19
sharpness” to the “limit point of political philosophy in general” and the “the truth of the
political as such”
32
I contest Nancy’s reading of Hegel elsewhere. Here I would like to emphasize
what is lost by treating Schmitt as a footnote to a version of Hegel that emphasizes the
speculative theodicy so as to make him the proper counter to Heidegger’s Seinsgeshichte.
To see the problem here, consider a passage where Nancy approaches and then retreats
from the problems of the sovereign decision raised by Schmitt. In The Sense of the
World Nancy suggests that “the combination of four terms--subject, citizen, sovereignty,
community--organizes, saturates, and exhausts the political space closing itself today.” In
this space that we never quite manage to leave, these four terms map out the coordinates
of two ideal-types of political community: the politics of the subject and the politics of
the citizen. The first names the metaphysics of the sovereign subject-work according to
which “the community at work creates and works itself, so to speak, thereby
accomplishing the subjective process of self-formation and self-production.”
33
The
second names the space of being-in-common of Nancy’s “Inoperative Community,”
where there is no common essence to the community of ecstatic singularities other than
their existent lack of essence and, as I have argued elsewhere, identity. But where the
earlier Inoperative Community had celebrated the first option--essentially a more public
and gelassen version of Heideggerian Gelassenheit--, here Nancy suggests that “one has
good reason to ask oneself if these two options are not in an intimate solidarity or
connivance.” (107) To the extent that they are, it is hard to see how what alternative there
could be to Schmitt, metaphysics, and all that Nancy attacks. Every community will
32
“The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch,” 110 and 114.
Convention