As regards some of the focuses of Nancy’s thought, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy has marked an important point of departure for him from the beginning: Nancy recurrently returns to issues which originate from the question of being as put forward by Heidegger. In examining some themes around the Heideggerian notion of being, my point of view is the differentiation between representation – presencing of what is present – and presentation – being as disclosedness. These concepts are to be examined, however, in order to get a grasp of the interpretations given by Nancy. How does being manifest itself in his philosophy, or what does it mean that being comes into presence?
The notion of presence may be set next to concepts such as Darstellung and Vorstellung, where Darstellung stands for the Latin praesentatio, the corresponding verb being “to present”, while Vorstellung signifies re-praesentatio, having the sense of “to make something present” or “to allow something to present itself”
(in French, [se] rendre présent), thus hinting at the presencing of what is present.
These issues will be dealt with in this chapter; associated points – such as how is it that anything may come into being in some figure, or the roles of sensibility and intelligibility in this investigation – will be discussed in the later parts of this study.
How should one characterize being in terms of presentation or coming into presence, if this is what being, first of all, “means”? To explore this question, I shall discuss its origins in Nancy. For Heidegger thinking of the present in terms of presence announces a metaphysical approach to the nature of being.344 First to be considered is the thought of existence. For Heidegger, as has been pointed out above, no notion of being “in general” exists, but it is still possible to speak of the “meaning” or the “truth of being”. Nancy adds to this notion the emphasis on the active position of sense: being as making-sense, or being acted as sense.345 That Nancy considers, above all, the practical aspect of being, also amounts to the fact that his inquiry into being begins from the existence of existents – which is not to say, however, that this would not also be Heidegger’s
344 Cf. Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 11-12.
345 Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 176-177 (La pensée dérobée, p. 90-91). Cf. section 1.1.
1 point of departure in the questioning of being. The theme of existence will be the main point in section 2.1.
How does Nancy motivate his understanding of the idea of coming-into-presence? In order to consider this concept, and before going to its alleged origins in Heideggerian thought, I shall take a brief look at Hegel’s term Darstellung, currently translated as “presentation”. In section 2.1, I shall attempt to illustrate its relatedness to the problematic of coming-into-presence in the philosophy of both Nancy and Heidegger. By Darstellung Hegel refers to the presentation of an idea in its sensible figure (sinnliche Darstellung der Idee). To be examined is how the Hegelian questioning of Darstellung paves the way for Nancy’s notion of presentation. As I see it, Nancy seeks an interpretation of this term which would bring forward the event-like character of being “as we have inherited it from Hegel”346 – an idea of being as existence.347 Along with this notion, I shall trace some ideas linked with Nancy’s related concepts as seen against the background of Hegel, and also, via Hegel, of Heidegger. Nancy has commented extensively on Hegel: in his monograph The Speculative Remark he aims at deconstructing Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung, “sublation”, in a way which largely parallels his dealing with the notions of philosophical discourse and its presentation in his books on Kant and Descartes, written in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.348
However, to outline the scope of being in Heidegger’s philosophy would prove to be an impossible task in the context of my dissertation, even with respect to Nancy’s work alone. Therefore, in section 2.2 I attempt instead to lay the foundation for the discussion of Nancy’s notion of presentation and its connection to art, as well as clarify the differences between Heidegger’s and Nancy’s understanding of coming-into-presence and its roots.
346 Nancy (2000). Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 175 (Être singulier pluriel, Paris: Galilée, 1996, p. 201).
347 E.g. ibid., p. 172 (Être singulier pluriel, p. 198).
348 Nancy (2001). The Speculative Remark (One of Hegel’s Bons Mots), trans. Céline Surprenant, Stanford: Stanford University Press, cf. p. 13-15 (La remarque spéculative (Un bon mot de Hegel), Paris: Galilée, 1973, p. 22-24). The Speculative Remark is the first of Nancy’s early monographs, the others being dedicated to Kant (Le discours de la syncope and L’impératif catégorique) and Descartes (Ego sum). In The Speculative Remark Nancy’s developing of the theme of presentation is already at an initial stage; it was in the books to come that he took up this notion more extensively. However, I have found Nancy’s monographs on Kant and Descartes more appropriate with respect to the treatment of presentation in this dissertation. However, The Speculative Remark opens the scheme of Nancy’s techniques of deconstructive reading which he has repeatedly adopted in the three following commentaries mentioned above. Later, Nancy wrote another book on Hegel, titled Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, in which he examines, above all, the relation between the concepts of sense and negativity in Hegel’s thought. See Nancy (2002). Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Hegel: L’inquiétude du négatif.
Paris: Hachette, 1997).
But before going to the problems of presentation and representation – thus attempting to open a perspective to the question why, with a view to art, presentation comes to the fore in a specific sense – I would like to take up the Kantian separation between the notions of Vorstellung and Darstellung.349 In Kant’s terminology Darstellung is referred to as the sensuous presentation of ideas, as “exhibition” or “exposition”. Darstellung names the intuitive presentation of a thing, without which there is thought but no cognition. By contrast, Vorstellung, a concept related to Darstellung, is the traditional rendering of “representation”
or “conception”.350 Imagination is the faculty of Darstellung, for it is imagination that makes an intuition coincide with the presence of its object. Darstellung refers to the Latin translation of “exhibition”: subjectio sub adspectum.351Vorstellung designates the way of making or rendering the thing present. Vorstellung means re-praesentio and, thus, has the sense of repetition – of establishing something before oneself and of keeping things at one’s disposal.352 Imagination has an intermediate status between sensibility and the understanding. Imagination joins together intuitions and concepts, thus featuring in the schematic synthesis which generates knowledge and experience.353
This is to say that by virtue of this a cognition of the object under a given concept is possible, as Kant explains in the Critique of Pure Reason. Intuition means reception: it is dependent on the presence of the object; in fact, intuition presupposes the presence of the object. It is a question of knowledge only when concepts are joined with intuitive presentation. In The Critique of Judgement imagination obtains a more independent status: it produces representations.
It is by virtue of representations that something, that is, forms, are born. Very roughly, one might say that the separation made by Kant between the concepts of Vorstellung and Darstellung is mediated in Nancy’s philosophy, which is reflected in Nancy’s distinguishing between the concepts of “presentation”
349 The first book dedicated to Nancy’s notion of presentation was a monograph on Kant, Le discours de la syncope, I. Logodaedalus. Here the concept of Darstellung is the centre of attention.
350 See e.g. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 961, 980.
351 Here, according to Kant, Darstellung offers an example. Kant, Critique of Judgement, § 59, see also p. 14-18. Cf. Beaufret, Jean (1973/1984). Dialogue avec Heidegger, II. Philosophie moderne. Paris:
Minuit, p. 78-80; Derrida, “Sending: On Representation”, esp. p. 306-312 (Psyché, p. 119-123); also Escoubas, Éliane (1986). Imago mundi, Paris: Galilée, p. 20.
352 Cf. Derrida, “Sending: On Representation”, p. 307-309 (Psyché, p. 120-121).
353 Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, A 140/B 179. In another formulation, Kant says: “[Only]
where the concept of an object is given, the function of judgement, in its employment of that concept for cognition, consists in presentation (exhibition), i.e. in placing beside the concept an intuition corresponding to it”. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, p. 34.
and “representation”. In important ways this mediation also happens through Heidegger’s interpretations.