From the ‘inoperative community’ to social authority; a Nancean

response to governmentality and the politics of loss.

Samuel Kirwan

School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol,

United Kingdom

Samuel.kirwan@bristol.ac.uk

From the ‘inoperative community’ to social authority; a Nancean

response to governmentality and the politics of loss.

This article addresses how the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy

might inform our understanding of ‘social authority’; an authority generated in

everyday practices which is placed under threat by moves to ‘empower’ the local.

Having set out the 'governmentality' approach to this empowerment, it argues

that, while drawing out in a very productive fashion the forms of power that fill

the sphere of community-oriented politics, it does not ask of how we might

alternatively configure our response to Hannah Arendt’s recognition of our

having lost a transcendent basis for authority, and does not recognise the role of

this loss in shaping this political sphere. The article thus sets out how Nancy’s

work, in re-framing this ‘loss’ as the constantly occurring fragmentation of the

community, allows for a productive and augmentative approach to authority,

highlighting its contingent production in moments of creativity and contestation.

A final section sets out how, following Nancy’s recent deliberations upon

democracy, such a ‘social authority’ may be seen as the essential to a democratic

politics.

Keywords: Jean-Luc Nancy; authority; community; governmentality; democracy.

Introduction

“It points to what is, or should be, the central question of contemporary politics:

the privatisation of social authority, and thus power, in England.” (McKibbin,

2012:3)

This article addresses how the work of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, in re-framing

our understandings of politics, community and democracy, might similarly re-frame our

understanding of authority. Focusing upon recent political developments in the United

Kingdom, the article argues that, as highlighted by the above quote in reference to the

aggressive retrenchment of the state, packaged as an empowerment of the ‘local’, in the

fields of education, healthcare, criminal justice and beyond, such a questioning of

authority, from where it derives and how it is practised, is imperative. In setting out a

‘Nancean’ approach to authority, the article addresses how social theory might conceive

such a ‘social authority’ without falling into the trap of reducing ‘the social’ to ‘the

community’ or other figure of social unity.

The aim of the article however is not only to critique this latter tendency, and as

such the communitarianisms that have held significant political influence over the last

thirty years. It argues also that, when addressing the role of community within

contemporary politics, Nancy’s work provides a necessary move beyond the critical

framework offered by Michel Foucault’s (1991) short lecture on ‘governmentality’.

While governmentality studies (see Dean, 1999; Miller, 1990), and particularly Nikolas

Rose’s observations on ‘governing through community’ (1999:192), have proved

extremely effective in highlighting the new forms of community-oriented authority to

which we are subject, they leave unaddressed the possibility of authorities generated

within the social, and as such the question of how current trends towards ‘local’

ownership of public goods would place these under threat. The article argues that, in

failing to articulate a political approach to the terrain of community empowerment and

behavioural interventions beyond the negativity of critique, the governmentality

approach is poorly equipped to engage with a ‘politics of lost authority’ prevalent in

contemporary celebrations of community and the local.

In contrast Nancy’s critical approach relies upon an engagement with the social

in its creativity and productivity. In transferring to the social the philosophical thought

of deconstruction, society is reduced neither to the unity of individuals nor to an endless

multiplicity, but rather to a productive tension between these two poles. The article

argues that, in the context of ‘the politics of lost authority’, the demand emerging from

Nancy’s work is to oppose the desire for an intimate authority created and executed

within the community, speaking instead for a ‘social authority’ emerging where the

community contests the ‘immanent figure’ such an intimate authority implies.

The Foundation of Authority

The basis of Nancy’s intervention into the discussion of politics, community and

democracy, and as such for the articulation of ‘social authority’ set out in this article, is

a focus upon a productive uncertainty at the heart of stable systems. Such a claim, of

course, directly contradicts the majority social-scientific investigations of authority,

within which it remains Max Weber’s (1978[1922]) identification of authoritative

‘ideal-types’, derived from shared practices of meaning-making, that provides the

guiding framework. It will be useful to begin from this stable platform, highlighting as

it does the reliance upon a foundation from which Nancy seeks to depart. We will as

such begin by discussing the powerful model of democratic authority offered by the

theorist of power Mark Haugaard (2010), for this is a model that, while following this

investigation of the structures that ground authority, importantly engages also with

democracy in its essential uncertainty. It is as such a model that will provide also an

indication of the lines of contestation and disruption that the article will expand to

provide the very essence of ‘social authority’.

As is well known, Weber’s engagement with Herrschaft1 distinguished between

three types of authority; legal-rational, traditional and charismatic (1978[1922]:212).

While we will return later to how the latter of these may be seen as a special case of

authority, of greater importance than the typology itself here is Weber’s proposition that

society contains distinct systems through which the power to affect the decisions of

another party may be rendered legitimate. On the Weberian account, if such power

relations are to be truly authoritative, this exercise of power must be consented to; it

must be recognised as legitimate (213). Combining this framework with the historically

separate focus upon ‘empowerment’ (see Hawley, 1963), Haugaard (2010) makes a case

for a particular form of ‘authoritative power’ proper to democracy, one that may be

placed in opposition to ‘coercive power’. For central to democracy is the principle of

‘repeat-play’; if you lose this time, there will be another chance (1054). The key to the

distinction with ‘coercive power’ is as such the shared recognition that within a

democracy we are all empowered in the reproduction of the system, even if we are

subaltern within it. Power in democracy is “non-zero-sum” (1057); because we agree to

1 While often translated to ‘legitimate domination’, I follow Uphoff (1989:30) and others in

translating Herrschaft to ‘authority’, a use signalled by Weber’s own suggestion of Autoritat

as a synonym for the term.

the democratic system, we are always augmented in its exercise, even the outcome falls

against our wishes. We are compliant before powerful figures, thus legitimating their

authority, because of the democratic system that empowers us all.

In describing democracy thus, Haugaard draws upon the proposition, associated

with the ‘post-foundational’ approach to politics (Marchart, 2007), that the essence of

the democratic system is its uncertainty. Taking Claude Lefort’s claim that “the locus of

power is an empty place” (1988:17), the key to democracy is not that those in

government have an unshakable mandate located in the general will of the people, but

that, as representatives of the essential conflict and division that constitutes this

‘people’, they will be replaced. Lefort’s democracy “welcomes and preserves

indeterminacy” (1988:16); its essence, as Carol Gould notes, is “an ongoing

contestation of prevailing authorities” (1990:337).

Important for this discussion however is the manner in which, when moving

from the democratic system to the forms of authority supported within it, Haugaard’s

text leaves behind this openness to uncertainty inscribed by ‘repeat-play’ to focus

instead upon shared ‘interpretative horizons’ and the possibilities for authoritative

action they afford. He notes how one’s habitus, the socially constructed frames of

reference through which the world is given meaning, recognises as legitimate certain

performances of authority and not others (Haugaard, 2010:1059); Such authority

positions are bound by clear conditions of possibility outside of which authoritative

action is not possible (1060); indeed to “impose authority irrespective of local meaning

… entails coercion and the resultant authority constitutes authority in appearance only”

(1061). The focus now is upon the very stability of the democratic system; rather than

‘repeat-play’ it is the “principle of equality”, in other words the notion that all are

potentially able to gain from the system, that anchors the habitus of the democratic

subject, and as such grounds the legitimation of political authority.

The departure from this model described in this article will examine exactly such

a subversion of local meaning, positioning the openness to uncertainty recognised by

Haugaard as central to democracy, but then foreclosed when examining performances

and legitimations of authority, to be the very essence of the social. Where the Weberian

position continued in this model foregrounds legitimation and stability, Nancy will see

contestation and disruption. The basis for this departure is the work of Hannah Arendt,

specifically her troubling claim that we have lost authority. Authority is not simply

‘power-over’ as legitimated within a democratic framework; it is irreparably alien to our

thought, issuing from an ‘outside’ to the social order to which we no longer have access.

It will be Nancy’s reworking of this proposition, placing this ‘loss’ as something

continual and always occurring rather than historically past, that will form the response

to the proposition that authority must be grounded in stable structures of meaning-

making. To respond to the question of why any such departure is necessary, we turn

now to Nikolas Rose’s work on how discourses of legitimate authority located in the

‘community’ became, in the 1980s and ‘90s, a central locus of government. Taking the

particular example of criminal justice, the section will present the profound dangers of

such initiatives, displaying how they restrict and contain our ability to question or

contest the practices of the police and other enforcement agencies.

The Politics of Loss

As the term ‘community’ has become increasingly prominent in public discourse, the

‘governmentality’ canon has provided a compelling and widely circulated critique of its

tactical and strategic deployment. This critique centres on the extent to which, as a

direct result of its suggestion otherwise, community is intertwined with power, and is

operative in maintaining certain circuits of inclusion and exclusion. We will begin by

examining the historico-theoretical basis for this critique as it was elaborated in

Foucault’s (1991) short lecture on ‘governmentality’, and how it has been applied to

community in the work of Nikolas Rose (1999).

As a portmanteau for ‘governmental rationality’, the term governmentality

describes an “art of government” (Foucault, 1991:97) focused not upon rule but upon

the channelling and distribution of subjects’ own self-management practices; in short,

upon ‘the conduct of conduct’. Its increasing use as a critical analytic is due to the

emergence in the 1990s of an ‘Anglo neo-Foucauldian’ governmentality studies (see

Rose, 1999, Dean, 1999), for which the concept captured with particular acuity the

modes of ‘hollowed-out’ governance particular to the ‘neo-liberal’ or ‘New Right’

reforms begun in the Reagan and Thatcher eras, and their continuation in the centre-left

administrations of the ‘New Democrats’ and ‘New Labour’.

In Foucault’s (1991) account, as a historical moment governmentality defines a

dissolution, “from the middle ages to the 16th century” (134), of “the constants of

sovereignty” (143). This ‘art of government’, enacted through various knowledges for

managing particular spheres of activity, progressively destabilised the division between

the governors and the governed. Governmental objectives were achieved not through

direct sovereign intervention into governed subjects, but through the constitution of the

‘governed’ as a population to be shaped by these emergent bodies of knowledge. Thus

Foucault noted how the division proper to sovereign rule was superseded by an

increasingly complex field of governmental techniques, one in which the population

was simultaneously an objective and a space of intervention (102). As the term for this

shift, ‘governmentality’ designates the saturation of the political by strategies and

techniques for the improvement of the productivity, wealth, longevity and health of the

population. To use the form of list typical to the contemporary governmentality

approaches, the terrain of government is henceforth the operation of “programmes,

strategies, tactics, devices, calculations, negotiations, intrigues, persuasions and

seductions” (Rose, 1999:5).

In ‘governing through community’, then, we are dealing not with a direct

imposition of community policies, discourses and directives upon a subjected populace,

but a specific arrangement of this socio-technical terrain in which ‘community’ is a kind

of conceptual locus. The starting point for any analysis of this field, inasmuch as it

designates the transition of this concept into politics, or its being bestowed a certain

governmental force, is the turn, by both the ‘New Democrats’ and ‘New Labour’, to

‘communitarian’ social philosophies, most notably that articulated by Amitai Etzioni

(1995, 1998). While on a substantive level the existence of anything resembling an

‘Etzionian’ policy has been questioned (Hale, 2006), in his analysis of ‘governing

through community’ Rose is concerned with the manner in which Etzioni’s focus upon

the production of morals and values in the community, in collaboration with Robert

Putnam’s (2001) foregrounding of civic participation as the site for the renewal of

community, translated into a new programmes, strategies and devices for enticing

individuals towards a certain responsibility of conduct. As the incorporation into

government of such profoundly personal moments of ethical self-formation, ‘governing

through community’ operates, Rose argues, through an ‘ethico-power’; a “micro-

management” of subjects’ own “self-steering practices” (1999:193).

The manner in which government is intertwined with the personal in this

account provides an indication of why the above described legitimation of authority

through stable structures of meaning-making will be insufficient in assessing ‘social

authority’. Haugaard positions the problem of democracy to be situations in which non-

democratic states authority is conferred without legitimation in local structures of

meaning. Governmentality as a concept focuses our attention upon the action of

government upon these very structures. New authorities, posing significant dangers, are

emerging as a result of operations upon our affective response to the world (Rose,

1999:187), principally our valorisation of ‘community’ and certain ethical vectors of

experience. The question of authority no longer concerns its legitimate grounding in the

habitus of social actors, but of demarcating productions of authority across a saturated

terrain in which questions of ‘legitimacy’, of the correspondence of claims to authority

with local structures of meaning, are immediately incorporated into techniques for

creating this legitimacy.

I do not wish, however, to leave the question of authority here, rendering it a

footnote to the surface plane of power-relations in their more or less destructive effects.

Indeed this article follows Haugaard in stating authority to be a key political question

for our time. To demonstrate why we need to move beyond the negative approach

conferred by governmentality we will take as an example the role of criminal justice

within ‘governing through community’. At the time Rose was writing, the concept of

‘Community Safety’ was fully established as a powerful critique of the management of

behaviour by the state and the criminal justice system traditionally conceived (Squires,

2007). Central to this critique was an observation, articulated by the same

communitarian authors, on the lost authority of the community in the context of

behavioural decline (Reiner, 2007). The socio-historical accounts of Etzioni, Putnam,

Alisdair MacIntyre (1997) and others sought to situate the rising levels of crime in the

1960s and 70s as part of a historical decline of the community, and as such of its

capacity to guarantee the morality of its members. In short, the need to affirm the

community, and to re-model the functions of the state in its image, was driven by the

very failure of the community as an effective moral authority. In line with this thinking,

the basis of Community Safety was the proposition that crime and anti-social behaviour

were to be combated through a greater level of communal authority; a tightening of

relational control, through a range of interventionary powers, over the process of

subject-formation (Home Office, 1991).2

Rose’s focus in this respect is upon how certain ‘authorities of conduct’ have

quietly assumed a dominant position within contemporary politics (1999: 187). It is a

questioning that finds resonance with the wider critique of community in which its

‘gated’ form is taken as emblematic of the exclusionary tactics that lie at the heart of all

community practices (Bauman, 2007). Yet such critical perspectives fail to ask of how

authority itself is being changed in these initiatives. For what constitutes a breach of the

injunctive powers through which Community Safety was enacted, whether Anti-Social

Behaviour Orders, Dispersal Orders or others, is a breach of rules set out by the

individual order, rather than a breach of the criminal law itself as it is applied

universally (Ashworth and Zedner, 2008:30-1). It is as such not a breach of the formal

structure that applies to all but of an interdiction particular to that person or population,

2 The major recommendation of the Morgan Report (The Home Office, 1991), through

which the term was given national prominence, was that crime prevention be considered a

task for all in the community (3).

created, in the terms set out in the Crime and Disorder Act (Great Britain, 1998:§1b) in

which the Anti-Social Behaviour Order was introduced, for the necessity of protecting

those in the community from any further harm. As Deleuze (1992:3) recognised, such

forms of intervention are contracts from which one can never leave; they preclude, in

other words, any situated questioning or contestation of their structure.

It is this particular aspect of New Labour’s community program, namely the

focus upon a community authority to be exercised through more supple and responsive

powers, that has been taken up by the current government under the terms ‘The Big

Society’ and ‘The Localism Agenda’. It is the argument of Phillip Blond, the principle

thinker behind the former concept, that this focus upon strengthening the authority of

the community was little more than an undercurrent within New Labour’s community

policy (Blond, 2009:§3), whose focus, in concepts such as ‘The Active Community’

(ACU, 1999), was always the individual; enticing, seducing and forcing that individual

into community participation. In the field of Community Safety legislation, the most

important step to be taken in this direction, one being explored by the current coalition

government, would be to significantly broaden the bodies who can apply for the above

described injunctive powers (Brokenshire, 2011), currently available only to the police

and social landlords.

As ‘The Big Society’ has faded from view, the government’s commitment to

‘the community’ has been principally framed through the term ‘localism’; the Localism

Bill making its way through consultation process in late 2011. The central proposal in

the Bill is the ‘right-to-challenge’, in which local groups would be able to trigger a

tendering process for Local Authority controlled local services where these were

considered by ‘the community’ to be inadequately run. While the emphasis in the

presentation of the Bill was on the capacity for local community groups to take on the

running of these services, the tendering process would be open also to the private sector,

and as such has been seen to appear “less like a tool for community empowerment, and

more like a lever to accelerate privatisation in disguise” (Kennedy, 2011). Private

companies are presented as central to the strengthening of the community inasmuch as,

in their ability to adapt to local markets, they are more able to meet the changing needs

of the community than the Local Authority. As has been raised with regard the

“unprecedented freedoms for both sponsors and headteachers” (Chitty, 2009:73)

afforded in the transformation of secondary schools into ‘Academies’, the effect of this

turn to the private sector is the closure of any capacity to question the running of these

services.

In sum the politics described here in its difference from ‘ethico-power’ bears

three key characteristics; first the loss of community is presented as a grounding truth,

second its filling in by the newly empowered intimate relationships of the local is

offered as the immediate prescription, and third the product of this politics is a closure

of questioning regarding forms of intervention. At the risk of adding another label to a

burgeoning field, I wish to identify in this threefold form a ‘politics of lost authority’.

Now, on a purely substantive level Rose’s critique of the enticement of ethical

subjects, and the new authorities through which these tactics are routed, is poorly

equipped to deal with the very abandonment, in favour of close-knit communities, of the

same individuals within the Community Safety agenda and to a greater extent in current

coalition policy. Indeed, such critiques have been incorporated into contemporary

invectives against New Labour’s community policy (see Cameron, 2009). In this failure

the governmentality framework could not envisage how ‘community’ would seam so

easily into private ownership; the latter promising a return to intimate community

relationships and a locally-produced authority with no semblance of an ethical

orientation to the common good.

More importantly however, in its closure of contestation, the form of authority

in question here demands a political approach offering not only a critique of its

manifestations, but also an account that would speak up for the aspects of community

that are under threat in these initiatives. For the critique of community, in its clearing

away of any questioning of what it means to live and act together, precludes

investigation of community as a positive capacity to transform the social. My argument

in this article is that, as a departure also from the view of authority as grounded in stable

structures of meaning, Nancy's work may be seen to highlight the generation of 'social

authority' in these disruptive moments. We will return in the conclusion to the field of

criminal justice, setting out what such a ‘social authority’ would mean in the context of

'Community Safety'.

The Retreat of the Political

What the governmentality critique highlights is the manner in which attempts to forge a

legitimate foundation for authority are immediately incorporated into the arena of

government. It highlights, in other words, the ‘end’ or ‘exhaustion’ of political

questions; the moment we ask them they retreat into the sphere of power-relations. To

articulate the ‘Nancean’ alternative to the governmentality approach when addressing

this terrain of ‘government through community’, we will begin, as did Nancy in his

early collaborative work with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, by engaging with Hannah

Arendt’s (1998) approach to this ‘exhaustion’ of the political. What Nancy’s

continuation of Arendt’s work demonstrates is that there can be no re-making of this

absented political stage. An alternative politics, on Nancy’s account, must be formed

from an alternative orientation to this ‘end’ or ‘exhaustion’. Furthermore, he argues that,

when transposed to the end or exhaustion of political authority in community-oriented

politics, a political alternative is to be found in the ‘holding open’ of the very

withdrawal of meaning that forms the condition for this exhaustion, and that, in a final

movement, this exposure to contingency is to be described as the community. Each of

these stages are to be addressed in turn; the ‘saturation’ of the political as it is detailed

in Arendt and Nancy, the delineation of ‘authority’ drawn by these same authors, and

the description of an ‘inoperative’ community that would be the very formation of

authority and the social.

Published in 1958, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1998) presented,

through a return to the public realm of political debate (polis) in ancient Greece, a

radical rethinking of the political, highlighting a constitutive misunderstanding of the

term at the heart of Western thinking. For the polis, and its corresponding subject (zoon

politikon), were concerned not with controlling and organizing the population, but with

the entirely separate practice of free debate. Participation in the polis was “freely

chosen” (13); it was as a sphere emptied of that necessity of governance proper to the

household (oikos).

Yet blurrings of this division between the oikos and the polis began to take hold

with the equation, in the Roman era, of the management of the household with the

management of the state; the good paterfamilias with the good King (27). The

expropriations of the peasant classes following the Reformation, and the accompanying

loss of meaning of private property,3 in further erasing the originary division between

public and private, brings this blurring to a full close, as the form of behaviour

pertaining to the household, the caring for and management of the life process (social

life), “has become the standard for all regions of life” (45). Man is no longer zoon

politikon but animal laborans; an entity occupied primarily with the material necessities

of life, whose accelerative growth under consumer capitalism, within which even items

for use become items for consumption, has outstripped any attachment to ‘natural’

necessity (124). Society, in this state of saturation, is a denuded terrain, comprised not

of plurality, and the capacity for a public stage that would bring together free men in

their constitutive differences, but a flattened terrain in which singular man makes

choices between technical options.

Now, at several points in Nancy’s oeuvre, Arendt’s illumination of the oikos and

its saturation of the political space has returned as a central organising problematic. For

Arendt poses the question of how we are to define a political agenda, or political

philosophy, when political argument and political meaning appear to ‘withdraw’ before

our very eyes. In other words, how is a political philosophy to be outlined when any

‘political’ problem is integrated into the social economy of necessity? It is this nagging

flaw that for Nancy as for Arendt defines the stakes of philosophical thought and

political intervention. While following Arendt’s delineation of this ‘saturation thesis’

3 Arendt notes another modern confusion here between wealth and property (1998:65-6).

however, Nancy seeks to give this ‘withdrawal’ of the political a double meaning,

defining both the exhaustion of the political, a trend mapped out in the above described

‘governmentality’ critiques, and the political itself.

With Arendt, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe observe ‘politics’ to be the play of

discourses and techniques which eradicate the political as a specific sphere, thus

neutralising the possibility of true political dialogue. They recognise the ‘victory of

animal laborans’ and the saturation of the public space by the socio-technical concerns

of ‘management’ and ‘efficiency’ to be the defining questions for contemporary

political theory (the third key question, discussed in more detail below, concerns the

loss of authority) (129). In seeking however to open a contrast to Arendt they describe

the ‘end’ or ‘exhaustion’ of politics, and this ‘loss of authority’, as itself the site through

which the ‘political’ as such might be approached. This is indicated in their claim, pace

Arendt, that “what drew back perhaps itself never took place” (131). Rather than a

critique of Arendt, Nancy’s approach might instead be seen as an attempt to pursue her

analysis of the oikos in a mode proper to this emphasis upon plurality. For in actively

reclaiming these Arendtian themes, Nancy’s work may instead be seen as a

problematisation of the assumption, widely made, that as The Human Condition

explores in a more or less positive fashion the role of the polis, it must be an argument

for actively restoring a deliberative form of democratic action in the present. For the

polis, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue, is not to be taken as a ‘past’ to be imagined

and, in whatever limited fashion, recuperated, but as an entity existing only in this

‘drawing back’, that is, in its ‘retreat’. ‘The political’, in their account, is to be

elaborated in the very condition of its ‘exhaustion’.

As such, the key distinction is not between the polis and the oikos, but between

different approaches or orientations towards the retreat of the polis. For Nancy, entities

such as the ‘community’ and ‘capital’ are essentialisations of the very conditions of this

loss of meaning, namely that being is respectively relational and ‘reticulated’ (2000:73-

74).4 Community, in this essentialised sense, is a ‘figure’ promising stability amidst the

contingency engendered in the retreat of political questions. The force and productivity

of the ‘governmentality’ approaches presented above lay in their critical demonstration

of the play of these figures that seek to plug this loss of meaning. As a major step

beyond that tradition however, Nancy enjoins us to engage with the loss of meaning on

the very conditions of its retreat (it is in this sense that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy

speak of a re-treating of the political). He enjoins us to think political practice not as the

creation of stability, but as the holding open of figures to the fact of their own inability

to signify.

To sum up, with Arendt, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy claim that ‘political’

dialogue is finished. What they argue is shown by such an admission is the fact that ‘the

political’ must be re-engaged in discussion attentive to this being-already-finished.

Nancy will describe, throughout his work, the condition of politics as ‘finitude’; as a

being already-in-retreat. Nancy argues that to practice politics will henceforth mean

only to think at the end of politics, which means to ceaselessly (for such a thought

cannot lead anywhere, but only begin again) re-engage and re-consider the retreat of the

political. What Nancy achieves is a transposition of this philosophical thought of ‘end’

and ‘retreat’ to the socio-political question of community; to think community as the

4 Nancy’s idiosyncratic approach to Castells’ (2000) analysis of the ‘network society’ is to

posit in the emergence of networked life an exposure to the originary reticulation of being

(see Armstrong, 2009).

end or exhaustion of community. As will be explained in the following section, he

enjoins us to see community as its failure to embody a unity that could serve as a

ground for authority. He enjoins us to see community not as useful for politics, but as

essentially inoperative. In developing this claim, the political force of Nancy’s approach

to ‘the retreat of the political’ will become clearer, the latter sections demonstrating how

the tropes of exhaustion and completion signal not an end, but rather a beginning; they

are the absent grounds through which what we might term ‘the new’, presented here as

the ‘release’ of the social, is possible. I argue however that it is the production of

authority in such moments that needs to be recognised, and as such before addressing

the ‘inoperative community’, the next section will follow a repetition of Nancy’s

reformulation of the loss of zoon politikon with regard Arendt’s similar engagement

with the loss of authority. The product of this repetition, further elaborated in the

following section, is a ‘social authority’ generated in the disruptive moments that

constitute the inoperative community.

The Exhaustion of Authority

That the community would fail to possess authority would be anathema to the

‘communitarian’ adherents of a ‘politics of lost authority’. For it would be, in these

accounts, the defining feature of a strong, resilient community that it is able to regulate

the behaviour of its members in a manner that they recognise as legitimate. Inasmuch as

the criminal law is itself recognised in such a way, it is because it has been fully

internalised by the community as its own moral code (Etzioni, 1995:22).

As noted above, such an analysis is fully in keeping with Max Weber’s

(1978:212-5) definition of authority as pertaining to those relationships in which the

power held by one party, manifested in the likelihood of their orders or commands

being followed, is legitimated by those following or subordinated by these acts. Yet

Weber’s primary interest, among the three ideal types of authority he discerned, in the

charismatic (Riesebrodt, 1999), that is, in the accumulation of authority through heroic

or creative acts (Weber, 1978[1922]:1114), highlights an aspect of authority that

contradicts this communitarian account. For in the charismatic, authority is drawn not

from the togetherness of its members and their achievement of a unified consensus, but

on the contrary, from the channelling of an excess. Such an account raises the

problematic, discussed above in the context of the ‘retreat’ or ‘absencing’ of political

‘grounds’, of how political initiatives and theories orient themselves to what is ‘outside’

the social order. Described in this section is the manner in which a Nancy continues an

analysis of a problem he shares with Arendt, namely the reliance of ‘community’ upon

the interiorisation of an outside to the discernible social order.

Much as The Human Condition demonstrated the extent to which we cannot

think the political, Arendt’s earlier essay “What is authority” (1954) addressed our

misunderstanding of authority. The essay describes the form of authority that “came to

an end” (8) as modernity successfully challenged, and dissolved, every form of

authority pertaining to a transcendent relationship of exteriority. Arendt states that it is

principally Roman authority whose absence haunts us; an authority derived, in a manner

specific to the mythology of the city of Rome, from the “sacredness of foundation” (17).

An authoritative act was one that was connected with, and as such augmented (the

original meaning of authority is derived from augere, to augment) the transcendent

event of the founding of Rome (18).

Arendt is clear that the Roman model of augmentation and testimony, and of a

‘sacred’ source of authority, has definitively disappeared from our thought. To live

without the understanding that the source of authority ‘transcends power’, is to live in a

terrain denuded of political action, and to be faced with the elementary problems of

human co-existance (29). Totalitarianism, Arendt argues, which dispenses with the

pyramid-like authoritarian structure in favour of a network of power-relations operating

around an empty space (5), thrives upon such a terrain in which the authority of

government is no longer recognised (1).

As noted above, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy recognised a response to this “loss

of authority as a distinct element of power” (1997b: 129) to be central to their joint

project. If ‘totalitarianism’ denotes the removal of any alternative frame of reference

(1997a: 111), it is totalitarianism under a ‘new’ or ‘soft’ form, they note, that would

denote the situation in which the exhaustion of political authority has produced the total

domination of ‘social’ concerns (1997b:128-9). Put otherwise, ‘soft totalitarianism’

corresponds to the closure of any force that might contest or disrupt the uninterrupted

play of socio-technical options.

Argued above was the concentration of governmentality studies upon only one

side of this problematic. In charting these techniques of government it grasps very well

the effects of the saturation of the political, and as such the contours of this ‘soft

totalitarianism’, but does not grapple with how authority might transcend power,

remaining engaged with the play of figures of authority. In other words, while the

governmentality perspective draws out in a very productive fashion the forms of power

that fill this denuded space, it does not ask of how we might alternatively configure our

response to Arendt’s recognition of our having lost a transcendent basis for authority.

For in the foregrounding of this loss we may draw two observations. First, as

described above in the section on ‘the politics of lost authority’, the manner in which the

communitarian accounts specifically targeted by Rose as setting out the contours of

‘ethico-power’ might themselves be specific responses to this loss.5 Second, that a

holding open of this question, as an exposure to contingency, might itself be the site for

contesting this domination of social concerns. As will be explained these two responses,

the formation of a stable ground in the community and the exposure of such stable

figures to their own contingency, may be seen as two orientations to the loss of

authority. Do we remake the foundation, or respond to it on the basis of its loss.

Again, Nancy seeks to work through the implications of Arendt’s elucidation of

Roman and Christian authority, paying particular attention to the manner in which the

‘sacredness of foundation’ is positioned by Arendt as existing only, for us ‘moderns’ at

least, in a state of withdrawal. And again, Nancy will take this proposition a step

further. Turning the focus to the crisis of this latter term, Nancy follows Arendt in

observing the impossibility of a transcendent authority around which subjects could

achieve a common union. Yet, if the figure of the sovereign presented itself as a

‘connection’, through the practices of testimony, to transcendence, and it is precisely

this sovereign figure of transcendent alterity that is in retreat, again for Nancy it is this

existence as retreat that must be fully engaged with. It is, again, in the retreat of the

5 This observation would similarly re-frame the startling regularity of ‘golden age’

community accounts (see Pearson, 1984).

sovereign figure that we will find a thinking, and practice, of authority proper to the

‘inoperative community’, as Nancy seeks, in his later work, to re-inscribe the term.

It is in this focus upon the loss of sovereign authority, as represented in the

absent figure, that Nancy’s work enters into a strange coalition with the ‘politics of lost

authority’. For in the focus upon a golden age, what the ‘communitarian’ authors testify

to, in Nancy’s view, is the existence of community as loss. To display what it is that

differentiates Nancy’s work from this tradition, it is necessary to detail the dual role of

the ‘figure’ in Nancy’s thought, as it gives an indication as to how this re-working of

sovereign authority is achieved in his work.

Nancy often introduces texts by defining a certain withdrawal of figures,

whether in the closure of “(Western) philosophy’s political programmes” (1991:xxxviii)

or in a lack, or loss, of ‘meaning’ (2000:1). Indeed, in the retreat of political and

religious authority, Nancy observes the withdrawal of “every space, form, or screen into

which or onto which a figure of community could be projected” (2000:47). At the same

time however, Nancy clearly adopts a critical stance with regard figures of community

as they are ‘at work’ in political discourse, a position encapsulated in the rhetorical

question; “does meaning not become ‘totalitarian’ as soon as it takes figure [prend

figure]” (Nancy, cited in Sparks, 1997:xxv).

It is as such important to stress the distinction between the immanent ‘figure’

and the ‘transcendent’ withdrawal of the figure. In the former case ‘immanence’

denotes a similarity, and simultaneity, of something to itself; the immanent figure is the

concept that forms its own ground, that provides its own cause, that gives its own

‘essence’, that gathers its meaning within itself. In the case of community, Nancy’s

work has frequently returned to the immanent figure proper to a ‘golden age’, a figure

for which;

always it is a matter of a lost age in which community was woven of tight,

harmonious, and infrangible bonds and in which above all it played back to itself,

through its institutions, its rituals, and its symbols, the representation, indeed the

living offering, of its own immanent unity, intimacy, and autonomy. (Nancy,

1991:9)

Enclosed, stable and unchanging, the immanent figure of community, as it is deployed

in the ‘communitarian’ literature, turns the originary relationality of the community, of

which more below, to an essence; a non-relational, unified community figure. Yet the

fact that this community can only ever be ‘lost’, in the communitarian literature as

elsewhere, is instructive. For “[c]ommunity has not taken place” (Nancy, 1991:11); or

rather, it has only taken place as this constitutive loss, as a retreat of immanent figures.

What the writing of Etzioni and others demonstrate is that the immanent figure, as it

immediately withdraws, betrays a transcendence at the heart of any thinking of the

figure.

Nancy is critical not of the figure as such, but rather a “will to absolute

immanence” (1991:12), doubling as Sparks notes as a “will-to-figure” (1997:xxiii),

which reacts to the withdrawal of figures by seeking to strengthen and solidify them or

to find in their absence a further reason to clarify and reiterate their importance.

Alasdair MacIntyre (1997) is indicative of this position, his work re-stating a need for

figures, it being only through a relation to a certain model of justice, practised and

embodied within a community setting, that the subject may acquire and practice a moral

subjectivity. Such a community, Nancy notes, could never actually ‘come about’ as

such; indeed in its immanent ‘union’ it would only present the death of community

(1991:12), if that is we re-think community as the moment of our being-in-common, a

proposition explored below.

In short, the community figure, Nancy states, is lost. Yet as loss, this same

figure exposes us to a transcendence; an exteriority experienced as the impossibility of

community. Its ‘presence’ is only the absence of any screen upon which a present

community could be projected. Thus, in the same manner as Lacoue-Labarthe and

Nancy (1997b) rejected the historical schema they took to be implicit in Arendt’s

account of the saturation of the political (131), Nancy argues that the sovereign figure,

as presented in Arendt’s ‘sacredness of foundation’, is not an ‘anterior’ space, whether

ontological or historical, but rather present only in its withdrawal. Nancy returns,

regularly, to Bataille’s assertion that “sovereignty is NOTHING” (cited in Nancy,

2000:139). Were we somehow to peel back the historical layers, we would find only the

non-figure of sovereign alterity, which would be ‘present’ to us only in its withdrawal

from presence. To demonstrate how we may draw from this paradoxical assertion a

positive, productive and creative vision of authority, we must turn to the description of

‘being-in-common’, as the abyssal foundation of community, in which Nancy locates

this ‘alterity’ in its continual emergence.

The Fragmentation of Community

For lack of a better term, it is community that, despite its use as an ‘immanent’ figure,

denotes the space in which the retreat of sovereign authority takes place; it is the space

of the between, the relation, the in-common. Such a ‘community’ could never be ‘put to

work’ for any political program – it is an inoperative community (Nancy, 1991). Nancy

opens his 1986 text of this name by stating the most urgent question for modernity to be

“the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community” (1). All figures for

political community (nation and class being the most prominent), are, he notes, in

fragmentation. Given this crisis of community, the text takes up, again, the thought of

the retreat; against the ‘will-to-figure’, and its production of immanent community

forms, community must be thought as fragmentation.

Such a thought of community continues the critical assessment, detailed above

through the rubric of contemporary ‘governmentality’ studies, of the manner in which

the immanent figure of community allows a certain authority to gather around particular

groups and subjects. A failure to engage with the crisis of political authority and the

retreat of sovereign alterity is manifest in a terrain of ‘immanent’ authorities that elude

contestation, for which we have little analytic tools or critical purchase to question,

deconstruct or subvert. Yet Nancy attempts to explore this critical project not through

critique as such, but rather by attempting to re-inscribe the very meaning of community

(Fynsk, 1991:ix). If traditional concepts of community, relying upon such immanent

figures, deconstruct community only to re-construct it under a different figure (inter-

subjectivity, care, human rights, and so on) Nancy finds in Bataille an entirely different

experience of community;

The crucial point of this experience was the exigency, reversing all nostalgia and

all communal metaphysics, of a “clear consciousness” of separation – this is to say

of a “clear consciousness” ... of the fact that immanence or intimacy cannot, nor are

they ever to be, regained. (1991:19)

Fully engaging with the impossibility of regaining community means re-thinking the

experience of community as pure ‘separation’; not being-together, but being-in-

common, in the sense of being contiguous to, but not part of, other beings. If the focus

on ‘dissolution, dislocation or conflagration’ continues the ontological schema from

“The retreat of the political” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1997b), namely that focused

upon ‘end’, ‘exhaustion’ and ‘retreat’, in this tension ‘being-in-common’ creates

between the ‘one’ and the ‘many’ Nancy’s work seeks to open an ontology of

community beginning from a singular plurality; moments of ‘communication’ and

‘contagion’ in which, as disruptions of the limit between beings, we are both together

and different.

Nancy’s starting point in setting out this disruption is the Heideggerian concept

of Destruktion (and as such the whole analytic of deconstruction), in which, through the

repeated exploration of the logical limits of a system of thought, its figures are critically

de-stabilised and as such exposed to their own ‘finitude’. While Heidegger sees

‘finitude’ in terms of the subject’s relationship to their own death, in foregrounding

‘being-in-common’ and this limit between beings Nancy sees this de-stabilisation in

terms of a relationship to other selves, other subjects and other beings. Furthermore, in

contrast to the typical mobilisation of deconstruction as a critical exercise, as Sparks

(1997) notes it is what might be created by Destruktion/deconstruction, rather than its

critical purchase, that fascinates Nancy. For Destruktion, as a repetition of what is

possible within a system of thought, is an act of repetition that opens onto an unknown,

for; “[t]he repetition of the gestures through which philosophy reaches the point of its

own exhaustion is the gesture ... by which philosophy can be made to release its

unthought” (Sparks, 1997:15). In the interrogation of community, Nancy extends this

‘unthought’ from its epistemological register into the social; expressing ‘release’ as the

productive moment in which social forms transform or reconfigure.

While the ‘inoperative community’ is Nancy’s term for this moment, seizing as

it does the manner in which being-in-common destabilises stable figures of social unity,

thus allowing for this ‘release’ of the social ‘unthought’, I wish to argue that conceiving

this moment as authority gives an important inflection to this model, placing an

emphasis on how in the ‘release’ of the social we may locate, to return to Arendt’s term

explored elsewhere in this issue,6 the augmentation of relationships and experiences. It

highlights an augmentative social authority that allows us to be regulated, to follow, to

trust and guide each other. As the ‘politics of lost authority’ becomes increasingly

dominant, I argue that in the holding open of the loss of stable foundations for authority,

this ‘social authority’ is re-inscribed in the denuded terrain of immanent authorities. To

speak of social authority, in other words, is to speak of an authority located in the social,

or in community, if we interpret these terms to mean not a unity, in other words the

communion of multiple individuals in a social one, but the productive holding open of

the very impossibility of this unity. In a similar manner to Nancy’s re-working of the

Arendtian loss of zoon politikon as the continually occurring opening of the political,

social authority may be seen as the loss of any foundation for authority, a loss whose

perpetual disruption produces a particular and contingent augmentation of the social.

The Blessing of Democracy

Having set out to examine in this article the concepts of politics, authority and

community through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, it is clear that we have also been

following a re-examination of the political imperatives of the latter’s thought in the

context of recent political tendencies towards empowering the intimate and responsive

6 Claire Blencowe, Leila Dawney, Tehseen Noorani’s contributions both approach authority

through the augmentation, in particular practices and technologies, of certain ‘objectivities’.

relationships of the ‘local’, in the form of both community and private ownership of

public resources.

In referring to the ‘loss of authority as a distinct element of power’ (Lacoue-

Labarthe and Nancy, 1997b:129), authority is primarily examined by Nancy in its

encroaching absence, as one exhausted figure among many through which society is

‘exposed’ to its lack of foundation. The dominance of the oikos or of socio-technical

options, in Nancy’s view, results from a failure to fully engage with this absence of

foundation. This failure is played out in the tendency to seek to remake this authority in

the intimate relationships of the local. Here we see the dominance of a will-to-figure, the

result of which is the closure of any community that might question, disrupt or contest

the stability of the social. Thus the urgent problem facing our community-saturated

times, as I have set it out, is a ‘politics of lost authority’; a gradual closure of political

contestation intensified in recent drives to place various social services in the hands of

private companies and community groups. ‘What is to be done’ is to oppose this

closure. In describing community as the contestation of intimacy, as contagion,

communication and disruption, the focus of the article has been to set out how Nancy’s

work demonstrates how this closure must be opposed as the community, as our being-

in-common.

This difficult assertion has been given more concrete form in Nancy’s recent

deliberations upon democracy, to which we will turn as a means of bringing the above

discussions of politics, authority and community to a conclusion. Nancy’s (2011)

contribution to a discussion of the state of contemporary democracy begins by noting, in

line with the above discussion of politics, the exhaustion of the term; its inability to

signify. “All that goes on now”, he argues, “is marginal debate about the differences

between various democratic systems and sensibilities” (58). If democracy is in retreat, it

is because it names, from its very birth as the ‘other’ of theocracy, in other words as the

emptying of all reference to an ‘outside’ entailed in the transference of sovereignty to

the people (61), this lack of a foundation.

This lack, Nancy argues, “was a blessing and a defect at the same time – an

anomaly never felt more keenly than we feel it today” (62). If the ‘defect’ lies in the

invitation to forge strong foundations as a response to this lack, the ‘blessing’ is that

democracy itself names this being-without-foundation of the political community. As

noted in the above delineation of Mark Haugaard’s work on democracy and authority,

the principle of ‘repeat-play’ inscribes an uncertainty at the heart of democracy; an

opening of all sites of political authority to their eventual replacement. Nancy extends

this principle of uncertainty to the community itself; the ‘foundation’ of community is

its own lack of founding unity. To build upon this blessing, Nancy argues for an

articulation of democracy as founded not in ‘the people’ as a unity, but as the

contestation of this unity, as the tension engendered in their always exceeding or

surpassing the figures that seek to stabilise or neutralise their multiplicity. Democracy is

the ‘other’ of theocracy inasmuch as its transcendent ground is no longer fully ‘outside’

but is incorporated into the social as an ‘intimate exteriority’ (Levett, 2005:430); the

disparate and productive moments in which such figures become open to their own

instability.

In Haugaard’s model outlined above, legitimate claims to authority must be

grounded in local systems of meaning, and as such the sign of ‘good’ democracy is that

it does not enforce authority irrespective of such grounds. ‘The politics of lost

authority’, I argued, displayed how such a focus upon legitimate grounds is

incorporated into a politics in which the ‘local’ or the ‘community’ is bestowed with an

incontestable ability to regulate its own problems. Yet while the governmentality

framework charts this tendency very effectively, also argued above was the manner in

which it does not effectively depart from it, inasmuch as it fails to positively conceive of

an authority generated in this openness to instability. As a movement beyond this

framework, Nancy enjoins us to focus upon democracy as the transfer of sovereignty to

the community in its fragmentation. He enjoins us to consider democratic authority not

as power legitimated by a principle of fairness, but as the augmentation of relationships

and experiences that emerges where the community is open to its inability to ground a

stable, immanent and legitimate unity.

Conclusion

To conclude we will return to the field, discussed above in the context of ‘the politics of

lost authority’, of criminal justice. The article argued that the inability of the community

to provide a firm foundation for authority, and as such to regulate the behaviour of its

members, was presented in certain communitarian texts, and community-oriented

policies, as a justification for strengthening this foundation through greater powers and

regulative tools. I have argued that a democratic authority, following Nancy, would no

longer be one firmly rooted in local definitions of what defines the community; its

values, limits and ideals. Rather, it would be the authority that emerges where such

imaginations fragment; in communal shapings of space in which the limits of ownership

are critically undermined, or where disciplinarities emerge that disrupt notions of who is

able to wield authority.7 The political response to problems of behaviour is indeed to

seek to foster an authority proper to ‘the community’, but where this authority is re-

configured as the contingent production of contestations and negotiations. Such

authority is proper to democracy not because it adequately corresponds to local systems

of meaning, and as such to the transfer of sovereignty to the people, but because it

emerges from this ‘people’ as their inscriptions of uncertainty and contestation within

the social. Such moments of authority, I have argued, are under threat from ‘the politics

of lost authority’ inasmuch as such initiatives seek to forge stable grounds for authority

in the local, thus creating authorities that are incontestable; certain of their legitimate

foundation in the community. In contrast, the ‘social authority’ emerging in the

productive moments of uncertainty relies upon such figures being open to their own

contingency.

This leads to the question of how one might ‘speak’ for such an authority, given

that the focus upon contingency here clearly precludes a political agenda in which tools

for the creation of such authority would be directly laid out. Indeed Nancy’s refusal to

set out a clear political agenda has, understandably, been the focus of significant

criticism (see for example Fraser, 1984). Yet as Chistopher Fynsk notes, rather than

strip us of political agency, Nancy’s work denotes two clear paths for political

engagement;

one can attempt to favour such communication, and one can attempt to engage in a

critique of the ideologies that dissimulate what Nancy calls the absence of

community (or of the fact of the impossibility of communion or immanence as it

appears to us today …). (1991:xi)

7 These examples, drawn from my doctoral research (Kirwan, 2011), refer respectively upon

the theoretical frameworks of Jacques Ranciere and Bernard Stiegler.

Regarding the latter path, this article has sought to critique the ‘ideologies’, currently

present in attempts to remake authority in the intimate relationships of the local, for

their dissimulation of our having always lost such an authority. It noted how the

governmentality critique does not fully get to grips with this dissimulation, inasmuch as

it focuses upon new figures of authority, and their place within an arrangement of

power, rather than the uncertain, and disruptive, presence of a ‘social authority’. It is in

speaking for this latter term that the article has sought to follow the former path

indicated by Fynsk; to ‘favour’ the community as the excessive, or productive, moment

in which figures are opened to their own contingency. Nancy demonstrates how this

opening, or exposure, is the essence of democracy; the transference of sovereignty to

the people in their productive uncertainty. I have sought to demonstrate here that,

similarly to Nancy’s re-working of the loss of zoon politikon, in the loss of any

foundational basis for authority, and the ‘social authority’ emerging where this loss is

engaged with on the very basis of its retreat, we may identify, to finish on a typically

Nancean call-to-arms, the democratic authority in whose name our responses to

discourses of privatisation, community and the local must speak.

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