1

Martta Heikkil, Ph.D., Dpt. of Aesthetics, University of Helsinki, Finland

JEAN-LUC NANCY AND THE INTIMATE DISTANCE OF ART This article reviews the concept of touch and some of the connotations it has in Jean-Luc Nancys thinking. I shall point to the notion of art and its connection with his specific use of the concept of sense. Finally, I discuss their relation to what Nancy means by artistic presentation. To find out about the way art may make something appear calls for an inquiry about the sense1 of art: how is art able to open its own strangeness and our exposure to it? How, in its strangeness, does art touch upon its own limit as the limit of nothingness? And how to approach the artworks unattainable absence, which, however, is of a profoundly intimate nature to the one who has an experience of it? This is a question of how art presents its own figure or form, or how art gives form to itself in another words, how art may present some sense. The rather complicated theme of touch requires, thus, the taking up of some of Nancys central philosophical figures: presentation, the body, spacing and the distance involved in it, as well as the world and technique.

The Sense of Art(s) For Jean-Luc Nancy, the event of coming-into-presence means presence before signification.2 What is at stake in art is the limit of the coming-into-presence of sense: what comes to be presented in art is the fact that there is presentation. In other words, art presents its own figure or form. What is peculiar to the way of artistic presentation is that the presencing occurs each time singularly, whereas the possibilities of coming into presence are innumerable. In question is not the fact that art would represent something to a subject, but that its presentation is related to itself: there is presentation because the obviousness of the factuality of presentation is in relation to itself. Art manifests that presentation is something evident; and this is to say that presentation in art is not in relation to a subject.
1

The term sense is liable to have taken different meanings in Nancys thinking, and it is greatly from this concept that many of his philosophical ideas seem to proceed. The French sens is the equivalent of the English sense in that both of these concepts are polysemantic. They may point to direction, intuition, reason, the five senses, or meaning. In his writings Nancy uses the whole semantic field of sense, which often makes the meaning of the word ambiguous. Most importantly, he uses sense in order to differentiate between meaning or signification, which indicates something given and fixed. Sense, in turn, refers to what precedes the separation between the sensible and the intellectual: sense exceeds or is beyond any signification. 2 Nancy, Jean-Luc (1997). The Gravity of Thought, trans. Franois Raffoul and Gregory Recco. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, p. 55.

Here, Nancys idea is the same as Martin Heideggers: being is not to be thought of as beingness or constant presence, but is rather to be described as coming into presence or presentation, whereby being takes place in an infinitely finite way: being which is not, but which comes or is born into presence here-and-now in an infinite arrival. Hence, as I see it, the limit of each sense, which comes to be embodied in a work of art, is where presentation touches itself.3 Here the limit is between the arts, the distribution of which Nancy discusses on the basis that art is the exposition of differences. Art presents singularly the detail and the local in their multiplicity.4 This is to say that the occurrences of presence are for Nancy always multiple, but in a singular way, since they are, from the beginning, infinitely differentiated according to the heterogeneity of the happening of the world, whereby the world is revealed as something. Thus, Nancy suggests that art would isolate a moment of the world as exteriority and exposition of the being-in-the-world, presented as such.5 Art is similar to world inasmuch as a world is no longer attached to a signification but is itself its own signification, or has no signification it is sense absenting itself, an ab-sense. Therefore, what opens in art is its own lack of end we have to invent the universal of art.6 What characterizes the sense of presentation in Nancy is, in a word, the exposition of existence. For him, being is primarily existence: by privileging existence, Nancy attempts to rethink Heideggers ontological difference with no hierarchy between the ontological and the ontic levels. The priority of existence undermines the very possibility of the Heideggerian quest for the meaning of being as such. As regards the notion of art, this thought has several implications. According to his own definition, existence is the spacing of a present that takes place, as present, when a substance or a subject is coming along or going away.7 For this reason, Nancy explains, the present as present is praesens, for it both precedes (itself) and succeeds (itself), thus separating itself and keeping at a distance the presence it carries.8
3 4

Cf. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1996). The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 34. See ibid., p. 20. 5 Ibid., p. 18. 6 See e.g. Margat, Claire (2002). Jean-Luc Nancy: y a-t-il encore un monde?, Art Press 281, p. 57, 59. 7 Nancy, Jean-Luc (1997). The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 65-66. 8 Ibid., p. 66. For Nancy the Bildung calls for a blind spot or the vanishing of unity of Einbildung so that an image may present itself. Such a blind spot appears in a specific sense in the case of the death mask. The gaze of the dead presents an inimaginable imaging (le bilden inimaginable), it is the model of an image or of a sight, because it looks without seeing or sees without looking. Thus, the mask works as the model of the pre-vision of the unity which anticipates itself in the precession of its own succession. Yet, it is a model, since it bildet and ein-bildet a Bildung in general. In other words, it vor-bildet the unity of the image. The blind spot of the empty look, the blackout of the oneness of the image,

The existence as a form of presence is, then, drawn out of absence; imagination is a force capable of doing this.9 The manifestation itself is the coming of a stranger and the birth into the world of what has no place in the world10 this strangeness, the very thing that is of interest to Nancy in art. Namely, an image like any thing presents itself inasmuch as it resembles itself, or touches its own sense, and thus affirms its being that thing.11 By this, one can understand that for Nancy art means acceding to access to the sense itself, without one acceding anywhere. Rather, access implies the opening up of time, its spacing and the here-and-now, Nancy says: this is what is designed by his notion of finitude.12 As a consequence, finitude is a question of the coming of sense, and not of the institution of sense; there are nothing but finite senses.13 The same phenomenon is manifested by the trace in the work of an artist: as he draws a line in a painting, in the contour he draws not a presence but a vestige of its birth.14 For this reason, each work of art is a cutting out (dcoupe) of appearing this is for Nancy the point at which phenomenology comes to its limit: here it is a question of the appearing of appearing, or of appearing as a coming into presence, namely, a coming of the world rather than into the world.15 Such coming of the world is not even a coming, but is the fact that the world discloses itself in its obviousness. This conception no doubt comes close to Heideggers idea of art as the setting itself to work of truth, the difference being, however, that at stake in Nancy is nothing like a revelation of originary truth of being.16 Yet, in the present connection Nancy mentions truth, as the name for the sense of sense, or the obviousness of the world which makes art. The figure that Nancy uses in this context is that the phenomenon is a light that illuminates, without which the light would appear in itself in other words, lux without fiat.17

is the focus in which the view or the representation, the shining of being, breaks out. This is to say that the imaging of unity is possible only out of death, that is, from the disruption of unity: from the non-presence of unity, in which unity pres-ents itself (se prs-ente), or comes both before and after itself. Nancy thus comments on Heideggers critique to the Kantian idea of the schema, produced by imagination. See Nancy, Jean-Luc (2003). Au fond des images. Paris: Galile, p. 172-174; cf. Heidegger, Martin (1997/1973). Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Fifth, enlarged edition, trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 20. 9 Nancy, Au fond des images, p. 48. 10 Nancy, The Muses, p. 76. 11 Nancy, Au fond des images, p. 24, 162-163. A somewhat similar idea is implied by Kantian schematism. 12 See Nancy, Jean-Luc (2003). A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 21. 13 Ibid., p. 27. 14 Nancy, The Muses, p. 75-76, cf. Nancy, Au fond des images, p. 162. 15 Nancy, The Muses, p. 31. 16 This thought was set forth by Heideggers notion of the artwork. See Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Heidegger, Martin (1975). Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, p. 15-87. 17 Ibid., p. 32-33.

Touch If art, as well as being, are for Nancy something which is never the foundation of its own existence, and the origin of which is to be traced in the withdrawal of origin, how should one articulate the most proper possibility of their existing? How to trace the possibility of the impossibility of existing, that is, the impossible fact of its existence? One answer which Nancy offers to these problems lies in the philosophical figure of touch, which may also be termed tact and contact. For Nancy, what touches is the sense of things: sense emerges as the multiple and fragmented real of the world to which thought is exposed as its limit. Sense is thus offered at the limit of signification, which is also the rupturing of presence.18 It could thus be said that, in attempting to think sense, Nancy is looking for the limit and the limits of the phenomenological account of the disclosure of the world.19 Worth considering at this point are the very limits of what he terms as sense and, as a consequence, the limit of touch and its connection with the limit of presentation. More exactly, what I try to discern here is whether, and on what grounds, Nancy sees a possible interrelation between the thinking of art to that of touch and the body. Nancys concept of the body has an affinity with the Heideggerian Dasein: both Dasein and the body are names for being and sense in that they have no pre-existing signification, but are always in excess of signification. Rather, they have sense only because of their situatedness, or better yet, sense takes place in them at a specific time and place. With his notion of body, however, Nancy wants to replace Dasein by giving it more bodily aspects or by showing its embodied and material existence in a word, its gravity. As I see it, what Nancy wants to bring forth with his idea of the body is that finite bodily sense makes sense, discloses a world, and thus constitutes existence. To be clarified now is how art touches sense in other words, how art may present or make manifest a sensuous figure or form which makes sense, precisely as the being-in-the-world which we encounter with our bodies makes sense.20 What follows is that senses exist as singular, particular bodies, when different things come in contact with one another. This explains why, for Nancy, a sense cannot exist as anything but local and singular, as a being-there: he names a local taking place of a sense corpus. The world of corpuses is exposed or presented, which happens only when the world is touched by the sense. In
18 19

Nancy, The Gravity of Thought, p. 63. Cf. James, Ian (2006). The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 218, cf. ibid., p. 118. 20 Nancy, The Muses, p. 18.

considering the scope of Nancys word touch (le toucher) and to touch (toucher), the first point of reference to it are the five senses, among which touch21 occupies a primary position. Tactility encompasses all the other senses, thus being a paradigm for all sensibility. What is meant by touch in Nancys philosophy is the relation to the world. Touching is not comprehension, but it points to addressing someone or something showing tact. Otherwise than one might expect, however, Nancys thinking of touch does not understand touch as continuity and immediacy. Rather, his conception of touch implies a thinking of separation, dislocation, or effraction, as Nancy calls it.22 His thought of touch calls for, first of all, a logic of contact in distance or in absolute separation. Touching means for Nancy primarily touching the limit of touch. In question is, thus, the possibility of touch starting from a relentless coming to a limit, or the impossibility of touch; on the limit things are exposed to themselves. To be asked now is what is the scope of touch and its relation to the thinking of limit and of finitude, and hence, to the way things come into presence, which only takes place at a limit? When one touches a thing, a distance is born even where I touches itself in the heart of I there proves to be a difference and a break or a syncope, as if one were addressing the other in oneself. The difference here is the difference of being (to itself). Touch posits the difference between the touching and the touched, and this interval is exposition itself.23 Touch touches only the limit of one touching itself. This is why touching takes place between the touchable and its untouchable limit. Touching is nothing but touching the border of the untouchable and approaching the inaccessible or the inappropriable, in other words, its alterity. By this, Nancy wants to express the idea that for him experience is always experience of the limit, and hence there is an asymmetry in that the you is inaccessible in its transcendence.24 Nancys haptology is grounded on the thinking of intimacy

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In his commentary Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida brings forth some of the most important thinkers behind Nancys notion of touch. First, there is Aristotles On the Soul (Peri Psykhs or De anima). Of modern philosophers, Kant has probably the greatest influence on Nancy. In Kantian terms, Nancys touch is what lies between understanding and sensibility; this is also the place of schematism and Dichtung, the sensuous faculty or sensuous figuration. For Kant, immediate, outer perception is the most certain kind of sensibility. Among the senses, touch is the one which underlies sight and hearing. Husserl continues with the tactilist or haptocentric tradition, whereas Merleau-Ponty develops a notion of symmetry between the touched and the touching, a symmetry which Husserl denies. Nancy, in turn, attempts to think of touching what does not touch itself: that is to say, the touching of a limit, or touching with the point. Cf. Derrida, Jacques (2000). Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Galile, p. 55-56. 22 James, The Fragmentary Demand, p. 150; see also Nancy, Jean-Luc (1992). Corpus. Paris: Mtaili, p. 12-13. 23 See Nancy,Jean-Luc (1987/1997). Des lieux divins. Mauvezin: T.E.R., p. 67. Nancys saying cela se touche can be translated either as it touches itself or one touches it, it lets itself be touched. For translations, cf. Derrida, Jacques (1993). Le toucher. Touch/to touch him, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Paragraph 16: 2, p. 125 (p. 122-157). See also Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, p. 47. 24 Cf. Derrida, Le toucher. Touch/to touch him, p. 142-143.

and an absence of contact.25 With respect to presentation, the structures of touch and presentation, when understood as the auto-presentation of presence, show similarity with each other in their heterogeneity and intervals art is divided from its origin. As I have tried to bring out earlier, art not only is the presentation of presentation, but also that the sensuous form of artistic presentation is expressed in terms of the singular plurality of the senses sustained in the simultaneous proximity and distance of touch: in a contact which occurs at distance. These notions come under focus now: how art touches its limit in presenting itself is the key question here. Touch demands that there should be a difference in which the touch may take place. What thus opens is an interval: it exists between us, between our contours. This is possible, Nancy clarifies, only because bodies are partes extra partes; all that is shared, is the difference.26 The bodies articulate the space: Because the bodies are not in space, but space is in the bodies, the space is a spacing, a tension of place.27 To put it another way, senses open to each other in a mutual communication, that is, sense has a certain value only if it is related with another sense.28 That a singular sense is born requires a difference from other senses hence, its opening to other senses must take place in common with other senses. That something as sense may be exposed or presented to each other requires a thinking of distance and difference. In other words, being takes place only when beings are touched by each other or when they are exposed to other beings. Next, I attempt to think what the scope of art might be in this scheme.

Producing the Distance: Space and Time If there are thresholds between the arts and the senses, these thresholds represent the limits of coming-into-presentation, on the verge of being touched. How are, then, these thresholds to be understood what is it that is on the threshold, and what is the nature of the threshold or limit? A metaphor used by Nancy is the intactness and touching of light and shadow: with it he tries to describe the liminal nature of sense in art. The threshold is that of sense in its infinite opening, art offering access to the limit of sense, to an access that infinitely accedes.29 One way to deal with the
25 26

See Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, p. 129. Nancy, Corpus, e.g. p. 80. 27 Ibid., p. 27. 28 This, of course, reminds us of Nancys notion of community, the members of which share only the fact that there is nothing to be shared. See e.g. Nancy (1991). The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Fenves. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Cf. Nancy, The Sense of the World, p. 82.

threshold is to take ourselves as spectators. As such, we are the limit of presentation: when being exposed to a work of art, we are the access to that which is absolutely inaccessible.30 The paradigmatic case of the absolutely inaccessible is death.31 Nancy thus suggests that the painting offers an opening, an access to all that is. The presence of the scene is an access: it is an expanse, a zone, a plane, and not a form or a consistency of Being.32 As I see it, this note could be read in a way that the painting spaces, as Nancy has remarked elsewhere, referring to the Heideggerian notion in Die Kunst und der Raum. The attempt to make access to the scene of the painting is something that Nancy deems indiscreet tactless, one might also say, as the limit is that of touch. In question is touch as limit.33 The discreteness of the zones and distance in itself is what constitutes the world: this is the sense of spacing or what might equally well be called being, Nancy remarks the absolute difference of appearance.34 The space inherent in spacing is not, to be sure, a spatial notion here, but ontological. The creation of the world is itself spacing and differentiation between the zones. What dislocates art from anything that might make it just aesthetic is technique: according to Nancy, the technicity of art dislodges art from its poetic assurance, if one understands by that the production of a revelation, or art conceived as a physis unveiled in its truth.35 This is because the role of technique is, finally and seemingly paradoxically, to put the work out of work (dsuvrement). This is not to say that technique would make work out of the work, but to put it outside itself, touching the infinite. From this it follows that art is always coming to its end. The end is the beginning of plurality, technique being a rule for an end.36 Arts sense of existence may thus be found in what infinitely touches its end: this is finitude and another sense of technique. The technique which corresponds here greatly with the Heideggerian techne of existence then appears to be the relation to the endless ends, and it is the relation to singular plurality, which is the duty of technique. This is the duty imposed on art. I might suggest that by linking his interpretation of techne with art, Nancy gives technique the position by which he
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Nancy, The Muses, p. 60. This is exemplified by Nancys interpretation of a painting by Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin (16051606), which he presents in The Muses, p. 57-67. 32 Nancy, The Muses, p. 66. 33 Cf. ibid., p. 57. 34 Ibid., p. 19. 35 Ibid., p. 37. 36 Stiegler, Bernard (1994). La technique et le temps, 1: La faute dEpimthe. Paris: Galile, p. 107.

attempts to justify his view of the endlessly multiplying origin of art. Technique is characterized by the fact that, as different means of production, it leads to another means. Thus, technique does not lead the artist to a conclusion concerning the category of the work which he is making on the contrary, it takes him to an end which is always only coming and postponed in the beginning. Here, I think, are the grounds for Nancys saying that presentation remains suspended in its passage.37 In Nancys thinking, the revelation takes the singular work of art to the limit of touch. Touching is touching the limit of touch, which in art means that each time the limit of technique comes to be touched, it does not give the work of art as a representative of an art, but leads art outside itself in order to consider another technique. This would be how the zoned being of art appears in its division. One should remark, however, that techne means that the end of art is, however, the beginning of plurality, and thus a beginning for technique. As I see it, for Nancy the technique of art is infinitely finite. A singular art touches infinitely its own limit; in this way, the arts can be divided into still new categories and take still new forms. Art is, in Nancys philosophy, a matter of distinction and of the opening and withdrawal of sense. It is according to this kind of a dual gesture that it comes into presence by opening itself to its own groundlessness.38 As elsewhere in Nancys discussion of sense, the sense of art is not identical with itself. Or, sense exists but as the movement and the escape from presence: this is to say that it eksists or exceeds itself. An image presents an absence. An image itself is a place: the singular place of what has no place. It is the place of displacement. Because the place of the image is empty, the number of its modes of presentation is indefinite sense exists by virtue of its ex-iting and exceeding itself, its departing from itself and unidentifying with itself, for it is the movement and escape from existing.39 The difference of art is to be found in a gathering of sense without signification. By distinguishing from itself an image, or art, dislocates itself: the distance is born between the sense understood from the basis of the material presence (of a text, for example) and an imaged (image) absence, revealed by the sense in the ground of the image.

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Nancy, The Muses, p. 34. What Nancy calls the singular plural occurrences of existence, or presence, or passage would, expressed in more Heideggerian terms, point to the idea that, while unconcealing being, art does not reveal physis in its truth. 38 Cf. ibid., p. 54. 39 Nancy, Au fond des images, p. 128-129. By comparing an image, or art in general, to absence, Nancy adopts a terminology which is very close to that of Maurice Blanchot.

Since the logic of representation as revelation is not valid as regards Nancys understanding of the presentation of art, one must consider another notion.40 The logic employed by Nancy, as I see it, derives from thinking of the birth of the origin of art in terms of spacing. The fact that art presents its own figure or form (that there is art, or, that there is a presentation of presentation), is the event of the coming of the world, something which does not have a place in the world. The event of the coming into being of the world is the fact that there is world.41 If one thinks, as Nancy does, that exposition in art is grounded in groundlessness, the sense of the artistic forms and figures is laid upon nothing else than sense without signification. The sense is given in absence, so that the origin itself is absence and lack, or to say the least, strange and absolute distancing, having no foundation in presence. Presence thus fails; instead, it exposes everything, and the exposed failing is its own proper touch.42 There is no other ground for presence except the birth to presence or the coming about of the forms of presence; these are its nascent vestiges, which only exist when the form or figure arises. This is what Nancy describes as spacing. In it, there is always a tension in existence, in other words, in a singular being, which is transitively as it is tended toward its limit and its outside. Existence is exposed to its limit. Hence, existence is singular, and being comes as a surprise.43 The plurality of art produces, finally, a fundamental double law. This happens, on the one hand, in that by touching on presentation one touches on nothing, on obviousness only, and this obviousness multiplies itself in its immanence. Results include colour, nuance, line and echo. On the other hand, art disappears as soon as it takes place. What comes into being is an art, which, in turn, is a work, effectuated in a style, a manner, and so forth, to a still more definite detail. Art is then nonapparent and/or disappearing; the unity of art syncopates itself in material plurality, which makes that art, in fact, vanishes twice.44
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Although the logic of the visible and the invisible does not apply as such to Nancys idea of arts presentation, his view may still have some similarity with Merleau-Pontys interpretation of the relation between the visible and the invisible. The first vision or the first vision of the world is the the invisible of the world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it or renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being. To Merleau-Ponty, perception qua wild perception is of itself ignorance of itself, imperception, and as such, it tends to see itself as an act and to forget itself as latent intentionality, as being toward. According to Franoise Dastur, this constitutive ignorance, expressed by the of itself, points to the blind spot which makes seeing possible. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968). The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 151, 213; Dastur, Franoise (1988). Monde, chair, vision, in Merleau-Ponty: Le psychique et le corporel, ed. Anna-Teresa Tyminiecka, Paris: Aubier, p. 125. 41 Nancy, Au fond des images, p. 132; Nancy, The Muses, p. 76. 42 Nancy, The Muses, p. 71-73, 75-76. 43 Cf. Nancy, The Sense of the World, p. 29-33. 44 Nancy, The Muses, p. 36. When aesthetics presents or anticipates itself in philosophy, it is suppressed twice: first, in the end of art, and secondly, in the enjoyment of imaginative reason. In fact, these two are the same to Nancy. Art meets its end because art comprises this enjoyment. As a consequence, Nancy sees art as a question of presentation in the thinking of both Kant and Hegel, for in both, presentation is what is at stake in the aesthetic. In Nancys view, The

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What I have attempted to show above is that, for Nancy, touch has ontological stakes in that art exists only on the basis of its singular plural origin: as soon as one speaks of art, one has to make reference to the different arts. The arts, thus, touch upon each other, constantly passing into one anothers space. Touch implies a spacing in what regards both the ontology of art its singular plural origin, and the different arts. What is more, a work of art can present some sense just because it does this in passing, by opening a certain presence: not by exposing a fixed and permanent signification, but as a relation to some other thing. It is the exposition of this thing the production of the thing puts the thing forward, presents and exposes it.45 To expose is to depart from a simple position, which is always also a deposition, abandonment to the contingency of a passing moment, of a situation and of a point of view. What is exposed is placed in the order of absolute, immutable, and necessary presence. Art disposes the thing according to the order of presence: for Nancy art thus proves to be the productive technique of presence.

presentation of truth rests on the truth of presentation, which is the enjoyment of pre-figured unity. Namely, the Hegelian spirit is itself the final self-appropriating enjoyment of the Kantian imagination. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1993). The Sublime Offering, in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, eds. Jean-Franois Courtine and Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 32. Furthermore, the Aufhebung of art in philosophy has the structure of enjoyment, where art in turn enjoys itself, for it may become, as philosophic art, the selfenjoyment of Spirit itself. 45 Nancy, Jean-Luc (1997). Technique du prsent: essai sur On Kawara. Villeurbanne: Nouveau Muse / Institut dart contemporain. Technique du prsent, p. 5.