6 June 2009

As I began to read Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community, I assumed (in my ignorance of most modern political theory) that his attack on “communities of fusion,” on the idea of community as a transcendent subject into which the individual members are dissolved, was primarily an attack on the Christian conception of communion, where the members of the church are made one in the body of Christ. And indeed, Nancy does name the Christian conception as the example of fusion par excellence.

But now I’m in the middle of Rousseau’s Social Contract, and his language fits Nancy’s criticisms possibly even better. Here’s a passage from I.vi:

In an instant, in place of the particular person of each contractee, this act of association [the declaration of the social pact] produces a moral and collective body composed of as many members as the assembly has voices, which receives from this very act its unity, its common moi, its life and its will. This public person, who is thus formed by the union of everyone else, in other times took the name of City, and now takes that of Republic or of body politic…

There are at least two points of Nancy’s critique that stick against Rousseau better than they do to Christianity:

1. Christian theology doesn’t speak quite as unambiguously of the person of Christ replacing the particular Christian as Rousseau does of the Republic replacing the natural person (though it wouldn’t be hard to make the case that a very similar dynamic is in play).

1. Rousseau’s Republic is explicitly “immanent” in Nancy’s sense, in that it claims to be the product of human beings determining their own essence, whereas becoming a member of Christ is supposed to be a matter of surrendering the claim to determine our own essence.

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Tags: Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Jean-Luc Nancy