on nancy’s Philosophical origins
1. Derrida and Differance
could not be authentic being without inauthentic being. In Nancy, however, these two levels seem to be still more radically indistinguishable. This problem will be taken up in Chapter 2, but before that, I turn to Nancy’s central question of difference from the viewpoint provided by Jacques Derrida.
1. Derrida and Differance
In order to retrace the deconstructive lines in Nancy’s thought, I shall turn here to Jacques Derrida and deconstruction. When inquiring into the historical background of deconstruction, there are probably two main lines to follow. The first can be retraced to Husserl’s term Abbau, “dismantling”; the second can be found in Heideggerian destruction of traditional ontology.258 As Derrida puts it, what is at stake in all of these is the will to reach the “ultimate foundation of concepts”.259
According to Rodolphe Gasché, Abbau appears in Husserl’s Experience and Judgment as late as in 1938.260 Abbau has to be seen against the background of phenomenological reduction or epokhé, which means the bracketing of or disposing with any information or supposition concerning the existence of the real world. Abbau can thus be called a genetic exploration of the conditions of the validity of judgement. This is done by retrogression in order to return to the original life-world toward the transcendental subjectivity constitutive of the both life-world and the “objective” world. What remains is pure consciousness, something that neither logic nor psychology is capable of revealing. A retrogression to the original life-world requires a radical dismantling of the theoretical world, leading to the “concealed foundation” of the scientific world. The objective is
258 It is notably in the essay “Ousia et Grammè” that Derrida is willing to challenge the account that Heidegger gives of the destruction of metaphysics. For Derrida in Heidegger’s philosophy it is not a question of a “destruction” of metaphysics in the proper sense of the term: rather, the destruction of metaphysics remains within metaphysics, only making explicit its principles. Derrida’s objection is mainly directed towards Heidegger’s ability to radically distinguish the “vulgar” concept of time, implicit in traditional metaphysics, as opposed to the originary, more fundamental concept of temporality. In Heidegger’s philosophy the latter must be understood as the dimension of existence, which is the dimension of finitude. Derrida seeks, however, to show that the destruction of the metaphysical concept uncritically borrows from the discourse of metaphysics itself. See Derrida (1982).
Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 48 (Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972, p. 54). See also Gasché, Rodolphe (1986). The Tain of the Mirror.
Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, p. 119; cf. Nancy, “Our History”, p. 103.
259 Derrida (1976). Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 60.
260 Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror, p. 109-111.
gaining access to what grounds “the subjectivity of psychological reflection”.
As a conclusion Gasché writes that Husserl rejects psychological reflection in the name of a more radical reflection, which is transcendental reflection; yet a
“strange ambiguity” sets the operation of dismantling apart from all other forms of phenomenological reduction.261
In this manner, Abbau stands for a nonreflective way of reaching the roots of the pregiven world, its idealization, and the sense-constituting structures of transcendental subjectivity. However, it is not an unmediated approach, but takes place in a mediated nonreflective condition. Gasché says: “The method of dismantling is nonreflective because it allows for a retrogression to something that cannot in principle be given as such”, that is, because the conditions with which it attempts to make contact cannot be beheld in an intuitive act, since it is a question of a reactivation of origins which must remain essentially dissimulated.262 Therefore, retrogression through dismantling is at once mediated and nonreflective.263 For Gasché, Abbau anticipates deconstruction just because it is a nonreflective turning back.
If we now wish to consider the Derridean notion of deconstruction as an endeavour to seek the “ultimate foundation of concepts”, “the philosophical itinerary to truth”, or “a relation of scientific representation as a form exterior to a given content”, the question remains open whether “deconstruction” can be thought of in terms of a method. In Derrida’s deconstructive practice there is no sign of a Platonic or a Hegelian sense of dialectics, including dividing (diairesis) and reunification (synagoge), aimed at the “conceptual activity of truth as it develops its own coherence”.264 Rather, deconstruction finds its motivation in destroying dialectics. What is included in Derrida’s texts is a position exterior to the totality of philosophy, which remains outside the identity of method and concept.
Therefore, deconstruction is also the deconstruction of the concept of method and has to be determined accordingly.265 Thus, is it not, in terms of method, its reverse notion that sets the framework for deconstruction? By attempting to negate the traditional concept and function of method, deconstruction is still
261 Ibid., p. 110-111; see also Carr, David (1974). Phenomenology and the Problem of History.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, cit. Gasché.
262 Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror, p. 111.
263 Ibid.; cf. Derrida (1989). Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P.
Leavey. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, p. 105 (L’origine de la géométrie de Edmund Husserl, Paris: PUF, 1962).
264 Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror, p. 122.
265 Ibid., p. 123.
necessarily related to it. This is also shown by the criticism of the discourse of metaphysics and its concept of method, scientific and philosophical alike. The negative dependency toward the strategies involved in the classical notion of method considered, deconstruction can be determined in a corresponding way:
it proceeds from a certain point of exteriority so as to re-inscribe the totality of all regions of philosophy in or with regard to what is exorbitant to it.
sense, différance, and tHe origin witHout origin
On what grounds may one argue, as has been done, that Nancy’s work is part of the tradition of deconstruction? And if so, how are the principles of deconstruction interpreted by Nancy? In order to explore these problems, I depart from two of Derrida’s basic concepts, writing and différance, as reflected and eventually paralleled by Nancy’s understanding of “sense”, the key concept in his philosophy, and the associated inquiry about the thought of its origin.266 To be interrogated in this context is also the notion of the ontological difference, of its system and of “a Being established in its own difference”, as well as Nancy’s doubt concerning the centrality of such difference in Heidegger’s thought.267 The point of departure is Nancy’s essay “Elliptical Sense” in which he gives a reading of Derrida’s text “Ellipsis”.268
In “Ellipsis” Derrida speaks about the closure of the book and the opening of the text: about “writing” as the origin of the text. Writing is the writing of the origin itself.269 It retraces the origin, but the origin of writing is not present or absent as such: it is “a trace which replaces a presence which has never been present, an origin by means of which nothing has begun”.270 The repetition of writing is what Derrida calls the first writing. Approximately, this is to say that language is constantly open to re-contextualizing, and it always differs
266 Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 91-111 (Une pensée finie, p. 269-296).
267 Cf. ibid., p. 101 (Une pensée finie, p. 282-283).
268 Derrida (2001). Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, p. 371-378 (L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967, p. 429-436).
269 For Derrida, all linguistic signs are written. Signs always refer to yet more signs ad infinitum, since there is no ultimate referent or foundation of linguistic signs; in other words, there are no ideal meanings in language. As for Nancy, he describes the Derridean “writing” as “altered sense” or
“the infinite re-petition of sense”, the access of sense to sense in its own demand, an access that does not accede. Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 94-95. With this, Nancy points to a notion of presence as withdrawal, while the withdrawing is exposed as a trace. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 9; Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 28, 98 (Une pensée finie, p. 50, 279).
270 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 371-372.
with respect to the moment it names. Writing or language does not arrive at a conclusion, in other words, a point of presence or perception which would be outside of writing or non-linguistic.
Nancy’s interpretation of Derrida’s “writing” and différance is based on an identification which he makes between these terms and the scope of his own notion of “sense”. What unites these concepts, Nancy argues, is the lack of origin: the origin of writing and sense alike is “the demand that it be given”.271 According to him, the sense – the sense of being – cannot be understood in terms of any identity with itself. That is to say, the condition of possibility of sense must be searched in non-self-identity. “The origin or sense”, Nancy says, “if the origin is by definition the origin of sense, contains within itself (and/or differing) the sense of the origin, its own sense, itself being the very sense and site of sense, ‘all sense’”.272 What is implied by this idea? As regards the background for this question, Nancy makes reference to Kant and the act of thought that Kant calls transcendental: that is, reason discovering itself and making itself available as the principle of its own possibilities.273 From such a point arises the condition of possibility which is not itself the origin, but which forms the condition of possibility of the origin itself – the origin which is no longer given.
On this kind of position, Nancy states, is grounded Derrida’s origin of différance: the origin that differs and defers, always with an open ending. To clarify this matter, Nancy seeks for a correspondence between “sense” and Derrida’s “writing”, even to the extent of seeing them as synonymous to each other. The central feature of sense is the assumption that it “has to repeat itself by opening in itself (as itself) the possibility of relating to itself in the ‘referral of one sign to another’”.274 It is in such a referral that sense is recognized or grasped as sense – sense is the duplication of the origin and the relation that is opened, in the origin, between the origin and the end.
For Derrida, nothing can return us to the origin, for the reason that there never was one determinable before the sign: the idea of origin is an effect of the
271 Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 93 (Une pensée finie, p. 272). Cf. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 373: “…[T]he return to the book is of an elliptical essence. Something invisible is missing in the grammar of this repetition. As this lack is invisible and undeterminable, as it completely redoubles and consecrates the book, once more passing through each point along its circuit, nothing has budged. And yet all meaning [sens] is altered by this lack.”
272 Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 92 (Une pensée finie, p. 270).
273 Ibid., p. 91-92 (Une pensée finie, p. 269-270).
274 Ibid., p. 93 (Une pensée finie, p. 272).
signifying system and not the other way around.275 Writing is, as a consequence, the “passion of and for the origin”: it is and makes the origin itself.276 And similarly, sense as presented by Nancy is not the origin: sense is the demand that it be given – sense must interrogate itself anew, sense calls for more sense.
Hence sense is repetition, the demand for the singular; singularity is doubled and “thirsts after itself insofar as it is the origin of the text”.277 No more than writing, sense can be thought of in terms of a transcendental sense, but it refers beyond itself, to other senses. To be exact, however, sense is always ideal in the Husserlian meaning of the term. Without the possibility of ideality no sense, linguistic or otherwise, could exist.278
For Derrida deconstruction works as a textual practice, the purpose of which is to break with any notion of a linear writing – be it linear in either spatial or temporal terms. Instead, he introduces a mode of writing which he calls écriture, “writing” or archi-écriture, “arche-writing”. Writing is a process of infinite referral, or it is a process of never arriving at a meaning itself: any text consists of comings into presence in an endless sequence, the openings of presence having no foundation in themselves. For Derrida all linguistic signs are written. Signs always refer to yet more signs ad infinitum, since there is no ultimate referent or foundation of linguistic signs; in other words, there are no ideal meanings in language. It is a question of producing a space of writing which “writes itself and reads itself, presents itself its own reading, presents its own presentation and accounts for this continuous operation”.279 Here Derrida refers to a writing which always starts again, infinitely and fictively, so that is lacks any decisive beginning and constantly repeats and already refers to another
“beginning” or event of the text.280 This makes the process, called dissemination, multiply itself from its start, which is numerous and diversified. In this way, the text consists of comings into presence in an endless sequence, the openings of presence having no foundation in themselves.281
275 Cf. e.g. Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction, p. 92f.
276 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 372.
277 Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 93, 96 (Une pensée finie, p. 272, 276).
278 This notion has been explored by, for example, Paola Marrati in her study Genesis and Trace:
Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger, trans. Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
In the present context I cannot, however, go into this question in any further detail.
279 Derrida (1972). La dissémination. Paris: Seuil, p. 326.
280 Ibid., p. 333-334.
281 A somewhat similar reasoning as regards the concept of a groundless ground also figures in Nancy’s texts, as well as in Heidegger. I shall return to this later.
9 Why is writing (or sense) elliptical, then? According to Derrida, as soon as a sign emerges, it begins by repeating itself. This repetition is writing because what disapperas in it is the self-identity of the origin.282 Yet there is something missing in this repetition, that is, in the return to the book: “[r]epeated, the same line is no longer exactly the same, the ring no longer has the same centre”.283 Writing is the outline of this alteration: the outline is “of an elliptical essence”.
In Nancy’s view, ellipsis comes to mean the other in the return to the self, “the geometral of the pas of meaning [sens], singular and plural [le géométral des pas du sens, des pas de sens]”.284 Although, according to Derrida, “all sense is altered [tout le sens est altéré]”, nothing however is altered, as there is not a first sense that would then be diverted and disturbed by a second writing. In Nancy’s reading, writing “thirsts after” its own lack; that is its passion, which is to say that sense thirsts after its own ellipsis. If, in Nancy, the Derridean ellipsis is to be understood as the circle which at once closes itself off and fails to do so, then sense, “as sense, does not close off its own sense, or closes it off only by repeating and differing from itself, appealing again and again to its limit as to its essence and its truth”.285 Sense’s return to itself, to this passion, turns out to be also the moment of its multiplication when its presence divides itself.
If we take for granted that in Derrida différance is “neither a word nor a concept”, this is, for Nancy, also the definition of what he terms as “sense”.286 What is implied in the identification of différance and sense? Above all, for Nancy this is to say that différance is the sense of sense: both sense and difference are destined to “write out” or exscribe themselves, and thus, to touch the world of existence.287 “Sense” is beyond all appropriation, before all significations. From this perspective, he claims sense to be comparable to the end of philosophy, which he sees to be a question of style: the end of philosophy is a matter of what sense does to discourse if sense exceeds significations. “Style” proves to be a matter of the praxis of thought and “its writing in the sense of the assumption of a responsibility for and to this excess”.288
282 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 374.
283 Ibid., p. 373.
284 Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 93 (Une pensée finie, p. 272).
285 Ibid., p. 95 (Une pensée finie, p. 275).
286 Nancy, The Sense of the World, p. 14 (Le sens du monde, p. 28).
287 Ibid., p. 10-11 (Le sens du monde, p. 21-24).
288 Ibid., p. 19 (Le sens du monde, p. 37). What can this “practical” aspect thus mean? One can make a parallel to what Nancy refers to with the notion of materiality. If sense acquires the meaning of matter forming itself, and if matter, as a consequence, is to mean the reality of difference and différance, it is “the very difference through which something is possible”. If there is something, there are several things – otherwise, there is nothing, no “there is”. Ibid., p. 57-58. With respect to Nancy’s ontology
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Furthermore, Nancy describes sense as the infinity of the occurrences of sense which are possible in the world and as the world. Sense corresponds with the truth of Derrida’s différance: there is either no truth in it, or it is “the void of its a-semantic truth”.289 This very (non)truth opens (onto) sense; and sense is the différance of truth itself. Truth, in this way, is what Nancy terms as being-such (l’être-tel), and sense is necessarily presented as deferred by truth. Being as such differs from being to being: in other words, “essentia differs from esse, of which it is, however, the truth”. Finally, sense defers (itself) in its very truth;
sense is differing/deferring signifyingness.290 Nancy himself compares sense with Derrida’s term dissemination, insofar as it “sows originally each place of the world, no matter which one, and without privilege, as the possible taking-place of a sense, of a being-toward”.291
In order to reflect some deconstructive practices in the context of Nancy’s work, I find it worthwhile to look at the way Derrida formulates the term of deconstruction in terms of time and space. He relates some of the fundamental features of deconstruction essentially with the Heideggerian understanding of ecstatic temporality, which is inseparable from the questions of spatiality.292 Thus, in Derrida, the centre of writing has been eluded and if nothing has preceded repetition, the “presence” of meaning has now to be taken, not as a continuous modification of presence, but as a rupture in presence in the production of meaning.293 The key notion is “hinge”, also translated as “fracturing”,294 which is the English equivalent of the French word brisure, literally meaning “joint” and
“break”, among other alternatives. “Fracturing” is a name for articulation and difference, described as the “strange movement” of the trace. A fracturing is the relation of the present to its presence. It takes place in the endless division and multiplication of the presence which is never present, but exists in its difference to itself; this is its possibility as impossibility.295 As Nancy’s interpretation argues,
of art, this notion proves to be decisive: the singularity of a work of art cannot be reduced to the universality of the concept of art, nor can the paradoxical nature of a work of art be transcended by the general essence of art. With this, he points to the Hegelian account of art. I shall come back to this in
of art, this notion proves to be decisive: the singularity of a work of art cannot be reduced to the universality of the concept of art, nor can the paradoxical nature of a work of art be transcended by the general essence of art. With this, he points to the Hegelian account of art. I shall come back to this in