Nancy and Hegel: Freedom, Democracy and the Loss of the Power to Signify

I attempt to explain why the principle of uncertainty of sense, or meaning, matters to thinking the political, and where it originates, where and how it comes to appear. My focus is Nancy’s Hegel, the structural and phenomenological openness of the principle of negation, the thought of this openness as “problematics of textuality,” and the implications for “sense.” I show how this openness is radicalized through Nancy’s early work on Kant’s idea of the “experience of freedom.” Nancy engages the negativity of spirit, and what “loss” would mean under negativity’s condition. This complicates the modern heritage and what is meant by freedom, monarchy, the nation-state, violence and the subject.