and “representation”. In important ways this mediation also happens through Heidegger’s interpretations.
.1 Presentation and Darstellung: Nancy on Hegel
The consideration of G. W. F. Hegel’s (1770–1831) importance to Nancy’s thinking of coming-into-presence and the associated questions could easily entail taking into consideration most of the tradition of Western philosophy. As a treatment like is not possible within the scope of this thesis, I shall limit myself to the viewpoints that are most closely related to the theme of presentation.354 Fundamental to Nancy’s work on Hegel is Hegel’s understanding of the object of philosophy, which is the Absolute Spirit or God. This is reality without qualification, which can be approached only negatively as that which is, as a whole, not finite, not a part. The motive for dealing with presentation is linked with Nancy’s confrontation with the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung,355
“sublation”, which he studies within the framework of the thought of difference or interval.356
For Nancy, Aufhebung or sublation works for the purpose of self-identification of sense.357 The Hegelian Absolute unfolds according to a dialectical model of self-development and evolution, which is the activity to recover totality in history.358 The Absolute is a movement where knowledge and the true are
354 Presentation, designed by both terms Darstellung and Vorstellung, covers Hegel’s understanding of the nature of thinking from Phenomenology of the Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes, Bamberg und Würzburg, 1807) to Aesthetics (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Berlin, 1820–21) and The Science of Logic (1830). In German the verb vorstellen means “to introduce or to present something”, as well as “to represent something”, especially in art. The verb darstellen is also used of representing or exhibiting something. As Michael Inwood points out in his Hegel Dictionary, Vorstellung contrasts, on the one hand, with perception, sensation and intuition, in that it does not need to involve the presence of the represented object, and on the other hand, with thought, concept and idea, in that it involves an image or a pictorial element. Hence, Vorstellung is the intermediate stage between intuition (Anschauung), or the sensory apprehension of individual external objects, and conceptual thought. Inwood, Michael (1992). A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 257-259.
355 In German, the verb aufheben, “to sublate”, has a double meaning: “to abolish” and “to elevate”.
In this way, it means both preserving and destroying. See Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, p. 284.
356 In his treatise of Hegel, one may notice a parallel between Nancy’s treatment of sublation and his accounts of Kant and Descartes.
357 More generally, the transgressive movement of Aufhebung may be called circulation and self-reproduction as the production of meaning.
358 Dialectics is the activity of recovering the totality of history; besides providing a historical model, dialectics gives a model for epistemology and ontology, as well as a method of presentation of ideas or conclusions. Besides providing a historical model, dialectics gives a model for epistemology and ontology, as well as a method of presenting ideas or conclusions. In the dialectic movement Hegel sees Spirit (Geist) developing through history, each period having a Zeitgeist, a spirit of the age. In repeating the division and unity, the impulses of life gradually approach towards the Idea. These stages
gathered together in their identity; the “substance” is not the same as “the true”, but the true is both substance and the subject.359 In the movement of sublation the negative is transgressed, as the thesis is negated by the antithesis, which, in turn, is negated by the synthesis.360 Sublation is simultaneous preserving and maintaining of what is sublated, and thus it bears the meaning of conserving the stakes in the movement of transgression.361 What unfolds in the history of thought is the substance, understood as the self-positing of the subject, which, in turn, establishes the unity of the self-identity of the spirit from out of an opposition, diversity or otherness, so that what is required for sublation is the gathering of diversity into unity.
In his early monograph on Hegel Nancy offers a reading of Hegel’s term Aufhebung or the aufheben.362 Here In this book Nancy creates a number of links between Aufhebung and the production of sense, all seen through a lens which focuses on something that I am willing to interpret in terms of the syncope or the différance. A general idea of Nancy’s treatment of Hegelian dialectics is to show that it cannot determine the uncertain conditions of discourse in which any sense is being produced.363 According to Nancy’s argument, the world, or
will eventually reach the end of self-understanding, that is, when Spirit comes to know itself. Thus, the term “Idea” is used to announce the ultimate unity between a concept and its object: in accordance with its own concept the Idea transposes itself into natural existence. In this constellation, the Idea and its presentation prove to be equally necessary to each other. Art, for its part, is philosophical thought expressed through sensuous means – thus, Hegel establishes art as ontological knowledge. Art forms, together with religion and philosophy, an absolute Spirit. However, art is inferior to philosophy in Hegel’s system. Cf. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie (2000). Art of the Modern Age, trans. Steven Rendall.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 135-137.
359 Cf. Sallis, John (1986/1995). Delimitations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 44-47, 51-52.
360 As Nancy states, he has dedicated his book The Speculative Remark to the theme of Aufhebung.
See Nancy, The Speculative Remark, p. 8f. (La remarque spéculative, p. 16f).
361 Cf. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 322-323 (L’écriture et la différence, p. 375-376). In his philosophy, probably best represented by Phenomenology of the Spirit in the present context, Hegel relies on the conception that absolute Spirit comes to be determined as the unity of the ideal (Knowledge) and the real (Being) in thought: in other words, that knowledge and reality are, finally, one. Everything, including our perceptions and experiences, belong to a procession of thought that is moving towards the end of history. This ultimate and final unity Hegel calls “Absolute Knowledge”
or “Absolute Spirit”. Absolute spirit – or reason – is the unity of its concepts and its objectivity, being absolute only insofar as it is the concept for itself. This is to say that philosophy is always related to its final goal, which is truth, since oppositions are gathered in the Spirit. Through the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity human consciousness unfolds as it gradually realizes that mind and reality are one; this is called the self-consciousness of the spirit (Selbstbewußtsein), in a way that meaning becomes identical with oneself. Here the role of the subject is prominent – it might be said that the Hegelian dialectic is, more than anything else, the process of the production of the subjectivity of the absolute subject: as its knowing itself is the knowing that conditions all objectivity, the subject is the absolute itself. However, it is in the process of unfolding and taking shape that the subjective and the objective spirit work as the path “on which this side of reality or existence forms itself”. The basis for this metaphysics is that a unity, to be a unity, must be a unity of parts. G. W. F. Hegel (1817–
30/1990). Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, and Critical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler, New York: Continuum (Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Heidelberg), § 303-304, 453-464.
362 See Nancy, The Speculative Remark, esp. p. 103-132 (La remarque spéculative, p. 129-164).
363 Cf. Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy, p. 27. It is a commonly known fact that Hegel’s idealism consists of parts and a whole as the dialectical pair: subjectivity is what
sense, in fact has no exteriority or transcendence that could be sublated, or any absent origin toward which it would move. Instead, the presentation of the world turns out to be incessantly strange to mankind, just as the future proves undecidable.364 What results is that the world is and ends up with the movement of sense, revealing in itself the work of negativity – hence Nancy’s notion of “open immanence” or transimmanence of the world.
As B. C. Hutchens points out, unlike Nancy’s own notion of sense understood as “open” immanence, the Hegelian synthesis stands for “reflective”
immanence par excellence.365 Hence, Hegel’s “Idea” or “concept” as the gathering of diversity into unity is what Nancy calls the “self-subsistent, self-determined unity of distinct moments of becoming”.366 Being, or the universal and abstract, is reflected as what is objective in opposition to the subject, and this reflection is determined as mediation in the sense of becoming.367 In Hutchens’s view, for Nancy such an account at once “involves closure of the terms of any relation and reduction of the plural singularities of beings to a general or universal foundation”.368 In the following, I shall consider how the notion of sense resonates with Nancy’s thought of the Hegelian Darstellung, and compare the meaning which Heidegger gives to Darstellung. How do these interpretations relate to Nancy’s dealing with presentation, and, ultimately, to his thinking of art? These questions are raised in this chapter, and will be developed further in Chapter 4.369
Associated with the previous notions, Nancy approaches the question of presentation (Darstellung) explicitly, using Hegel’s Science of Logic as his principal source. In this context, Nancy gives Aufhebung the meaning of “relief”, the
allows objectivity to come into being. Another way to express the same thing could be that in his investigations Hegel endeavours to make the development of the history of philosophy comprehensible, so that thought, in its historicity, turns out to be not being as such but coming. One can read, as Clive Cazeaux does, the supposition that knowledge and reality are one as a response to Kant’s problem of how the subjective mind can offer objective judgment. See The Continental Aesthetics Reader (2000), ed. Clive Cazeaux. London: Routledge, p. 8-9.
364 Nancy, Hegel: L’inquiétude du négatif, p. 8-10, cf. Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy, p. 44.
365 Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy, p. 34.
366 Nancy, The Speculative Remark, p. 32 (La remarque spéculative, p. 47).
367 But later Hegel gave history the meaning of actuality (energeia). Cf. Hegel, Werke, vol. XIV, p.
321, cit. Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 330. What I shall clarify in greater detail below is the thought that art is not a presentation of an Idea for Nancy, but just a vestige or a trace, “smoke without fire”, left by the Idea in its disappearing. The trace is not the sensible trace of the insensible, but it is the sensible traced or tracing, as its very sense. This can be equated with the notion of atheism. Nancy, The Muses, p.
96-97 (Les muses, p. 154-155).
368 Cf. Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy, p. 34.
369 As a foundation for Nancy’s working through Hegel there is Hegel’s understanding of the object of philosophy, which is the Absolute Spirit or God. This is reality without qualification, which can be approached only negatively as that which is, as a whole, not finite, not a part.
projection of the figure of philosophical discourse: it is “determinateness right at itself”, an sich, the one that “the proposition proposes”.370 Aufhebung is for Nancy “the word, the speculative” – it is “the word that is speculative but is so without syntax, without copula”.371 This is what the Science of Logic begins with:
the “empty word” or the emptiness of the word as the immediacy of being. The Logic ends by presenting itself as the presentation of the disappearance of the word, since “logic exhibits the self-movement [die Selbstwegung] of the absolute Idea only as the original word, which is an outwardizing or utterance [Äusserung], but an utterance that in being [indem sie ist] has immediately vanished again [verschwinden] as something outer [Äusseres]”. This is the moment of logic.372 Nancy’s deconstructive reading of Hegel would thus result in asking if it is possible that what must “present” itself does not present itself, but differentiates itself and alienates itself – does the necessity of manifestation or appearance entail the necessity of loss? This would be a question of the form of Darstellung.373
In Nancy’s view, the aufheben, as the form of the word, as the “vanishing of the lexicon”, is neither a concept nor a signification, but rather a passage from one text to another. In his interpretation of Aufhebung he, in this way, questions the terms of logical identity in Hegelian dialectics. According to Hutchens’s formulation, what Nancy wonders is whether there might be any place in the dialectic for undecidability, for meanings that are restless and “lost” – that is, born between singular existents, and thus are open.374 Aufhebung is, thus, the principle for the production of philosophical discourse.375 In order for the empty word to be uttered, so that it may give way to its exteriorization and pronunciation, it has to be thought of departing from its vanishing (Verschwindung). Or rather,
370 What unfolds in the history of thought is the substance, which encompasses both subject and object when subject is understood as the movement of self-positing. By self-positing Hegel means establishing the unity of the self-identity of the spirit from out of an opposition, diversity or otherness, so that what is required for sublation (Aufhebung) is the gathering of diversity into unity. Sublation is simultaneous preserving and maintaining of what is sublated, and thus it bears the meaning of conserving the stakes in the movement of transgression.
371 Nancy, The Speculative Remark, p. 106 (La remarque spéculative, p. 132). Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe (1993). The Subject of Philosophy, ed. Thomas Trezise. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 134 ([1975]. “L’imprésentable”, Poétique 21, p. 68 [p. 53-95]). Here Lacoue-Labarthe states that the concept is the protrusion (saillie) of the figure.
372 Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Humanity Books, p. 825, cit. Nancy, The Speculative Remark, p. 107 (La remarque spéculative, p. 133).
373 Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, The Subject of Philosophy, p. 143 (“L’imprésentable”, p. 75).
374 Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy, p. 27.
375 In a later study on Hegel, Hegel: L’inquiétude du négatif (translated as Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative), Nancy takes a new position concerning similar matters from the point of view of the subject and of negativity: the subject is “what it makes of itself, and what it does is the experience of the conscience of the negativity of the substance”; as for negativity, history means the sense of its movement. With Hegel’s philosophy – and, according to Nancy, in fact with all philosophy since Hegel – we are thus dealing with the thought of philosophical discourse which is transforming itself and infinitely returning to its groundless ground. Nancy, Hegel: L’inquiétude du négatif, cf. p. 8-10.
the empty word has to resurrect or re-emerge, since always, “from the end the memory has already recited this word”.376 This is Nancy’s explication of the aufheben: the passage from representation to philosophical thinking, or in other words, the speculative process in language. From this, he concludes that
“Darstellung is the fact of the aufheben, and the aufheben is the process through which the speculative is and presents itself in the outside, in the word”.377 Based on the logic of the constitutive absence that gives rise to any presentation, this statement correlates, of course, with Nancy’s fundamental ideas of being.
What is it, more exactly, that allows for the confrontation between the Hegelian process of the unfolding of the Spirit and the notion of presentation, Darstellung, in Nancy’s interpretation? This notion is grounded in Hegel’s understanding of “history” as becoming, as achieving actuality (Wirklichkeit) and the truth of beings.378 His notion of truth, as read on the basis provided by Logic, is something which Nancy conceives of as the taking place of the true, beyond the true itself.379 Here Nancy makes a difference between, on the one hand, the knowledge of the true “in” the thing which arrives, and on the other, the conception concerning what appears as a simple event or the fact that it arrives, that is, the eventness of its event, or “that something happens”.380
In Nancy, this problem now proves to be that of the sense of the eventness of the event, which, in turn, evokes the problem of the taking place of the sense
376 Nancy, The Speculative Remark, p. 108 (La remarque spéculative, p. 134). When speaking of the production of discourse, Nancy now turns his focus to the language of philosophy, which, nevertheless, belongs to an economy in which representation reigns “under the species of dogmatic metaphysics”, that is to say, under the species of the empiricism of meaning, “according to usage, in a word”. Yet philosophy is privileged in terms of representation, namely its ability to define its own use of language.
It “has the right to select from the language of common life which is made for the world of pictorial thinking, such expressions that seem to approximate [scheinen … nahe kommen] to the determinations of a concept”. Nancy, The Speculative Remark, p. 113 (La remarque spéculative, p. 141); cf. Hegel, The Encyclopedia of Logic (With the Zusätze), trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991, § 26, cf. § 33, cit. Nancy, The Speculative Remark, p. 113-114; p. 186-187, note 12 (La remarque spéculative, p. 141, note 146; p. 142); Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 708, cit.
Nancy, The Speculative Remark, p. 114 (La remarque spéculative, p. 142).
377 Nancy, The Speculative Remark, p. 120 (La remarque spéculative, p. 149). This is in outline of the way in which Nancy introduces the deeper meaning of Hegelian Aufhebung, “the word, the speculative”: “a word [seems to approximate] the speculative” (un mot (paraît s’approcher) du spéculatif). According to Nancy, the concept is not in language but in philosophy, and the passage from representation is also a passage between word and concept. Citing Hegel, “in common life, too, one associates [verbinden] with it the same concept for which philosophy employs it [gebrauchen];
for common life has no concept, but only pictorial thoughts and general ideas, and to recognise the concept in what is else a mere general idea is philosophy itself”. Nancy, The Speculative Remark, p. 114 (La remarque spéculative, p. 142).
378 Cf. Taminiaux, Jacques (1993). Poetics, Speculation, and Judgment, trans. and ed. Michael Gendre. Albany: SUNY Press, p. 130.
379 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 161 (Être singulier pluriel, p. 187).
380 See Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, esp. § 43-49, p. 60-71. Werner Hamacher gives an account of this problematic in his essay “Ou, séance, touche de Nancy, ici”, referring to Nancy’s essay
“The Decision of Existence”, which I shall deal with in greater detail later.
of being: is sense independent of its eventness?381 Or, is it even possible to think of sense in terms other than surprise itself, the singular event of being, without its being reducible to a general foundation?
For Hegel, what unfolds in the history of thought is the substance, which he understands as the self-positing of the subject. The self-positing of the subject, in turn, establishes the unity of the self-identity of the spirit from out of an opposition, diversity or otherness, so that what is required for sublation is the gathering of diversity into unity. Yet Nancy states that Hegel’s position is not sufficient to account for how it is that there are singular events of sense and of thought, since for Nancy, Hegel’s thought disregards the aspect of surprise involved in the notion of the eventness of the event.
The question which at this point guides Nancy’s reasoning could be expressed in the following terms: how is one to retain the event without turning it into a mere object or moment of thinking? How could one think “within” the surprising event?382 As I see it, what we need to ask is, in other words, how Nancy retains an ambivalence in his inquiry – how is it that he both tries to think of
The question which at this point guides Nancy’s reasoning could be expressed in the following terms: how is one to retain the event without turning it into a mere object or moment of thinking? How could one think “within” the surprising event?382 As I see it, what we need to ask is, in other words, how Nancy retains an ambivalence in his inquiry – how is it that he both tries to think of