What Is To Be Done? —J-L Nancy (from Retreating the Political, Routeledge, 1996)
What is to be done, at present? The question is on everybody’s lips and, in a certain way, it is the question people always have lying in wait for any passing philosopher. Not: What is to be thought? But indeed: What is to be done? The question is on everybody’s lips (including the philosopher’s), but withheld, barely uttered, for we do not know if we still have the right, or whether we have the means, to raise it. Perhaps, we think more or less discretely to ourselves, perhaps the uncertainty of ‘what is to be done?’ is today so great, so fluctuating, so indeterminate, that we do not need even to do this: raise the question. Especially if the question were to presuppose that one already might know what it is right to think, and that the only issue is how one might then proceed to act. Behind us theory, and before us practice—the key thing is knowing what it is opportune to decide in order to embark on specific action. But this is what is presupposed most ordinarily by the question. And ‘what is to be done?’ means, in that case, ‘how to act’ in order to achieve an already given goal. ‘Transforming the world’ then means: realizing an already given interpretation of the world, and realizing a hope. But we do not know what it is right for us to think, or even properly to hope. Perhaps we no longer even know what it is to think nor, conqequently, what it is to think ‘doing’, nor what ‘doing’ is, absolutely. Perhaps though, we know one thing at least: ‘What is to be done?’ means for us: how to make a world for which all is not already done (played out, finished, enshrined in a destiny), nor still entirely to do (in the future for always future tomorrows). This would mean that the question places us simultaneously before a doubly imperative response. It is necessary to measure up to what nothing in the world can measure, no established law, no inevitable process, no prediction, no calculable horizon—absolute justice, limitless quality, perfect dignity—and it is necessary to invent and create the world itself, immediately, here and now, at every moment, without reference to yesterday and tomorrow. Which is the same as saying that it is necessary at one and the same time to affirm and denounce the world as it is—not to weigh out as best one can equal amounts of submission and revolt, and always end up halfway between reform and accommodation, but to make the world into the place, never still, always perpetually reopened, of its own contradiction, which is what it prevents us from ever knowing in advance what is to be done, but it imposes on us the task of never making anything that is not a world. What will become of our world is something we cannot know, and we can no longer believe in being able to predict or command it. But we can act in such a way that this world is a world able to open itself up to its own uncertainty as such.
These are not vague generalities. I am writing these lines in January, 1996. France’s December strikes showed clearly the whole difficulty, not to say aporia, that exists in ‘what is to be done?’ once all guarantees are suspended and all models become obsolete. Resignation in the face of the brutalities of economic Realpolitik clashed with feverish or eager words that hardly took the risk of saying exactly what was to be done. But between the two, something was perceptible: that it is ineluctable to invent a world, instead of being subjected to one, or dreaming of another. Invention is always without model and without warranty. But indeed that implies facing up to turmoil, anxiety, even disarray. Where certainties come apart, there too gathers the strength that no certainty can match. —Translated by Leslie Hill
