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On the Multiple Senses of Democracy

Jean-Luc Nancy

Never do we wonder as much about the fragility of democracy as

when democratic certainty is generally confirmed. When every
discourse guarantees that ‘democracy’ is the only acceptable type of
political regime for emancipated humanity that has come of age and
that has no other purpose than itself, then the very idea of democracy
loses its colour, becomes blurred, and perplexes us.
Let us first establish the following: the so-called ‘totalitarian’
possibilities that put the twentieth century to the test have already
emerged from this trouble. Unlike those who, during the 1920s and
1930s, could believe in the demand for a radical re-foundation of
the res publica [la chose publique et commune], we can no longer ignore
the traps and the monsters hiding behind our perplexities towards
democracy.
And yet, it is impossible simply to be ‘democrat’ without wondering
about what this means, for the meaning of the term keeps posing
problems, at every step, each time one has recourse to it. To ignore
these difficulties – as political discourses constantly do – is as
dangerous as to challenge democracy. Their avoidance forbids us
to think and thus covers over the same traps and monsters, or even
other ones.
I propose here nothing other than a merely minimal argument or
schematic procedure for the examination of the possible meanings
of ‘democracy’:
1) Either the word points to the exercise of political power by the
people and in this case:
a) the ‘people’ refers to a fraction of the social whole that is distinct
from another one to which it is supposedly inferior and that dominates
it. In this case, democracy is not a regime but the overthrow of a
regime (or at least, of a government). It is the revolt of misery and of
the intolerable in bodies and souls, of hunger, of fear. From passive
subjects, the subjected become active ones. The legitimacy of their
revolt is absolute. It is however merely that of revolt and does not
allow for the foundation of a regime. In revolt, there are democrats

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 44 Jean-Luc Nancy

rather than democracy. Revolt only exists in its act, in its times and
its places. It is not a coincidence if, in modern political experience,
the idea of ‘permanent revolution’ has constituted both an infinitely
vanishing point and a line of conduct. The subject of revolt simul-
taneously refers, for the time being, to an absolute, inalienable and
indivisible dignity, or to a value that is measured to nothing but to
itself – and, in the long run, to the same absolute value as an infinite
opening that no quality, institution, or even identity should be able
to close off. Democratic politics is thus a politics of periodic return
to the breach of revolt (to the brink of revolt). It can determine the
circumstance and the subject that open up this breach only on an
ad hoc basis.
Or, b) the ‘people’ is considered as the whole and as the body of
social reality. Instead of a thought that proceeds in a differential
manner, one is faced with a thought that favours the whole. The
political sovereignty of the people thus signifies above all its self-
constitution as a ‘people’. This self-constitution obviously precedes
every political constitution, which the people constitute, rather
than being constituted by it. Here the people-subject is affirmed not
as an actor and a force but first of all as a substance: the primary
reality whose existence and movement flow only from itself. The
history of modern thought shows in turn either the impossibility of
engendering a politics that would be itself the self-engendering of the
people (‘direct’ democracy, the infinite presupposition of a common
and organic will, that is, according to Rousseau, the sole prerogative
of the gods) – or else the solution to the problem of democracy as the
dissolution of the entire political sphere as particular sphere, which
disappears in the total and social self-productive sphere (Marx).
When one has taken into account the whole of this first hypothesis,
as our history appears to have done, two possible modalities of what
can be called a politics in negativity [ politique en négativité ] emerge:
either the periodical and dispersed politics of particular configurations
of the ‘breach’, that yet implies the abstention from participation
to the (parliamentary and republican) democratic institution
– or else, the thought of democracy that holds the impossibility
of embodying its essence and of representing its figure, with the
necessity of maintaining ‘democratically’ this impossibility. In both
cases, politics is affirmed essentially in a retreat in the precise sense
that political authority, as the authority of a subsumptive unity of
nature and fate, of the project and of the identity of something like
a ‘people’, must be kept in retreat of itself, must remain the negative

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 On the Multiple Senses of Democracy 45

index of an always remote presence. The model here is that of a

negative theology, and in fact what is at issue is nothing other than
politics as onto-theo-politics (or the theologico-political) whose sign
is inverted. (The question can be formulated in the following manner:
Have revolutions done anything other than invert the sign of the
theologico-political?)
2) Or else, ‘democracy’ does not so much point to a political
specificity as to ‘civil society’ or to ‘the social bond’ considered from
the perspective of an ethos or of a democratic feeling, namely, under
the heading of the regulative idea that the motto ‘liberty, equality,
fraternity’ represents, whatever its precise interpretation may be.
On this view, democracy is a description and/or an evaluation of
the being-in-common based on the mutual recognition of fellow
creatures and on the independence of each group who share this
recognition. The model for such a group is given in the form of what
is called a ‘commune’ or a ‘community’ (as in Marx). Two thoughts
of the commun(e)ity are possible:
According to the first (rather American in Tocqueville’s
understanding), the commune is not yet in the political order: it
is beyond the State and can be represented as subsisting without
or under the latter (its freedom is in it more a franchise than a self-
constituting freedom). It is local and restricted, it does not involve
power as such. It has the nature of an interiority and its outside is as
much the other commune as the State itself. The latter thus appears
less as a subsumptive and identificatory authority than as a separate
one, responsible for another sphere (in the kind of an imperial or
federal power).
According to the second (more European and variously modulated
in socialist or fascist versions), the community takes the place of the
negativity formulated above. Its interiority or its subjectivity fulfils the
identificatory and subsumptive role of the State which tendentiously
erases or sublimates itself in it. One therefore reconstitutes a positive
onto-theologico-politics, but an immanent version of it and no longer
a transcendent one.
3) The question of democracy can thus apparently be condensed
in the following manner: does this word finally point to the tacit
renewal of the theologico-political through a negative-transcendent
or immanent-positive metamorphosis, or does it point to a genuine
rupture from the theologico-political? (We recognise one form of
the debate on ‘secularisation’ as it opposed Carl Schmitt and Hans

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 46 Jean-Luc Nancy

Blumenberg. More generally, this debate pertains to the essence or

to the meaning of modernity.)
If, as I think, what is at issue is a rupture, we should nevertheless
determine in what way it is not yet brought to completion. Indeed,
not only does the ‘European’ thought of democracy often remain
burdened by the weight of the theologico-political (positive or
negative), but ‘American’ thought simultaneously frees the forces of
inequality that an ‘internal’ principle of the people no longer tempers,
and the forces of the incompatible and sterilising communitarian
turning in on oneself. There thus remains at least one meaning of
‘democracy’ (or of whatever name one may have to give to it) that
is not yet spelled out. (The qualifiers ‘European’ and ‘American’ are
here formal indexes: the real features are formed everywhere. It would
not be naive to think that Europe, in spite of all its defects, could
be a real place for putting an unheard-of meaning of ‘democracy’
to the test.)
The task that is clearly expounded is therefore neither that of a
destruction of democracy, nor that of its indefinite perfecting: it is
above all that of coming to a decision about the ‘rupture’ at issue,
therefore about ‘modernity’ (or about so-called ‘post-modernity’).
The decision will have to involve a decision upon the nature, the
stake and the place of the political. Should it still be thought in the
shadow of the theologico-political (namely, what one calls today
‘the political’ tout court)? Or else, should it be thought according
to an essential retreat of that ‘political’ (essential, substantial and
subsumptive of all the being-in-common): this withdrawal [retrait]
would not be a retreat [retraite], but a retracing of everything that is
at issue with the being-in-common (being together or being-with).
Namely and singularly, the question as to whether the political sphere
should not remain distinct from the sphere of the ‘common’, which
it neither exhausts nor overhangs. Politics is not responsible for the
identity and for the fate of the common, but for the ruling – should
it be infinite – of justice (it has therefore to do with power). The
common puts into play existence (it has therefore to do with meaning
[sens]). What is at issue is the gap between meaning and power. The
one assuredly does not exclude the other, but nor does it substitute
itself for it. (The legitimacy of revolt is not so much suppressed, as
its ultimate horizon displaced.) The theologico-political subsumes
together power and meaning, justice and existence, and absorbs the
common into the political (or the reverse). Ultimately, one no longer
knows what ‘common’ and ‘political’ mean. That is what makes us

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 On the Multiple Senses of Democracy 47

perplexed about ‘democracy’. It is therefore a question of thinking

the interval between the common and the political: one does not
belong to the one as to the other, and not ‘everything’ is political. Nor
is ‘everything’ common, since the ‘common’ is neither a thing nor a
whole. Between power and meaning, there is proximity and distance,
there is altogether a relation of power and a relation of meaning
[sens] ... It may be a new form of man’s relation to himself, who
would not know how to be ‘his own end’ (if that is the foundation
of ‘democracy’) without moving away from himself in order to move
beyond.
Jean-Luc Nancy, December 1999.
Translated by Céline Surprenant

IS EVERYTHING POLITICAL?
(A SIMPLE NOTE)
A sentence floats on the horizon of our thoughts, it declares that
everything is political. It can be addressed or received in many ways:
sometimes in a distributive mode (the diverse moments or pieces
of existence in common all proceed in some way from the moment
or piece called ‘political’, which has a privilege of diffusion or of
transversality), sometimes on a rather dominating mode (at first or
ultimately, it is the ‘political’ sphere that determines or commands the
activity of the other spheres), at other times, finally, in an integrative
or assumptive mode (the essence of the whole of existence is of a
political nature). In each of these cases, the tone of the enunciation
or of the reception can be resigned, disconcerted, affirmative or
protestatory.
Before simply and vaguely ‘floating’, this sentence on the horizon
has been the axiom of a modern elaboration. It has probably
constituted and consolidated the horizon itself during a long period
– perhaps in fact from 1789 up until ‘today’, even if we do not know
whether ‘our days’ are still or are already no longer circumscribed by
this horizon. (But in particular, this sentence has become a maxim
or a motto as much for fascism as for communism [les fascismes et
les communismes]: it was probably, beyond all disparities, their point
of contact.)
So as not to dwell in this brief note on what has preceded
modernity, let us limit ourselves to saying the following: politics was

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 48 Jean-Luc Nancy

not ‘totalising’ for antiquity, which no doubt invented it but which

conceived of it only in the condition of a city of ‘free men’, that is,
of an essentially differential and not ‘totalising’ polis. Slavery alone,
with its economical corollaries, prevents us from understanding, for
example, the ‘architectonic’ place of politics in Aristotle according to
the idea that ‘everything is political’. In this political space, the free
man enjoys the polis for other ends than that of political management
(for example, the bios theoretikos, the leisure of thinking life), just as
the polis survives on infra-political bases (slavery and subsistence
above all by familial units). As far as the politics of the sovereign
Nation-State is concerned, it was sustaining itself, on the one hand,
on the basis of everyone’s relation to a destination that always
somewhat disregarded politics (a religious, symbolic destination)
– whereas the same sovereignty, on the other hand, was leading
towards ‘politics in totality’ [la politique en totalité ] that has become
that of the moderns.
If we say today that politics is held in check or on the edge by
economy, it is only through a hasty confusion: what we thus call
‘economy’ is in fact nothing other than what was formerly called
‘political economy’, that is to say, the functioning of the management
of subsistence and of prosperity, not so much at the level of the family
which is relatively self-sufficient (the oikos, the household), but at
the level of the city (polis). ‘Political economy’ was nothing other
than the considering of the polis as an oikos, that is, as a collective
or communitarian reality supposedly belonging to a natural order
(generation, kinship, property of patrimony: ground, goods, slaves).
It followed logically that if the oiko-nomia was transposed at the
level of the polis, the shift could not simply be a matter of scale,
but also implied that the politeia, the knowledge of the businesses
of the city, should itself be reinterpreted as an oiko-nomia. But the
latter was itself and simultaneously no longer reinterpreted only in
terms of subsistence and of prosperity (of ‘good life’), but in terms
of production and of reproduction of wealth (of the ‘having-more’
[plus-avoir]).
When all is said and done, what is at issue is always the way in
which the grouping of men is to be interpreted. It is understood as
a ‘political whole’ insofar as the ‘political’ is itself determined as
total, totalising or inclusive. It is indeed what it has done, in a major
way, by determining itself as an encompassing oikos: more precisely,
as an oiko-logical encompassment, that of a concourse or of a
concurrence – in the primary sense of these terms – of the natural

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 On the Multiple Senses of Democracy 49

resources of its members. This was first called ‘physiocracy’

(‘government by nature’).
At the same time, it was necessary to determine the ‘natural’ nature
of the members of the political oikos. This was done by constituting the
city itself, no longer on the basis of an autonomous and transcendent
order with regard to the oikoi (founding or federating them, while
being simultaneously of another essence than them), but on the
basis of an assumed originary ‘oikology’, an originary familiarity
between men themselves and between men and nature. Thus, the
institution of the ‘social body’ or of a ‘civil society’ (in the primary
and exact sense of the terms: a political society or a society where the
notion of citizenship is central) was presented as being tendentiously,
ideally or originally identical to the institution of humanity itself,
the latter moreover having no other ultimate destination than to
produce itself as second nature or as an entirely humanised nature
(supposing that such a concept should not be contradictory, which
is no doubt precisely one nub of the problem ...).
According to this logic, ‘everything is political’ is given as a
principle, whence it follows that ‘politics’ itself, as an order separated
from any specific institution, knowledge (or art), cannot but tend
towards the suppression of its own separation so as to realise the
natural totality that it expresses or that it first indicates. In that case,
there is no difference, ultimately, between ‘everything is political’ and
‘everything is economical’. Democracy and market can thus together
and mutually force their way through the process that is today called
‘mondialisation’. ‘Everything is political’ thus also comes down to
saying that there is a self-sufficiency of ‘man’, himself considered as
producer of his nature and in him, of the whole of nature. The vague
representation of this self-sufficiency and of this self-production has
thoroughly dominated, up until now, the representations of politics,
whether they be ‘of the right’ or ‘of the left’, at least all those that are
presented under the heading of a global political ‘project’, whether it
be ‘of the state’ or ‘against the state’, ‘consensual’ or ‘revolutionary’,
etc. (There also exists a weak version of politics as an activity of
regulation, of correction of the imbalances and of the lowering of
tensions: but the background of this ‘social-democrat’ bricolage,
incidentally sometimes very honourable [but also sometimes fraught
with dishonest compromises], nevertheless remains the same.)

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 50 Jean-Luc Nancy

The only question that what is today called the ‘crisis’, the ‘eclipse’,
the ‘paralysis’ of politics raises is in fact that of the self-sufficiency
of man and/or of nature in him or through him. Now, it is precisely
the inconsistency of this self-sufficiency that is gradually being
demonstrated by our time. For mondialisation – or the general oiko-
logicisation of the polis – also reveals increasingly vividly or more
violently the non-naturality of its own process (but also, eventually,
that of the alleged ‘nature’ itself: never have we been to such a great
extent in the order of a meta-phusis).
The ‘man’ that has emancipated itself through ‘total eco-politics’
– this man whose social-market represents simultaneously and
symmetrically the universal form of ‘rights’ and the planetary
proliferation of injustice, extortion and exploitation – turns out to
be not so much ‘alienated’ (in the sense in which he could designate
the ‘proper’ in relation to which ‘alienation’ can be measured
and determined) as deprived of identity, of propriety, of end and
of measure. Man first bears witness to a lack of being [manque à
être]. On the one hand, existence is forbidden to the exploited that
is submitted to survival (it is indeed a prohibition rather than a
lack). The affluent, on the other hand, know increasingly well – even
leaving aside compassion – that neither their well-being nor the
suffering [mal-être] of the others that corresponds to it, produce being-
man or being-world.
But in this way – and this is the most recent lesson, still almost
inaudible, most often unheard-of – the ‘lack’ itself reveals simul-
taneously the insufficiency of a simple logic of the lack. Such a
logic, analogous to that of alienation, presupposes a ‘fullness’ as
terminus a quo or ad quem. Now, if there is no terminus – neither origin
nor end – it is because one is faced with the paradoxical logic of a
complete incompleteness or of an infinite finitude. This logic turns
out henceforth to form ‘man’, and with him (and through him),
‘nature’ as well as ‘history’.
Now, in the singular light of this paradox, the invention of the
politeia may turn out already to have been the revelation of such
a logic. The man of the logos, that is properly the zoon politikon,
is the being whose own measure is incommensurable and cannot
be appropriated. The polis has simultaneously represented itself as
a given common measure, or as the self-donation of a common
measure, and as an indefinite instability and a permanent reworking
[remise en chantier] (even if rare, with episodic manifestations) of

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 On the Multiple Senses of Democracy 51

the measure of the incommensurable. (The index of the ‘common

measure’ is then to be understood both transversally: a linking
measure, and in a distributive sense: a measure due to everyone
[revenant à chacun].)
The measure has a name: justice. Justice involves, from the moment
that it is not given, the exercise of a power (thus of counter-powers,
of reversals, of alliances of power, etc.). The exercise of such a power,
in whatever sense one may envisage it, is from the first incompatible
with an identification carried out under the heading of the oiko-
nomy: under the heading of natural self-sufficiency. But precisely,
it has become obvious that there is no oikonomy: there is, in all
respects, only an echotechny, that is to say a common place or a
dwelling in the production, the invention and the ceaseless trans-
formation of ends that are never given. No doubt, the domination
of ‘political economy’ has never been more overwhelming; but never
has the fundamental inconsistency of its so-called self-sufficiency
been more manifest. Never has it been more manifest that the value
(the value of ‘man’ or of the ‘world’) is absolutely incommensurable
with any measured value (evaluated). (Commensurability is called
‘general equivalence’.)

◀▶

Politics has retreated as the donation (self- or hetero-donation,

human or divine) of an essence and of a common destination: it
has retreated as totality or totalisation. In this way, not everything
is political.
But politics traces itself again either as a place for the exercise
of power that aims at an incommensurable justice – or as a place
where to claim the in-finity of being-man and of being-world. By
definition, it does not resorb in itself all the other places of existence.
The others are those where incommensurability is somewhat formed
or presented: they can be called ‘art’, ‘religion’, ‘thought’, ‘science’,
‘ethics’, ‘conduct’ [conduite], ‘exchange’, ‘production’, ‘love’, ‘war’,
‘kinship’, ‘rapture’, they can have an infinite number of names. Their
distinctions and their mutual circumscriptions (that prevent neither
contiguity nor compenetrations) each time define the occurrence of a
configuration whereby a certain presentation takes place – even if this
presentation should itself give rise to a non-presentation [imprésenta-
tion] or to a retreat of presence. (The non-political spheres are not

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 52 Jean-Luc Nancy

however those of a ‘private’ order opposed to a ‘public’ one: all the

spheres are public and private, if one must use these terms. All are
shared, in the double edge of this word.)
Between these configurations (and here again, without excluding
their points of contact and their contagions) there is incommensur-
ability. Politics is redrawn [se redessine] at this place: as the place
where the opening of this incommensurability must be maintained,
and in general, the opening of the incommensurability of justice and
of value. Contrary to what was affirmed by the theologico-political
as well as by political economy – but not without relation to what
was at stake in the polis from ‘before politics’ (if one dare say so)
– politics is no longer the place of the assumption of a uni-totality. It
is therefore no longer the place of the taking form [mise-en-forme], or
of the presenting [mise-en-presence] of incommensurability or of some
unity of origin and end, in brief of a ‘humanity’. Politics is concerned
with space and spacing (with space-time), but not with figure.
Politics is no doubt the place of an ‘in-common’ as such – but only
in the mode of an incommensurability kept opened (and according to
the two axes sketched above). It does not subsume the ‘in-common’
under any kind of union, community, subject or epiphany. All that
pertains to the ‘common’ is not political, and what is political is not
entirely ‘common’. But at the same time, neither the sphere of the
in-common, nor that of politics admit of the separation between a
‘society of exteriority’ and a ‘community in interiority’. (Dualism does
not hold any more for the social body/soul than for the individual
body/soul.)
Politics must henceforth be understood as the specific place of the
articulation of a non-unity – and of the symbolisation of a non-figure.
The names ‘equality’ and ‘liberty’ are nothing but the problematical
names, not saturated with meaning, under the heading of which
must be kept open the demand for not achieving an essence or an
end of the incommensurable, yet and precisely, they are the names
under the heading of which its (im)possibility must be sustained.
The exigency of adjusting power – the force that must hold the
non-organic non-unity – to an incommensurable ‘justice’. The
demand, then, for adjusting it to the universal (not given, but to be
produced). At this point, politics is far from being ‘everything’ – even
if everything goes through it, meets and crosses it. Politics becomes
precisely a place of de-totalisation. Or else, could we risk saying: if
‘everything is political’ – but according to another acceptation than

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 On the Multiple Senses of Democracy 53

that of political theology and/or political economy – it is in the sense

that ‘everything’, the ‘whole’ should in no way be total or totalised.
Are we equal to the task of conceiving ‘democracy’ in this way, with
such a degree of intensity?
Jean-Luc Nancy, April 2000.
Translated by Céline Surprenant

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