Jean-Luc Nancy and the Identity of a People

Abstract Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought consistently positions itself against political forms grounded in ideas of essence or belonging. Accordingly, it sometimes portrays the concept of identity in a negative light, tending instead to gesture towards the ontological exposure at the heart of any political configuration. This tendency has led critics to claim that Nancy regards identity as a priori disastrous and to be dismissed outright. Nonetheless, a careful reading of Nancy’s work reveals a recurring preoccupation with the question of collective identity. As this article suggests, Nancy’s critique is directed less against identity as such than the ‘infinite identity’ that would bestow a totalizing ‘work’ on the collective. Indeed, Nancy constantly insists that politics cannot do without some degree of identity or figure, however skeletal. The question we must then ask is how we are to conceive this minimal figuration. One way of approaching such a figuration, I shall argue, lies in Nancy’s treatment of the proper name. This article develops Nancy’s thinking of identity and the name, showing how it allows us to think a limited coherence of the collective — here of a ‘people’ — in a way that nevertheless resists its closure, ultimately to think identity as this resistance.