Clinamen is, for Jean-Luc Nancy, a metaphor for the submission or ‘inclining’
of the atom-individual towards “community”. Even more - “Community is at
least the clinamen of the “individual”.” (“The Inoperative Community” in: The
Inoperative Community, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp. 3-4) The
atom uses its free will to join itself to an entity in which it will cease to be an
“individual” – like in Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz” – the atom qua
magic bullet has one shot to hit its mark. The principle of clinamen in ancient
atomism serves rather to individuate the otherwise indistinguishable atom –
in Nancy’s doctrine of community the atom’s clinamen is a retreat from its
“immanence” – its autarchic absolute self. Afterwards in Nancy’s
interpretation the atom forfeits all its elasticity of self – it is only an
indistinguishable part of “community”. The ‘atom’ seems to have transformed
itself discreetly in Nancy’s interpretation into an alias of Heidegger’s Dasein –
the “community” into the Volksgemeinschaft. Clinamen is the socio-genetic
act of communal absorption – the atom moves ‘outside’ of itself and ‘inside’
something greater than itself – community. Once inside there is no egress.
But community is more than just an aggregate of atoms – it is a principle of
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non-immanence, of always being outside of oneself – or as Nancy following
Heidegger says – of ecstasy.
Oddly though the individual or atom occupies at least two positions in relation
to community – its clinamen in some way is a ‘pre-historical’ or primeval act
of creation and at the same time the individual-atom is merely the abstract
result of the “decomposition” of community.
This would mean though that community is primary – a view certainly
favored by Nancy. In this second version community would have ‘preceded’
the individual historically and metaphysically – the atom would not have
‘composed’ it originally by its one and only act of clinamen. The individual is
merely a part of the unravelling of community, a passive fruit of its
degeneration or decadence. But then the atom’s clinamen would have been
made redundant. Unless one could assume hypothetically that a pre-existing
community, whose formation is ontologically given or apriori, would have
been shattered in an equally remote time. The remnants of this primeval
cataclysm, its diaspora, re-gather in a secondary act of clinamen, each on its
own, into a new imperfect body. Such a sequence resembles the Kabbalistic
concept of the ‘breaking of the vessels’. Although Nancy insists that actually
community never was – so that it cannot have been lost, the feelings of loss
are only nostalgia for a chimera – perhaps the “inoperative” community
implies some similar idea of an original shattering of community, which if it
subsequently existed then only in an inferior haphazardly reconstructed form.
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happen countless times. If the atom can incline itself toward – it can equally
incline itself away from a point – this is what happens when bodies cleave
abruptly or disintegrate over time – on a social empirical level friendships
break, love dies, empires collapse, saturation points of all kinds are reached.
Even bankruptcy can be seen as the negative clinamen of the atomic workings
of the ‘community’ of Capital. As a devout Heideggerian Nancy finds it
difficult to conceive of ontological moves ‘away’ from a point – so many of
Heidegger’s terms include the move towards – for instance being-towards-
death, being-with, all kinds of fusional modes. Even ‘falling’ (Verfallen Sein)
is at least a move towards a kind of abyss – an ontological surrender to the
force of Dasein-gravity. Falling is something Dasein endures or experiences –
falling happens to Dasein rather than Dasein doing it. “But singularity never
has the nature or the structure of individuality. Singularity never takes place
at the level of atoms, those identifiable if not identical identities; rather it
takes place at the level of the clinamen, which is unidentifiable. It is linked to
ecstasy: one could not properly say that the singular being is the subject of
ecstasy, for ecstasy has no “subject” – but one must say that ecstasy
(community) happens to the singular being.” (“The Inoperative Community”
op. cit. pp. 6-7)
Still if clinamen as the founding act of community happens only once, then
Nancy’s concept of community would require the abolition of chance – but in
the words of Mallarmé – no throw of the dice can abolish chance.
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Degrees of ecstasy: How to distinguish between the ecstasy of Being =
Community and the ecstasy of fusion? Is there a gradient from one to the
other? An elevation? The path of excess? Of failure? Of betrayal?
2. Unbuilding
Rural spots are dedicated to keeping the accident alive. To observe world
history or the cosmos for that matter from the rural unbuilt areas is to be in a
permanently arrested clinamen – or in a continuous eccentric semi-
revolution. Rural in this case is also peripheral. One turns away from rural
apparent emptiness and at the same time towards metropolitan apparent
fullness. Neither are quite what they seem. But the uneventfulness of the
rural area seems to imply it has dropped out or away from historical causality
– from any causality, which does not originate in the city. The U.S. Secretary
of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt Henry Morgenthau wanted to
turn defeated Nazi Germany into one big farm or cabbage patch – his plan
was not realised. Although some areas of East Germany have slipped into
such a re-ruralisation on their own – Eisenhüttenstadt, Nordhausen even
parts of Berlin to name a few. It is the power of the physical land itself in
absence of a human constructive will which carries out any process of
decivilization. In Eisenhüttenstadt for instance – the bureaucratic will is not
absent but mostly deconstructive. Entropy and the negative human plan
coincide. The Eisenhüttenstadt Blog nostalgically documents the progress of
demolition – posting photographs of the pieces of brick and mortar falling
from the crumbling facades of hotels on the main street (potentially striking
the passers-by), of empty apartment blocks with the caption – this is now a
flat field. The photographic remains of every area of still erect built space
looking picturesque in the setting sun or painted over with graffiti, just
sunlight itself pouring through an empty unnaturally wide street, even cracked
tiles where once a statue of the unicorn, the city mascot, stood are cherished
like heirlooms.
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The same demolishing power chewing up Eisenhüttenstadt lurks in any semi-
unbuilt rural area as the constant stochastic force of the original wasteland.
The wilderness is the perpetual intermittent event of any rural space.
There is a power in degeneracy – it is the power of undoing. As Nancy writes
– “The relation (the community) is, if it is, nothing other than what undoes, in
its very principle – and at its closure or on its limit – the autarchy of absolute
immanence.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit. p. 4)
One night after watching “Blade-Runner” we stepped out into the night of true
nihilism – the empty streets of a ‘spectral suburb’ like village on the Thames.
What we soon saw made “Blade-Runner” seem like an optimistic heart-
warming film – all those buildings in good repair, enterprising agents, streets
teeming with extras – civilization is in full flower. How much more horror is
presented by the unevents of sheer living – outside of any plot or pattern. Or
if any pattern – then only the traces of clinamen. Such an unauthored
unevent accosted our eyes from which the film images were rapidly fading –
we saw as we approached the old people’s flats on the outskirts of what is itself
an outskirt, that something there had been quite deranged. It turned out to be
their boundary wall or what was left of it. The walls in front of the old people’s
flats had been semi-razed – unbuilt in various unrelated ways. Columns
twisted around and knocked over, bricks plucked out and partially crushed
down – one wonders how it could have taken place without interference, how
many hands were working on it. Were they enchanted? But in particular –
the treatment of the hedges was astonishing. The privet seemed turned inside
out and axed through and flayed. “Mon cœur repose sous ces débris (…)”
(Gerard de Nerval)
Unremarkable scenes are the accident in its dormant state – the sparsely
furnished mimicry (mimesis) of the void. Its truth, the accident, lies on the
surface although in abeyance. ‘Aletheia’ appears in suspension.
The more characterless it is, the more indistinguishable from other scenes, the
more the spot lies in ambush. This is a principle of natural sham – its
mimicry or ruse is always based on some kind of heightened normality – one
is instinctively on one’s guard against the ‘normal’.
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Return to the scene of the accidents, the riverbank. The rains have softened
down the meadow especially at the stile, closest to the river. The mud is so
whipped up and smooth I almost slip. A lady walking her dog might have seen
me sliding around. As I came to the stile crossing she spoke to me from the
other side: Last winter a lady broke her leg here, one would have thought they
would have put down some gravel.
I: Yes it’s very slippery.
The woman could have been one of those guardians of the rivers from the
English legends – those who half warn, half frighten the traveller into his
doom. They are human abstractions of the landscape – a remnant of the old
pagan economy of sacrifice. A primitive or prototype of the exchange relation.
The victim of the river is offered in exchange for the prosperity of the
community – but it is a self-activating ritual happening by chance. The
murderous rivers are often spoken of as ‘she’. The locals living around the
river Dart on the edge of Dartmoor have heard ‘her’ cry. Of the Dart it is said:
The Dart, the Dart – the cruel Dart
Every year demands a heart…
The woman probably wanted to sound sympathetic, but it came out as a kind
of threat or curse. The logic behind it, places known to have their built in
natural menace should be preserved, protected like sacred sites, and left
untouched. It also happened to be the closest point to the river’s edge. One
could just as easily slip down into the water as break one’s leg on the
riverbank.
I: I didn’t feel like wearing my wellies.
She: Although you needed them.
Errors of judgement are good introductions to the accident.
The friendliness of a secret enemy can only be the working of the evil eye.
Roy, the retired mechanic, looked too inquisitively at me when asking me how
I am. I said: Very well thank you. Two hours later I had the flu. The
mechanical evil eye works especially well at a distance. His former partner
who now runs the garage together with a Caliban assistant whose face is so
disfigured I have never dared to look at him (I know it only by hearsay)
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operate in the same fashion. They count on weather and natural forces to set
their contraptions in motion. Timing doesn’t matter. They are not in a hurry.
3. Caves
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The race of cave dwellers lived in Arabia Felix, on the African Red Sea coast –
those children of Abraham mentioned by Flavius. They were said to have lead
the Turks down secret passages in times of war. Borges uses all of these
attributes (elements) in his story. The narrator finds the semi-conscious
stupefied troglodyte waiting for him like a loyal dog ready to lead him back out
of the labyrinth away from the City of the Immortals. The City was so
perversely constructed so as to ensure a permanent noisome presence of evil
in the universe, polluting past and future, even threatening the stars.
Somehow Borges hints that this City might be a parable for the City of London
– especially the part around the Barbican. The story starts in London – the
frame is a manuscript found in a set of Pope’s Iliad sold to a Princess of
Lucinges by an antique dealer. The year is 1929, the year of the Great Crash.
The caves are in London too – the underground, the tunnels.
4. Fascist Communion
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This was Hegel’s never-ending scandal for Bataille. Community and ecstasy –
is that one possible translation of slave and master?
Bataille’s eye only opens at his own peril – to see is to die. The Medusa curse
of consciousness. Some of this danger hovers over Nancy’s text – or does he
just set up zones where it might land without possessing the death-defying
consciousness of the Hegelian master, but rather the consciousness of the self-
preserving slave – so that the angel of death just passes over?
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– who is the subject of the truth of politics – the sovereign or the
‘community’?
(see Spectres of Heidegger at Birkbeck, Faust Series Opus 9, 3rd August 2010)
It is not just Bataille’s swaying one sees in Nancy’s text – Nancy himself is
suspended between the same two poles of community and ecstasy – never
sure in which direction he is moving at any given moment. He is like the
Tarot figure of the hanging man – who hangs open eyed from his feet from a
gallows – acutely cognizant (“the clear consciousness of the communal night”)
of all his surroundings, but unable to come to a clear decision about the
multitude of details presenting themselves to his upside-down fixed gaze.
“(…)the paradox of a thinking magnetically attracted toward community and
yet governed by a theme of the sovereignty of a subject. For Bataille, as for us
all, a thinking of the subject thwarts a thinking of community.” (“The
Inoperative Community”, op. cit., p. 23)
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“fascination with fascism inasmuch as it seemed to indicate the direction (…)
of an intense community, devoted to excess. (…) Fascism was the grotesque or
abject resurgence of an obsession with communion; it crystallized the motif of
its supposed loss and the nostalgia for its images of fusion. In this respect, it
was the convulsion of Christianity, and it ended up fascinating modern
Christianity in its entirety.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit. p. 17)
One wonders what that is - ‘fascist orgiastics’ – the granite blocks of party
slaves at the Nuremberg Parteitag waiting with one bated breath for the word
of ‘communion’ from their master? That does not look like an orgy. An orgy
has to do with touching, saturnalia – the kiss and coitus of the masses. The
communal orgy must in some way mimic the joy of lovers. Once again one of
Nancy’s paradoxes exposes itself as the inner ressentiment of the text towards
‘being’ which would evade the law alias community, ‘being’ which is not
abandoned to that law. “Community is given to us – or we are given and
abandoned to community: a gift to be renewed and communicated, it is not a
work to be done or produced.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit., p. 35)
And as such – this community, a gift, which you cannot even give back if you
wanted to (although Esposito more a realist will speak of how to become
immune to this gift) – has its ways of resisting what in turn resists its gift of
itself: “Community is, in a sense, resistance itself: namely, resistance to
immanence. (…) (resistance to the communion of everyone or to the exclusive
passion of one or several: to all the forms and all the violences of
subjectivity).” (ibid.)
“Lovers form the extreme though not external limit of community.” (“The
Inoperative Community”, op. cit., p. 38) (Nancy imitates and undermines
Bataille’s partiality for lovers). But lovers in Nancy’s view merely demonstrate
ecstasy for the benefit of community – they set a sort of standard of sharing
between ‘singular beings’ (not subjects), which the community can easily
appropriate. This does not occur as a matter of course – but it is community’s
potential. Because although between lovers is where “ecstasy, joy touches its
limit” – community is ecstasy – so lovers must be exposed to community or
are its exposure of its own innermost possibility. This is the node in Nancy’s
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text where he is most magnetically drawn to fascism or to ‘fascist excess’ as
the alleged paroxysm of communion (“delirium of incarnated communion”,
ibid.) – because in his view only in the fascist orgy can community become the
lover of itself and at the same time touch itself as a community of lovers. But
what does this touching look like? It is a touching of the limit. Just as one is
hoping to discover what the communion-orgy of the fascist masses might be –
Nancy shies away from the transgression his text desires and drops back down
into an image of a work, not of love: “Lovers touch each other, unlike fellow
citizens (unless, once again, in the delirium of a fanaticized mass or in the
piling up of exterminated bodies – wherever it is a matter of a work).” (“The
Inoperative Community”, op. cit., 39) In this parenthetical remark prefaced
by “once again” the text folds upon itself revealing its abyssal trajectory. The
parenthesis contains (and segregates) the ‘groundless ground’ of community
which Nancy conceals and reveals incessantly throughout his text – as if it
mirrored his own process of thinking and unthinking of a thought: – that the
“fanaticized mass” meaning the three-headed hybrid: the fusion - Nazi state-
people-movement is what Nancy desires in community and that only in this
extreme form can community realise its potential for communion - which is at
the very least when ‘citizens’ touch one another. But the only example he can
think of is the touching of dead bodies or rather exterminated bodies
(analogous to the Christian worship of the unique dead body of Christ) –
whose inert existence came about as the ‘work’ of the communion. The
communion takes place not through the direct erotic touching of the
community of itself or of the deified ruler but ‘sublimated’ through the
communal touching of the communion’s erotic work of extermination. This
resembles a typical structure of perversion – as in de Sade’s “republic of
crime” – the perverse entity constitutes itself erotically through the total
appropriation and expropriation of the body – its own and the other’s.
Klossowski in his analysis of de Sade’s idea of ‘community’ discovers in his
utopia of the limitless body a process quite similar to Nancy’s difficult and
elusive concept of “compearing” (com-paraît): “An inherent operation of the
phantasy of the perverse is the abolishing (divesting) of property on one’s own
body as well as the other’s. The perverse operator inhabits the body of the
other as his own and in this way communicates (apportions) his own body to
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the body of the other.” (Pierre Klossowski, “Sade und Fourier” in: Lektüre zu
de Sade, Frankfurt, 1981, p. 224) Except, in opposition to Nancy’s
‘compearing’, which is the sharing and splitting of singularities exposed in
community - in de Sade’s perverse cosmos the abolishing of the limit
(‘sharing’) between bodies is done on a strictly venal and pecuniary basis.
Nancy seems to retract and nullify his claim to have discovered the joy of
lovers in ‘the delirium of the fanaticized mass’, which is Nazism – for
community is, according to Nancy, above all else, not a work – it is inoperative
or non-sacred transcendence. He only allows himself to begin to speak of
love, – the touching of the piled up exterminated bodies in the camps (those
who pile up touch the bodies and bodies ‘touch’ one another in the piles of the
death work) – but ends with “a matter of work” – thinking perhaps that the
classification as work will immunize the thought against its own volupté.
It seems more ‘proper’ to say work in the context of the extermination act than
love – although was it not the ‘work of love’ – the sexualized love of Volk and
Führer which spawned the Auschwitz planet and its new idea of work
embodied in “Arbeit macht frei”? Although Nancy tries to displace work with
love in his ideal notion of fascist communion – work inevitably asserts itself.
It is the simple resistance of the sheer economical nature of fascism to any
contrived transcendence. This despite the fact, that fascism is the spiritual
‘messianic’ other of capitalism – hence so precious for its survival. Bataille
grasped the intimate connection between a fascist ‘theory of value’ (its
discovery of heretofore unknown sources/agencies of value) and sacrifice,
death, excess of endless consumption. They had for him a predominantly
economic ring.
If there is transcendence in fascism then only through work – but what kind of
work?
The seminal Nazi Gestalt, its generic singleton, fixated in a work by Ernst
Jünger, which so impressed Heidegger, was not the Lover rather the Worker.
(Der Arbeiter - Herrschaft und Gestalt)
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What then exactly is the “inoperative community”? Besides revealing that it is
not a work nor dedicated to any kind of production and that although not
sacred but a sort of replacement for the sacred, Nancy does little to dispel the
mystery of this loose appellation of being. It is in any case a Being. One can
be forgiven for not quite understanding – not even Agamben who ploughs the
same furrow can say much more than - “The only coherent way to understand
inoperativeness is to think of it as a generic mode of potentiality that is not
exhausted (…) in a transitus de potentia ad actum.” (see Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, 1995,
p. 62) Why then say “inoperative”? – if this does not mean broken or obsolete
at the very least it is a kind of idleness – perhaps an expectant one – but not
one in which one does anything in particular which might become a ‘subject’,
one only undoes – is it a mode of potentiality of the end – a kind of waiting for
the end or a community towards the end? Or a readiness as in ready-to-hand,
awaiting a work which cannot yet be conceived. Is this work-to-come perhaps
Heidegger’s “Ereignis” (final event or appropriation)? That is why the
community still bears work in the negative sense in its name – a cancelled
work but one, which could be renewed at any moment. Still, it is not just a
defunct artefact of abandonment – although one is abandoned to it. Nancy
hints at what the unworked work of the inoperative community might be – or
rather what sort of work will resist being unworked even in the inoperative
community. This appears in a footnote appended to the claim:
“Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical
and institutional.” (“The Inoperative Community” op. cit., p. 31) It is not
though the unworking of “the political”. The footnote contains a clue to the
provenance of the “inoperative community” – it is a being with a particular
openness for the political: “I do not include the political here. In the form of
the State or the Party (if not the State-Party), it indeed seems to be the order
of a work. But it is perhaps at the heart of the political that communitarian
unworking resists.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit., p. 158) Why does
the political suddenly appear in the midst of community, supposedly merely
the locus of fraternal sharing, now the order of a work of a State or the Party?
What State-Party might he be referring to – certainly not the Communist
Party? Nancy with typical Heideggerian Bauernschläue (peasant slyness)
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seems to have hidden the purpose of his seemingly purposeless
communication-community in a footnote - it is the base for a political
eventuality– one whose potentiality includes a State-Party. The “inoperative
community” is not just an anodyne being-in-common – it is a coming State –
an existing one would hardly need to ‘resist’, it already is.
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activation of a power directed toward the historical advent of a dictatorship.
(…) Heidegger continues, in the Beiträge, to hold to his interpretation of
Jünger’s “total mobilization” which he conflates with the Hitlerian and
dictatorial relation between Führung and Gefolgschaft. It is true that what
Heidegger describes in the Beiträge forms an invisible and apparently idle
community, a silent conjuration. But its purpose is to prepare and wait for the
unique time and place at which the “people”, assembled according to and by
means of that invisible community, will be able to found their “truth”, whose
law they will enforce over the whole Western world, or even the entire earth.”
(Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy,
Yale University Press, 2009, p. 281)
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the singular outline of our being-in-common expose itself.” (“The Inoperative
Community”, op. cit. pp. 40-41)
Nancy’s coy love of fascism and its annihilation of the subject known as
‘fascist communion’ is a love, which dare not speak its name. One can almost
hear Bataille laughing.
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