ON DEMOCRACY1

Is there a sense to saying “democracy”? Obviously one can and must reply, “no, not
the least sense any more, since it's no longer possible to say anything else”, just as
much as, “yes, of course, since equality, justice and freedom are under threat
everywhere––by plutocracies, technocracies, and mafiocracies”.

“Democracy” has become an exemplary case of insignificance: by representing the

totality of virtuous politics and the sole way of ensuring the common good, the word
has ended up reabsorbing and dissolving any problematic characteristics and any
possibility of being interrogated or questioned. There merely remain some marginal
debates on the differences between different systems or various democratic
sensibilities. In sum, “Democracy” means everything––politics, ethics, right2,
civilization––and therefore means nothing.

This insignificance must be taken very seriously. It is precisely this insignificance,

moreover, that constitutes the contemporary task of thinking, as attested to by the
present “investigation”: we are no longer content with allowing irregularities in
common sense to drift along. We demand that the insignificance of democracy appear
before the tribunal of reason.

I resort to this Kantian metaphor because I think that it is not, in effect, a question of
the same demand imposed on Kant to submit the very sense of “knowledge” itself to
critical discernment. Which ever way you look at it, henceforth one can no longer
nullify, even if so inclined, the demarcation between the subject's knowledge of the
object and knowledge––let's call it “the subject without object”, to be short and
simple. Or if you prefer: between the knowledge of objects that are calculable,
masterable, and the knowledge of the subject itself in its reaching out towards ends
(moreover, ends that are infinite). Ultimately, we must now become capable of a no
less clear and consistent demarcation between two senses, two values and two stakes
that dimly cover the confused insignificance of the word “democracy”.

On the one hand the word designates––in a mode that resembles, to continue with the
analogy, the Kantian regime of the “understanding”––the conditions governing the
possible ways in which government and organisation are practised since no
transcendent principle can claim to regulate them (given that neither “man” nor
“right” can assert transcendence in this regard).

1
Translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Enquête Sur La Démocratie” by Gilbert Leung (February 2009). Other
possible renderings of the title include, inter alia, “Surveying Democracy” and “Investigating
Democracy”. The original essay is due to be published as part of an edited collection by “La Fabrique”.
To avoid any copyright issues, this translation is offered for private use only and in relation to the
masterclass to be held by Jean-Luc Nancy on the 16th March 2009 at the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities. Moreover, Jean-Luc Nancy bears no responsibility for the accuracy of this translation; that
burden lies with the translator alone.
2
Translator’s note: Given the word droit can mean either “right” or “law” and notwithstanding the fact that
loi always means “law”, I have consistently translated droit as “right” except on two occasions which
will be indicated in the text.
 On the other hand, the same word designates––in a mode this time resembling the
regime of “reason”––the Idea of man and/or of the world from the moment that,
withdrawn from any allegiance towards a beyond-world, they do not postulate any
less their capacity to be (by themselves and without subreption of their immanence)
the subject of an unconditional transcendence, that it to say, capable of deploying full
autonomy. (As you might have guessed, I also use the verb “postulate” in a manner
that follows the Kantian analogy to designate the legitimate mode––in a regime of
finitude, that is to say, of “the death of God”––of an opening to the infinite.)

This second meaning can certainly not be said to be the “proper” meaning and no
dictionary authorises it. But while it may not constitute the meaning of the term, it is
the signifyingness (signifiance) that attaches to it: democracy promotes and promises
the freedom of the human being as a whole in the equality of all human beings. In this
sense, modern democracy engages man, absolutely, ontologically, and not the single
“citizen”; or it tends to confuse the two. In any event, modern democracy corresponds
to much more than a political3 mutation: it also corresponds to a mutation of culture
or civilisation so profound that it has anthropological value, quite as much as the
technical and economic mutations with which it is connected. This is why Rousseau's
contract does not only institute a political body: it produces man himself, the
humanity of man.

For a similar amphibology of a word to be possible, it must be possible for there to be

some ambiguity, confusion or indistinction on the register pertaining to the origin or
usage of this word, that is to say, the register of politics.

It is indeed from a duality or duplicity constitutive of “politics” that the poorly

perceived and unsettled ambivalence of “democracy” arises. Politics has never
ceased, from the Greeks to us, to maintain a double disposition: on the one hand, as
the only rule of common existence and, on the other hand, as the assumption of the
sense or truth of this existence. Sometimes politics clearly detaches its sphere of
action and claim, and sometimes, on the contrary, it bears responsibility for the
totality of existence (and becomes indiscernibly common and singular). It is not
surprising that the major efforts towards political achievement in the 20th century
were made under the sign of the following assumption: that common being happens
like the self-exceeding or auto-sublimation of the administration of relations and
forces. This exceeding or sublimation could be called “people”, “community”, or still
other names (including the “Republic”) and has perfectly represented the desire of
politics to exceed itself (if need be by doing away with itself as a separate sphere and,
for example, in absorbing or dissolving the State). It is from this self-exceeding or
auto-sublimation that “democracy” arises together with its ambivalence and
insignificance.

3
Translator’s note: All instances of the word “political” in this translation should be read as the adjectival
form of politics. The ontological and ethical category of “the political” (le politique as opposed to la
politique) that Nancy discusses extensively elsewhere does not explicitly occur in this text. Whether it
is implicit in certain instances is another question.
 3

Everything begins in reality with politics itself, for it is necessary to remember that it
has begun. We are often ready to think that there is always politics and that it is
everywhere. No doubt there is always power and it is everywhere. But there has not
always been politics. It is together with philosophy a Greek invention, and like
philosophy it is an invention that springs from the end of divine presences: agrarian
and theocratic cults. Just as logos is built on the disqualification of mythos, similarly
politics orders itself around the disappearance of the god-king.

Democracy is firstly the other of theocracy, meaning it is also the other of given right:
it must invent right. It must invent itself. Contrary to the pious images of Athenian
democracy that we have loved (and for good reason ...) to make for ourselves, its
history shows this from the outset and always in a state of anxiety about itself and
concerned for its reinvention. The whole of Socrates and Plato is produced in this
context, like the search for the logocracy that would put an end to the failings of
democracy. Ultimately, this search has continued through to us, across several
transformations of which the most important was the attempt to establish, with the
State and its sovereignty, a foundation distinctly autonomous from public right.

In transferring Sovereignty to the people, modern democracy revealed what still

remained (badly) concealed by the appearance of the “divine right” of the monarchy
(at least in France): namely, Sovereignty is founded neither in logos nor in mythos.
From its birth, (Rousseau's) democracy has known itself to be unfounded. This is its
luck and its weakness: we are at the heart of this chiasmus.

It is necessary to discern where luck and weakness are respectively leading us.

To do this, let us start by observing that democracy did not start or re-start without
being accompanied by “civil religion”. Otherwise said: for as long as it has believed
in itself, it has also known that it needed not so much to “secularise” theocracy, but
rather to invent what could be, from the given right, an equivalent without being a
succedaneum or a substitute: a figure of the gift that would guard (tutélaire) the
invention always to be invented. A religion, then, that without founding right would
grant its blessing to its political creation.

It is thus that Athens and Rome lived through political religions that wore out––which
never perhaps, or rarely, had all the tutelary consistency hoped for. It was not by
chance that Socrates was condemned for impiety towards the civil religion, nor was it
by chance that Christianity separated itself from both Jewish theocracy and the
Roman civil religion (itself already weakened, having given way on its true faith,
which was the Republic). Philosophy and Christianity accompanies the long failure of
civil religion in Antiquity. Only when Christianity relinquishes the place not of a new
theocracy or civil religion exactly, but of an ambiguous partition––association,
competition, dissociation––between the throne and the alter, will civil religion be able
to seek a return to its ensign (in America) or to its example (in France); but it will be
dedicated to remaining more civil than religious, and in any case, if one wants to take
issue with the words, more political than spiritual.
Too little attention is paid to Plato's relation with democracy. The reverence in which
he is held not as the first of philosophers in a chronological sense, but indeed for his
strictly foundational role, causes us to regard (in our democratic habitus) his hostility
towards the Athenian regime, such as he knew it, as a simple fault, as an aristocratic
tendency. But what is at stake is much more important: what Plato reproaches in
democracy is its not being founded in truth, its not being able to produce the deeds to
its original title. The suspicion towards the gods of the city––and the suspicion
towards gods and myths in general––opens on to the possibility of a foundation in
logos (in a logos of which theos, in the singular, becomes another name).

Consequently, a choice traverses our whole history: either politics is unfounded and
must remain so (along with right); or it gives itself a foundation, a “sufficient reason”
in the sense of Leibniz. In the first case, it makes do with motives in the absence of
reason(s): security, protection against nature and against unsociability, the intersection
of interests. In the second case, the reason or Reason invoked––divine right or raison
d'Etat, national or international myth––inevitably turns the common assumption that
it announces in domination and in oppression.

The fate of the idea of “revolution” has been played out in the articulation between
the two alternatives. Democracy well and truly demands a revolution: to turn the very
ground of politics. It must expose it to the absence of any foundation. But it does not
therefore allow the revolution to return to the supposed point of a foundation.
Revolution suspended, therefore.

Recent times have seen the development of many styles of thinking about the
suspended revolution, thoughts of the insurrectionary moment as opposed to the
revolutionary movement (towards the State); thoughts of politics as a constantly
renewed act of revolt, critique and subversion stripped of any foundational claim;
thoughts of the continuous harassment rather than the overthrowing of the State (that
is to say, literally of what is established, ensured, and thus supposedly founded in
truth). These thoughts are just; they take note of the following: that “politics” is not
worth the assumption of either humanity or the world (since henceforth man, nature,
and universe are indissociable). It is necessary to step towards the dissipation of what
will have been a grand illusion of modernity, that which was long expressed through
the desire for the disappearance of the State, that is to say, the substitution of the
foundation that is recognised as non-consistent by a foundation in truth––the truth
residing itself in the democratic projection of mankind (and the world) that is equal,
just, fraternal and withdrawn from any power.

It becomes necessary to take a further step: to think how politics without foundation
and to some extent in a state of permanent revolution (if it is possible to twist this
syntagm in such a way...) has the task of enabling an opening of spheres that are in
right foreign to it and that are, for their part, spheres of truth or of sense: those that
designate more or less well the names of “art”, “thinking”, “love”, “desire” or all
other possible designations for the relation to the infinite––or said better still, infinite
relation.
To think the heterogeneity of these spheres to the sphere of politics proper is a
political necessity. Now, “democracy”––that which we have been more and more
accustomed to name as such––tends on the contrary, according to this custom, to
present a homogeneity of these spheres or of these orders. Even if it remains vague
and confused, this presumed homogeneity leads us astray.

Before continuing let us pause a moment on a linguistic consideration. Whether it is a

matter of an etymological process endowed with sense or else historical chance
(besides, the two orders are not easily separated in the formation and evolution of
languages), the present state of our political lexicon offers a great resource for
thinking: “democracy” is formed by a suffix that refers to force, to violent imposition,
unlike the suffix -archy which refers to founded power, legitimated in a principle.
This is clear when one considers the series: plutocracy, aristocracy, theocracy,
technocracy, autocracy, or even bureaucracy (or ochlocracy, “power of the mob...”);
as distinguished from: monarchy, anarchy, hierarchy, oligarchy. Without looking to
enter into a precise analysis of the histories of these terms (which would imply further
terms like nomarchy, tetrarchy, or even physiocracy or mediocracy, with
consideration of the differences in epochs, levels, and language registers), one can see
how the designation of a founding principle is distinguished clearly from the
imputation of a dominating force (which implies, of course, that “theocracy” is a term
thought from the point of view opposed to the idea of a legitimate divine sovereignty
and that even “aristocracy” can imply a contradiction between the idea of those who
are “best” and their more or less arbitrary domination).

Regardless of whether it be a question of, once again, strictly linguistic phenomena,

the word “democracy” still appears to keep things away from the possibility of a
founding principle. And in fact, it is necessary to say that democracy implies in its
essence something of an anarchy that one is tempted to call principial, if precisely one
could not properly authorise this contradictio in adjecto.

There is no “demarchy”: the “people” do not make principle. At most it only produces
the oxymoron or paradox of the principle without princedom. This is also why the
right to which the democratic institution refers can in truth only live in a constantly
active and renewed relationship with its lack of foundation. So it is that the first
modernity forged the expression “natural right” and that the philosophical implication
of this expression continues to be active, but in an implicit and confused mode, in the
expression “rights of man” (or of the animal, child, foetus, environment, of nature
itself, etc.)

It is urgent to reaffirm and put to work this affirmation whose content and scope are
nevertheless theoretically well established: not only is there no “human nature”, but
“man”, if one wants to confront him with the idea of “nature” (of an autonomous and
auto-finalised order), only offers the characteristics of a subject lacking “nature” or in
excess of any species of “naturalness”: the subject of a denaturation in whatever
sense, the worst or the best, one might wish to take this word.

Democracy as politics, not being able to be founded on a transcendent principle, is

necessarily founded, or unfounded, on the absence of human nature.
 7

At the level of politics, there follows from these actions and institutions two major
consequences:

The first consequence concerns power. Democracy implies in right, or seems to

imply––it is precisely on semblance or reality that it is necessary here to speak––at
least a tendentious disappearance of the specific and separate instance of power. Now,
we have already seen that it is precisely the nullification of such a separation that is
problematic. It is for a “people of gods” that such a nullification could take effect. The
model of the “councils” (or soviets) whose ideal form is ultimately the people in
permanent assembly and the appointment of delegates to specified tasks is
accompanied by the permanent revocability of these same delegates. That it is
possible and desirable, on a number of social levels or scales, to exercise systems of
co-management or participation which tend more or less towards this model, does not
mean it is practical at the scale of society as a whole4. But it is not simply a question
of scale: it is a question of essence. Society itself exists in the exteriority of relations.
In this sense “society” only begins where there is an end to the integration into
interiority of a group that cements its system of kinship and its relation to the myths,
figures or totems of the group itself. One can even say that the distinction, or even
opposition, between “society” and “community”, as it has been formulated since the
19th century and as it is implicit in all the considerations of the classical age on the
“unsociable sociability” of men (Kant), is not by chance contemporaneous to
democracy––just as the dissolution of rural communities was not unconnected to the
birth of the cities. The city––polis––already represented a kind of bond (lien) in
exteriority, a problem that democracy had to solve.

Of course, it is not a question of taking these terms––”interiority, exteriority”––

literally, neither in the register of the group nor that of the individual. But it is
necessary to take account of the fact that the representations they induce may or may
not be taken into account and put into practice. Modern society (we precisely do not
have any other generic term for it) is represented in accordance with the exteriority of
its members (supposed individuals) and their relations (supposed interests and forces).
A whole anthropology––if not a metaphysics––is understood as soon as one speaks of
“society”, and of “sociality”, “sociability”, “association”. One associates from a
position of exteriority, and dissociation is always the possible corollary of an
association.

This is also why power, in society, seems only to retain the traits of “legitimate
violence”, and why there is nothing left of a symbolic function that would link to the
“internal” truth of the group. Democracy therefore resolves itself with difficulty by
assuming a power that betrays the absence of such a symbolism in the strongest sense
of the word (let us say, in the sense of and in different periods: civil or non-civil
religion, feudal allegiance and national unity, which could appear to ensure its force).
In this sense, the real name that democracy desires, and what it has in fact engendered
and carried for 500 years as its horizon, is the name communism. This will have been
the name of the desire for the creation of a symbolic truth of community that society
4
Translator’s note: The last part of this sentence can be more literally translated as: “... does not prevent it
from being impractical at the scale of society as a whole”.
knew in all respects to be absent. The name is perhaps obsolete, but this is not what I
will discuss here. It will have been the name carrying an idea––barely an idea, not at
all a concept in the strict sense, but a thinking, a direction of thinking according to
which democracy in fact interrogates its own essence and destination.

It no longer suffices today (far from it!) to denounce this or that “betrayal” of the
communist ideal. It is necessary rather to take account of the following: the
communist idea did not have to be an ideal––utopian or rational––for it did not have
to undertake the dialectical relief of social exteriority and a common or community
interiority (or symbolicity, or ontological consistence: it is all one). It was responsible
for opening the question of what society, as such, leaves in suffering: precisely the
symbolic, or ontological, or more banally the sense or the truth of being together.

Communism was therefore not political and it never was. Its denunciation of the
separation of politics was not itself political. Communism did not know it, we must
know it from now on.

But it is important in such conditions to not be deluded about power. Power is not
only the exterior expedient that aims at more or less maintaining the unsocial society
and which has a predilection for seizing the most exterior cravings themselves, even
ones that are the most coldly foreign or the most hostile to the body of society. For
precisely it is a question of this “body” and to know if there is one in organic
interiority or if it is an aggregate capable of better organisation.

That power organises, manages and governs, does not make the separation of its own
sphere reprehensible. This is why we see again today, being as “communist” as we
could wish to be, the sense of a necessity of the State (with which, and not against
which, are posed other questions beyond the State: questions of international law [le
droit international] and the limits of classical sovereignty).

But it is necessary not to resign oneself to the inevitable. In power, there in no longer
a necessity for government. There is a proper desire, a drive towards domination and
a correlative drive towards subordination. One cannot reduce all the phenomena of
power––political as well as symbolic, cultural, intellectual, of words or of the image,
etc––to a mechanics of forces rebellious to morality or to the idea of a community of
justice and fraternity (for it is always, in the final analysis, a condemnation of this
kind that flows as an undercurrent to our analysis of power[s]). Such a reduction
ignores what the drive in question can have as distinct from the sole desire to destroy
or of death. In the push towards mastery, expropriation or domination, the
commandment and the government, it is not forbidden (however it is exactly for
psychoanalysis) to consider at the same time the fury of subjugation, degradation or
destruction and the zeal of taking control, of the power to keep, contain and to shape
with a view to a form and of what a form can reveal. The conjunction, indeed the
mêlée of these two aspects cannot be avoided and one cannot be content with hoping
for a drives police who sorts out bad dominations from good domestications.
Barbarism and civilisation rub shoulders dangerously, but this danger is the sign of
the indeterminacy and opening of the movement that pushes towards mastery and
possession.
This movement is as much of life as of death, of subject in expansion as object in
subjection; it is as much the fact of an increase of being in its desire as that of its
collapse in satisfaction and assuagement. Such is the profound stake of Spinoza's
conatus or of Nietzsche's will to power, to take the most visible figures of this pushing
whose signs are in fact everywhere in thinking––which can only be ambivalent if it is
neither pre-formed nor pre-destined to any goal.

Political power is certainly destined to ensure sociality, up to the possibility of

contesting and recasting its established relations. But it is there, wherever sociality
can access indeterminate ends, where power as such is without power: ends without
the end of sense, senses, forms, or intensities of desire. Democracy poses in principle
an exceeding of power––but in its truth and greatness (or even its majesty!) and not in
its nullification.

We have always known in fact where power lies since we have always thought––
except in simple tyranny, which is without thought––that government governs for the
good of the governed (by which it is possible to say that everywhere––except, once
again, in tyranny––power is invested in the people, whether the regime is or is not
expressly democratic). But what thus circumscribes the powerfulness of power does
not determine either the nature or the forms and contents of the good of the governed.

This good is essentially not determined (which does not mean indeterminate) and can
only be determined in a movement that invents or creates it while opening it once
again to an interrogation––anxiety or élan––on what it could well be or become. What
are the forms, what are the senses, what are the stakes of an existence in which all we
can know from the outset (and this outset we always take anew) is contained in two
propositions:

• it, this existence, does not respond to any design, destiny or project that
preceded it;
• it is not more individual than collective: the act of existence (l'exister)––or the
truth of “being”––only takes place according to the plural of singularities in
which any postulation of a unity of “being” dissolves.

The good without project or unity consists in the invention always retaking forms
according to which sense can take place. Sense, this means: the referring of ones to
others, circulation, exchange or the sharing of possibilities of experience, that is to
say, of relations to the outside, to the possibility of an opening on to the infinite. The
common is everything here. Sense, senses, sensation, sentiment, sensibility/sensitivity
and sensuality, these are only given in common. More exactly, it is the condition itself
of the common: to sense ones to others, and through it the exteriority that is not
converted or replete in interiority, but tense, under tension between us.

As it engages a metaphysics (or as one is wont to say: a relation to ends) and cannot
ensure it through a civil or non-civil religion, democracy insists that its politics
unleash, clearly and extensively, the fact that the stakes of sense and of senses
overflow the spheres of its government. It is neither a public and private matter nor a
collective and individual matter. It is a matter of the common or the in-common which
 is precisely neither one nor the other and whose whole consistency is found in the
maintenance of the separation of the one and the other. The common is in fact the
regime of the world: of the circulation of senses.

The sphere of the common is not one: it is made of multiples approaches of the order
of sense––of which each sort is itself multiple, as in the diversity of arts, in thinking,
in desires, affects, etc. What “democracy” means here is the admission––without
assumption––of all these diversities to one “community” which does not unify them
but on the contrary deploys their multiplicity and with it the infinity from which it
constitutes the innumerable and unachievable.

The trap that politics caught itself in with the birth of modern democracy––that is, to
reiterate, democracy without an effective principle of civil religion––is the trap that
confuses the mastery of social stability (the State according to the origin of the word:
il stato, stable state) with the idea of a form that encompasses all the expressive forms
of being-in-common (that is to say, of being or existence tout court, absolutely).

It is not that it is illegitimate or vain to aspire to a form of all forms. In a sense, each
of them demands nothing less, whether it be through one of the arts or through love,
thinking or knowledge. But each of them knows––and knows from an innate
knowledge, originary––that its aspiration to envelope and carry away all the forms
only declares its truth when it opens itself to their multiple developments and lets an
inexhaustible diversity proliferate. Our drive towards unity or synthesis is known,
when it is known well, as the drive towards expansion and deployment, not a
tightening into a final point. A certain comprehension of politics is burdened with the
gravity of the final point and of the uniqueness of sense5.

Taking things from the angle of the line or desire, of resonance or language, of
calculation or gesture, of concoction or cloaking (de la cuisine ou du drapé), it is not
a regime of form that does not finish by opening out6 on to all the others by contact or
referral, by contrast or analogy, in a direct, oblique or fragmented way––but for all
that, no one thinks of absorbing or reuniting the others without then turning towards
their own negation. If “the brass awakes as horn” (Rimbaud) it is because it does not
go back to being a violin.

Moreover, it is not the form of forms or the accomplishment of a totality. The all, on
the contrary, demands more than the all (even if an emptiness or a silence) without
which the all implodes. Now, “politics” lets us believe that there could be such a thing
and that in addition, for this very reason, “politics” had to erase its own distinction in
affirming that “all is politics” or that in politics there is the antecedent necessary for
any other praxis.

5
Translator’s note: I have translated the phrase sens unique as “uniqueness of sense” even though the former
usually means “one-way” (as in “one-way street”). There appears to be a play on words involving
Nancy’s very specific notion of sense that cannot be rendered by “one-way”.
6
Translator’s note: “Opening out” is a translation of s’épanouir that also carries within it the sense of the
opening out of the petals of a rose, a blossoming or blooming.
 Politics must provide the form of the access to the opening of other forms: it is the
antecedent of a condition of access, not of a foundation or a determination of sense.
This does not subordinate politics; this confers upon it a particularity that is of the
highest service. It must constantly renew the possibility of eclosure7 of the forms or
registers of sense. In return, it must not itself be constituted in form, at least not with
the same sense. On the other hand, it gives its field to the formation of force.

Politics never leads to ends. It leads to stages of transient equilibria. Art, love or
thinking are each time, at each occurrence one could say, entitled to declare
themselves accomplished. But at the same time, these accomplishments only hold
value in their own sphere and cannot claim to make law (droit) or politics. One could
thus say that these registers are of the order of a “finishing of the infinite”, whereas
politics concerns the absence of definition.

10

I shall end inconclusively with some fragmentary remarks.

1. The delimitation of the spheres of non-politics (here called “art”, “love”,

“thinking”, etc) is neither given nor immutable; the invention of these spheres, their
formation, their putting into figures and rhythms––for example, the invention of
modern “art”––is itself concerned with this regime of the invention of ends and of
their transformation, reinvention, etc.
2. The delimitation between the sphere of politics and the ensemble of others is also
not given or immutable; for example: where must one begin and finish a “cultural
politics”? ... And it is a feature of democracy to have to reflect on the limits within of
the sphere of “politics”.
3. All my points might seem to lead to the legitimating of the current state of things
in our democracies such as they exist; in fact, politics observes the lines dividing out
the spheres of “art”, “science” and “love”––while never ceasing to intervene in a
hundred ways between each of them. But precisely in this state of things, what I am
striving to bring to light is never said or thought: how politics is not the place of the
assumption of ends, but only the access to their possibility. Invent the place, the
organ, the discourse of this reflection; this would be a considerable political gesture.
4. “Democracy” is therefore the name of a mutation of humanity in its relation to
these ends, or to itself as “being ends” (Kant). This is not the name of an auto-
management of rational humanity, nor the name of a definitive truth inscribed in the
heaven of Ideas. It is the name, oh how many bad signifiers, of a humanity that finds
itself exposed to the absence of any given end––of any heaven, of any future, but not
of any infinite––Exposed, existent.

Jean-Luc Nancy



7
Translator’s note: I have followed Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Mallenfant and Michael B. Smith, the translators
of “Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity” (New York: Fordham University Press 2008),
in translating éclosion as “eclosure”. According to them, the French term literally means “hatching” or
“blossoming” (of flowers), while the English term is used in the field of entomology to designate a
butterfly’s metamorphosis from pupa to winged fulfilment [sic].