INTRODUCTIONcal?) transcendence or self-transcendence of the immanent principle of the political is the
legacy invoked by the self-appointed heirs of the Roman model. Nancy mentions the
French Revolution and Italian fascism, each invested in a different mode of civil religion,
whether based on the ‘‘residual minimum of political affect,’’ namely, fraternity (as in the
French Revolution and Italian fascism), or on a celebration of community, reverting to
dictatorship (as in what Nancy calls ‘‘ ‘real’ communisms’’; pp. 108–9). In genuine and
perverse ways, these modern political formations sought to supplement the rational de-
duction of the social contract with affects that rendered it ‘‘perceptible to the hearts of
citizens’’ by appealing to fervor and desire and hence by bringing about a regime of
assembly other than on the basis of interest.
Next to ‘‘fraternity,’’ the appeals to ‘‘friendship,’’ ‘‘solidarity,’’ ‘‘responsibility,’’ and
‘‘justice’’ are so many recent examples of affects resisting the autonomy upon which the
political remains nonetheless premised. The typically French articulation of ‘‘secularism
[laı ̈cite ́]’’ is characterized by the same motif and motivation, namely, ‘‘the necessity of
conceiving and practicing something like the observance and celebration of the values,
symbols, and signs of recognition that attest to everyone’s adherence to the community
as such.’’ This affective significance oflaı ̈cite ́is more important than its formal indication
of a juridical arrangement concerning the precise modalities of the constitutional separa-
tion of church and state. Indeed, the Christian concept of ‘‘love’’ all along expressed a
similar exigency or concern, as is clear from the texts of the Gospels and St. Paul all the
way up to Hegel’s philosophy of right and, Nancy suggests, Ju ̈rgen Habermas’s idea of
‘‘constitutional patriotism.’’
Nancy thus postulates a more fundamental and effective/affective modality of relation
(here called ‘‘love’’), which precedes or supersedes the distinction between autonomy and
heteronomy and exerts itself in—and beyond—the very resistance between the two poles
that has constituted the essence of the political since Greece, Rome, and the earliest begin-
nings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Religion and faith, its doctrine and ritual, its
words, places, and commonplaces can no longer be had and lived they way we (think) we
did.^97 What remains is the need to ‘‘invent a new way to play the political institution,’’
withoutthe theological backup of any of the historically exhausted civil religions, and
premised on nothing more (and nothing less) than a ‘‘Being in common, or being to-
gether—or even more simply, and in the barest form, being several’’ (p. 111).^98
In the end, from the beginning the question of the political thus refers to a funda-
mental ontological problem, not least because, as Nancy writes, ‘‘the general idea of toler-
ance, and of the state as a space of tolerance, remains inferior or even foreign to what is
rightfully expected of the political: namely, to take charge of a force of affect inherent in
being-with’’ (p. 109). This intrinsic resistance is no longer necessarily or even primarily
that between church and state but rather the resistance of (our) ‘‘being-with’’ to itself:
that is to say, of a ‘‘being-with’’ that, for this very reason, ‘‘refuses to be fulfilled under
any form of hypostasis, configuration, institution, or legislation’’ (p. 112), but, on the
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