Nancy’s thought on the ontology of art departs from the idea that art and the arts exist singularly in their multiplicity. His view thus includes the thought of the uniqueness of arts. This notion, unlike most theories of art in the history of aesthetics, is not built on the self-constituted, self-pronounced classical subject, on thinking of art as representation, and on searching for an origin of art in general. Why is it that Nancy focuses on the ontology of singular arts in their multiplicity? I shall suggest that this problem cannot be differentiated from the ontology of art. Parallel to the thought according to which there is no being in general but only the singular existence of an existent, there is no art “in general”:
arts exist singularly. Still, generality or universality does not grant a uniqueness or a unity of origin.734 It should now be asked why Nancy claims that the question of the multiplicity of art has so far not been recognized in theories of art, or has resulted in various difficulties.735 In examining the problem of the origin of arts, he encounters the question of finding the ontological foundation of art. The reason why this leads him to analyse art beginning from its material facticity – how it involves the problem of difference is examined in what follows.
In the essay “Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?” Nancy gives his most sustained discussion of the ontology of art.736 As his point of departure, he takes the Muses of antiquity who, he says, have always been several, whatever their attributes and number. This fact offers him the point of departure for thinking about the multiple origin of art – why there are several arts instead of just one. It is not a question of finding a principle of plurality, but of regarding plurality itself as a principle and in relation to the essence of art.737 In the following I shall try to interrogate the role of notions such as difference or interval, as well as those of limit and threshold, and thereby elucidate the nature of the break or interruption around which Nancy’s notion of art is articulated.
In his philosophy, a distance can be found, first of all, in and as the tension between the concept of “art” and that of “the arts” in their diversity. While the
734 Cf. Nancy, The Muses, p. 19 (Les Muses, p. 38).
735 Ibid., p. 1-2 (Les Muses, p. 11-12).
736 Ibid., p. 1-39 (“Pourquoi y a-t-il plusieurs arts, et non pas un seul? (Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes)”, Les Muses, p. 9-70).
737 Ibid., p. 1-2 (Les Muses, p. 11-12).
19 traditional notion of art, Nancy claims, is based on the distinction between the alleged one art and its division, he himself understands art as a singular notion which is grounded in diffraction. In fact, this diffraction extends to the untouchable end of “art” in its diversity.
one art – several arts
Why does Nancy insist on shifting the focus from a general notion of “art” to its diffraction, and places its origin in heterogeneity? I shall first try to draw together, in a schematic and perhaps still immanent way, some lines which Nancy takes up in order to build an ontology of art. To be discussed is what motivates his thought of art, starting from its supposedly divided origin: how such an account should contribute to theories of art more than to a single concept of art, and what it is able to make visible as regards the field of the aesthetic. Another question to be reflected on is the position and novelty of this thinking about theories of art, as well as Nancy’s success in offering an ontology which does not rest on an idea of aesthetic subjectivity.738 In considering the legitimacy of the problem of the multiplicity of art, or why it so far has been impugned or why theories of art have failed to recognize it as a question, Nancy addresses two possible answers. In the first the givenness of plurality comes to be affirmed through mere observation. But the classification or hierarchy of arts is not without problems, or, as Nancy suggests, at least there have been many historical variations, as is shown by the internal distribution concerning the order of the recognized arts, and the extension of the jurisdiction or what must be recognized as art, in their changes.739
Making an appeal to the attributes of the arts would lead to a task which would be uncontrollable in its extension, Nancy remarks, as music may be thought of in terms of sounds, time, or space, whereas painting appears as the art of vision, of light and of colour, among other things. These ways of asking about the plurality of art ignores his “ontological” question, that is, the one that
738 Let us remark, once more, that at the most general level, the foundations of Nancy’s account of the ontology of art lie in the critique of metaphysics. A view shared by Nancy and Heidegger is that it implies a thinking of the destitution of the essence of being and the groundlessness of subjectivity.
Thus, they find the foundation of existence abysmal, which leads them to replace the metaphysical notion of being as presence by the thought of presence in its state of coming into presence, as presencing. See e.g. Nancy, The Gravity of Thought.
739 Nancy, The Muses, p. 2 (Les Muses, p. 12).
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concerns the plurality of the origin of art: by following the lines of argument given above art rather would only come to be thought of as “art” in general or plurality without referring to “its own order, the singular plural of art, of the arts”. Also, the tendency to avoid the ontological question of arts might point to the fact that we are not in the register of ontology, but of technology – the relation between technology and ontology, or whether technology can make an ontology, is yet to be interrogated.740 As for now, let us state that the scope of technique is not the same in Nancy’s philosophy as it is in Heidegger, for whom techne stands for a way of revealing things. Nancy’s understanding of technique is based on the existence of techniques in the plural. I shall come back to this later in this chapter.
The second way to approach the supposed singular plurality of arts would be that which there is one art or an essence of art. This is what Nancy calls the
“philosophical” response, which, according to him, many artists share. In his opinion, these views fail in attempting to place the notion of art above its own diversity, even above art itself, if “art” does not reside in art itself no more than it does in artistic practices.741 In such theories, plurality is conceived of in terms of manifestations or the moments of a unique reality, be that Idea, substance or subject, so that “art” may finally exceed its own distinction.
From another point of view, this is to say that the being which is characteristic of art is, for Nancy, to show the world as though it were cut off from itself.
Thus, art assumes a figure on its cutaway section: it is “form without ground, abyss and shore of apparition”.742 The objective which Nancy now sets himself is to make explicit how philosophy has established “art” in the singular form, since he understands the determination of art in terms of singularity, in the first place, as a philosophical determination. At the same time, philosophy has left unanswered the question concerning the plurality of arts, which must be seen against the background of the connection between art and technique.
Historically the thought of the plurality of arts is by no means unprecedented.
Yet in his account Nancy seems to rely on an assumption that previous theories of art have more or less failed in attempting to produce an ontology which
740 Ibid, p. 2-3 (Les Muses, p. 12-13).
741 One example is offered by Heidegger, for whom the reflection on art is determined by the question of being. According to him, art “belongs to the disclosure of appropriation by way of which the
‘meaning of being’ can alone be defined”; art is thus not a cultural achievement nor an appearance of spirit. Cf. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 86; Nancy, The Muses, p. 4, cf. n. 3 (Les Muses, p.
15-16, n. 1).
742 Nancy, The Muses, p. 75 (Les Muses, p. 128-129).
11 would be based on an original heterogeneity. To further clarify the nature of the problem, Nancy takes up views presented by Kant, Schelling and Hegel.743 For Kant the division of arts is simply given, consisting of the tripartition comprising the arts of speech, the formative or figurative arts, and the art of the play of sensations.744 In the sublime Nancy sees a potential for going beyond art: the sublime escapes from the plurality of arts, for in Kant’s theory there is just one sublime for all the arts. In Schelling’s philosophy, art effects the
“representation of the absolute with absolute indifference of the universal and the particular”.745 This is the definition of the symbol, whose supreme form is language. Diversity is thus subsumed into unity. Lastly, with Hegel the unity of art and the differentiation of its historical forms demand their external reality, that of the particular arts; namely, that “art” only comes into existence by means of particular arts.746 Underlying all this is the supposed “irreducible material difference” of the arts, which blocks art from sublation, that is, from its self-overcoming.
Why does Nancy tend to promote a view that does not allow space for a general notion of art, and which, however, still appears to remain inevitably related to it? How should one characterize the position of art, if it can be located only in its own multiplicity? Does “art” not risk becoming another very general statement of Art, instead of being deconstructed by the idea of many arts? Or does art after all remain an illustration of philosophy? In other words, is Nancy’s approach capable of addressing the works in their very singularity and locality?
Whether there is an ambiguity in Nancy himself, is the thing to be interrogated now. As I see it, the possible reasons for this double nature of Nancy’s account, if one may say so – of formulating a theory founded in an idea of the original multiplicity of art and of the arts – are to be sought from outside his immediate reflections on the sphere of the aesthetic.
743 Ibid., p. 7-9 (Les Muses, p. 21-24).
744 See Kant, The Critique of Judgement, § 51. The arts of speech include rhetoric and poetry;
the formative arts are the arts of “sensuous truth” (plastic art, i.e. sculpture and architecture) or of
“sensuous semblance” (painting); and finally, the art of the beautiful play of sensations, refers to music and the art of colour. See also Escoubas, Imago mundi, p. 68-79. Here she refers to Kant’s double or reverse mimesis between the appearance (Aussehen) of nature and of art: nature may prove beautiful when it wears the appearance of art, and “art can also be termed beautiful, where we are conscious of its being art, while yet it has the appearance of nature”. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, § 45, p. 167.
745 Schelling, F. W. J. (1989). The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Scott. Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, p. 45.
746 Hegel (1998). Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2, trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p.
613ff.
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In reflecting on the motivation of his ontology of art, Nancy’s key terms are heterogeneity and differentiation. The alternatives presented above, which are designated to put into question any notion of the unity of art, now lead him to conclude that art would be in default or in excess of its own concept. This is to say that art would never appear “except in a tension between two concepts of art, one technical and the other sublime”, so that the tension itself would remain without concept.747 His point of departure is the assumption that art and the arts inter-belong to each other (s’entr’appartiennent) in an extended mode of interiority, and for this reason a tension exists between them – the tension between art and the different arts. Art, in this way, would be a matter of res extensa and partes extra partes. How Nancy wishes to thematize the tension, and what its bringing to the fore entails as regards the ontology of art, is what I shall focus on in what follows.
The statement that there is not presentation of art “in general”, but only the plural presentation of the singular plural of presentation proves to be valid for Nancy because, he says, art takes place singularly: it comes into presence, but only as plural and in terms of discontinuity. Nancy attempts to clarify these as matters of time and space – namely, in their interlacement, which is to say as spacing. The dis-location of the world into plural worlds, that is, into what he terms as “the irreducible plurality of the unity ‘world’”, takes place producing the a priori and the transcendental of art.748 Here, the discreteness of the different zones and distance in itself is what constitutes the world. Constituting the world, in turn, is the sense of spacing – or what might as well be called being – that is, the absolute difference of appearance or of being-in-the-world as such.749
The way Nancy comments on the distribution of the arts can be compared with the separation which he makes between the metaphysical “signification”
and the rediscovered, genuinely philosophical “sense”. According to him, art has the ability to release the senses from signification – or rather, art disengages the world from signification. Such disengagement is the moment of the opening of sense, which is always only coming. This is the sense of the (sensuous) senses in that they are external to signification and, finally, they come to mean the
747 Nancy, The Muses, p. 4-6 (Les Muses, p. 16-18). The tension of simultaneous belonging and ek-sisting is also the structure of Nancy’s idea of transimmanence.
748 Ibid., p. 19 (Les Muses, p. 38).
749 Ibid., p. 20 (Les Muses, p. 40). This is the reason why aesthetics for Nancy becomes
“transcendental aesthetics”. See section 4.2.
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“sense of the world”. The sense of the world stands here for suspension of signification.750
Hence it may be said that art is always postponed, in the state of being born, and in this way it means presentation or, in other words, setting itself to work of exposition.751 As I see it, art is external to signification twice over.
First, it dislocates the senses from signification; secondly, it distracts the alleged synesthesia between the sensuous senses, if we suppose that sensibility is understood as external to signification. In both stages of dislocation, sense does not coincide with signification when the five senses are multiplied when touching each other at innumerable points in art.752 By the same token – that art is outside of the sphere of signification – art cannot be a question of representation: art shows the beginning of a beginning.753 It discloses what and how the work of art is: it shows what the depicted thing is “in truth”. Truth is here understood in the sense of unconcealedness or aletheia.754
In Heidegger’s philosophy, being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein), like any being-in (In-sein), is restricted to Dasein’s state of being.755 Only Dasein is in the world; as for its ontological characteristic or modality of being, Dasein is an existentiale.756 Heidegger calls Dasein’s characters of being existentialia. They are to be distinguished from “categories”, which are characteristics of being for
750 By saying that the suspension of signification is that of touch, Nancy states that “being-in-the-world touches on its sense, is touched by it, touches itself as sense”. Ibid., p. 22 (Les Muses, p. 44).
751 Nancy, Le Regard du portrait, p. 34. The “setting itself to work of exposition” recalls, in Heideggerian terms, the “setting itself to work of truth” as in Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art”.
See Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, e.g. p. 39.
752 A later nomination which Nancy has given to the original heterogeneity of the sensuous domains is oscillation. Oscillation is what happens in the exchangeability called into question between a text and an image, between sonority and visuality, in the event in which they interpret – incarnate and animate – each other. The horizon of interpretation between image and text is at each other’s limit, referring to one another, in a way that they vacillate between the presence of form and of spirit, without that they would fix any presence. Cf. Nancy, Au fond des images, p. 122, 131, 136; The Muses, p. 22 (Les Muses, p. 44).
753 Nancy, Les Muses, rev. ed., p. 182.
754 One of the famous examples that Heidegger uses in “The Origin of the Work of Art” is van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes. The shoes stand for what Heidegger calls “equipment”, the quality of which is in usefulness and reliability. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 33-36. I return to this example in section 4.3.
755 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 12, esp. p. 78-80; § 41, p. 235f. The fundamental ontological characteristics of being-in-the-world are existentiality, facticity, and fallenness. Heidegger explains that
“being-in” usually comes to be understood as “being in something”: this is “the kind of Being which an entity has when it is ‘in’ another one”. Their being is that of being-present-at-hand. In his later writings Heidegger expands the notion of being-in: in Die Kunst und der Raum – as in the much earlier “Origin of the Work of Art” – he notes that “things themselves are the places, and do not merely belong in a place”. This statement has several consequences as regards Nancy’s ontology of art. See Heidegger, Die Kunst und der Raum, p. 11; cf. Nancy, The Muses, p. 19 (Les Muses, p. 39).
756 Dasein understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. Thus, the task of Dasein is to decide of its own existence. The understanding of oneself is what Heidegger calls existentiell, and the question of existence is one of Dasein’s ontical affairs. Again, the context of such structures, or the thematic explication of Dasein’s ontological structure, belongs to the sphere of existential analysis. Heidegger, Being and Time, § 4. Cf. also Chapters 1 and 3 of this study.
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entities whose character is not that of Dasein. Together, existentialia and categories are “the two basic possibilities for characteristics of Being”.757 Respectively, the entities whose kind of being is not of the character of Dasein, but which have “a definite location-relationship with something else which has the same kind of Being”, are “categorial”. The things of the latter sort are merely present-at-hand within the world; they are worldless in themselves.758 For Nancy, being in the world does not seem to be reserved uniquely for man, but instead all beings are more or less in the world. The grounds of this extended notion of
entities whose character is not that of Dasein. Together, existentialia and categories are “the two basic possibilities for characteristics of Being”.757 Respectively, the entities whose kind of being is not of the character of Dasein, but which have “a definite location-relationship with something else which has the same kind of Being”, are “categorial”. The things of the latter sort are merely present-at-hand within the world; they are worldless in themselves.758 For Nancy, being in the world does not seem to be reserved uniquely for man, but instead all beings are more or less in the world. The grounds of this extended notion of