ABSTRACT

‘The people’ haunts democracy, and the sovereignty of the modern state presupposes its will: the social contract of equal and autonomous individuals. But if the power of the state derives from this spectre, the injunction to conceptualise it – or to lay it to rest – faces a double bind. On the one hand, to appeal to a unified body is to reduce difference to the order of the same, at worst yielding to a totalitarian ideal. On the other hand, to abandon the community is tantamount to an affirmation of the status quo, foreclosing the possibility of collective resistance to capitalism. In light of this predicament, this paper revisits the efforts by Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, amongst others, to conceptualise the community as inoperative. What are the political implications of predicating ‘the people’ on alterity? Is such a turn a dereliction of the commitment to emancipatory politics or in fact a means to revitalise it? It is suggested that Franz Kafka’s last story, ‘Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People [Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse]’, answers compellingly to these questions.

摘要

“人民”困扰着民主，现代国家的主权以它的意志为前提：平等和自主的个人的社会契约。但是，如果国家的权力来源于这个幽灵，那么将其概念化——或让它休息——的禁令面临着双重约束。一方面，诉诸统一体就是将差异化为同一秩序，最坏的情况是屈服于极权主义的理想。另一方面，放弃社区就等于是对现状的肯定，排除了集体抵制资本主义的可能性。鉴于这种困境，本文重新审视了让-卢克·南希和莫里斯·布朗肖等人将社区概念化为无效的努力。将“人民”置于他性之上的政治含义是什么？这种转变是对解放政治承诺的失职，还是实际上是振兴政治的一种手段？有人认为，弗朗茨·卡夫卡的最后一个故事“约瑟芬，歌手或老鼠人 [Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse]”有力地回答了这些问题。