Abstract

Nancy has been criticised for rejecting the politics of emancipation that characterises the thought of some of his more militant contemporaries. To be sure, he does distance himself from the rhetoric of emancipation. He considers that the grand modern emancipation narrative of the Enlightenment, and of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, expired with the end of the Cold War, and that the ideal of emancipation carried by this narrative is dangerous insofar as it imposes “ultimate sense” on history and assumes an “essence of humanity” that is to be liberated. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Nancy’s rejection of the modern, linear account of emancipatory politics is a refusal of emancipation per se. Indeed, his reason for rejecting modernity’s simple narrative of emancipatory progress is that this framing of history is by a long chalk not emancipatory enough, and that it has far too much in common with the identitarian politics against which it seeks to set itself. So it should come as no surprise that Nancy uses emancipatory language in his very rejection of the politics of emancipation, arguing for example that we need “emancipation from a certain thinking of emancipation.” This article makes the case for Nancy as a rich and radical thinker of emancipation whose thought, far from being apolitical when it comes to liberation, offers us a broad, robust and practical account of the emancipatory. This case is made by weaving together two important strands of Nancy’s thought. First, his deconstruction of Christianity is examined in the light of the claim that Christianity is “in itself and by itself in a state of surpassing” and that Christianity’s self-surpassing is “perhaps its deepest tradition.” This leads, secondly, to a consideration of Nancy’s frequent meditations on Pascal’s statement that “man infinitely exceeds/surpasses man.” When they are taken together, what emerges from these two strands of Nancy’s thought is a pattern of emancipation that goes beyond simple historical ruptures to operate across multiple temporalities at once, each populated by plural vectors of continuity and change. Nancy seeks emancipation from a double slavery: the slavery of absolutising a continuity with the past, and that born of the ideological fantasy of a simple rupture with the past. Instead, he offers us an account of emancipation that is capable of navigating a subtler course through multiple dynamics of continuity and change. The article concludes by briefly examining Nancy’s use of the term ressourcement to characterise this radical account of emancipation, evoking the importance of the gesture described by this term for the biblical prophets, for the magisterial reformers and for Vatican II. Far from being weak in its emancipatory potential, Nancy’s thought takes the modern emancipatory imperative and returns it to us with greater depth, breadth and potency.

摘要

南希因拒绝解放政治而受到批评，这种政治是他的一些更激进的同时代人思想的特征。可以肯定的是，他确实远离了解放的修辞。他认为，启蒙运动和 18 世纪后期革命的宏大现代解放叙事随着冷战的结束而终结，这种叙事所承载的解放理想是危险的，因为它强加了“终极意义”。 ”在历史上，并承担了要解放的“人性本质”。然而，假设南希拒绝现代的、线性的解放政治解释是拒绝解放本身，这将是错误的。确实，他拒绝现代性关于解放进步的简单叙述的原因是，这种历史框架远未充分解放，而且它与它试图反对的身份政治有太多共同之处。因此，南希在拒绝解放政治时使用了解放性语言也就不足为奇了，例如，他认为我们需要“从某种解放思想中解放出来”。这篇文章证明南希是一位富有而激进的解放思想家，她的思想在解放方面远非非政治性，而是为我们提供了对解放的广泛、有力和实用的说明。这个案例是通过将南希思想的两条重要线索编织在一起而形成的。第一的，他对基督教的解构是根据基督教“在其自身和自我超越的状态中”以及基督教的自我超越“也许是其最深刻的传统”的主张来检验的。其次，这导致了对南希对帕斯卡“人无限超越/超越人”的陈述的频繁沉思的考虑。当将它们放在一起时，从南希的这两条思想中出现的是一种解放模式，它超越了简单的历史断裂，同时跨越了多个时间性，每个时间性都由多个连续性和变化的向量组成。南希寻求从双重奴隶制中解放出来：绝对化与过去的连续性的奴隶制，以及与过去简单决裂的意识形态幻想所产生的奴隶制。反而，他为我们提供了一个关于解放的描述，它能够通过连续性和变化的多重动力来引导更微妙的过程。文章最后简要审查了南希对该术语的使用资源来描述这种对解放的激进描述，唤起了这个词对圣经先知、权威改革者和梵蒂冈二世所描述的姿态的重要性。南希的思想远非在其解放潜力方面薄弱，而是将现代解放的命令以更大的深度、广度和效力返回给我们。