The Birth to Presence (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

M E R I D I A N

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher & David E.Wellbery Editors

11111 ii 11 mi

Bogazici University Library

39001102297382

Translated b y Brian H o l m e s & others

Stanford University Press

Stanford California

THE BIRTH TO PRESENCE

Jean-Luc Nancy

00 i !\/3>f>

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1993 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data appear at the end of the book Original printing 1993 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03

Acknowledgments

I warmly thank everyone who helped in the birth of this book. First, Helen Tartar, Humanities Editor of Stanford University Press, by whose invitation—at the suggestion of David Wellbery— the idea for this collection was born. Her help has been precious and precise during the whole process. Then, Brian Holmes, who played the role of editor for the translation. He coordinated the work of the different translators, suggesting changes within the texts, as well as in the choice of texts. And, with him, all the trans­ lators and editors, whose job, I know, was not easy: Xavier Calla­ han, David Carroll, Mary Ann and Peter Caws, Thomas Harrison, Nathalia King, Christine Laennec, [Catherine Lydon, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Emily McVarish, Paula Moddel, Avital Ronell, Claudette Sartiliot, Michael Syrotinski, Rodney Trumble, and David Wellbery. Then, the publishers of the first versions of the texts, in French or in English, who kindly gave their permission to reprint or translate the essays: Alea, Cahiers de I'Herne, Critique, Columbia University Press, Duke University Press, Editions Gali­ lee, Flammarion, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Po&sie, Revue des Sciences Humaines, Social Research, Stanford Italian Re­ view and Anma Libri, Sud, University of Wisconsin Press, and Yale French Studies. Finally, my friends and colleagues Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Ann Smock, who agreed to publish here two dialogs they wrote with me. ^ \) N/ p. BOGAZICI UNIVERSiTESi KUTUPHANESI

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Acknowledgments

Full bibliographical data for a certain number of references are missing in this volume. I am responsible for that. After hard and dedicated work by the translators in locating the quotes, Helen Tartar, who did a meticulous general revision of the manuscript, asked me to help fill in the remaining references. In some cases, however, it has been impossible to do so. Some readers may take this to be oversight or a blameworthy hastiness, even if the refer­ ence is to a well-known text. ("What is 'well-known isn't known at all," writes Hegel; I know this sentence well, but I don't know where to locate it in the Phenomenology of Mind.) Maybe some French have a certain lack of philological seriousness. But, without trying to make excuses, one should also take into account a Nietzschean heritage of rebellion against a certain philology. Therefore, the omission was sometimes done deliberately from the outset: I wanted to let some citations stand by themselves (in their proper value), out of their initial context, because for me their usage didn't implicate any reference to the context. Thereby the sentence is given as much value as the information it carries. You sometimes have to take books out of libraries, and sentences out of books; that's a way of giving them another chance or letting them run another risk. Some texts in this collection have been deliberately conceived that way (e.g., the first part of "Exscription"). J.-L. N .

§ On the Collection As Such

A collection is not a pure aggregation of different pieces. It builds a whole, if not a system (but, why not?), at least a coordination of themes. What perhaps is more, it makes sensible an insistence, if not an obsession (but, why not?), in a certain way of thinking. Here, this is clearly a thinking of "presence." Not the firmly standing presence, immobile and impassive, of a platonic Idea. But presence as a to-be-here, or to-be-there, as a come-to-here, or there, of somebody. Some body: an existence, a being in the world, being given to the world. N o more, no less, than everybody, everyday, everywhere. No more, no less than the finitude of this existence, which means: the matter of fact that it does not have its sense in any Idea (in any achievement of "sense"), but does have it in being exposed to this presence that comes, and only comes. As when we are born—an event that lasts all our lives. Coming (being in the birth, being a birth), existence misses sense as meaningful "sense." But this missing makes itself sense, and makes sense, our sense, the sense of exposed beings. Hence, the two parts of this book: "Existence," which comprises texts on finitude, on different points of view; and "Poetry," whose concern is the presentation of presence. "Poetry" means, not a literary genre as such, but the limit of "literature," of "writing," where nothing is written but the coming of a presence, a coming

ix

X

On the Collection As Such

that can never be written or presented in any way. The edge on which writing writes only its own limit, exposed to

Contents

Introduction: The Birth to Presence PART

i

i: Existence

Identity and Trembling

9

Abandoned Being

36

Dei Paralysis Progressiva

48

Hyperion's Joy

58

The Decision of Existence

82

The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch

110

Finite History

143

The Heart of Things

167

Corpus

189

PART 1 1 :

Poetry

In Statu Nascendi

211

Vox Clamans in Deserto

234

Menstruum Universale

248

Noli Me Frangere coauthored with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

266

Exergues

279

To Possess Truth in One Soul and One Body

284

We need . . .

307

Speaking Without Being Able To coauthored with Ann Smock

310

Exscription

319

On Painting (and) Presence

341

Laughter, Presence

368

Psyche

393

Notes

395

THE BIRTH TO PRESENCE

§ Introduction: The Birth to Presence

The epoch of representation is as old as the West. It is not certain that "the West" itself is not a single, unique "epoch," coextensive with humanity ever since "homo" became homo (whether habilis, faber, or sapiens, we need not examine here). This means that the end is not in sight, even if humanity's self-suppression is now a possibility in humanity's general program. And, consequently, the end of representation is not in sight. There is, perhaps, no human­ ity (and, perhaps, no animality) that does not include representa­ tion—although representation may not exhaust what, in man, passes infinitely beyond man. Yet this also means that the limit of the West is ceaselessly in sight: "the West" is precisely what designates itself as limit, as demarcation, even when it ceaselessly pushes back the frontiers of its imperium. By the turn of a singular paradox, the West appears as what has as its planetary, galactic, universal vocation limidessly to extend its own delimitation. It opens the world to the closure that it is. This closure is named in many ways (appropriation, fulfillment, signification, destination, etc.); in particular, it is named "represen­ tation." Representation is what 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. But the irrepresentable, pure presence or pure absence, is also an i

2

The Birth to Presence

effect of representation (just as "the East," or "the Other World," are effects of "the West"). The subject of representation even represents to itself, as a blinding sun, the pure object of knowledge and desire that absolutely given Presence would necessarily be. The characteristic of representational thought is: to represent, for itself, both itself and its outside, the outside of its limit. To cut out a form upon the fundament, and to cut out a form of the fundament. Thereafter, nothing more can come, nothing more can come forth or be born from any fundament. It is different for whoever comes after the subject, whoever succeeds to the West. He comes, does nothing but come, and for him, presence in its entirety is coming: which means, not "having come" (past participle), but a coming (the action of coming, arriv­ ing). Presence is what is born, and does not cease being born. Of it and to it there is birth, and only birth. This is the presence of whoever, for whomever comes: who succeeds the "subject" of the West, who succeeds the West—this coming of another that the West always demands, and always forecloses. Not form and fundament, but the pace, the passage, the coming in which nothing is distinguished, and everything is unbound. What is born has no form, nor is it the fundament that is born. "To be born" is rather to transform, transport, and entrance all determinations. To be bom is not to have been born, and to have been born. It is the same with all verbs: to think is not yet to have thought, and already to have thought. Thus "to be born" is the verb of all verbs: the "in the midst of taking place" that has neither beginning nor end. The verb without a presence of coming to presence. The unique "form" and the unique "fundament" of being. "To be" is not yet to have been, and already to have been. To be born is the name of being, and it is precisely not a name. Since the dawn of contemporary thought, since Hegel (it suffices to reread the preface of the Phenomenology), "birth" has been used to speak of what is absolutely in excess of representation. Already Hegel grasps essential knowledge—which will engender absolute

The Birth to Presence

3

knowledge—as this movement of arising and negating any repre­ sentation given with this rising, as well as any representation of this rising. Hegel names this "the experience of consciousness." Experience: traversal to the limits, traversal as knowledge, and no knowledge of the traversal if not that formed by "traversing" itself. Presence is only given in this arising and in this stepping beyond, which accedes to nothing but its own movement. One can of course say "I = I," but the / w i l l not have preexisted birth, nor will it emerge from birth, either: it will be born to its own death. Can I think that "death" will be born in me? That it is always being born? Assuredly, I cannot think anything else. Nothing will have preexisted birth, and nothing will have suc­ ceeded it. It always "is," it never "is." To be born is the name of being. If death has fascinated Western thought, it is to the degree that Western thought believed itself capable of constructing upon death its dialectical paradigm of pure presence and absence. Death is the absolute signified, the sealing ofF of sense. It is the name, but "to be born" is the verb. It is certainly neither false nor excessive to say that all production of sense—of a sense making sense in this sense—is a deathwork. It is thus with all "ideals," with all "works," and it is also thus, remark­ ably, with all philosophies. Philosophy distinguishes itself by the unique way it profits from death—which is also a way of assuring its own perdurability. Philosophy is ignorant of true mourning. True mourning has nothing to do with the "work of mourning": the "work of mourning," an elaboration concerned with fending off the incoporation of the dead, is very much the work of philosophy, it is the very work of representation. In the end, the dead will be represented, thus held at bay. But mourning is without limits and without representation. It is tears and ashes. It is: to recuperate nothing, to represent nothing. And thus it is also: to be born to this un-represented of the dead, of death.

4

The Birth to Presence

To be born: to find ourselves exposed, to ex-ist. Existence is an imminence of existence. Each day, each instant exposes us to its necessity, its law, its caprice. Existence is not; rather, it is the existing of being, to which all ontology finally boils down. Thought is poor. It is this poverty that we must think. Thought is this: merely to be born to presence, and not to represent its presentation, or its absentation. Thought is poor, insofar as birth is thought. The poverty of thought is imposed, in the face of philosophy and against it (even in the bosom of philosophy itself), by "literature," or "poetry," or "art" in general. On the condition that these are not already replete with philosophy, which occurs much more often than it might seem, for this is a matter neither of "genre" nor of "style." It goes much further. It is, quite simply, a question of knowing, in a voice, in a tone, in a writing, whether a thought is being born, or dying: opening sense, ex-posing it, or sealing it off (and wishing to impose it). At issue is this: either a discourse names, or a writing is traced by its verb. This is often, perhaps always, indiscernible. But in experience, it suffers no hesitation. Experience is just this, being born to the presence of a sense, a presence itself nascent, and only nascent. Such is the destitution, such the freedom of experience. Before all representational grasp, before a consciousness and its subject, before science, and theology, and philosophy, there is that: the that of, precisely, there is. But "there is" « n o t itself a presence, to which our signs, our demonstrations, and our monstrations might refer. One cannot "refer" to it or "return" to it: it is always, already, there, but neither in the mode of "being" (as a substance) nor in that of "there" (as a presence). It is there in the mode of being born: to the degree that it occurs, birth effaces itself, and brings itself indefinitely back. Birth is this slipping away of presence through which everything comes to presence. This coming is also a "going away." Presence does not come

The Birth to Presence

5

without effacing the Presence that representation would like to designate (its fundament, its origin, its subject). The coming is a "coming and going." It is a back and forth, which nowhere exceeds the world in the direction of a Principle or an End. For this back and forth contained within the limit of the world is the world itself, is its coming, is our coming to it, in it. Back and forth from birth to birth, from sex to sex, from mouth to word, from thought to thought. Thus, presence is not "for" a subject, and is not "for" itself. Presence itself is birth, the coming that effaces itself and brings itself back. Always further behind, always in advance of itself. When an earlier thought said "the Idea!," or when it said, "praxis!," or when it said, "to the things themselves!," it meant to say only this. Only this birth, this "nativeness" that is not a signification, but the coming of a world to the world. A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger, an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or perfect delicate works of signification. That is why, if I speak here of birth, I will not try to make it into one more accretion of sense. I will rather leave it, if this is possible, as the lack of "sense" that it "is." I will leave it exposed, abandoned. Joy, jouissance, to come, have the sense of birth: the sense of the inexhaustible imminence of sense. When it has not passed over into ornamentation or into the repetition of philosophy, "poetry" has never sought to create anything else. The coming and going of imminence. "The delight of presence" is the mystical formula par excellence. It is even the formula of mysticism in general, that is to say, of the metaphysics present in all mysticism. Presentia frui. But at present it is a question of what has no "fruition," nor any "fruit," whose consumption or consummation is impossible. Or rather, and more precisely, it is a question of what in the "fruit" itself makes the fruit: its coming, its birth in flower, always renewed. It is a question of the pre-venience of the flower in the fruit. There is no mysticism in

6

The Birth to Presence

this. It merely invites a simple thought, withdrawn and coming forth, careful, graceful, attentive: pre-venient. It is a question of preventing philosophies, of preventing appropriative thinking—it is a question of this jouissance, of this "grander" rejoicing that Dante invokes at the end of his poem. T R A N S L A T E D BY B R I A N

HOLMES

P A R T O N E

Existence

§ Identity and Trembling

Indifferent Identity "Identity, as self-consciousness, is what distinguishes man from nature, particularly from the brutes, which never reach the point of comprehending themselves as ' I , ' that is, pure self-contained unity. Such is the identity of what we call, in any possible sense, a subject or the subject—which is, always and in the last analysis, the philosophical subject. This identity is not the simple abstract position of a thing as immediately what it is and only what it is; rather, it actualizes itself as a grasping of itself by the unity thalLam in myself: an Ego, an irreducible kernel of seJ£