Exposures of Being Singular Plural
Jean-Luc Nancy's Social Ontology of the Photographic Image
by
Andrew Warfield
Student 10390405
MA Thesis; Department of Philosophy; Universiteit van Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr. Aukje van Rooden Second Reader: Dr. Johan Frederik Hartle
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 1
Chapter One – World, Sense, Touch, Dis-Enclosure …... 4
1.1 Nancy's Theoretical Modeling of World …... 4
1.2 The Question of Being-With …... 8
1.3 Metaphysical Critique of Metaphysics: Nietzsche and Heidegger …... 10
1.4 Creation Ex Nihilo and Nihilism …... 14
Chapter Two – Exteriority and the Photographic Image …... 17
2.1 Representation and the Relational …... 17
2.2 Finite Trans-Immanence …... 21
2.3 The Strangeness of Photography …... 27
2.4 Exscription …... 30
2.5 Time, Violence, and Truth …... 33
Chapter Three – Operations of Community …... 37
3.1 Responsibility and Justice …... 37
3.2 Freedom and Creation …... 41
3.3 Exposing Photography …... 43
Conclusion …... 45
Introduction
Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.
– Roland Barthes1
In an attempt to find distance from the metaphysics of representation, I ask with the plurality of the arts in mind (how there has always been “Muses and not the Muse”2): is it possible to access the
phenomenon of looking through the lens of listening? Imagine a photo to the likeness of a work of music. Not as a visual representation of a symphonic sound but an image as resonance and oscillation of the senses. The luminous melded with the sonorous. As just a few minute examples, some
photographers go out into the urban streets, or into the desert or mountains, or canvass the human body and produce photographic art that presents a material presence. For instance, this materiality can be a sense of anarchical, cacophonous energy or a sense of smooth, melodious warmth. What would it be to work further into the ontology of the photo-image and escape the idea of representation? To examine the being of the photo-image, whether loud or quiet, and to locate what the photo-image illuminates in its sporadic existence and relationship with light?
In this thesis I will primarily focus upon the ontological reasoning of Jean-Luc Nancy concerning imagery in general and photography in particular. The aim of my research in this area is to specify the links between sense, signification, and the singular plurality of being. In so doing I hope to question the responsibility of the arts in how the world is shared and the precise role of imagery and photography. The philosophical relevance of these questions revolves around the significant bearing that images, specifically photographic images, have on the ways in which the world is shared. One of the many reasons to examine this is to come to an understanding of our in-common world as it is right now in a manner that is outside of metaphysical thinking, e.g., substance, immanence, representation. Nancy questions the horizons of these ideas in such a way that pushes these ideas to their philosophical limit. As imagery has become entirely ubiquitous in practically all cultures, what is at stake in asking these questions is to investigate the ways in which imagery is involved in how the world can be shared.
A key element of this thesis is to disrupt the myths of community. Nancy gives an ontological dimension to the thought of community, which resolutely challenges standard conceptions of political community. His is one that allows for the opening for the thought of community based upon the being-with of singularities (which involves the conscious recognition of our sharing), as opposed to the
1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 6. 2 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses (Stanford: Stanford UP., 1996), 1.
concept of community as a group of atomistic individuals bounded by a collective identity and grounded in metaphysics of subject-hood. That form of identity denies our being-in-common and inevitably leads to attempts to protect identity through rejection of others (racism and xenophobia stem from this foundation). Why is it that no productions of humans can maintain a mastering over what grounds or provides foundation for itself? This in essence is what is meant by finitude. Also, in this moment of realization of finitude, shaky metaphysical constructs are erected, e.g., God, Man, Reason, that are attempts at mastering human production and all spheres of beings. How is it that since the Enlightenment our time has become a secular postscript (e.g., privileging of reason, free will, and universality of law) to the very theological traditions that have been tried so hard to overcome? Here, the philosophical relevancy of Nancy's work is in the affirmation of the failing of such constructs and what results is not another myth, i.e., nihilism, but a petition for freedom and the recognition that being is not predesigned by any form of grounding. Therefore, what is truly at stake here is coming to grips with the understanding that singular being is relation of sharing with others.
As Nancy speaks of language often in his texts, it is necessary to enumerate the ties between language and photography. I view the photo-image as a form of writing with light. Reiterating the point that both text and image share the fact that they have no innate relationship with their referents. I wish to trace out this functioning within imagery and its consequences and through navigating the vanishing points of signification and sense so as to focus on the photographic image and the creation of the world. Does the photo-image function as an index or can it be a creative force of the world? Can the image be a divergence from regimes of common knowledge? If so, can the image take responsibility for the world and respond to itself?
In the first chapter, I will provide an overview of some of Nancy's key terms: world, being-with, and being-singular-plural so as to contextualize the themes of imagery. Key to this explication will be how Nancy devotes himself to the questioning of what it means to be in a world, i.e., how it is that there is a world. It must be stressed that for Nancy such questions are centered upon a
post-metaphysical view of the world as a whole and our place in it are just that; questions and as such they must remain open questions. This will also include a discussion on the critique of metaphysics and on the co-existential analytic of Nancy along with its indebtedness to Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. Chapter two will focus on the photographic image. It will provide a demonstration of how Nancy's work is not an attempt to find the origin of the world that is beyond the world nor to get beyond phenomenology but to grasp at the very limits of world and phenomenology. Central to my
argument will consider the photo-image as a mode of exposure of being qua exteriority, i.e., how a photo can expose the exteriority of a thing as a contact or relation with what is outside the thing. In addition, I will discuss Nancy's approaches to representation, finitude, and his erudite neologisms of 'trans-immanence' and 'exscription.' Central to this chapter will be a discussion based upon how the photo-image acts more as an extension of the world as opposed to a representation. It will also
elaborate on Nancy's attempt to establish that violence has an ontology rooted in fixed, universal truth. Chapter three will detail the aspects of community, responsibility, and justice. I will give explanation to these terms and demonstrate the role photography can have. One of the main issues in this chapter is the questioning of what responsibility photography can have given the ontology of the image presented in the previous chapters.
The objective of this thesis is to identify the distinction between sense and world and how Nancy rethinks the role of aesthetics herein implied. Within the logics of Nancy's singular plural ontology, there is a definite tension between the arts, finitude, and the senses. Art becomes the location where common-sense understood through signification is dis-located from sense: “We are dealing with this: the form-idea withdraws and the vestigial form of this withdraw is what our platonizing lexicon makes us call 'sensible.' Aesthetics as the domain and the thinking of the sensible does not mean anything other than that”.3 This is how Nancy relates his understanding of the current metaphysical discourse
surrounding art as one that seeks to deconstruct essence and existence as sense.
Chapter One – World, Sense, Touch, Dis-Enclosure
The true world–we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With
the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.
– Friedrich Nietzsche4
1.1. Nancy's Theoretical Modeling of World
Nancy's complex treatment of sense is one that is intricately tied to his disposition that the experience of the world is one that is qualitatively heterogeneous. First, it is necessary to explicate Nancy's conceptualization of world as opposed to the Earth or globe. World should be understood as the space in which being is dis-enclosed as opposed to any form of image of the world that manifests itself as a world-view, Weltbild (world-image) or Weltanschauung. That is, understanding the world as a single encompassing image of humanity's relation to the universe is for Nancy an impossible
abstraction. For example, an understanding of the world that considers there to be an Earth that is outside of our being and can be utilized in an instrumental, means-to-ends manner.5 Or, the belief in a
divine realm outside the world, or the belief that the world is total non-sense. For Nancy, there is no outside the world or outside sense for we are always in the world and the world always has a sense to it. Therefore, sense is indispensably bound to being and world. I will sketch out further the ideas of world and image in the second chapter.
Through an assessment of Heidegger's conception of Dasein delivered in his 1929-30 lecture course: The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Nancy elaborates the point that Heidegger
categorizes the world in its relation to humanity in a rather tenuous manner.6 In the lecture, Heidegger
mentions that: “the stone is without world;” “the animal is poor in the world;” “humanity is world forming.” Nancy's criticism is that this is not adequate to the fact that what is non-human in the world is much more than the mere correlates of human phenomenology resting upon a differentiation of subject and object. What is exterior to humanity is what allows for humanity to make sense of itself in-the-world. He remarks: “...this world beyond humanity is the effective exteriority of humanity itself, if the formula is understood in such a way as to avoid construing the relation between humanity and world as a relation between subject and object.”7 The world does not partake in the traditional subject,
object binary distinction, world and Earth are not synonymous thoughts in Nancy's work. World is the
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols from The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), 486.
5 Jean Luc-Nancy, The Sense of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 54. 6 Ibid. 55.
aggregate of all beings whereas Earth is the natural sphere of nature. Which is in itself an entity that does not persist outside of being and need not be considered an object of technological mastery or any other usage because before anything in the world is put to use it is en-framed, revealed, and disclosed within a form of the world as beings-as-a-whole. This is a turn towards rethinking of what it is to relate to the world as our being-in-the-world. It is a rejection of thinking the world as though it is outside ourselves, i.e., the world as object and us as subject. The mode of relating to the world has become far more elemental to the extent that we as humans can no longer relate to the world with complete autonomy. For it is the world that allows the possibility of its dis-enclosure.
The method of dis-enclosure is of tantamount importance. Nancy distances himself from the term “disclosure” which carries with it a logic of revival and return. Disclosure posits that there is a ready-made answer; nothing has actually been lost, it is simply hidden, lying in wait to be discovered or rediscovered. This reasoning makes a basic assumption about existence: that the world is a given which presupposes a giver, thus, disclosure is in truth only more closure, according to Nancy. Dis-enclosure, on the other hand, does not take part in such metaphysical assumptions, what is dis-enclosed is the birth of an entirely uncommon world, Nancy comments, and I quote at length:
Dis-enclosure denotes the opening of an enclosure, the raising of a barrier. And the closure that should interest us is that which has been designated as 'the closure of metaphysics.' This
expression has, first, the sense of a tautology: 'metaphysics,' in the sense by which Nietzsche and Heidegger have marked this term, denotes the representation of being as beings and as beings present. In so doing, metaphysics sets a founding, warranting presence beyond the world (viz., the Idea, Summum Ens, the Subject, the Will). This setup stabilizes beings, enclosing them in their own beingness. Everything–properly and precisely everything–is played out in the mutual referral of these two regimes of beings or presence: the 'immanent' and the
'transcendent;' the 'here-below' and the 'beyond;' the 'sensuous' and the 'intelligible;' 'appearance' and 'reality.' Closure is the completion of this totality that conceives itself to be fulfilled in its self-referentiality.8
Nancy's style of dis-enclosure is distinguished from disclosure in that it is not a means to return or rebuild a new structure after it has exposed what was once closed. That would be a self-defeating strategy. To begin with dis-enclosure examines the unstable openings that closures are built upon and does not merely reconstitute a new closure on top of that opening but allows for the opening to remain open. This is also a critique of the metaphysical closure of a one world-view of the we as subjects looking upon the world as an object that is outside us.
The question arises of how to create an image of the world that would be in accordance with
Nancy's dis-enclosure. Is it possible that art and imagery can provide a distinct view of the world that does not conform to the metaphysical closure of the world being outside? An artistic image that does not present an image of the world as a Weltanschauung that encompass all of humanity and all of time? Nancy makes a clear distinction that this Weltbild is a form of closure that appropriates time from its very beginning. It is as though we need to understand time in its full effect. That is, to understand time so that it can never be filtered into a story or representation. This is time that has a presence that is always advancing beyond itself so that there is a constant novel image of itself that is also constantly evanescent to the point in which it is unimaginable.9 Art in this mode of time is one of emergence, i.e.,
art not attempting to answer the question of the origin of time through a story. Rather, it has to do with an eternal return and experience. It is to view time as each instant going ahead of itself and returning back to itself never cut of from its origin. Nancy differentiates himself with Nietzsche's formulation of the eternal return in that he does not consider time to be necessarily released into a flow of becoming. For Nancy, time is: “Neither the eternal nor the incessant, but something that is neither: time itself, the tension of originary time. Death opening onto the eternal return of birth: this is what is hardest to think, an experience that goes all the way and that can no longer even show itself as an 'experience.' Yet, 'art' 'speaks' of nothing else.”10
Nancy is asserting that art is something we can experience and feel, but what exactly is it that we experience? It is a particular shaping of the world and of the self in the world.11 Also, in this context
what does 'world' mean? It equals the capabilities of interpretation, the “circulation of meaning”12
again, this methodology is implicitly Heideggerian in that the world is understood as “a totality of 'significabilities', that is, of possibilities of meaning, not a totality of given significations, but a totality of possibilities of signification.”13 That is, an opening to another world that is not a second world
outside of this world. This is why it is constantly said that an artist has their own 'world'; they create a new world that cannot be understood at first and this is how an artist can actually form their audience. Also, perhaps this is why many people comment on current art that it is in fact somehow 'not art' because it can not yet be understood as art. Art yields a sense of the world to take shape and circulate without stabilizing it to a finalizing enclosure of signification. This is meaning that is a feeling that never comes to rest in a verbalized and finale signification. As at times philosophy, but more often than
9 Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II (Stanford: Stanford UP., 2006), 217. 10 Ibid. 217.
11 Jean Luc Nancy, “Art Today,” Journal of Visual Culture 9, No. 1 (2010): 92. 12 Ibid. 92.
not, ideology, verbalizes “the meaning of the world is this,” whether it be a message focused upon humanity, or a divine world, or that the world has no meaning whatsoever. Art never makes such a statement it “disengages the senses from signification”14 as a release from the world as signification, or
rather, it disengages the world from signification, and that is what we call “the senses" when the senses are sensed as being outside of significations. This would be what Nancy refers to as the sense of the
world (as suspension from signification) and touch itself.15
It follows that for Nancy existence has to understood in terms of singularity. Existence, exposed as a singularity, exposes the singularity of Being within all being, i.e., the existence of humanity does not differentiate a true form of existing from that of a category of secondary existence. But rather, the difference between Being and being contours the factual state of singularity. We could not consider ourselves to be 'humans' if not for other 'non-human' things. Therefore, existence can not be taken as a property of Dasein but as the primary singularity of Being that Dasein in turn exposes in all being. This does not equal so much that it is the world of humanity that humanity is exposed to but the world of the nonhuman and in turn humanity is also exposed. Humanity could be considered the exposing of the world; neither as a ending or grounding of the world, but the world as “the exposure of humanity; it is
neither the environment nor the representation of humanity.”16 It is distinguishable that Nancy is
specifying how humanity need not be isolated from the rest of being as each in turn exposes one another. He is ascribing to humanity the spacing of meaning, i.e., 'we' are meaning but we are not the contents, results, of consummation of meaning. We can say that we are meaning in the sense that we are the elemental component in which meaning can be fabricated and disseminate. With the retreat of religion and political ideologies, there is a certain sense that neither political leaders nor religion can be depended upon to provide sense for us. Therefore, 'we' must make sense for ourselves, not as the humanistic substance and sum total of meaning of nature, Being, or history but as the we-are that is our being. It must be stressed that by saying 'we' must make sense for ourselves in no way meant to regard the experience and values of humanity as the final aim and goal of all existence or place humanity at the absolute center of 'creation.' That is, existence is not a property of humanity's being, it is the
originative singularness of Being; humanity's creation of existence is more of an exposure of existence which humanity shares with all beings. I will return to the idea of exposure further into the thesis for it is essential to understanding Nancy's ontology of the image.
14 Nancy, Muses, 22. 15 Ibid. 22.
The influence of Heidegger's ontology and his critique of metaphysical critique upon Nancy's philosophy cannot be underestimated, Nancy writes that: “The existential analytic of Being and Time is the project from which all subsequent thinking follows, whether this is Heidegger's own later thinking or our various ways of thinking against or beyond Heidegger himself.”17 However, Nancy's project is
one that examines and develops his ideas into far greater conclusions and resists any reduction to a conformist 'Heideggerianism.' It is clear that his work Being Singular Plural is an endeavor to expound beyond Heidegger as he takes on the task of reforming the entirety of first philosophy by allocating the basis of Being within a constitution of singular plurality. That is, parallel and contrary to Heidegger, Nancy contends that there is no pure givenness of Being as an object that can function as a grounding of Being–“Being itself is given to us as meaning. Being does not have meaning. Being itself, the phenomenon of Being, is meaning that is, in turn, its own circulation—and we are this circulation. There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself is the sharing of Being.”18 In
Nancy's philosophy being is never independent of meaning, simply given, or objectified but is
comprised as an unremitting circulation of meaning that can only take place among beings. Meaning is actual but can in no way be restrained to a single origin within a single self or the space of community but rather, what Nancy more radically refers to as a transimmanence or transindividuality that is a plural partitioning; a distinction that is inseparable from being-with.
1.2 The Question of Being-With
In the foreground is Nancy replying to Heidegger's 'ontological question,' i.e., the question of being or Seinsfrage in which singular being is explored within a pre-preexistent Being. Yet, Nancy refashions Heidegger's task of devising a fundamental ontology of being from the Seinsfrage to a question of being-with or Mitseinsfrage; thus challenging both premises of a antecedent Being that each separate being is 'thrown' and 'fallen' into and the attempt to access the questioning singular being apart from societal interchange.19 Nancy has a close kinship with Heidegger's Dasein in regards of
Nancy's view of the world as not partaking in a binary subject, object separation. This links specially with Heidegger's notion of the da or 'there/place,' in Dasein, i.e., being as always already in the world. It should be said that this radically opposes the Cartesian tradition of accepting the world as an object
17 Ibid. 93. 18 Ibid. 2.
and humans as subjects standing before it. For both Nancy and Heidegger the Cartesian model is refused so that the only manner in which the world may be encountered as the world is in its totality as
world, is through accounting for being as in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-world). Nancy distinguishes
himself from Heidegger in that for him, Mitsein is of far greater importance in facing the world.
Whereas Heidegger situated his remembrance of the forgetting of being within an existential analytic of the authenticity of Dasein. Nancy, on the contrary, sees to it that such a first philosophy is revised within the existential analytic of the inauthenticity of Mitsein, i.e., as far as Heidegger's ontology is concerned.20 However, in Being Singular Plural, Nancy critically disputes both Heidegger's notions of
Dasein and Mitsein when the question of community is implicated, he remarks that “Heidegger's
ontology of Mitsein is still no more than a sketch”21, i.e., even though there is 'with' in Mitsein, there is
still a failure to propel the singular being into its exteriority to the degree required for the event of a being-singular-plural. I will return to the issue of subjectivity and the community in further chapters.
Nancy provides a compelling rethinking of both Dasien and Mitsein; he takes this direction not only for ontological reasons but for political purposes as well. With the terrible fate of the politics of Heidegger's authenticity of Dasein, Nancy realizes within the concept of inauthentic Mitsein, there is a more potent form of philosophical revolution at stake. What Nancy sees as the failure of Heidegger's own potentiality of thought is that he turns to hastily from the singularity of Dasein to the assimilated many of das Man and along the way neglects to see how the cohesion of Being is among beings and in being-in-common. For Nancy, Heidegger cannot grasp the possibilities inherent in being-with as he rushes to situate an opposition between being-with as a structural formation of ordinary anonymity that is at variance to Dasein's potential for an individual existence of authenticity. In his own words, Nancy says:
What is the being-with of Being?....if Being is being-with, then it is, in its being-with, the 'with' that constitutes Being; the with is not simply an addition. This operates in the same way as a collective power: power is neither exterior to the members of the collective nor interior to each one of them, but rather consists in the collectivity as such. Therefore, it is not the case that the 'with' is an addition to some prior Being; instead, the 'with' is at the heart of Being.22
Thus, for Nancy, the ontological and political question is no longer a mater of the sovereignty of a single self or that of the Other but has become the question of being-with, the question of sense posed to a finite humanity, it is our question as a 'social' ontology of being-with. A primary purpose with this
20 Simon Critchley, "With Being-With?" Studies in Practical Philosophy: A Journal of Ethical and Political Philosophy 1, No.1 (1999), 54.
21 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 44. 22 Ibid. 30, 35.
is to critique philosophy's subordination of being-with to Being, i.e., the privileging of subjectivity, and thus creating for itself the problem of being, especially Heidegger's positioning the originarity of
Dasein and only after that giving character of co-origin to Mitsein. It is also to move away from
thinking of being as substance to being as a dynamic action of sharing the world, a being-with. This concept of sharing is one that displaces substantive metaphysics in that it is not as though what is shared is a substance that can be possessed and divided between beings, it is the praxis of sharing a finite being. Nancy makes the remark that: “If being is sharing, our sharing, then 'to be' (to exist) is to share.”23 With this form of inquiry into Mitsein, Nancy distinguishes being as a meshwork of happening
and motion as opposed to substance or properties. Indeed, it is through this action of sharing that, for Nancy, a community comes into being and prior to this act there is no being or common-substance to speak of.
1.3 Metaphysical Critique of Metaphysics: Nietzsche and Heidegger
It is also with the influence of Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics that Nancy reworks Heidegger's critical affirmation of the 'overcoming of metaphysics.' It is as though Nancy utilizes Nietzsche to counter Heidegger in that much of what Nancy advocates is close to Heideggarian thought but is undone and remodeled with that of Nietzscheian thought. That is, with Nancy's being singular plural he is able to rethink Heidegger's ontology amidst a Nietzscheian casting of multiplicity. Nancy also reestablishes Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics contra Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche. Heidegger's critical appraisal of Nietzsche is that Nietzsche remains in the metaphysical line of thought, i.e., a thinking of being based upon beings as a totality, Heidegger states:
Nietzsche stands within a decision, as do all Western thinkers before him. With them, he affirms the predominance of beings over against Being, without knowing what is involved in such an affirmation.... Thought metaphysically, Being is that which is thought from beings as their most universal definition and to beings as their ground and cause.... Beings are regarded as that which lays claim to an explanation. Each time, beings take precedence here as the standard, the goal, and the actualization of Being.24
For Heidegger, to think within the domain of metaphysics is to regard Being upon the basis of beings, i.e., a utmost being which provides a grounding cause, such as an Aristotelian causa sui, prime mover, or a divine god. Or as an equally disadvantageous alternative, a totality of beings in consideration of being could be thought of as a realm of transcendental essences or continual selfhood, e.g., the Platonic Ideas. For each of these Heidegger would point out that being is first thought as beings in general and
23 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford UP., 1993), 72. 24 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche. Vol. 3 (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 6, 7.
only afterwards is their grounding searched for within a particular cause, selfhood, or essence that is always external and precedent. Heidegger is saying that Nietzsche remains inside this form of thinking in that he positions the totality of beings intrinsically with that of flux and becoming. In one of Nancy's early articles, “Nietzsche: Mais où sont les yeux pour le voir?” (Nietzsche: But Do We Have The Eyes To See Him?), originally published in 1968 in the journal Esprit, he directly confronts Heidegger's criticism of Nietzsche as the authority that overturns all authority. Nancy alludes to Nietzsche as indeed remaining within the boundaries of metaphysical thinking, however, Nietzsche is also able to
simultaneously exceed and supervene upon the inner logics of metaphysics:
...in the playing out to the very end the game of this metaphysics. The entirety of metaphysics can be found in Nietzsche... Certainly, Nietzsche warns us with the utmost rigor that
metaphysics cannot be surpassed, that one cannot leave one's tradition. Heidegger today maintains this warning. But Nietzsche is there to show us another way.25
What Nancy is indicating is that Nietzsche himself preemptively displaces Heidegger's evaluation and even offers a resolve that does not conform to Heidegger's intellection of being. Thus it is Nietzsche that supplies an advancement for philosophy.26 Nancy presents Nietzsche as one who considers
knowledge and truth to be an act of interpreting and existence as fable. Within this view, systems of philosophy are read and valuated as interpretation that lacks a solid reenforcement of truth whose position is correlative more to rhetoric and metaphor than timeless, pure reason. Nancy insists that such an affirmation of existence as narrative or truth as rhetorical trope may give the appearance of a gesture towards a metaphysical foundation. However, this gesture also releases a prescript that fuses the instant of the affirmation into an interpretative narration in itself, presenting the depiction:
Perhaps metaphysics, by dint of being infinitely spread out in Nietzsche, of revealing itself as the free circulation of interpretations,... perhaps metaphysics has delivered itself from itself. Neither suppressed, nor surpassed: delivered. Free to occupy its own metaphysical perspective, but also to be put into play against itself.27
Metaphysics is indeed ubiquitous within the thought of Nietzsche. Yet the metaphysical foundation is that of deconstructing foundations. Thus, according to its own logic, it deconstructs its own foundation within an eternal return of interpretation. Hence, this gesture exceeds, ruptures, and subverts all such metaphysical efforts to sustain a grounding for the discernment of beings in their entirety.
Here, a decisive contrast can be made between Heidegger and Nancy concerning existence, the world, and sense. For Nancy, it is not only through Dasein that existence is formulated. In terms of
25 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Nietzsche: Mais où sont les yeux pour le voir?” Esprit, trans. Ian James (March 1968), 500.
26 Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford UP., 2006), 19.
imagery, Heidegger's ontology would say that the image cannot make sense of itself as an image; whereas Dasein can make sense of the image through a meaningful relation to itself. Now for Nancy, the image does not exist based upon a Dasein that would allow for the image to be what it is through relating meaningfully to it, Nancy sees an opening for the existence of the image that is not only possible once the image is confronted by a subject.28 One can relate to an image precisely because it is
there, exposed in its own materiality, eluding apprehension. This is the main crux of Nancy's criticism of Heidegger's phenomenological ontology, that any form of access to meaning or significance is only considered through the provisions of incorporation and appropriation.
For Heidegger, the world can only have sense with the existence of a Dasein, whereas for Nancy, the making of sense is not restricted to Dasein but rather to singularities (whether images or people) partaking the exposure of one another. That things in the world can have meaning is underscored by the releasing of sense that happens among the intervals of the modulations between singularities; the sense of the world is not created solely by or for Daseins. What relation Nancy does speak of humans having to the sense of the world is that of an expositor. He comments: “Within language, 'humanity' is not the subject of the world; it does not represent the world, it is no the origin or end. It is not its meaning; it does not give it meaning. It (humanity) is the exponent, but what it thus exposes is not itself, it is not 'humanity'; rather, it exposes the world and its proper being-with-all-beings in the world, exposes it as world.”29 Thus, people are not the composers of the world, having authority over the sense making of
the world, they are the exposures of the exposing of circulations of contact with all that which has existence in the world. In this way Nancy implies a bearing of action regarding existence, i.e., humans as exposures of the world can resolve to either allow the space for the relations of exposition to remain open or they can close it off, shutting down the exposure of an entity into itself.
It must be noted that this praxis concerning existence need not be approached dualistically as one is already an interiority facing an exteriority; existence is that which can be a practice but it is not as though to exist is a autonomous determination or an absolutely transparent manifestation. The involvement with existence should be understood as responsibility for the sense of the world, to struggle for the constant reopening of the spaces of the sense of the world, so that the world can have the possibility to be a world; as Nancy says: “A world is precisely that in which there is room for everyone: but a genuine place, one in which things can genuinely take place (in this world). Otherwise,
28 Nancy, Sense of World, 62. 29 Nancy, Being Singular Plural. 85.
this is not a 'world': it is a 'globe' or a 'glome,' it is a 'land of exile' and a 'vale of tears.'30 This would in
effect be a form of world that is a circulation of sense that cannot be signified. In direct opposition to the world as an opening to some other higher world that can provide a ground for the world outside the world, e.g., a divine realm of god(s) and angles. Indeed, with God's death comes the sense that this openness to a world beyond has become senseless. As such, it persists today that all that is left of the world is the closed notion of a “land of exile” and this equals that the world still has not faced its own boundlessness as such even while maintaining no belief in another world or the divine.
As for visual art and the current or contemporary world of today, what can be said as a defining element of 'art today'? Nancy would articulate that what is crucial to art today is the “opening of a form that is above all a question”31 its exigency being how the formation of a world is attainable, a question
of “formation of forms for which no preliminary form is given”32 or to put it bluntly; what is art? This
corresponds to Kant's notion of the schema which is the intellection that there is a non-sensible image that premises the opening of sensible images; so that the demand of art today is to continue exterior to any schematism. This also involves all the possible sensible forms of the arts in general whether verbal, auditory, or visual. One could say that the departure of grand imposing schemas (either ethical,
political, religious, and also aesthetic) is what constitutes being-in-the-world today as a world that is “at a loss for world”33 thus, the self is also in a amorphous disposition and this is precisely what
contemporary art identifies and portrays. As for art being political, Nancy sees this as a grave error because to accept that a certain work of art is simply political is a means of forgetfulness of the question of art. Also, to posit an 'art for arts sake' position is just as wrong for it too converts art into a exclusive product or even a bludgeon (“here you are, this is war”34) of pure signification that dominates
the work and leaves it completely closed to the world.35 However, it can be said that the act or gesture
of art that points beyond the work can function as a questioning of what is art. For Nancy, this is what art is today. As with Duchamp's Fountain, the art becomes a signal (Nancy phrases it as a Heideggerian
Wink) of the question of art and that there is the possibility for opening a world to us. The gesture is not
a schema of a form but is “a sensible dynamism that precedes, accompanies, or succeeds meaning or signification, it is sensible sense [sens sensible].”36 This is sense understood to be apart from meaning
30 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 42. 31 Nancy, “Art Today,” 94.
32 Ibid. 94. 33 Ibid. 95. 34 Ibid. 95. 35 Ibid. 96. 36 Ibid. 97.
and/or signification. It is sense as the limits of meaning and signification and that which allows for the possibility of meaning and signification. A sense of sharing an embodied, worldly, and material
existence which always already has sense. Thus, sense is a priori to language or any form of symbolic determination. As such, sense is the multiple of the real that exposes the limits of thought, rupturing presence and signification.37
1.4 Creation Ex Nihilo and Nihilism
In the aftermath of Nietzsche and Heidegger, the discourse of 'exposure' (to the limits of philosophical, metaphysical, and aesthetic thought) is quite proper for attending to photographic imagery. In that a photo is materialistically speaking an exposure of light, i.e., the total density of light that is allowed to fall upon the film or digital sensor inside a camera (I will come back to the topic of light in the next chapter). Returning to Nancy's singular plural ontology of the image and the creation of the meaning of the world as exposure as opposed to appearance or representation. It can be said that the world is created ex nihilo. It is not a production or construction outside of exposure as a birth of sense into the presence of being; the nihil that the world is created from is seen in the light of an opening or exposure, rather than a grounding. Traditionally, creatio ex nihilo implies that there is no value or sense in things as they are in themselves for everything emerges from an absolute nothingness. Therefore, all valuation and sense can only be given by a creator that is outside all things. Philosophy has gone to extreme lengths trying to put what is outside of ex nihilo into an immanence within all that exists. However, Nancy regards any such attempt as inherently futile. He effectually revises the entire conception of ex nihilo so as to accept the full outcome. Nancy's ex nihilo of the world is an expression of an extreme materialism that views the world as “created from nothing: this does not mean fabricated with nothing by a particularly ingenious producer... The ex nihilo is the genuine formulation of a radical materialism, that is to say, precisely, without roots”.38 Nancy's revaluation of the conditions of
creation ex nihilo and the 'nihil' of nihilism correlates with his encounter between Heidegger's and
Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics and the overcoming of nihilism concerning the death of God. That is, any reasoning that could be embedded inside a firm sediment for the entirety of all that is has died. Thus, the question now becomes whether or not this death of God/reason that distributes the world as a contingency, produces an inescapable nihilism or whether it acclimates a recourse for overcoming nihilism. Within Nietzsche's thought, the death of God indicates that our past guiding valuations,
37 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997), 63. 38 Nancy, Creation of the World, 51.
deriving their strength from the belief that they were absolutely objective, have become powerless for they are now seen as wholly subjective human activity. Hence, values are not discovered outside but constructed inside; Nietzsche's conclusion is that values themselves are not what is valuable but the act of valuing itself, the will that produces such values, is what actually holds true value. Within this devaluation of all values emerges a form of consummated nihilism for Nietzsche and he locates within this nihilism the possibility for the overcoming of nihilism; through dissolution of transcendental and teleological accounts of the world and affirmation of the physical world as the only world which exists as an eternal state of becoming. Furthermore, Nietzsche's precept for a valuation which can overcome nihilism becomes the “will to power” often misunderstood to be a willing of something outside of the will. However, Nietzsche's will to power is a will to prevail over itself, not simply in achievement of some end or ambition, which also excludes teleological thinking of 'positive development' and 'negative decay' (Nietzsche's will to power is simultaneously both), but in self-overcoming and Being as the continual becoming of life.
In sum, Nietzsche's will to power can overcome nihilism, however, for Nancy (here he agrees with Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche) this will to power reduces all life to one measure: the will, and therefore persists as being nihilistic. Nancy distinguishes himself with the understanding that the overcoming of nihilism is only possible through a mode of valuation that surmises an
incommensurability of all valuation; as transcendent thinking dies there is not a birth of an endless immanentism of becoming. The death of God and the overcoming of nihilism are for Nancy bound to his revaluation or dis-enclosure of creation ex nihilo and how such a notion contains the implication that, as the world is 'created' out of nothing, there is therefore no fundamental prerequisite for the world and therefore there is also no absolute creator, whether divine or human:
The idea of creatio ex nihilo, inasmuch as it is clearly distinguished from any form of
production or fabrication, essentially covers the dual motif of an absence of necessity and the existence of a given without reason, having neither foundation nor principle... Ex nihilo, which is to say: ...nothing but that which is, nothing but that which grows, lacking any growth
principle.39
Thus, the world has no form of giver to impart reason, yet the world continues to have an opening whether or not it is open only to a nothingness. Nancy is attempting to think beyond the logics of metaphysical closure that seeks a meaning for the world that requires a transcendental giving from outside, or an immanent grounding from inside the world. If this is the case that all of existence is not an incarnation of any form of more fundamental, metaphysical reality, how does imagery and
representation fit into the creation of the world? This question addresses the relations between the world as creation ex nihilo and imagery. In the next chapter I will first explore further the consequences of ex nihilo regarding the photo-image. In the third chapter I will discuss further the role of community concerning ex nihilo and creation.
Chapter Two – Exteriority and the Photographic Image
The photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the
sight by force…
– Roland Barthes40
2.1 Representation and the Relational
Turning to Nancy's discernment of the ontology of representation, it is quite noticeable that this too could be recognized as an ongoing dialogue with Heidegger in that there is a certain ontological structure of analysis of imagery and representation that resembles that of Heidegger's investigation of
Dasein. Nancy opposes the classical distinction between truth versus appearance. He does not hold that
the image is a double or copy of the thing in the world. He allows the image to have an ontological autonomy all of its own but not as an object has autonomy; the image for Nancy has an incisive form of presence that is not thing-like. Nancy writes that the image “is neither the thing nor the imitation of the thing. It is the resemblance of the thing, which is different. In its resemblance, the thing is detached from itself. It is not the 'thing-itself' but the 'sameness' of the present thing as such.”41 Indeed,
addressing imagery with regards to being turns away from the traditional formulation of opposing representation from some category of true being. This is a custom of thinking that places the image as a manner of appearance that simply appears, i.e., the image is a representation that can only have any import based upon its affinity to being, while not actually holding any veritable role in being. Within this understanding the image can only be recognized as a relation to its very own non-being, as a
re-presentation of an augmented factual presence. This regulates imagery to occupy a subsidiary sphere of
existence that is entirely subtractive; it is only a double or copy of the true, legitimate thing.
Accordingly, Nancy commences with his ontology of the image not as a facsimile of the thing in the world nor as an object, but through a Heideggerian analysis of the image as present-at-hand or
Vorhanden. Nancy refers to this as a distinction of the image; in the chapter titled: “The Image – The
Distinct” from his 2005 work The Ground of the Image, he writes:
The distinct stands apart from the world of things considered as a world of availability. In this world all things are available for use, according to their manifestation. What is withdrawn from this world has no use, or has a completely different use, and is not presented in a manifestation (a force is not a form: here it is also a question of how the image is not a form and is not formal). It is not what shows itself but rather what gathers itself into itself, the taut force on the
40 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 91.
side of forms or beyond them, but not as another obscure form: rather as the other of forms. It is the intimate and its passion, distinct from all representation.42
Afterwards there is a brief discussion of Rene Magritte's famous painting of a pipe titled: This is Not A
Pipe. Nancy proposes that the image speaks in a manner that is nonlinguistic, that the image is
supported by itself as an image, as image: “The image as image is thus distinct from its being-there in the sense of the Vorhanden, its simple presence in the homogeneity of the world...”43 The
meaning of an image is therefore tied to how the image functions as the presentation of imaging itself. Not as though we are a Cartesian subject standing outside a represented image of the world. The world must not be objectified and reduced to an image and therefore, we must not be subjectified into
separated spectators. This would equal a situation in which humans and the world lose their correlative ontology. On the one hand, this separation has led to massive surges in technological power. On the other, it has also opened the floodgates for such destruction as World Wars, brought the planet to the brink of nuclear annihilation, and now global climate change; which is only to mention a few of the globally sized affects. The time has passed in which there can be a figure that is an observer of the world as such, a figure in which Nancy refers to as a cosmotheoros.44 If it is so that it is no longer
possible to represent the figure of the cosmotheoros it is due to the fact that the world can not be
recognized as a representation any longer. This form of worldview as a representation of the world is to ascribe a final explanation to the world and thus an ending of the world. Nancy attributes the Nazi
Weltanschauung as an attempt to answer to the absence of a cosmotheoros. He also credits Heidegger
as turning against this form of Nazism and the entirety of this “age of the Weltbilder–images or pictures of a world”45 in his 1938 essay: Die Zeit des Weltbildes ('The Age of the World Picture'). To reach the
preeminent determination of the contemporary world is to see that the world remains outside of representation as a whole, i.e., apart from representations of it and any world of representation.
Nancy discerns the image as Heidegger discerns the being of Dasein in that the image has its own modality of being that is set-apart from objectified conditions. This is a shift from categorical structures to existentilia. In doing this Nancy turns away from the objective elements of the image to that of the ontological dimensions of the image; the presence, absence, spatiality, temporality, finitude,
immanence, transcendence, and sense of the image-being. For both Heidegger and Nancy, the
existentiale of being-with, Mitsein, is a major factor in the constitution of being. For Nancy, the
42 Ibid. 2, 3. 43 Ibid. 9.
44 Nancy, Creation of the World, 43. 45 Ibid. 43.
possibility for the opening of meaning can only be generated within a framework of co-originarity. This is precisely why the world needs to be reconsidered not as an outside object but rather as the place in which we are in. For even the assertion of an outside positioning is only possible from a position within the world. Being-in-the-world and being-with is constitutive to being as such. This is not us as a
relation to the world but us as the relation itself. We are the place where the world can happen, where it can be. This is an understanding of humans together as the Mit in Mitsein within a radical openness of the world. An openness that is not opened to some other world but towards itself as its own happening; assuming itself as its own boundless event and taking this on as its own ontology. This would be what Nancy deems as mondialisation as opposed to globalization, i.e., the world merely as a 'globe'
consisting of an accumulation of beings. What is missing from globalization is the boundlessness of
mondialisation. This boundlessness is infinite, however, it negates itself in the process and is realized
as finite. This is not an expression of an Aufhebung or any dialectical movement for there is no synthesis into a higher action or infinity. To realize the world as boundless (infinite) is to also realize that it is finite in the sense that there will never be any point of absolute knowledge. To exist in the world as the finite mit-da (with-there) where the world can be realized as infinite sein (being) correlates with Nancy's notion of creation considered in the first chapter.
The point here is that what makes all imagery distinct (akin to the separation of the sacred from the profane) is that it is distant and that this distancing is often too quickly referred to as an absence or a distancing that is outside the world. The haste in which this is absence is referenced is in fact a piercing presence that recedes into itself and stands apart from the instrumentality of signification. The image at once simultaneously says that it is the thing imaged and that as image it images the thing. The image does not say that it is an image of the thing as substitute but that it is a thing-image, the absence of the thing is presented as sense.46 One can say that the image presents itself in its being-image as a
presence-at-hand, i.e., the presence of the image creates a sense of rupture. This notion of presentation is one that effectively ruptures the idea of representation and is the location of Nietzsche's 'death of God' in which all distinction between the world of the real and the apparent world is abolished. Presentation relates back to Nancy's critique of Kant in The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus. In this work Nancy emphasizes the terms Darstellung and Dichtung.47 The former can mean 'bringing
into presence', 'resemblance', or 'showing' mainly derived through pure reason. The latter implies a general creativity relating to all forms of verse and should be distinguished from the more precise term
46 Nancy, Ground of the Image, 70. 47 James, Fragmentary Demand, 46.
Poesie.48 Nancy's line of thought here is that philosophy is meant to present concepts in a manner that
is deductive from pure reason (Darstellung). However, philosophy cannot achieve this without the use of Dichtung. This turns back to how metaphysics will always be implicated in trying to overcome metaphysics. Yet, as Nancy has shown in his reading of Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche, the logic of metaphysics can be used to displace itself. Nancy gives the name of 'syncopation' to the fact that within all metaphysical discourse it is impossible to give full presence of the content from deductions of pure reason, i.e., Darstellung without Dichtung.49 Therefore, what is required is a indeterminate relation of
the two into what Nancy refers to as Dardichtung.50 Here, the pure presence of Darstellung disappears
through Dichtung, creating a presence of absence. Thus, it is not a representation but a presentation in its own right. This is the term I identify as the proper mode of presentation that severs any ties to representation because it acknowledges its role in its own creation. It does not ignore its Dichtung characteristics and hence distances itself from myths of representation (in particular, myths of representation of communal identity). This mode of presentation is one that is necessary for the consideration of imagery and photography. In this mode of presentation, photography can expose a finite sense of the singular plurality of being and thus interrupt the myth of a shared essential identity of community. In opposition to this myth is can communicate a sense of sharing a finite being-in-common without any form or figure of identity.
For Nancy, the photo-image is an exemplary way of understanding the image as a means of exposing rather than depicting. This expository approach to the subject of the photo-image sees
photography not as an instrument of acquisition, but it looks to how presence is presented to the world, the appearance-ing, the spacing of space, exteriority. To expose, e.g., by means of photography, is not to show something that was once hidden; it is existence itself. This coming into presence is not an identity, substance, or signification but an exposition and exposure of sense that expands, contacts, and touches. Photographic imagery can communicate entirely by itself as itself, itself as meaning without the necessity of verbal or textual messaging or any mediation of language. Also, exteriority as existence must be understood as the partitioned exposure of our being-with and this being-with does not emerge from a being-by-itself. The being-with is prior, for to have a being-by-itself there must first be the being-with.
Returning to Nancy's discernment of sense, it could be convolutedly stated that the sense of an
48 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus (Stanford: Stanford UP., 2008), 72, 73. 49 James, Fragmentary Demand, 46.
image is not an antecedent condition, nor the effect of reflection through significations but circulations of dis-enclosure within pre-subjective, plural/co-existent, relations between singular beings. Sense must be understood as not bound to an order of symbolism or the relations between signifiers and signifieds; it is not meaning, it is the excessive limit of signification in which meaning and
representations are able to happen. As for the singularity of being, it may be said that this singularity consists of the fundamental differences of each thing that exists every time it is exposed to existence and is in contact with others. Nancy makes a point to stress that being is being-to, i.e., an exposure-to before any will, intuition, morality, etc. of the subject can exist. Sense is the contact or world that is shared in its materiality which already has sense before any form of symbolic or linguistic decisiveness. That being is prior to subjectivity is a revolutionary proposal in Nancy's work. How he negotiates this is through the understanding that being is always being-with. He says: “We must re-appropriate what already made us who 'we' are today, here and now, the 'we' of a world who no longer struggle to have meaning but to be meaning itself.”51 For Nancy, sense is the world as a co-extensive singular plurality,
être-avec, or Mitsein. It must also be comprehended that while sense is never for identification in a
personal manner, neither is it meant for communal identification. It is not the subject that gives ground to being and world for the subject is already in the world. Thus, the questioning of sense is the
fundamental question of ontology today.
2.2 Finite Trans-Immanence
There is a particular finitude within this mode of ontology that is necessary for Nancy's thinking of imagery. Nancy strictly condemns any notion of sense being transcendent or originating from outside the world, e.g., god or mysticism. Yet, he also resists any conceptualization of sense as being immanent within the world, i.e., acquired through subjectivity, nationality, polis, doctrine, etc. Lines of thought based in pure immanence or transcendence are both mythical and nihilistic. Nancy's
philosophy is one that oscillates the boundary between nihilistic discourse and mythical discourse. His stance is that being is in perpetual becoming while simultaneously being an absolute. He gives the comment: “That which for itself, depends on nothing, is an absolute. That which nothing completes in itself is a fragment. Being or existence is an absolute fragment. To exist: the happenstance of an absolute fragment.”52 He is definitely exploring the factual conditions for sense; what he does say
concerning sense is that it is itself the world and gives structuring to the world. Western thought has
51 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 4. 52 Nancy, Sense of World, 152.
been attempting for centuries to locate the beyond of sense and transcend the horizons of immanence. Yet, there can be no beyond the world according to Nancy for there is nothing but world; what we have is our continuous exposure of sense within the world:
Being is the infinite actuality of the finite. Its act–existing–depends on nothing and does not have to progress in order to perfect itself. But its perfection is existing as unappeasable and inappropriable being-toward. The structure of existing is neither the in-itself nor the for-itself dialectic, but the toward: neither toward oneself nor toward the other without being, first of all, toward the world, the toward of being-toward-the-world as constitution of ipseity. Neither toward happiness nor toward unhappiness without being, first of all, toward the happenstance that the world is.53
Here, thinking and world are not correlated with sense but are identical and coextensive with sense. It is material and singular by association with the interwoven corporeal networks and situated together with thinking and world. Sense and world are never two different objects, sense and world together are the openness of being; they occupy the same temporal and spatial limits. Nancy manages this constitution through a diachronic sequencing, tracing out the contemporary, common understanding of history as having reached an end and therefore the world is presented as meaningless and devoid of absolute values. However, he is also apt to point out that in the absence of absolute meaning, relativist values and nihilism are likewise dismissed. For Nancy, a mode of finite thinking is required for any sort of action in the world and thus any variety of art or imagery; “Not a thinking of relativity, which implies the Absolute, but a thinking of absolute finitude, absolutely detached from all infinite and senseless completion or achievement.”54 Nancy's idea of thinking as finitude is opposed to the notion that
thinking is a limitation for that would give the implication of a beyond that is unlimited. Rather, he is calling for a thinking of limitation that exposes existence as infinitely finite. This type of thinking is not of nothingness but of the “un-grounding of being: this 'being,' the only one, whose existence exhausts all its substance and all its possibility.”55 To think of this un-grounded sense as the only demonstration
of the presence of the thing, means thinking of presence that is not an essence at all but “birth to presence: birth and death to the infinite presentation of the fact that there is no ultimate sense, only a finite sense, finite senses, a multiplication of singular bursts of sense resting on no unity or
substance.”56
What Nancy maintains is that sense has been given many immanent and/or transcendent
53 Ibid. 152.
54 Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking (Stanford: Stanford UP., 2003), 27. 55 Ibid. 27.
appropriating symbolic figures, whether they be subjective, political, communal, or mythical. As such, they are all projected upon the range of transgression and then mirrored back through a mimetic means with the intent to give a foundation for self-identification based upon technological, economic, or political willfulness. Here is where Nancy distinguishes himself from pre-existing substantialist social territory that posits a false reality covering over the Real. For if such “false realities” are according to Nancy merely the symbolic figures of social relations and not what constitutes the social then it is the
relating that is factual and corresponds to societal being. Thus, what is real in society and its sense can
be canvased only upon the limits of the finite, singular relationality of the events of sharing within society. To posit a completed reflective ideal of immanence or transcendence is to abandon any hope of being exposed to the sense of the world, a notion Nancy fundamentally opposes. To further clarify what Nancy means by substantialism, it is a form of metaphysics that apprehends beings as entirely
grounded together within a general being. Nancy opposes this by countering that being is groundless, oriented to its own singularity as a singular being and functions within an ambivalent state in which numerous and fluctuating meanings are distributed whenever singular beings are in contact.
This brings us back to the concept of trans-immanence and its relation to being-with, the nature of sense, and art. Trans-immanence is what Nancy references as the fusion of transcendent and immanent notions concerning sense and world. Hence, sense traverses being without ever being imparted from outside or within being, it motions across relations of the social but never objectively or subjectively substantializes them. It allows for meaningfulness without establishing a diminished and wholly reducible, appropriable meaning. Nancy views art as having the ability to direct sense in the manner in which sense itself is also explicit:
… art is the transcendence of immanence as such, the transcendence of immanence that does not go outside itself in transcending... A “trans-immanence.” Art exposes this. Once again it does not “represent” this. Art is its ex-position. The transimmanence, or patency, of the world takes place as art, as works of art. And that is why these works themselves work a definitive torsion on the couple transcendence/immanence.57
Here, art is that which dis-encloses a closure; it is with the world, i.e., to speak only of the image qua objective traits would be to lose focus of the being of the image and reflect only upon the superficial traces of the image. Trans-immanence is the between that allows sense to dis-enclose the world in a mode that is non-concluding and non-re-presentational. It concerns the manner in which the world is composed of occurrences of relational contacts transversing singularities as opposed to the imposition of truth, which is a form of violent fixation. I will return to the notion of truth in following chapters.
For now, I will conclude with the idea of transimmanence that sense is trans-immanent because it is never fully open to reflective thought. That is, sense circulates upon the outer limits of thought and takes place between the coextensive we of finite thinking between singularities.
The we Nancy speaks of is not a being in itself but an event, a happening in which sense finds its circulation and is continuously created. Imagery, and thus photography, operates within the finitude of the 'we' allows for sense to freely disperse without being bound to a pre-established location of sense or through rationalized, instrumental premises. Nancy also relates the idea of time and history within the concept of finitude in that history is not parcel of successive time or causality but to the 'we' or being-in-common of community because community itself is historical.58 This is so due to the fact that
community is not a form of substance of a subject, i.e., community is not a being and thus can have no process of progression towards a teleological ending. This being-in-common only happens, it is not a
being itself, it is a non-infinite event or happening, thus it must be situated in a finite history. Nancy
adds that our time is one that now carries an anxious rhythm as a time suspended from history, to whatever possible degree that any movement is imaginable brings with it a highly incredulous
uneasiness. Why is this so? Nancy points to the roots of this anxiousness in that since the beginnings of modern thought, the West has presented itself to itself as having a advantageous historical direction leading to a collective destiny. Using Lyotardian terminology, he says that it was presented as part of a “grand narrative” this narrative being so grand because the ultimate ending it was leading to was to be so great.59
Our current time with the threats of genocide, war, climate change, hunger, etc. is one in which this version of history has become a suspenseful deferment. Humankind is now presented to itself as destructive of itself and history, so that the process of the negative within any form of dialectics is annihilated and as the west spreads over the world it “opens the world to the closure that it is.”60
Nancy's return to being is to return to how the world is disclosed within sense and returns to itself in sense as opposed to representation of the self that “determines itself by its own limit. It is the
delimitation for a subject, and by this subject, of what 'in itself' would be neither represented nor representable.”61 However, Nancy broadly differs from Lyotard's project of micro-narratives in that
Nancy considers historicity and narrativity to actually share the same 'history', that is, the end of history also involves the end of narrativity; humankind has reached an end of all narratives whether macro or
58 Jean Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford UP., 1993), 143. 59 Ibid. 144.
60 Ibid. 1. 61 Ibid. 1.
micro.62 From this standpoint it becomes necessary to attempt to grasp the now different aesthetic
presentation of the current time, for it is now outside of history and must therefore be reconsidered. How is it that 'our' time is outside of history? Nancy regards the mode of relation between 'our' being-in-common and time as a form of event, saying:
The possibility of saying “our time” and the possibility of making sense is given by a
reciprocity between “our” and “time.” This does not imply a collective property, as if first we exist, and then we posses a certain time. On the contrary, time gives us, by its spacing, the possibility of being we, or at least the possibility of saying “we” and “our.” In order to say “we,” we have to be in a certain common space of time – even if by our “we,” “we” mean to include all mankind. According to such a statement, the common space of time is some several million years.63
There is a sense of history as the production of meaning having already happened and become past. This includes the belief that this event is not simply a piece of our history but is the finality of our history and thus history is presented as no longer having any relevance.
Yet, this need not signal that sense is not involved in this happening if sense is understood as being different from that of signification, i.e., sense as the surround in which signification and non-signification can take place. This is sense comprehended within the framework of existence as being itself transcendental, thus sense is our transcendental and existential condition. Concerning this condition, Nancy states: “Sense is perhaps itself the happening, or what always happens through the happening, behind and/or beyond the resorption of history in its signification.”64 Nancy is speaking
about the happening of sense as an exteriority of signification and existence. That is, sense happens exterior to significations of existence. This has important implications for the understanding of the relations between immanence and the self. Exteriority is a key element in Nancy's work, with regards to immanence. It is crucial to acknowledge why Nancy contends the possibility for interior, subjective meaning. For Nancy, the identification of a self traverses through an exteriority first (a not-self) thus, there is no possibility for the presence of a pure-self. One feels as though they are singular, however, this only emerges upon the foundations of plurality. He says:
To exist does not simply mean 'to be.' On the contrary; to exist means not to be in the immediate presence or in the immanency of a “being-thing.” To exist is not to be immanent, or not to be present to oneself, and not to be set forth by oneself. To exist, therefore, is to hold one's
“selfness” as an “otherness,” and in such a way that no essence, no subject, no place can present
this otherness in itself – either as the proper selfness of an other, or an “Other,” or a common
being (life or substance).65
62 Ibid. 145. 63 Ibid. 151. 64 Ibid. 153. 65 Ibid. 154.
