ABSTRACT
The modern emancipation narrative assumes, indeed it must assume, that it knows who is to be liberated, and therefore what sort of liberation is required, but for Nancy this is both presumptive and far from obvious. For Andrew Norris, Nancy’s distinction between politics and the political means that he “all but abandons politics” because he takes away from politics the transcendence which it needs to effect decisive historical change: “Nancy’s distinction between these political freedoms and the political thus has the force of robbing practical, enforceable freedoms of philosophical significance” in favour of a notion of “the political” which is dislocated from all practical politics. The call for an emancipation from emancipation is not a cute apolitical self-reflexivity on Nancy’s part, but a recognition of the self-defeating totalitarianism of emancipatory ideology.
