The title of Nancy’s Globalization or the Creation of the World, as the author’s Preface makes clear, is intentionally ambiguous; the terms can represent an alternative, or be treated as synonymous. In the first sense, ‘Globalization’ stands for the continued dominance of the existing network of market relationships which are understood as an endless and self-destructive pursuit of profit (the ‘bad infinite’ of p. 40). But ‘globalization’ can also mean, or might be made to mean, the creation of the world, understood as ‘re-opening each possible struggle for…what must form the contrary of global injustice’ (p. 54). In this latter sense, we are to understand globalization in a positive light.
Nancy recognizes explicitly that this notion of the creation of the world is in origin a theological one (p. 67). This is an important point, for much of the argument of the book turns on the notions of what is involved in ‘creation’, and what is meant by a ‘world’. Creation in the Christian tradition was an activity strictly reserved to God of which all human works could be only a pale imitation, and there was an absolute divorce between the Creator and His creation. Indeed, Nancy points out that in Western thought at large, in classical as well as Christian times, the world has always been contrasted with something else. In the case of Platonism, it was the timeless, changeless, perfect order of form; in Christianity with a heaven usually conceived of as sharing these characteristics.
What has changed in our own time is that the force of this contrast has collapsed. There is no longer anything for us to contrast the world with, and consequently (if one accepts this view) our very idea of what a world is – what this world is – has fallen into confusion. This, however, is not an inevitable state of affairs, if we appreciate the nature of ‘the world’ as a concept. Perhaps most importantly, we must understand that it is an ideal whole; that is to say, the world as such is not something we can encounter directly in experience. To be a world is just to be the ‘form of forms’, understood as the framework which makes meaningful experience possible (p. 52). A world is a ‘totality of meaning’ (p. 41), and meaning requires form.
Nancy deliberately makes use of Platonic language here, perhaps to indicate the extent to which he is both remaining within and modifying the older tradition of thinking about the idea of a world. He is continuous with the earlier tradition insofar as he retains the irrational element of Platonism, as evinced in his quotation of Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’ (p. 52). But the key difference between Nancy’s idea of a world and the earlier ideas that he identifies is that for him, this ‘form of forms’, however mysterious, is something artefactual. The ‘world’, in his sense, is a human creation through and through (‘the world’ is entirely distinct in this sense from the material reality of ‘the globe’), and taking responsibility for the framework of meaning it provides is what is involved in ‘creating’ it.
As Nancy himself recognizes, this is a descendant of Nietzsche’s view that God is dead (p. 69), and the second section ends on a decidedly existential note: ‘It is for us to decide for ourselves’ (p. 74). In the remarks on history and philosophy at the beginning of the third section it becomes obvious, if it was not clear enough already, why he is placing this emphasis on decision; he wants to get away from conceptions of the historical process, whether theological or teleological or both, that dictate a pre-ordained path (‘the absence of auto-completion’, p. 81) for historical events. The future is open, rather than closed. Traditional philosophy (‘metaphysics’, p. 81) was a sometimes covert and sometimes overt attempt to close off the future in one particular direction; philosophy today (‘deconstruction’, p. 83) has achieved a self-consciousness regarding its own historic character that renders any such enterprise illegitimate.
Nancy associates this shift with a similar transformation in the notion of ‘nature’. Already in Hegel we find the idea that human intelligence generates a ‘second nature’ for us. In our own time, thanks to technology (in its broadest sense, which includes things like writing and accounting) we have moved beyond ‘nature’ altogether, in the sense that for human beings, absolutely nothing is fixed. We live in a condition of ‘extreme instability and mutability’ (p. 87), a condition that is underlined by the list of ‘the succession of technologies’ on p. 89.
This account of the world has implications, in Nancy’s mind, for the place of politics within it. He borrows Badiou’s notion of politics as one of the four ‘conditions of philosophy’ (p. 85), but also makes it a ‘structure of the impossible’ and itself a ‘technology’ (p. 88). Each of these claims requires some explication. The most plausible way of construing the idea that politics is a condition of philosophy is perhaps to say that philosophy can only occur in a civil order; it is certainly true that in Athens, for example, this is how it began. By calling it a ‘structure of the impossible’ he may possibly mean that it sets forth human goals that are constantly in the process of transformation and hence are never finally achieved. And politics as a technology is presumably akin to all other technologies in that it contributes to the process of ‘denaturation, or…the infinitization of ends’ (p. 90).
This understanding of politics, however, seems to be somewhat at odds with the idea of justice outlined in the ‘Complements’, a section in which Rousseau is invoked and Nancy himself strikes a very Rousseauian note when he declares that ‘an unbearable injustice is unleashed everywhere: the earth trembles, the viruses infect, men are criminals, liars, and executioners’ (p. 111). The notion that ‘the world is to itself the supreme law of its justice’ seems to suggest an appeal to a suitably dynamicized notion of natural law that will conveniently result in a condemnation of all those things of which Nancy disapproves; in particular the way in which ‘sovereignty…as pure violence’ and the ‘violence of capital’ have allegedly captured the modern state (p. 105).
As a confessed Marxist sympathizer, it is disappointing rather than surprising that Nancy should end up apparently contradicting his initial Nietzschean commitment to an idea of the world as a playful Heraclitean flux and retreating into trite gnomic utterances (‘And what if sovereignty was the revolt of the people?’, p. 109). Typically for a French intellectual, a virtual contempt for the mundane complexities of politics runs throughout the work, and a large part of the reason for this is the excessive voluntarism it displays. It is simply not true to say that ‘A people are always their own invention’, for the same reason it is not true that
It is for us to decide for ourselves’.
A great deal of individual and collective identity, and a great deal of historical change for that matter, is entirely outside the sphere of invention and decision. At the personal level, one’s gender, ethnicity, health, height, strength, appearance, and so on are all (at least initially and for the most part) given, as are indeed social status and religious confession – and yet they are absolutely constitutive of identity. So far as historical movements affecting the fate of peoples go, a great deal of our current political problems result from the fact that the world’s population has doubled in the last fifty years or so (here, on the increasing importance of so-called ‘biopolitics’ in the modern world, no doubt Nancy and Foucault have a point). And human history as a whole has been profoundly determined by considerations of climate, demography, disease, distribution of natural resources, and so on, that were within no-one’s control; indeed, for much of history these were factors of which we were all profoundly ignorant.
Thus, to represent our existential and by extension our political situation as one of continuous Protean self-creation by fiat seems profoundly misleading. While Nancy’s reflections on the nature of worldhood are frequently insightful, (despite the portentous tone), in the last resort his treatment of politics appears naïve. Real politics means wrestling with complex problems under conditions of severe constraint where the most one can usually hope to achieve is a compromise that will inevitably fail to fully satisfy most of those concerned.
Dealing with globalization is not a choice between existential self-enactment and the final victory of finance capital but an attempt to address such mundane but unavoidable dilemmas as, how are we to divide the world’s water resources given that the developing world is moving towards a meat-eating diet that consumes on average fifteen times the amount of water as a vegetarian one? How are we to adjust institutions of international society (the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and so on) that still reflect the world as it was in 1945 and other countries (like China, India, and Brazil) are now far more prominent? How are we going to address climate change? Mitigate the inequalities of world trade? And so on.
Certainly, democratic politics must now be carried on the absence of the various illusions to which totalitarian ideologies, feudal monarchies, and dynastic empires were all subject in their different ways, but when one has said this, one has not really said very much. While it is in Nancy’s favour that he does recognize that power is necessarily part of politics (p. 106), he never really grasps what this means in concrete terms. The real problems of globalization require a mastery of detail, an acceptance of limitations, and a tolerance of imperfection for which (in common with Badiou and Latour) he seems to have little taste.