to intervene, to commit themselves” (1997:97). For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s work pursues Heidegger’s recognition of theory as the “supreme realisation [Verwicklichung] of genuine practice” (cited in Sparks, 1997:64). “What is to be done”, Nancy (1997) argues, cannot be considered a separate problematic from theoretical determinations of what the world is and what hopes one may hold for its transformation. A positive, practical determination is as such precluded, as by necessity a politics proper to the thought of the retreat must only be the retreat itself; investigating and pursuing the withdrawal of political figures. This may nonetheless be proposed as a foregrounding of the question, or moreover a holding open of the question of the political. Such a proposal is not to be confused with critique (and it is here that the distinction with ‘governmentality’ becomes further apparent); it implies rather the inscription of figures as originarily uncertain. As Nancy notes; What will become of our world is something we cannot know, and we can no longer believe in being able to predict or command it. But we can act in such a way that this world is a world able to open itself up to its own uncertainty as such. (1997:158) In other words, we might seek to pursue this thought of the retreat; to inscribe a thought of withdrawal as the originary uncertainty of political figures. And we might also seek to oppose those politics that would, in a move described presently, obscure or neutralise this withdrawal in a ‘will-to-figure’ or ‘will-to-immanence’. Christopher Fynsk thus describes, referring to the primary terrain of this practice that will be addressed in this article, that of community and its withdrawal in the dispersal of communication, these
community, Nancy’s work has frequently returned to the immanent figure proper to a ‘golden age’, a figure for which; always it is a matter of a lost age in which community was woven of tight, harmonious, and infrangible bonds and in which above all it played back to itself, through its institutions, its rituals, and its symbols, the representation, indeed the living offering, of its own immanent unity, intimacy, and autonomy. (Nancy, 1991:9) Enclosed, stable and unchanging, the immanent figure of community, as it is deployed in the ‘communitarian’ literature, turns the originary relationality of the community, of which more below, to an essence; a non-relational, unified community figure. Yet the fact that this community can only ever be ‘lost’, in the communitarian literature as elsewhere, is instructive. For “[c]ommunity has not taken place” (Nancy, 1991:11); or rather, it has only taken place as this constitutive loss, as a retreat of immanent figures. What the writing of Etzioni and others demonstrate is that the immanent figure, as it immediately withdraws, betrays a transcendence at the heart of any thinking of the figure. Nancy is critical not of the figure as such, but rather a “will to absolute immanence” (1991:12), doubling as Sparks notes as a “will-to-figure” (1997:xxiii), which reacts to the withdrawal of figures by seeking to strengthen and solidify them or to find in their absence a further reason to clarify and reiterate their importance. Alasdair MacIntyre (1997) is indicative of this position, his work re-stating a need for figures, it being only through a relation to a certain model of justice, practised and
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