In March, the Birbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London organized a symposium “On the Idea of Communism.” Speakers included the usual suspects: Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek and others. A summary with videos of the proceedings is available here.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s contribution, “Communism, the Word” merits close reading. Nancy is interested in both the etymology of the word and the sense that exceeds its meaning: “Actually, [the] historical data [about the use made of the word] are unable to give us the origin and the meaning—or, even better, the sense—of “communism”. No history, no etymology either, can produce anything like sense. ” For Nancy, communism is “the ontological truth of the common, that is the relation—which ultimately is nothing else than sense.”
Communism, therefore, means the common condition of all the singularities of subjects, that is of all the exceptions, all the uncommon points whose network makes a world (a possibility of sense). It does not belong to the political. It comes before any politics. It is what gives to politics an absolute requirement: the requirement to open the common space to the common itself— that is neither to the private nor to the collective, neither to separation nor to totality—but without permitting any political achievement of the common itself, any kind of making a substance of it. Communism is a principle of activation and limitation of politics.
In that sense, the “spectre” of communism haunts not capitalism specifically but the very notion of “common” sense.