What Is to Be Done?

Jean-Luc Nancy, Irving Goh

diacritics, Volume 42, Number 2, 2014, pp. 100-117 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2014.0009

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/576042

Access provided by University of California @ Santa Cruz (8 Feb 2017 02:07 GMT)
WHAT IS TO BE
DONE?

JEAN-LUC NANCY
It is not difficult to justify the choice of the subject that I am proposing. The reason is Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor Emeritus
simple: it is a question, and I pose this question to myself; and, because we all ask our- of Philosophy at the University of
Strasbourg. His major works include
selves this question, I pose it to you, regardless of whether or not it is proposed for a lec- The Inoperative Community, The Sense
ture. The “subject,” moreover, immediately prohibits us from turning it into a “theme” of the World, Being Singular Plural,
that one would then “treat.” There can only be a “treatise” on the question what is to be The Experience of Freedom, and the
two volumes of The Deconstruction
done? provided that there is a delay in responding to it, and one can respond to it only by of Christianity. His recent books—
doing something in addition to articulating a response. After Fukushima: The Equivalence of
We ask ourselves this question today, at the beginning of the second decade of the Catastrophes and Identity: Fragments,
Frankness—have been translated and
twenty-first century, an era that has many reasons to wonder by what justification it is published by Fordham University Press.
worthy of an “era,” and to wonder if it has not already been swept beyond the scope of
that term—swept into another era, then, or perhaps outside the possibility of thinking Translated by Irving Goh
only of the inauguration of a new era. This possibility has probably accompanied suc-
cessive occurrences of the question what is to be done? Perhaps that possibility has since
been exhausted, if not profoundly transformed.
We also ask ourselves this question because it has been asked of us. It is due to this
repeated questioning that the feeling, more than the “idea,” of a necessity in the choice
of the subject came to me. Invited to speak under the auspices of the Société française
de philosophie, it was impossible for me to forget that such a society today encounters a
sort of inverse image in a philosophy of society, that is, in the remarkable phenomenon
whereby the signifier “philosophy” has become ubiquitous in the media or in mainstream
culture, while at the same time the discipline suffers from a disaffection that affects “the
humanities” in general. As a “societal phenomenon,” philosophy offers a hasty, muddled,
and indulgent response to the restlessness of a more or less explicit what is to be done?
Philosophy in that sense simply comprises the expectation and demand that proposals
from politics and religion can no longer satisfy, at least, to simplify matters, for European
societies (but there are indications that call for extending the scope of that observation).
After all, is that not how philosophy began? Philosophy—whether Pythagorean,
Socratic, or Cynic—was firstly the proposition of doing, of acting in a world where the
given rules, assigned places, and models and ends of existence were fading away. It can
be shown that a concern with doing has always subtended, if not ordered, all other philo-
sophical concerns of knowing or of thinking. At the same time, from the outset this con-
cern is determined by a desire to understand what it means to do, and consequently, a
concern with what the very sense of a doing can, or must, be modeled upon.

>>

A history of this question would be a staggering undertaking. In 1994, in a debate at the

Sorbonne between Alain Minc and Jacques Derrida—organized by “The New World”
association (whose name implies confidence in what is being done and in what is to be
done)—Derrida extended the question: What is to be done—with the question what is to
be done? The dash clearly maintained the question (he even says that one must again ask
what is to be done, in an entirely new way), while acknowledging its already citational,

DIACRITICS Volume 42.2 (2014) 100–119 © 2015 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
102 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.2

received, and perhaps hackneyed nature, hence the need to take it up again, to renew it,
and to recast it.
I will not comment on that text. Rather, I want to note that almost twenty years
later,1 we are led back to the same question with an increased brutality compared to the
urgency that the participants of the 1994 debate felt, while at the same time we have
become more reserved, more skeptical even, as to the very possibility of identifying and
engaging with a doing. Derrida noted that the question had encountered two remark-
able epochs in modern history: that of Kant and that of Lenin, each on the eve of revo-
lution. We might even go so far as to say
that modern history is punctuated by the
return and movements of this question.
The question does indeed shift. Kant’s
question is not what is to be done? but what
must I do? As a question, indeed as one of
the four questions imperative to reason,
it evinces the modern erasure of a given
duty, in favor of a duty to be defined and
projected (following the rule, as we know,
of the universal). However, as the answer
to this question lies in what Kant calls
“common rational knowledge,” it shows
the intrinsically practical nature of reason.
This means that reason acts and orders
itself to act by itself, without straying as it
does in its theoretical usage, but without
Jean-Luc Nancy, 2007.
Photo: Parham Shahrjerdi being able to determine (or schematize, in Kantian terms) the object of the action’s uni-
versal project. The response to this question takes the form of a regulating aim: doing as
if a universal goal could be shown.
In more or less direct fashion, the legacy of the “as if”—which, with Hans Vaihinger,
has been recast in a way that is most apparent in its effects on Sigmund Freud or Hans
Kelsen—would guide all reformative and transformative initiatives by adapting to what
Nietzsche, unlikely in this filiation, called “regulating fiction.” To admit to the fictive (or
fictional, as one says today, in a kind of cautious understatement) nature of the end one
seeks involves a dissociation of the doing of the action and that which should be its goal.
The first stance of the question what is to be done?, as a question of duty, involves an
internal dehiscence of doing: it is ordered and yet its execution cannot be objectified.
That is moreover why it is ordered in spite of its being ultimately unrealizable. This is
the dehiscence of pure reason to the extent that it is practical: it orders itself to make a
rational world (subject to moral laws). It thus calls upon itself to become reality, even
though its ultimate realization can only be “postulated.” And because it is postulated—
and because it is only postulated—its realization must be made the object of an order.
What Is to Be Done? >> Jean-Luc Nancy 103

It can be said that after Kant the history of philosophy—and also of theories and
practices, political and social as well as scientific and aesthetic, perhaps even a general
history of the relation between theory and practice (a history also introduced by Kant
in a well-known text)—is divided between maintaining this dehiscence and the need
to reduce it. The decision is played out between the fictionalizing and the realization
(Verwirklichung) of reason (or what we might call Idea or Humanity).

>>

The question what is to be done?, on its own (if one can say that), disengaged from
the reference to duty, presupposes that the duty is known and the goal determined.
The question first appears in a literary context, that is, in a work of fiction: Nikolay
Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? It was due to the novel’s huge success
that Lenin used the title in 1902. The novelistic portrayal of a new libertarian and sensual
humanity had in fact provoked very violent reactions from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but
they were powerless against the dominant craze. Otherwise, Chernyshevsky’s title can
be explained on two levels: on the one hand, what is to be done is to bring “new men”
into the world; and, on the other hand, what the artist must do is to provide a “textbook
for life.”2 We can perhaps say that it is only with this novel that the question found a strict
balance between fictive representation and realization, each referring to the other in
what constitutes for Chernyshevsky an extrapolation of Hegelian aesthetics.
When the question is again posed by Lenin, it no longer concerns fiction, even
though his text includes an interesting comment that contrasts the “dreams” of those
he denounces with the necessity of other dreams—the kind that one seeks to realize,
which allow for “some connection between dreams and life.”3 But the question has
clearly become a question of means. Means are not immediately given without a specific
reflection on the goal. When we think of all that was in the process of being played out
beginning in 1902, we understand the importance of that reflection. Where what is to
be done? could at first appear as “how to do,” the representation of the goal itself had to
progressively emerge by being put to the test and modeled, and even transformed. Today,
we are not done evaluating the extent to which the process has resulted in the degrada-
tion, alienation, or betrayal of the goal, or the extent to which the goal itself has been
represented and envisioned in a way that destined it to retreat further into a fiction that
has lost all regulative functions.
Whatever its relevance—when all is said and done it is significant—we must consider
the fact that this historical undertaking proceeded not only from Marx and the demand
to “transform the world” (to verändern it, to make it otherwise), but also with an entire
climate of practical or praxical demands to which Chernyshevsky, among others, is a
witness.4 This is how philosophy came to conceive of itself as needing to become reality.
This can be seen in Hegel, for whom “duty” becomes confused with the efficacy (effec-
tivité) of history (it should be said that the twilight gray of philosophy brings about a
certain shortage of vitality and color); in Marx, for whom the production of reason is
104 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.2

the same as the social production of existence and real value; and also later in Husserl,
who in 1936 calls for the Verwirklichung (realization) of “metaphysics or universal phi-
losophy”5 as the challenge of “philosophical combat.” That was three years after Hei-
degger’s Rektoratsrede and two years after he resigned as rector. In his inaugural address,
Heidegger declared that “the self-assertion of the German University,” that is, the self-
effectuation of “science,” which “is philosophy,” refers to “theory . . . understood as itself
the highest realization of genuine practice.”6
There is on both sides the same desire for both effectuation and the struggle for effec-
tuation, but one side places its confidence exclusively in theoretical means, while the
other is disposed to use the most brutal force in its desire for victory. The contrast is
nowhere near symmetrical. On both sides, what stands out is the motif of an assumed
unity of theory and practice, of reabsorption, and thus, of dehiscence (that neither side
would wish to call “regulative”).

>>

The desire, which is more or less evident, to overcome dehiscence and to affirm in some
way the truth at work (en acte)—in entelechy to use Husserl’s term—in practical reason,
or whatever name one gives to it (an authentic existence, or, as Sartre puts it, a “totali-
tarian [while meaning “totalizing”] praxis”7) dissipated around 1968. It is even possible
to state that the most significant result of 1968 in terms of thought has been a tension
stretching to the limit of this desire, surpassing the aim of a theoretical goal by a practice
modeled after it, surpassing the registers of strategy and politics, and resulting in a sin-
gular praxis: that of an intransigent here and now (hic et nunc).
This resulted in two consequences: on the one hand, the refusal of transformative and
even revolutionary action, and, on the other, the affirmation of the immediate efficacy
of a revolution that, in short, was already underway. That is what phrases such as “live
like there’s no tomorrow and enjoy without holding back” or “make love, not war!” were
saying. I will indulge in sharing a brief personal memory: that of having shared with
a para-Situationist group the proud refusal to participate in the creation of a “critical
university,” a project that we deemed to be trapped within the idea of a “project,” that is,
with the idea of an “institution.”
The critique of a “project” as the submission to an aim was Bataille’s, expressed
scarcely ten years earlier in these terms: “For me, it concerns an impossibility to agree
with the principle on which real action in an organized society rests. . . . Unconditional
refusal is the affirmation of my sovereignty.”8 And: “We are entering into a world where
the accumulated knowledge will generally allow man to be transformed into means. . . .
We must define that which cannot be reduced to this transformation.”9
Therefore, everything happens as if, on the one hand, it became imperative and urgent
to define what Kant had postulated as the dignity of an end that is, precisely, indefinable
(e.g., man), and on the other, no less imperative and urgent, to posit a notion of what is
called “sovereignty”; this notion should be, first and foremost, a present affirmation, for
What Is to Be Done? >> Jean-Luc Nancy 105

now unconditional, cast in a more or less regulatory manner. Without avoiding a task
to be done that he could otherwise acknowledge as “communism,” Bataille introduces
another dehiscence, which could be seen as taking a direction opposite the preceding
one: no longer between the theoretical aim and the practical possibility, but between an
already given and irreducible efficacy and a pragmatic progression that must broaden
the possibilities of its assertion.
Both 1968 and Bataille’s thoughts here can be seen as distinct evidence of a rotational
movement that was produced—on a global level—at the moment when, for the first time
since 1945, revolutionary perspectives, the consciousness of history and progress, tech-
nical innovation, and geopolitical balances were transformed together. The moment was
1967, when Ernesto “Che” Guevara—who coined the phrase, “Be realistic, demand the
impossible”—died.
If what is to be done? up to that point was determined at times with the aim of an
ultimate objective, and at times by establishing judicious means, it is now the doing itself
that is subject to a shift that is perhaps as distinctive as the one that brought it into being
at the birth of history and thought. This matter of doing (l’affaire du faire) does not play
itself out only at the level of the project or militancy (the question, meanwhile, has arisen
from the meaning of an activism that allows its participants to be sacrificed). It no lon-
ger plays itself out with the prospect of an
at least underlying adjustment of means to It is necessary to recognize in doing a
ends. Rather, it is necessary to recognize
in doing a type of differentiation not seen type of differentiation not seen before.
before. An interrogation of the doing itself
comes after the dehiscence of theory and An interrogation of the doing itself comes
practice and the will to lessen any devia-
tion in carrying out the project. after the dehiscence of theory and practice
It would certainly be possible to show
how this question can be seen in a series of and the will to lessen any deviation in
repetitions, glosses, and interpretations of
Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. The carrying out the project.
extraordinary fortune of this thesis shows
the extent to which it touched the nerve of an era: the sense of an urgent necessity of
doing. I will not attempt to recount this undoubtedly rich history. I only note that Der-
rida, in a seminar that will be referred to again, still feels (éprouve)—if I can say that—the
need to return to Marx’s phrase by emphasizing, among other terms, verändern, which
does not at all mean the same thing as “to transform.”
Verändern signifies if not exactly “to alter,” then “to do something other” (faire autre).
When translated as “to transform,” the relation to “to interpret” (to “to only interpret”)
appears as a relation to Verwirklichung: the (theoretical) interpretation provided the
formal condition of a transformation to be set to work. This would be Hegel placed on
his feet again, or Spirit understood—and Understanding itself—as the auto-production
of social, human, and ultimately, even natural existence. In spite of how Marx himself
106 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.2

is understood, to do something other suggests a different meaning: while interpretation

leaves that which it interprets intact, like a text whose literality is preserved, even if it
remains opaque, Veränderung would write another text. And instead of being the real-
ization of an interpretation, this text would be the inventing and setting in motion of
another world, which is to say, of another configuration of sense. No longer would any-
thing be identifiable by its preserved literality.
The result is that the implied doing is not the same: according to the first reading,
it is a production, a poiesis derived from the rules of art (for example, the action of the
proletariat as the realization of the fecundity of the negative); according to the second
reading, it is an acting (agir), an action that draws both its form and its force from itself.
It does not apply itself to the world; rather, it creates a world in the way that a painter’s
gesture—the touch, the hand, and the palette—makes a world that is its own. But it is
the praxis that matters: the production, the work, has value only as it is a manifestation
of this praxis, in other words, the intransitive doing, which, in doing (se faisant), makes
itself (se fait) rather than making something (else).

>>

The meaning of the question what is to be done? played itself out most profoundly—
to the point of making necessary the question what is to be done with this question?—when
it considered the meaning and the stakes of doing as praxis, or of the praxis re-actual-
ized by Marxism with a certain floating of its signification in relation to its Aristotelian
determination.
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt shows how the relation between theory
and practice has been turned on its head (if we can translate her word Umstülpung as
that10) in such a way that the practical finality in (and not “of”) theoria understood as
contemplation yielded to the determination of doing as production, thus determining
(theoretical) thought as productive force, and consequently as operational rather than
contemplative. Truth as verifiable reveals this: it is truth made (faite), produced. Doing
itself is inflected with the value of “acting” or “practicing” (as one practices a profession)
up to the value of “producing,” “realizing,” “executing.” Arendt says that the Tun—with a
semantic scope similar to that of “doing”—always stands out more than Handeln—which
refers to the acting of the process, of the relation.
Without dwelling on Arendt’s treatment of the question, we cannot help but consider
the ambivalence that is introduced in doing the moment it is understood simultaneously
as transitive and intransitive, or conversely, the reductive univocality that results from
the complete absorption of the intransitive within the transitive.
This absorption was named “actionism,” a term that originated in the art world,
and in a German context at times extended to the realm of politics (with a significant
echo in the English word “activism,” due to its frequent use). The activist was confused
with the militant, and even with the leftist (or “radical”) militant. In 1969, Adorno pub-
lished a text very critical of what he referred to as the actionism of the ’68 generation
What Is to Be Done? >> Jean-Luc Nancy 107

(in short, the opposite of what I mentioned earlier—but there were many diverse aspects
to ’68).
Against those who advocated a “primacy of praxis,”11 Adorno formulated a critique
that could seem to be inspired by Arendt: “A pseudo-activity is provoked and at the same
time condemned to being illusory by the current state of the technical forces of pro-
duction.” A little later—adopting with bitter irony McLuhan’s quip that “the medium is
the message”—Adorno goes so far as to write that “the substitution of means for ends
replaces the qualities in people themselves.”12 What is missing in this submission to
the productivist model is, on the one hand, the sense of a fair take on where questions
stand: “the question ‘what is to be done?’ [is] an automatic reflex to every critical thought
before it is fully expressed, let alone comprehended.”13 On the other hand, and equally
significant, it is also the sense of the heterogeneity between theory and practice that is
missing: “The dogma of the unity of theory and praxis, contrary to the doctrine on which
it is based, is undialectical: it underhandedly appropriates simple identity where contra-
diction alone has the chance of becoming productive.”14
The contradiction (Widerspruch) in question cannot take place between the mean-
ings of theory and practice: as such it would be a contradiction in theory itself. It is a
contradiction in the nature and the extent of the two registers, and it implies that each
acts on the other to prevent it from essentially being only what it is, seen from the point
of view of the mind or of restless impatience.15
Some years later, in 1974, the French agrégation program for philosophy proposed,
seemingly without coincidence, the question “theory and practice.” European Marx-
ism, particularly in Italy in the Gramscian vein and in France with the impetus from
Althusser, was preoccupied with open questions in a world still further from the pos-
sibilities of taking revolutionary action, while asserting the efficacy of numerous social,
technological, and economic transformations that theories seemed to be doing their
utmost to accomplish rather than to anticipate them.
Once again, the history of this moment of profound recasting of objectives, condi-
tions, and consciousness of what is to be done? would be a significant undertaking. I will
simply point out that the question was taken up by Derrida, who devoted a seminar to
it.16 From that seminar, I will point out a motif that forms in some regard the seminar’s
dominant note. The motif is at once given with the expression “it must be done” (faut
le faire), as used in informal semantics. (It should be noted that in 1974, the expression
common today, “that will (or won’t) do,” was not in use, although the two expressions are
not unrelated.) “It must be done” has more well-known synonyms, as Derrida observes:
“one must bear with it, put up with it” (faut se le taper, se le coltiner). The contrast, if not
the contradiction, that practice poses must hold true in an appreciable way, in its pains-
takingness, and its difficulty. We arrange materials according to their strength, materials
that are themselves material, human, institutional, etc. The specific weight of “it must be
done” leads to this consequence: “no practice is ever purely faithful to its principle.” This
infidelity, also known as inadequation, will show itself to be “radical and a priori neces-
sary” the moment the practical initiative, the decision to act, can only be what it is by not
108 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.2

being purely the implementation of a program. Better yet: a program cannot program
such a decision.
Derrida will return to this motif again elsewhere in several ways, for example, in
writing that “no politics has ever been adequate to its concept.”17 Or, with regard to the
“practical operation” that is “sovereignty” according to Bataille, Derrida cites Bataille:
“between the time of the effort and sovereign time there is necessarily a cut (coupure),
and, one could even say an abyss.”18

>>

By all of these means—which are quite diverse—the initial dehiscence of theory and
practice was transformed into an obvious slippage, or it deteriorated into a discrepancy,
a distortion, or even to a trend that recast the two notions.
Meanwhile, through those transformations, or alongside them, something happened
to doing itself, in general. The pattern of theory’s coupling with practice became worn
out or jammed at the same time that the “world pictures” (Heidegger’s Weltbilder)
invested the word “ideology” with a new meaning to indicate a “logic of the idea” and
therefore also its Verwirklichung.19 To speak of an “end of ideologies” was to place at
a distance the possibility of a will in the Kantian sense, that is, a capacity to make real
a representation.20
If the question of revolution—its possibility, its desirability, and ultimately its reality—
continues to be debated; if, rather, it seemed possible to speak of an “end of history” that
would suspend all recourse to a project; if many practices, claiming sometimes to be art,
sometimes to be associative, religious, or humanitarian actions, offer themselves outside
of, or in the place of, political action; if faire l’Europe (building Europe) or faire la paix
(making peace) are expressions hardly distinguishable from faire semblant (pretending),
not to mention faire des études (pursuing an education) or faire du sport (playing sports),
it is because the doing (le faire) has been jeopardized (fragilisé).
It has been jeopardized—made weak or dubious—as confidence in the grounds and
motives of Verwirklichung has increased. It is not just the realization of projects, pro-
grams or plans that has lost credibility: efficacy itself, or at least its representation, has
been destabilized. It is as if the extremes of suffering or revolt were necessary for us
to experience the thickness of the flesh or material compactness. Otherwise, we seem
most often to have trouble disentangling the image from the thing, if not situating the
virtual (a word that has experienced an excessive surge), much as fiction proves itself
indivisible from its presentation, or as the spectacle slips immediately into a critique
of the spectacle, as the “impossible” becomes another name for the “real,” and as the
story of Bartleby who escaped the dealings (affairement) of Wall Street becomes a kind
of philosopheme.21
I do not bring these points together out of mockery. Rather, I am attempting to char-
acterize our sensitivity to the difficulty of considering activism, especially on behalf
of any cause other than the insurrection that is the obligatory response to immediate,
What Is to Be Done? >> Jean-Luc Nancy 109

unbearable, or oppressive violence. Today, the question what is to be done? has even become
the title of a theatrical performance and the name of an artistic collective, although now
the intent cannot be the same as that of Chernyshevsky. Even when the question is posed
in good faith, it can’t avoid the awareness that it is a quotation and even a quotation
of a quotation.
In speaking of sensitivity, I do not intend to dwell in a psycho-sociological register
that would allow me to avoid political and philosophical engagement. This is because
sensitivity both acts and mobilizes thought. Sensitivity is even thought’s mobility, its
élan, its drive. Without an impetus to push it, the will does not want. Seneca and Ovid
both said as much,22 and Adorno, in the text cited earlier, speaks of the “practical impul-
sion” that pushes thought without thought knowing it is being pushed.23
Mocking the question what is to be done? and as a evidence that no one seems to
claims it, Jean-Luc Godard, as long ago as 1965, in the middle of the story of a colorful,
self-destructive Pierrot le fou, had Pierrot’s companion utter these words: “What can I
do? I don’t know what to do,” just after the word “do” (faire) appeared in close-up on a
page of a notebook.
Not knowing what to do, not even knowing what one could do without even “prefer-
ring not to,” is to await or interrogate the very possibility of a doing, about which one
has an idea, without having experienced
its efficacy. In the words that Anna Karina Even when the question is posed in
utters while walking along a rather gloomy
shore, the efficacy of the absent doing (le good faith, it can’t avoid the awareness
faire manquant) is not the implementa-
tion of a project, nor of a certain behavior that it is a quotation and even a quotation
or exercise. Nor is it poiesis or praxis in a
Marxian or Aristotelian sense. Not know- of a quotation.
ing what to do is also being aware that you
exist only in a private mode. Doing takes on the meaning it once had in the expression
faire la vie (live it up), often the same as faire la fête (celebrate). It can also be seen in faire
l’amour (make love) and, to some extent, in faire la guerre (wage war) or in other expres-
sions such as faire jeune (look young), or in the impersonal il fait beau (it’s a beautiful
day), where the verb takes on a meaning suspended between “being” (être) and “appear-
ing” (paraître).

>>

As a response to having-to-be (devoir-être) or to being as duty and project, doing remains

to be done (à faire) and maintains in itself—in its dealings (son affaire) and in its deeds
(son fait)—the entire distance of this “to” (à) (or we might even say its “to”). This dis-
tance is negligible as long as a horizon of certitude presents itself, on which the veri-
table form (the Idea) of the fait accompli, or entelechy, manifests itself. Ever since duty
and/or project—one therefore the other and vice versa—came to the forefront, the result
110 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.2

has been an oscillation from regulating dehiscence to revolutionary effectuation. It is

remarkable that “revolution” has come to signify real action—which is effective because
it is efficient—as well as the reversal or the upheaval of the situation. Revolution has
been the fulfillment of regulation while regulation has become a revolution deferred
or averted.
In this process, efficacy has come to be located under the sign of violence. Nietzsche,
Weber, Sorel, Benjamin, and Bataille, as well as more recent commentators on Ben-
jamin and Bataille, such as Derrida, could attest in many different ways that violence
has become the experimentum crucis of what is to be done? Either it is understood as
a necessary moment in the effectuation of the Idea—but as such becomes an aspect of
regulation—or it establishes itself as the emergence of the Idea itself, in its omnipotence.
However, such an emergence has a name—sacrifice—a concept our culture has caused to
fade away. When there is meaning in sanctification (faire du sacré)—or in making some-
thing sacred—one does not ask what is to be done? The operation of veri-fying (véri-fier)
arises entirely from the operation of sacri-ficing (sacri-fier): the former contradicts the
latter, and either replaces or undoes it. As soon as the effectuation of the project verifies
its validity through its implementation (here and now, ideally), the doing thus imple-
mented counteracts the project itself.
When the feat proves to be desperately interminable, or when the fait accompli
is shown to be the destruction of its own Idea, the doing that was to be done is dis-
credited or dismissed. In a sense, the entire history of what is to be done? has contin-
ually restaged its own disavowals. And yet this history could have better underscored
or highlighted the characteristic of efficacy, which is the most distinguished hallmark
of doing.
It is for this reason that the demand for an efficacy that is neither projective nor
tyrannical has become apparent in contemporary thought. It is in particular for this rea-
son that the motif of history has rotated in response to the obligation to question the
paradigms of revolution and of progress, a questioning that has paved the way to motifs
of spacing and/or event. What Heidegger labels Faktizität—which could be translated
as “factuality” as long as the term does not carry a sense of mute platitude—essentially
refers to the existential efficacy of what Kant foresaw with the factum rationis: less a
duty to fulfill than an always already exposure to a real, worldly, and material exteriority;
less the realm of a practice as a specific and distinct (moral, political, pragmatic) order
than the very identity of so-called reason, its rationality at work, its ethos as ordinary
conduct as well as site or dwelling.24
Doing thus implies this value that opens its semantic scope within and without, to
be understood in terms of both production and execution: the value of facio as “to put,
place, establish,” but we must specify “‘to put, in a creative way, establish in existence,’
and not simply to leave an object on the ground.”25 At issue is making being (faire être)
rather than having-to-be (devoir être). These two provisions, these two tensions, are
always divided on the matter of philosophical ethos—and pathos. It is significant, how-
ever, that recent thought has felt the need, so to speak, to present itself in modes aligned
What Is to Be Done? >> Jean-Luc Nancy 111

with doing rather than with being, on the one hand, and with having-to-do (devoir faire)
on the other.26

>>

I will only give a few signposts for an analysis that could be the subject of a thesis. In the
middle of the twentieth century, in the turn away from the linguistic usage of the term
“pragmatics,” a kind of philosophical pragmatics was developed that came to replace the
theorizing of constructions awaiting implementation and/or verification.
This pragmatics is never absent from philosophy. It is vivid in Platonic dialogism, in
Cartesian or Malebranchian meditation, in Spinoza’s mos geometricum, and in the Hege-
lian speculative economy of discourse. Similarly, it declares itself as such in Nietzsche’s
aphorism or in Kierkegaard’s “crumb.”27 Each philosophy is an attitude, a course of action,
a thought experiment, a consequence of language in its lexicon, syntax, rhetoric, and tone.
Thus, there has been a trend to gradually identify the work of Michel Foucault with
sociopolitical actions but also, ultimately, with a kind of exhortation one might qual-
ify with Montaigne’s term “exercitation,” which, to be of the “mind” (l’esprit) is all the
more significantly the appearance and allure of the “body.” Emmanuel Levinas did not
propose that ethics surpass ontology without putting into play a word that exceeds his
own discourse, by making it the “contact” of an “original language, the foundation of
the other.”28 Gilles Deleuze, in a paradoxical mode, designates as “creation of concepts”
that which presents itself equally as the mobilization of words and images according
to a kind of permanent performativity. “Rhizome,” “crystal,” or “becoming impercep-
tible” are clearly more than signifying figures: they are switches (embrayeurs) of activ-
ity, affectivity, and efficacy. With différance as “neither a word nor a concept,” Derrida
was suggesting a gesture—contrary to what some saw as the procrastination of the ten-
sion in actuality (in language and in the body of thought)—of a presence in its difference
from itself.
Two facts can be added to these disparate characteristics of a pragmatics that can-
not be subsumed under one identity: the first is the importance that each of these lines
of thoughts grants to literature and art,29 that is, to an ensemble of spheres that deem
invalid the division between being (or thinking) and doing. The second is the remove
from political power. These lines of thought no longer require a government of sages, the
illuminating counsel of princes, or a list of theoretical points that precedes taking action.
They also discovered the need to establish a significant distance from the very idea of
“the political.” Here, a line from Foucault can speak for all: “It is not for philosophy to
tell power what to do (faire), but it must exist as true-speaking (dire-vrai) in a certain
relation to political action.”30
The question what is to be done? has not disappeared but it clearly relates to other
spheres in which it is essential to take into account the slippage or the divergence from
the philosophical register. The cause of such a slippage or divergence is at times the
impossibility of Verwirklichung, at times the excess of a violent Auswirkung.
112 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.2

For its part, the “true-speaking” (dire-vrai) is not a speaking-the-true (dire-le-vrai),

that is, a production of verifiable significations. It is rather the praxis of a speaking that
does not let itself be subjected to any project, tending only to its own speaking (dire) and
therefore to the opening of a sense (sens) each time unheard-of. That unknown (inouï)
is positioned within the incommensurability of an outside that effectively escapes all
meaning (sens). It does not make an appeal to Verwirklichung but to the actual, present
Wirklichkeit (reality), by an attentive listening able to discern the inaudible.
As for what cannot be said, it is not a matter of just being silent: more than that, it is
necessary to understand that “to keep silent” is still a means of speaking and of creat-
ing the chances of sense-making. This is most likely the way that Wittgenstein under-
stood himself. Today, chances are more than ever those of the unknown. More than ever,
Minerva’s owl takes flight at dusk. A world is in the process of ending: that is philosophi-
cally the meaning of the phenomenon called “globalization.” We are like the Stoics of the
fifth century who could not sense a becoming in the making, beyond what they called the
inclinatio of Rome.

>>

We are not able to sense—any more than could the Romans—the nature or the direction
of a transformation whose quivers, jolts, and, often, upheavals we can’t help but feel. In
truth, our history appears more and more to have gradually erased the possibilities it
In truth, our history appears more and had once opened with regard to the ques-
tion what is to be done? By making “hav-
more to have gradually erased the ing to do” (devoir faire) into a question, it
freed it from a given order of ends; by com-
possibilities it had once opened with ing up with ends prescribed by an entire
humanity, it designated the horizon of an
regard to the question what is to be done? ultimate production. That horizon has
changed with the perspectives of destruc-
tion and auto-destruction: we are no longer facing a sole end with another side that
brings damage, or disasters, and at times the indefinite proliferation of new ends. Com-
pletions exceed themselves (les accomplissements sont des débordements); entelechies
resemble entropies.
The “doing” is perhaps lost when we presuppose it to be the effectuation of a project
through the implementation of a will. The failure or at least the insufficiency of this pre-
supposition, contemporaneous to the “practical philosophy” of Descartes’s invention,31
is recognized by the admission that thought is deficient regarding action. It is the admis-
sion that Heidegger made in the wake of the defeat that definitively condemned his ear-
lier commitments;32 Sartre made the same admission two or three years later when he
wrote that action was still awaiting its philosophy;33 and it subsequently became Arendt’s
lamentation of the “curse of Western history,” which, for her, comprises the separation of
action and thought, from the century after Pericles until our time.34
What Is to Be Done? >> Jean-Luc Nancy 113

How can we not recognize that we have made—or rather made ourselves into—sub-
jects of a production that surpasses us, both in that it evades the schema of its realiza-
tion and in the fact that it replicates itself according to the autarky of a “doing” that has
surrendered to its own development? Savoir faire—and pouvoir faire (being-able-to-do),
which is, after all, the meaning of “technics,” merges with, then replaces, devoir-faire
(having-to-do). However, knowing, being-able-to, and having-to, leave intact some-
thing of “doing”: the efficacy, which is not the efficacy of an object, nor of an active or
passive power nor of the effect of a cause, but the efficacy that lies in the fact (le fait) of
an existence.
Such a fact is neither done nor to be done (ni fait, ni à faire), if I can put it that way,
twisting the expression.35 It makes itself (il est se faisant) such that no subject is its agent
without making itself (se faire) in the process. The existent that makes itself relates to
itself as to its subject, which is not given (and does not have to be given) but which adapts
itself in exact accord with this absence of being given. That absence is not a lack: it is a
response to the essential impossibility of entelechy, that is to say, to the fact that telos is
not something that can be accomplished or realized, nor something in which one can
invest, for the “real” is nothing given, produced, or producible. The “doing” in question
makes itself (se fait) because it is the making (faire) of a “self,” that is, a self character-
ized by the perpetual return or referral (renvoi) that is not even “to itself” since “self”
is already in itself this very referral (a referral, I might add, that is thus to itself only
as to others).
As a question, what is to be done? presupposes a project, an object, or an effect as its
aim. Every day we of course proceed on all of these levels, which must be governed by
prudential (regulating, negotiating, strategic) virtue. But this is still not “doing” if doing
or acting is at the same time being brought to the limits of those registers, where the
impossibility of completion (en finir) leads to the necessity of in-completion (infinir) (if I
may venture such a term).
To be brought at the same time to the limits of prudence means to be exposed to the
incommensurability of sense (sens). Sense is never adequate to an object, a project, or an
effect. And it is this inadequation that must be allowed to play itself out. If civilization
has entered a stage of transformation, it is because it has understood the futility of its
project being ruled by a single effectuation.
What then is to be done? We have to think doing (le faire) even as it slides away, or
even disconnects, from the project, the intention, and the question themselves. What
to do with the question in general? The affirmation that precedes it must be consid-
ered as much by looking backward as forward: the affirmation of existing in its expo-
sure to the infiniteness that it is, in other words, not as an object, a project, or an effect.
Consider, then, “make exist” (faire exister) as being without principle or goal, without
author or project, but an existing that asserts itself as what Celan calls the “doing with-
out a shoreline”—an adventurous and risk-taking boundless doing (uferlosem Tun).36 In
Celan’s poem, it is the mother who is doing; the last line calls that doing a “shimmer from
the ground” (Schimmer aus dem Grund). A similar shimmer, also the shimmer of the
114 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.2

poem, arises from a depth that remains endless. A light from that depth, however, can be
grasped when it comes from the doing of the other who makes nothing less—and noth-
ing more—than sense. Making sense—like creating a world (faire monde), making love,
being daytime or nighttime (faire jour et nuit), making apparent (faire sentir)—all these
happen only by and for the other, as Sartre, among others, has said.37 At the moment of
the question what is to be done?, we must not forget that a shimmer that preceded it now
gestures (fait signe) beyond it.
What Is to Be Done? >> Jean-Luc Nancy 115
Notes
This text was first delivered as a lecture organized by
the Société française de philosophie at the Sorbonne
on March 17, 2012. It was subsequently published in
the Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 106,
no. 2 (2012). I thank Jean-Luc Nancy and the editors
of the bulletin for the permission to translate the text
into English here. I am very grateful to Diane Berrett
Brown and Priyanka Deshmukh for their immense
help in translating this piece.—Trans.
A brief essay by Jean-Luc Nancy, also titled “What
Is to Be Done?,” appears as a two-page postscript
to Retreating the Political, a collection of essays
coauthored with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (London:
Routledge, 1997).—Ed.
1 In 2015, it is now just slightly over twenty years
after the 1994 debate between Minc and Derrida.
Derrida’s “Que faire—de la question ‘Que faire?’—?” is
published in Derrida pour les temps à venir, ed. René
Major (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2007), 45–62.—Trans.
2 Chernyshevsky, “The Aesthetic Relation of
Art to Reality,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, 379.
Nancy quotes from a French translation “Rapports
esthétiques entre l’art et la réalité,” http://lespiedsnus-
enmouvement.fr/EsthetiqueRealite.html.—Trans.
3 Here Lenin quotes from Dmitri Pisarev’s
“Blunders of Immature Thinking” (Lenin, What Is to Be
Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, 159).
4 To limit myself to just one name, I must mention
that Kierkegaard represents, in the same time period,
a homologous demand, but at the other end of the
philosophical spectrum.
5 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, 15; §6.
6 Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German
University,” 473. In Nancy’s quotation of Heidegger’s
text in French, “realization” is kept as Verwirklichung
while “genuine practice” is referred to as “authentic
praxis.”—Trans.
7 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1,
817.
8 Bataille to Dionys Mascolo, June 22, 1958, in
Bataille, Choix de lettres 1917–1962, 481, 482.
9 Bataille to Dionys Mascolo, July 12, 1958
(ibid., 490).
10 In the English translation of Vita activa, The
Human Condition, the word Umstülpung is translated
as “reversal.”—Trans.
11 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 268.
12 Ibid., 270. In using the term Eigenschaften [for
qualities], Adorno evokes Musil’s novel [Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften or The Man without Qualities].
13 Ibid., 276.
14 Ibid., 277.
15 In the same text, Adorno lashes out at the
“impatience that wants to transform the world without
having to interpret it while so far it has been chapter
and verse that philosophers have merely interpreted”
(ibid., 265).
16 This seminar will be published by Galilée, so
it is not possible to provide page references before
its publication. The text was prepared by Alexander
Garcia-Düttmann, who very kindly sent it to me. The
reference to Adorno’s text cited above and a quota-
tion from Foucault to follow are from that text.
17 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 114. The rest of
the text affirms the inadequation of every concept to
itself.
18 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 438n27; trans-
lation modified. Georges Bataille, “L’enseignement de
la mort,” in Œuvres complètes, 8:207.
19 See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 469.
116 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.2
20 This theme is strikingly clear when Kant speaks
of the “causality of God’s understanding, his actualiza-
tion of the objects of his representation” in Lectures
on Philosophical Theology, 97.
21 See Gisèle Berkman, L’effet Bartleby.
22 In the second part of “On Clemency,” Seneca
writes of how “what is now untutored impulse may
grow into matured decision” (416), a nod to Ovid’s
“what was impulse is science now,” in “Remedia Amo-
ris” (“Remedies,” 319, line 10).
23 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 264.
24 This could be ethos, meaning dwelling or lair, or
ēthos, meaning conduct, habitus: a twofold possibility
as the backdrop to the theme of “morals” (mœurs) and
Sittlichkeit in general.
25 Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and
Society, 381.
26 Claude Simon exemplifies this tendency when
he states that it is by a doing that one best justifies
one’s existence: “It is not the “cogito ergo sum” of
Descartes, but rather an ‘I do (I produce), therefore I
am,’ which seems to me a basic necessity, which every
normal person feels in responding to it in one form
or another, be it bringing in the harvest (faisant venir
une récolte), in doing business (faisant des affaires),
building or constructing a bridge or machines, doing
research, etc.” (Quatre conférences, 76).
27 From the Danish smule, in Kierkegaard’s
Philosophiske Smuler, philosophical crumbs or frag-
ments.—Trans.
28 Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” 116. He also
expressly calls for a surpassing of the separation of
theory and practice, notably in the preface to Totality
and Infinity.
29 Despite appearances and mutatis mutandis, this
concerns Levinas. See the collection Le souci de l’art
chez Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Danielle Cohen-
Levinas. In turn, this would of course require that one
mention Adorno, Benjamin, Bataille, and Granel.
30 Foucault, The Government of Self and Others:
Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, 286;
translation modified.
31 See the sixth part of Descartes’s Discourse on
Method.
32 See the beginning of Heidegger’s “Letter on
Humanism.”
33 Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 50.
34 Arendt writes of how, “in the aftermath of the
Periclean Age, the men of action and the men of
thought parted company,” underscoring the extent to
which the separation is factual and not legitimized, a
practice devoid of theory (On Revolution, 176).
35 The expression “ni fait, ni à faire” describes a
task so poorly done that one may as well not have
bothered.—Trans.
36 Paul Celan, “Bukowina,” in Die Gedichte, 371.
As indicated in Nancy’s text, the phrase “adventurous
and risk-taking” is built on Fahrt (voyage) and Fährnis
(peril) in Celan’s poem.—Trans.
37 Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 540.
What Is to Be Done? >> Jean-Luc Nancy 117
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. “Marginalia to Theory and
Praxis.” In Critical Models: Interventions and Catch-
words, translated by Henry W. Pickford, 259–78.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1958.
———. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1963.
———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Har-
court Brace, 1973.
Bataille, Georges. Choix de lettres 1917–1962. Edited
by Michel Surya. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
———. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
Benveniste, Émile. Indo-European Language and
Society. Translated by Elizabeth Palmer. Coral
Gables: University of Miami Press, 1973.
Berkman, Gisèle. L’effet Bartleby: Philosophes lecteurs.
Paris: Hermann, 2011.
Celan, Paul. Die Gedichte. Edited by Barbara Wiede-
mann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003.
Chernyshevsky, Nikolay Gavrilovich. Selected
Philosophical Essays. Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1953.
Cohen-Levinas, Danielle, ed. Le souci de l’art chez
Emmanuel Levinas. Paris: Éditions Manucius, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. Translated by
George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.
———. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. The Government of Self and Others:
Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983. Edited
by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell.
Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic
Writings, edited and translated by David Farrell
Krell, 193–242. New York: HarperCollins, 1977.
———. “The Self-Assertion of the German University.”
Translated by Karsten Harries. Review of Meta­
physics 38, no. 3 (1985): 467–502.
Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to
Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David
Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1970.
Kant, Immanuel. Lectures on Philosophical Theology.
Translated by Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M.
Clark. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Lenin, V. I. What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of
Our Movement. New York: International Publishers,
1929.
Levinas, Emmanuel. “Language and Proximity.”
In Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by
Alphonso Lingis, 109–26. Dordrecht, The Nether-
lands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987.
Ovid. “Remedies.” In Love Poems, Letters, and
Remedies of Ovid, translated by David R. Slavitt,
317–52. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason,
Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles. Translated
by Alan Sheridan-Smith. Edited by Jonathan Rée.
London: Verso, 1982.
———. Notebooks for an Ethics. Translated by David
Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992.
Seneca. “On Clemency.” In Minor Dialogues Together
with the Dialogue On Clemency, translated by
Aubrey Stewart, 380–423. London: George Bell
and Sons, 1902.
Simon, Claude. Quatre conférences. Edited by Patrick
Longuet. Paris: Minuit, 2012.
IMAGE (next pages): Simon Hantaï 
TABULA, 1981
Acrylic on canvas, 256.5 x 426.4 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Simon
Hantaï and Paul Kasmin Gallery