On Krisis and Community:
‘The Political’ After Heidegger and Schmitt, and After Aristotle
Andrew Norris
I am afraid that the title of my talk today promises quite a bit more than I will be able to
deliver. This is not so much an intentional case of bait and switch as it is an attempt to
situate what I will say in a broader context that might both invite a wider range of
responses, and allow me to relate these responses to the broader project of which this talk
is a part. My immediate subject today is the contribution to political theory made by
Jean-Luc Nancy. But what interests me about Nancy is as much his participation in a
larger movement of political thought as it is the particular details of his own work.
Nancy is one of a large group of contemporary political theorists for whom the political
is a central concept and recurrent phrase. As well as Nancy and his regular co-author
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, this group includes influential and important theorists such as
Hannah Arendt, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Ranciere, Sheldon Wolin, and
Slavoj Zizek.
1
Such great weight is put upon this notion today that it is no surprise that
Routledge now has a book series devoted to it: Heidegger and the Political, Lacan and the
1
Given Arendt’s central importance in the development of this movement of thought, it should be noted
that a prominent Arendt scholar denies that Arendt even deploys the phrase, the political. In The Attack of
the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, Hanna Pitkin comments upon “Arendt’s puzzling
hypostatization of the adjective ‘social’ into a noun.” It is, Pitkin writes, “almost as if she were readying
the word to serve as this monster’s proper name. She does nothing comparable with what she regards as
the contrasting adjective, ‘political.’ And she hypostasizes ‘social’ even though there is a perfectly good
noun, ‘society,’ already available” (The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social
[Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998], 3). But Arendt does precisely the same with ‘political’
in what is perhaps her most important essay, “What is Freedom?” as well as in her own1960 German
translation of her 1958 The Human Condition. Indeed, it is somewhat odd that the English 1958 edition of
HC continues to be treated as the definitive version, as Arendt made a number of changes to it when she
published it in German in 1960 under the title Vita Activa oder Vom tätigen Leben. Of the English version,
Arendt herself suggested that its structure did not represent a exhaustive and definitive statement of her
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