Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy points out that democracy now means (or signifies) a number of totally different things: politics, ethic, law, civilization—and therefore means nothing.

Since the Greeks, democracy has, on the one hand, referred to the regulation and organization of common existence. But on the other, it refers to the almost religious (or transcendental) assumptions about the essence and deeper meaning of this existence—the free human. Since democracy refers to the liberty of each human being in relation to all human beings, modern democracy makes statements not only about the democrat (the subject of democracy), or the citizen (the subject of politics), but the human (the subject as such). Modern democracy actually combines, and makes indistinguishable, two separate and previously distinct things: this is no longer a human who happens to also be part of a system or social contract with others, but a human who cannot be thought or imagined without it’s relation to this contract. In this way, democracy not only refers to a political system, but refers more deeply to the “humanity of mankind itself” (60).

This produces a serious problem. For in one instance, democracy acts like a political system—claiming its own authority to govern over (or even through) the public. But the next moment, democracy is pushing past mere government to claim something about the essence of humanity, the individual, and the collective. For Nancy, the danger of this is clear: if democracy can be both a system of government and a way of defining humanity itself as free, there is no way to “get outside” of democracy to criticize it. Any criticism of it can be seen as proof of the democracies correctness (since ability to think freely is one of the tenants democracy assumes), and therefore, said criticism also, and quite bizarrely, justifies the governmental structure to which “democracy” is linked—the same structure it would criticize. 

Additionally, Nancy suggests democracy, is the “other” (or the opposite) of theocracy, making it the opposite of law that is dispensed from on high and unquestionable. In a democracy, it is clear that the law is invented—it is something democracy invents as it invents itself, through trial and error. Therefore, in a sense, democracy is always suspicious of itself, of the correctness of it’s own operations. This is why sovereign democratic states try to place law on autonomous footing—protecting it so carefully from revision. It is an attempt to provide a stable (almost religious) foundation rather than accept the inherent flux and self-justification at the heart of democracy. 

According to Nancy, this foundation-less-ness produces two beliefs simultaneously: 1) law that is ungrounded should remain so and 2) law must be endowed with a foundation. But according to Nancy, this foundation-less-ness, the double meaning of democracy, is both a blessing a defect of democracy, for through it comes revolution. For Nancy, revolution, and the antagonism and dissensus it represents, is a necessary effect of the double bind of democracy. It is democracy playing itself out. Nancy therefore argues for the centrality of ongoing conflict and revolution, and a certain contingency to guard against the death of democracy. - Rebekah Sinclair

References: 

• “Finite and Infinite Democracy,” in Democracy in What State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• The Truth About Democracy. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.