’,

and the absence of a sovereign authority as embodied in a communion of community,

what emerges is a distinction between the authority possessed by a community and the

authority the community is. If the former corresponds to an exercise of power located in

the community as the ‘true’ representatives of a location, identity or morality, the latter

is an authority, or weightiness that, as the altogether mundane event of our being-in-

common, is the no less radically political moment in which being appears in its

plurality.

Hypostatisation

In contrast we may observe how Community Safety interventions hypostatise –

render material or immanent – this disruption of the formal structure. Again this

observation begins with the role of community in the ‘communitarian’ accounts, whose

focus upon the formation of the moral self within the community setting turned the

contingency of affective experience, in other words the very excessive condition of the

loss of meaning, to an observable and manipulable event to be shaped and channelled

within a system of governmental power. The background to this hypostatisation was the

socio-historical claim that, as such a moment must be formed in the ‘community’

conceived as a communion of members, the apparent decline of the moral self must

imply a decline of community as the site of this moral formation. The need to tighten up

the authority of the community as such took the form of the political initiatives

described above in which the demand made of the criminal law was for it to better

represent the community as this immanent hypostatisation.

It is in a manner somewhat foreign to Nancy’s work that I have used ‘authority’

in this article to describe the contestation of this hypostatisation. Nonetheless, as the

‘politics of lost authority’ becomes increasingly dominant, I argue that it is in the

holding open of the loss of authority that the plurality of being that gives us in our

differences, the very plurality that allows us to be regulated, to follow, to trust and guide

each other, might be re-inscribed in the denuded terrain of immanent authorities.

Concluding Thoughts

Having set out to examine in this article the concepts of community and authority

through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, it is clear that we have also been following a re-

examination of the political imperatives of the latter’s thought through recent

developments in the politics of community. In referring to the ‘loss of authority as a

distinct element of power’ (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1997b:129), authority is

examined by Nancy in its encroaching absence, in other words as part of a general

political agenda to expose terrains of exhaustion in their retreat. The dominance of the

oikos or of socio-technical options is the dominance of power without the community

that might question, disrupt or contest this power. Thus the urgent problem facing our

community-saturated times, as I have set it out, is a ‘politics of lost authority’ developed

through the Community Safety paradigm in which political contestation is gradually

foreclosed. ‘What is to be done’ is to oppose this closure, for which in this article I have

used the term ‘immanent authority’, to oppose it as the community. This article has

sought to draw these situated contestations into a politics of the common; an articulation

of the impossibility of immanent comm-union in whose name our engagements of the

social must be drawn.

As authority itself becomes the terrain of the closure of community we find an

imperative to develop another language of community and its authority. In short, it

demands a research agenda focusing not on exclusion,8 but upon the destructive

inclusion of individuals as immanent figures, and the manner in which practices of

community and of politics may pursue the continual interruption of this inclusion.

A turn to community, and the ‘sovereignty of its sharing’, in this context, is the

affirmation that community has no authority to shape the behaviour of its members.

Community ‘has’ only its own closure in a ‘will-to-immanence’ and the arrangement of

power-relations proper to this movement, what I have termed in this article a ‘politics of

lost authority’. What Nancy’s thought demands, or moreover what community in its

retreat demands, is a thought and a practice of this failure; a recognition that community

as this guarantee is exhausted, completed, finished. Instead of seeking to plug this

failure with a return to the figure, we must repeat that the authority of community is the

8 This tendency, for which there has not been the space to explore in this article, is taken by

many (see Turner, 2007; Krasmann, 2007) who seek to continue Agamben’s (1998) thesis

on the ‘state of exception’.

interruption of this claim; it is the weightiness of being, in its plurality, that arrives in

the very retreat of what community cannot be.

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