Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp.

47–50, 2003

Consecration and massacre1

JEAN-LUC NANCY

Translated by Amanda Macdonald

Saturday
Daily: a user’s guide2
Why have I accepted this proposal of a daily chronicle? Because the everyday
fascinates me as a constitutive dimension of modernity. Everydayness appears
with the decline or the disappearance of the rhythm of mythic and cosmic
scansions, when the epic and even the novel eclipsed themselves behind the
daily, in all senses of the word: intimate or public, the day-to-day repertory of
a succession of fleeting presents, without origin or destination. From Heidegger
to Benjamin and from Lefebvre to Debord, from micro-history to the painting of
days à la On Kawara, without forgetting the ‘psychopathology of daily life’, the
everyday, the daily has run like a nervous system through our culture, stimulat-
ing it. Well before our time, Hegel could say that the reading of the daily paper
was the daily prayer of the modern man. But this prayer as yet honoured a divine
spirit present in each moment of its own history. For us, the everyday flows
rather like the inconsistent and insignificant instant where each present takes its
leave. Sometimes, the event prompts an enigmatic or monstrous presence, unable
to be appropriated and unforgettable. The everyday then takes charge, simul-
taneously, of the repetition of the shock and its erasure. This is what is
happening in an exemplary way at the moment: already September 11 is fading
a little, no longer always makes the front page nor even the inside front page of
the dailies, but at the same time it does not cease to come to us and to come alive
to us, anew, with its questions. Barring events to the contrary, this is what I will
chronicle.

Sunday
Two models of monotheism
Since when, though, do we live in the aftermath of events, always waiting for
their appropriation? In fact, since the First World War: 1914, 1917, 1933, the
dates of Auschwitz and of Hiroshima, those of the post- or para-colonial wars,
of the ‘fall of the wall’, of the Arab-Israeli wars, of the wars in the former
Yugoslavia, of the innumerable conflicts of peoples, States, partisans, capitals,
on all continents, have shaped the everyday in strange fashion: the more it
extends its law of insignificance and equivalence, the more it also becomes the
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/03/010047–04  2003 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
DOI: 10.1080/1368879032000080401
 JEAN-LUC NANCY

everyday of this exception: war. Today, Le Monde3 is publishing a thick dossier

on ‘war and right’. But should one not begin by recalling that war cannot be kept
in the right and that ‘rights in war’ are obviously subordinated to a ‘right of war
(and of peace)’ which was in bygone days the privilege of sovereigns. This right,
of exception by definition, was intended to be self-legitimating (as an archaic last
instance it was sacred; war is holy, or else it is something other than war).
Today, we seek to legitimate war, that is to transform it into an operation of a
police nature. But there is no State for this police, no more than there is any
divine for that which is no longer sacred. That is moreover why confronting one
another today are a vaguely sacralised police (‘in God we trust’) and a
hypersacralised warrior rearmament: two models of monotheism.

Monday
‘Added’ to what?
The difficulty, however, is that monotheism, in law, escapes from the model. Its
god does not cease to withdraw from figuration and modelisation. After Isaiah
and John, the Koran says of him that ‘He is the first and the last/He who is
apparent and he who is hidden’. The dailies have devoted a lot of space,
recently, to debates about monotheism and war. I believe, in effect, that the most
potent and also the most ambiguous quality of our current times does remain
there. On the one hand, monotheism as a reassertion of the One and his
domination, on the other monotheism—or the atheism to which it itself gives
birth—as the withdrawing and the deconstitution of the One: the possibility of
the multiple. On the side of the One, a model must be presented: the ‘first’ must
put itself to the fore. The divine One or the capital One, it’s all the same. On
the side of withdrawing … everything remains to be invented, perhaps. Because
democratic pluralism is not yet the multiplicity of the singulars. It too can even
operate as a model or figure of the One: one ‘universal right’, for example,
linked to a ‘global market’. The latter, very precisely, must be saved from
recession: and there is the everyday regaining its position on the ‘first’ page the
last few days. The global market must be saved for its own sake and so as not
to ‘give terrorists the added pleasure of a recession’ (unsourced quotation, in
today’s Libé4). ‘Added’ to what? To a first pleasure and a first victory. In effect,
a model has won through, a divine figure with a battle-ready arm, war
resuscitated. It won through because faced against it parades its symmetrical
counterpart, the fetish-god of money and misery.

Tuesday
All these little others killed …
The collision is not between civilisations nor between religions, but between two
models which are stretching the limits of the civilisation once called ‘Western’.
General formula for war: consecration and massacre. Formula for our war:
double consecration of the Great Other and of One’s Self, with massacre of all
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the others. All these little others killed, battered, burnt to death, amputated,
stupefied. All those who live the everyday of terror, of hunger, of the lack of care
and of services, the lack of education, the lack of information. The everyday that
has no more everydayness to it. The one that has no rhythm left but jerks, jolts,
convulsions. Once the war calms down, by contrast, everydayness reappears: a
while ago it was bistro tables we saw re-emerge in Sarajevo. But they say that
confusion reigns in Kabul. Confusion is the everyday of war-time, whereas war
itself claims the clarity of its principle, of its justice. This state has been
widespread in the world for a long while. Confusion or one-way traffic of
meaning, we cannot get out of it, unless through a call to consensus that fools
nobody. We are lacking an art of multiple senses, multiple ways, of the
equivocal and even of veiled senses, veiled ways, of suspended sense or of
ab-sense. An art, or rather … a sense (of direction)?

Wednesday
The accidental Occident or not?
This morning, news in the conditional: Bin Laden could have been seeking to
assassinate the Pope six years ago, in the Philippines. Se non è vero, è ben
travato. The question is in effect that of the equivalence between Christianity (I
permit myself to group here all Christianities under the figure of the Pope:
apologies to Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and other Churches, but this
figuration exists …) and capitalism, between the Sovereign Pontif and the World
Trade Centre, between communion and commerce. A matter of an equivalence
between the equality of the children of God and the general equivalence of
monetarised exchange. As Marx knew very well and in the wake of political
economy, the liberty and equality of individuals is a condition of the market, and
primarily of the labour market. Bin Laden is not thinking about this, some will
say to me. I am not so convinced, even though I know that he thinks about other
things or that those around him think of other things (and precisely about money
and about the power of the marketplace, too). Nor is the Pope thinking about
this: now here is a proposition that is even less certain, but he thinks about it (for
his sake I hope he does) as a formidable contradiction between universal love
and universal exploitation within the one kingdom. Thus, a contradiction that
must divide him. Why this sudden insistence upon poverty in the formative
Judeo-Christianity, and then in Islam, and at the same time in one whole
dimension of Hellenistic philosophy? Why the repeated motif of ‘true riches’?
Because wealth was beginning to change meaning and direction and to produce
instead of making resplendent, to produce wealth and thus also poverty. It is with
the consequences of that beginning that we are now grappling, and with its
ambiguous face: the unique god, he who refuses the gold and ivory of idols,
and the supposed god of the poor, who strips the idols bare and leaves the rich
to get richer. Now, there was indeed then a beginning, a historic event, many
events. This was not a simple accident. The accidental Occident or not? But
non-accidental, does that mean necessary?
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Thursday
Thanks to God
Thanksgiving Day: once again, the West, its history. Thanks to God for having
guided the Mayflower all the way to Massachussetts, in 1620. At the moment,
it is Ramadan, which, it has been decided all round, will not stop the war.
Thanks to God for having spoken to the prophet in the ‘night of destiny’ in the
month of Ramadan, 610. Who would deny that these dates punctuate our
provenance? But the discovery of the earth and the revelations of the word set
up the enterprise to dominate and exploit. The earth goes round in circles and
the word makes no sense there, gives no direction. Even Israel has replaced
prophets with colonists.

Friday
Who can speak and who knows?
It always remains an option to reopen talk, prophecy, philosophy and poetry.
What we are lacking is only talk, and talk never speaks except in the withdrawal
of the One. Talk is the sign of this withdrawal. This morning on CNN or LCI
the first Taliban members surrendering: muteness and heaviness in all the
bulletins. Without uniforms, victors and vanquished are for me indistinguishable.
It is just about arms changing hands without a word. Strike a blow, anyone can
do that, but who is able to talk and who knows how to do so? The present takes
its leave without being named. Speeches are unstoppable, just like the everyday,
but speech is rare: who speaks, then, today?
The stele to the memory of the great writer Mir Ali Shir Nav’i was shattered
by the fall of a palette of food supplies at Herat, the ancient capital of the
Timourides, where this ‘prince of poets’ also ruled as vizir.

Translator’s notes
1
This chronicle appeared in the French daily national newspaper, Libération, on Saturday, 24 November
2001, p 41, under the title, ‘Le sacre et le massacre’ within the rubric, ‘Mon journal de la semaine’ [‘My
diary for the week’]. It is translated with the author’s permission, from a text supplied by the author.
2
The French heading reads, ‘Quotidien mode d’emploi’. The word ‘quotidien’, while meaning ‘the everyday’
when used as a noun in combination with the definite article (le quotidien), and ‘daily’ when it is used as
a masculin adjective, is most particularly, in the context of Nancy’s diary, also an alternative term for
journal, or daily newspaper, when used in combination with the indefinite article (un quotidien, i.e. un
journal quotidien). By putting the word without an article, Nancy is able to play on it to invoke both the
broad phenomenon of daily-ness and the more particular sense of the daily newspaper.
3
Le Monde [The World/The Globe] is the national daily of record, that is to say, it aspires to providing
journalist’s journalism, which, in the French scheme of things, means that it places the emphasis on
sophisticated, well-informed, sustained, analytical writing (so that ‘feature’ writing is practically the norm).
In the fairly busy constellation of French national dailies, Le Monde is on the earnest, professionally
responsible left (though less to the left, doubtless, than in previous years), while Libération (in which Nancy
is writing) still bears some of its anarcho-socialist credentials, positioning itself as an innovator in form and
as a vehicle for fun, quirky, marginal and adventurous points of view.
4
Libération is generally referred to by its readers as ‘Libé’.

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