Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking by Morin Marie-Eve. Gratton Peter. & Marie-Eve Morin

Author:Morin, Marie-Eve.,Gratton, Peter. & Marie-Eve Morin [Gratton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438442280
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

EXPOSITIONS OF THE POLITICAL

Justice, Freedom, and Equality

EIGHT

ARCHI-ETHICS, JUSTICE, AND THE SUSPENSION OF HISTORY IN THE WRITING OF JEAN-LUC NANCY

B. C. Hutchens

Jean-Luc Nancy's commitment to a revolutionary politics attentive to the incessant re-inauguration of justice fulfills the promise of his notion of “archiethics,” which sets out to resist those discourses that threaten to substantialize the notion of community by means of historical ideals. Nancy challenges the Kantian and libertarian traditions of justice (broadly construed) that insist on the subordination of freedom to certain “rights,” which strive but fail to appropriate the singular efforts of freedom and the incommensurable “sharing” (partage) that, for Nancy, composes communities.

This chapter addresses the question of the relation between the discourses of the suspension of history and the demand for justice. More specifically, I propose that Nancy's notion of the “archi-ethics” of writing is consistent with his effort to understand freedom and justice in the context of the “suspension of history.” On my reading, Nancy is arguing that the suspension of history transforms the traditional paradigm of justice as an “equality of measure” with respect to the obsolete notions of the “individual” and the “community” it presupposes. What he calls “archi-ethics” arises through this transformation and serves as a form of writing that enables alternative relationships between a singularity that incessantly reaffirms itself, despite generalized individuation, through a freedom that constantly surprises and seizes itself rather than is “granted” by a political body or “taken” from a political class. A community thought in this way would be a sharing of relations rather than of substantial individuals relating atomically, and would be the mark of a justice that answers to freedom's groundlessness.

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