An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (With Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 183

An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 183

An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images)*

Robert Hughes

With special attention to landscape art, this overview explores Jean-Luc Nancy’s aesthetics in five theses: (1) The event of art involves shedding the everyday significations and conceptual framings that shut out the world and enclose the subject in solipsism, (2) Art locates the subject in the presentness of a singular sensuous event, (3) Art arouses intimations of the ground of the image as a ground of unpresented chaos, wildness, and indifference, (4) Art stages a real encounter with the world’s unsignifying indifference to human existence, and (5) Art exposes the subject as other to itself in the event of art.

The recent publication of Aavo Kokk and Andres Eilart’s Pintsliga tõmmatud Eesti (2011)1 gives us occasion to reconsider the strange and special pleasures of landscape images. By happy coincidence, this issue of Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on Art and Architecture invites consideration of the aesthetics of the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (b. 1940), whose essay on landscape painting begs us to do the same. Now, if landscape art calls for a critical reconsideration, this is surely not because landscape has been neglected, exactly, but because certain corners of the critical humanities – mine, to be specific, literary studies – have come to regard landscape primarily as a sign of something else: as a symbol of forces more dynamic and dramatic than mere landscape, more urgent than mere pretty pictures with

* The present essay owes much to the kind hospitality of the Research Group in Critical Theory at the Estonian Literary Museum. I should also mention my dear sister-in-law, Anu Tamm (who gave me Kokk and Eilart’s book while I was at work on a larger project on the aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy) and, of course, I could never forget the remarkable conversation of Uku, Anna, and Ella, interlocutors of infinite charm, all of them. 1 A. Kokk, A. Eilart, Pintsliga tõmmatud Eesti. Tallinn: Eesti Ajalehed, 2011. See also http://www.maastikumaal. ee/ENG/. robert hughes 184

mountains and meadows and forests, skies fixed in their slow dramas of light and shadow, icons of a reactionary pastoral sentimentalism or an environmentalist la- ment for a world under threat. Thus, for many students and critics, landscape in art may strike the eye less for the scene itself, than for the way such images treat regional or national iconographies and for the position the landscape thereby as- sumes in political debates and identitarian passions conventionally associated with this imagery. For eyes eager to see an Estonian sublime, for patriots hungry for evidence of local or national excellence or for nationalists wishing to meditate on the Estonian people’s relation to their little bit of the earth, for pastoralists seeking a pre-modern vision of a more ‘natural’ relation of humanity within nature, for anthropologists and historians curious to see peasants, fisherfolk, and workers in their proper settings at various moments in Estonian history – for all of these viewers, the long and excellent history of Estonian landscape art offers much to enjoy. The present essay has no wish to deny the considerable pleasures of art’s representational dimension (and I presume Jean-Luc Nancy would not deny them either), but it does propose to consider landscape painting in a different register. This more phenomenological register unsettles, in certain respects, the pleasures of representation, or, better, shows how these pleasures of landscape-as-representation enjoy their special quality as art by co-existing with a different kind of aesthetic pleasure, one that runs counter to the essentially narcissistic pleasures of finding one’s ideological predispositions confirmed in a painting or of exercis- ing one’s laboriously-acquired critical mastery. The aim of the essay, ultimately, is to think about the way that the uncanny workings of art suggest something about the aesthetic subject and his or her sense of the world. Jean-Luc Nancy’s work will be central for us here and this essay will proceed primarily as an exposition of his ideas on the aesthetics and ontology of art, especially as he has developed these ideas since the early 1990s. Consideration of several Estonian landscape paintings will help make Nancy’s course of thought more concrete – an indispensable func- tion, since what phenomenological criticism strives for, perhaps above all else, is a reflection upon one’s concrete sense of the world. In fact, this would be one way to understand Nancy’s own revolt against critical transformations of landscape into signs and symbols. Nancy’s work argues that when one encounters a landscape that is genuinely artful and not yet seized upon as a symbol for something other than itself, when one exposes oneself to an aesthetic event in its concrete, sensuous un- folding, this aesthetic encounter yields an uncannily displaced and doubled vision, both of oneself and of the world of sense that one faces. We will develop this argu- ment through five basic claims about art that Nancy puts forth. An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 185 The event of art involves shedding the everyday significations and conceptual framings that shut out the world and enclose the subject in solipsism Interpretation has defined, for many long decades, the critical act itself and it is, as we have said, a common critical reflex to ‘read’ images for their significance. Students appreciate it as a sign of a scholar’s specialised knowledge and hope to re- produce it in fulfilling their own assignments; the public expects it of the critic; and artists and writers are commonly asked for ‘the message’ of their work, a declaration of its meaning. Despite the occasional exasperations for writers and artists and critics of this presumed conceptual essence of the work (‘If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint’ said the American painter Edward Hopper), it is easy to see one or another painting as dominated by its conceptual, ideological, biographical, or historical dimensions. Richard Sagrits’s Sügis Kundas (Autumn in Kunda, 1964, Art Museum of Estonia), for example, will strike at least some viewers, I would think, as dominated by the canons of Soviet socialist realism, whether in conformity, in resistance, or in some complex mixture of the two. If the painting also gives a sense for the acrid smell of the factory combining with the cool air of a late afternoon in early autumn, if it impresses the viewer for the special light of a mixed cloudy day, when the sun, hitherto hidden, sinks below cloud cover and shoots a few last rays over the horizon to illuminate our workers on their way home, if the viewer finds him- or herself caught in the unexpected gaze of the workers in the foreground – if the painting does these things, it likely does them over and against a predisposition to take the painting as a signifier in the shifting ideological struggles that still surround the art of the Estonian Soviet period. I do not wish to suggest that such ideological readings are improper, but rather that such readings tend to subordinate other, perhaps more surprising features of the painting. It might be productive, I think, to resist the critical impulse to fix a painting as a sign within already well-rehearsed debates and thoughts, and to overcome the impulse to fix the image in a moral frame judging the artist, Soviet industrial policy, Soviet pictorial dictates, and the broad course of the Soviet occupation. We may return later to the matter of judgment and consider how it operates in Sagrits’ painting (What do they see, those workers who seem to be looking at us? Do they regard the viewer or the painter? Is there a judgment implied in their regard?). These conceptual framings and these ideological arguments are ultimately so lipsistic, I would say, in the sense that they are repetitions of already well-worn arguments and thus take the critic and his or her reader nowhere he or she has not already been. What school child on this side of the Narva River has not already been told of the wickedness of the Soviet occupation, the disaster of its industrial policy and the wrong-headedness of its cultural policy, considered from an Estonian point of view? Surely there are satisfactions and comforts in such rehearsals, but one cannot really call them surprising. In such cases, the painting effectively functions as an occasion to recall a set of arguments and positions with a life pre-existing (and unaffected by) the subject’s encounter with the painting, which thus becomes an encounter missed, we might say. A more authentic encounter with exteriority robert hughes 186

would catch the viewer of this painting in a moment of openness, touch the subject in some unanticipated and surprising way, and seize upon his or her attentiveness in an event of the new.

Art locates the subject in the thereness and the thisness of a singular sensuous event One of Nancy’s Heideggerian inheritances in his thinking of art is to conceive of the work of art as, to some degree, an event of presentation, in which things come forth into greater distinctness to make their impression on one’s sensibility, and in which, correspondingly, the viewer comes likewise into a fuller, more authentic sense of his or her being in the world. Such a conception of art presupposes that, in the ordinary course of everyday life, the being of human beings, and the attentiveness they bring to bear on themselves and on the world around them, is somehow veiled or muted. The ‘work’ of art, then, ‘works’ to more authentically re-engage the subject with his or her own existence and world. Insofar as landscape painting works as art (and not just as a sign or as an object), Nancy (like Heidegger) would argue that it directs its work, as art, at this very existential problematic. I expect art lovers would give their sympathy to this claim most readily in the case of works that masterfully represent and call forth the sensuous aspects of a recognisable scene. The art lover who gives him- or herself over to Eduard Ole’s Haapsalu sadam (Port of Haapsalu, 1943, Mart Lepp’s private collection) or Voldemar Peil’s Koolimäe rand (Beach of Koolimäe, 1976, private collection) will perhaps find that the painting summons the very specific feel of the air on an overcast day on the Baltic: the high rumble of the sea, the low beating of wind in one’s ear, the soft susurration of the coastal grasses, and the sense of exposure to the elements under the vast movements of cloud and coming storm. Andrei Jegorov’s Talvemaastik Pöide kirikuga (A Wintry Landscape with Pöide Church, 1920s/1930s, private collection), a very different scene, offers up the crisp chill air and the special light of a clear winter’s afternoon in the open country: at once a sensation of the wintery world and the concrete sense of what it is to be a man or woman making one’s way through such a world, alive to its pleasures, perhaps, but also exposed to its hazards. Such works at once represent the sensuous world – an overcast day on the coast, a mid- winter’s day in the country – and, at the same time, open the viewer onto a sense of what it is to be a sensuous being in this world. Nancy and Heidegger would both claim that art’s power to effect a kind of presencing is evident even in works of greater abstraction. Konrad Mägi’s somewhat more abstract Kasaritsa järv (Lake Kasaritsa, ca. 1915–1917, Art Museum of Estonia) may appeal less literally to the letter of the viewer’s recollected experience; its departures from strict realism may separate it from one’s objective memories of standing at the edge of a South Estonian lake (fig. 1). But Mägi’s landscape, however abstract, breathes with the mystery and dark beauty of the lake and broods with the obscurity of its lake-depths. It is, in short, a no-less masterful presentation of An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 187 the extraordinary subjective experience of standing by such a lake in a susceptible mood and, as it reflects the shadowy forests on the far side of the lake and the gran- deur of the clouds rolling overhead, it affects the receptive art lover in much the same way. In the case of Mägi’s painting, we might say that the work of art offers up not the transparency of the world, not the clarity of one’s experience of the world, but the self-concealment of the earth, its inexhaustible mystery, and the awe this must inspire in the attentive viewer. Mägi’s painting brings us to the impression that the earth always retains its secret and keeps something hidden from human sense. A clear sense of obscurity: not precisely a paradox, but a puzzle for thought that characterises the work of art.

Art arouses intimations of the ground of the image as the contrary of presentation as such: chaos, wildness, indifference When Jean-Luc Nancy describes the special aesthetic force of landscape images in his essay ‘Paysage avec dépaysement’2, he does so in terms of what he calls the ‘ground’ of the image. The French word is fond, suggesting a base or bottom or foun- dation that underlies some more visible, more elaborate structure – it shares its Latin root with the Estonian word vundament. Let us say that in any intelligible artistic image, there operates a kind of logic of appearance that takes up the manifold elements, renders them distinct, establishes their various relationships, assembles them and frames them as a unity, and thus presents the image as making aesthetic sense for the viewer. Much of this logic of the sensible, one presumes, is governed by the fundamental structures of human understanding and much of it is surely governed conventionally, by the already- existing rules of genre established and shared between artists and viewers. But it is surely also true that a work of art will bend and shape and improvise upon these generic rules in pursuit of its own creative ends. Where the image sets forth a unity, exhibits a vision of a whole, establishes a site for the possible discernibility and presentation of things and their relations, what Nancy calls the ground of the image is that from which the image is ripped: a field of the ununified, the unidentified, the unthingified, the indiscernible, indistinct, and unexperienced. If one might speak of ‘elements’ of a field where in fact no elements have appeared, one might propose that elements of this field might theoretically come into vision under a different, future logic of appearance, but such would be an absolutely speculative proposition. Given a logic or frame of appearance, or given several frames, the field of the unpresented remains as undifferentiated and ‘unimaginable’ as the Lacanian real. The ground of the image denotes for Nancy a field of inconsistency and flux, so it does not even make sense to speak of elements of the ground, since the ground is the field in which no elements are presented and none can be distinguished. The ground of the image is thus the field of the nothing, in the

2 In J.-L. Nancy, Au fond des images. Paris: Galilee, 2003 (translated as ‘Uncanny Landscape’ in J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image. Trans. J. Fort. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, pp. 51–62). robert hughes 188

sense that there is nothing there that appears or presents itself as an existent; the ground is the nihil one speaks of, when one speaks of creation ex nihilo. And yet, Nancy proposes that, impalpable and invisible as it is, the ground lends its weight to the force or intensity of the work of art. Let us again consider Konrad Mägi’s Kasaritsa järv. An informal poll of the sunny young art critics of my household offers the unanimous declaration that the most remarkable feature of Mägi’s landscape is its very appealing darkness. What about this darkness, one must wonder. We have already described Mägi’s landscape as presenting the viewer with a sense that something here is essentially concealed from presentation – the sense that, indicated somewhere, beyond its darknesses and its depths, lies an insistent secret, something withheld from view. If it is a secret the viewer must contend with, it is nonetheless not a secret that is addressed to the viewer and is not, in any hypothetical circumstance or future, graspable by the viewer. The light of a brighter day, a more penetrating vision – draining the lake, satellite imaging, what have you – will not lay bare this kind of mystery. Indeed, de- stroy the remarkable darkness of this painting and one destroys with it this secret that belongs to the intimacy and the encounter between viewer and painting and, within the world of the painting, belongs to the earth itself. This secret is located, one might say, somewhere along the edge of the human subject and the inhuman earth. The darkness of this oddly luminous painting is indeed a curious quality, par- ticularly as it plays out on the figure of the lake. Consider the primordial terms of visual intelligibility that landscape art routinely deploys: elements of light and shadow, separations of heaven and earth, distinctions of the near and the far, the high and the low. Mägi’s Kasaritsa järv works within these terms, as it must, but consider also how the lake – that dominates the foreground and doubles the back- ground – casts many of these fundamental terms back at the viewer, only in reverse. As if the lake were the mirror that nature might hold up to admire itself, or, better, as if it were an enormous black eyeball, regarding the heavens and the earth and reflecting them back darkly on its surface, but giving no sign of its judgment. If we ask ourselves how Mägi’s painting operates to bring its elements into visibility, we observe how the light of the air brings earth, sky, and water into their distinction, etches the birch and the pine trunks against the dark foliage of their backgrounds and again flickers their images across the surface of the lake. We see how the painting is organised not only in terms of the foregrounded lake and the backgrounded fields and forests, but also in terms of the opposition of earth and sky. These oppositions are complicated by the lake. True: the lake offers a natural mirror giving the painting its line of horizontal symmetry along the far edge of the shore and thereby organising our understanding of the elements of the picture. But the lake not only joins the earth and the sky, it reverses them, such that what is farthest (the sky behind the far trees) comes closest to the foreground of the reflection, the foot of the viewing subject. Or to put the same thing in reverse: what is near- est to the vision of the painting, the clouds at the foot of the painting, are what is farthest in the world of the landscape. In this reflected world, the trees stand above An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 189 the sky. If there is a depth implied in the water that gives weight to its cold, blue darkness, it is not a depth of meaning, nor a depth to be measured in metres, but an absolute distance that will not be sounded. In a curious way, the lake at the centre of the painting defeats the distinctions – of near and far, above and below, light and dark, visible and invisible – that organise the scene. It is a lake to lose oneself in, a lake to drown in, like the legendary lord of Kasaritsa manor. Nancy spends some time and care outlining the matter of distance in his con- ceptualisations of landscape painting and the artistic image more generally. For him, there remains something essentially indistinct in the image, or just beyond it, something that persists beyond the grasp of conscious thought and that will finally trouble the unity of the image. Nancy’s point of contrast is with the garden, which he takes to be a more thoroughly domesticated scene:

…a garden belongs to a presupposed, preexisting space, which is the space of a dwelling. The garden is domanial; it belongs to the order of the courtyard: the house and its outbuildings open onto it, but it does not open onto any- thing. Paradise is a garden (that is the original sense of the word) because it is the common dwelling place of man and God. That is, moreover, why it can be closed to those who were expelled from it, which is to say, those whose own freedom drove them out of the domain. In the garden, there cannot be any landscape…. There can only be the posit- ing of reminders, citations of certain types of landscape…. This is not merely a question of scale; it is a question of the relation to what is far and near, in a sense that is not simply that of measurable spatial distance. There are gar- dens – parks, if you prefer – of vast dimensions, whose perspectives, regular or not, can stretch far out of sight [à perte de vue]. But if sight gets lost, consciousness does not; it maintains itself as the consciousness of a domain and as a self-assurance with respect to what is off in the distance. You yourself won’t get lost there. The landscape begins with a notion, however vague or confused, of distanc- ing and of a loss of sight [une perte de vue], for both the physical eye and the eye of the mind.3

The sense of near and far offered in landscape paintings, then, is indeed about bringing things into nearness and distinctness, but it is also about indicating a different order of distance, a farness beyond, in which one might indeed ‘lose oneself’. Thus whatever a landscape image may exhibit of its distinctive elements and their relations, it also indicates the persistence of some site of the unexhibited and the potential encounter with something that defeats all expectation, some thing (if one can call it a thing) unpresented, perhaps lurking beyond those frames that gather the presented elements into unified time, space, and consciousness.

3 J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 52–32 (Au fond des images, p. 103f). robert hughes 190

Where would one look for this indistinct threat, this uncanny unsettlement in Mägi’s painting of Kasaritsa Verijärv? Insofar as it is a quality proper to the painting itself (and not strictly the subjective experience of this painting), I wonder if it lies in the darkness of the lake, beneath the image of imaging that its reflective surface offers to us, a darkness that swallows much of the light of the reflected earth, dark- ens the light of the reflected heavens, and casts our customary points of orientation back upon us all topsy-turvy. In Mägi’s painting, the dark lake at the centre of the painting gestures toward the negation of light and visibility, the reversal of ordinary sense, hints at something unimaginable beneath the visible lake, beyond the site of expectation and intelligibility, where one might lose oneself in a way that one does not or cannot in a garden. There are surely alternate descriptions of the possible ground of this painting – might it not also lie in the unnatural lines that Mägi uses to edge his natural elements? But whatever the ground or grounds a critic would wish to propose for the painting, Nancy would suggest that the operative fascination of the image of Kasaritsa järv transpires apart from the content of its significations, in indicating a beyond of a given logic of visibility.

Art stages an encounter with the world’s unsignifying indifference to human existence From Nancy’s perspective, the critical predilection for ‘depth’, for symbolism and allusion, the aesthetic sense, one might say, that an art work promises to open, through an act of interpretation, upon a hidden field of signification and truth – all this is a misapprehension of the way that art truly bears upon presence and non- presence. Persisting with this critical habit of thought means that one misses the essential drama of landscape art and fails to see how paintings like Mägi’s or Ole’s are really operating. By way of contrast, one might take two of Nancy’s examples of Christian art: the illuminated calendric scenes of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (15th century) and the field peasants bowed in prayer in Jean-François Millet’s crepuscular Angelus (1857/1859). It is fascinating to see how each work situates its human figures within a natural setting. The attitude of each painting is in perfectly sympathetic harmony with the religiosity of their human figures.4 It is true that these are natural scenes, as in landscape art. But these scenes take place, if one can put it this way, under the sign of a divinity that thoroughly informs their every aspect, so that all nature functions as a sign to refer to a divine presence located

4 There are more complicated (and perhaps more interesting) analyses to be given of Millet’s Angelus, but Nancy’s naïve reading is surely one legitimate possibility and the present essay will leave aside here alternate readings in order to keep its focus on Nancy. Nancy’s reading, justifiable in itself, also has the salutary benefit of disturbing objective chronology: it is simply not true that modernity arrived in the West everywhere and all at once with the Romantic break. One can see this in the sometimes condescending, sometimes wistful, but nearly always distanced regard that writers, artists, and intellectuals turned upon the vanishing peasant life of the nineteenth century, as in Gustave Flaubert’s Simple Heart (1877), for example. For present purposes, though, this essay will follow Nancy in taking Millet’s Angelus as an exception to this general tendency, as if the painting were an artifact of a (still) absolutely self-confident theocentric cosmology, regardless of whatever else might also have been happening in Paris in 1857 and 1859. An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 191 elsewhere, above the scene, in the heavens beyond the firmament. These Christian paintings are not instances of landscape painting in Nancy’s post-theological con- ceptualisation of the art. Instead, Nancy is implicitly asking us to reconsider the problem of art from outside the theologically structured habits of Western critics – habits that may govern the vision and taste of viewers and readers across the reli- gious and irreligious spectra. The real drama of Nancy’s landscape, like the real work of the artistic image for Nancy, involves the presencing of the work against a ground of non-presencing. Landscape art, writes Nancy, ‘…is the contrary of a ground: the ‘land’ in it must be entirely surface, and that alone throughout.’5 The surface quality of the landscape is already evident. In terms of an aesthetic response that posits an elsewhere of truth or presence, in terms of a theological perspective that posits the givenness of human beings and natural elements under an overarching divine order, in these terms, the art of landscape shows itself to be depthless: surface and nothing more. So far as Nancy is concerned, there is no other world above or behind our world6 and none authoritatively above or behind this aspect of the world of the work of art either. As divine presence withdraws from the vision of landscape art, Nancy writes, ‘what is henceforth present is the immensity itself, the limitless opening of place as a taking place of what no longer has any determinate place’7. In lieu of divine presence, landscape art gives the touch of raw immensity. We will return shortly to the sense of indetermination that Nancy also identifies here, the lostness within an immensity, finally the exile or unsettling dépaysement characteristic of the paysage or landscape image, but let us, as a preliminary matter, persist further with the previous citation: How are we to understand Nancy’s declaration that the landscape image is precisely ‘the contrary of a ground’8? When Nancy writes that a landscape image is ‘the contrary of a ground’, he is do- ing several things at once. First, he is proposing that one consider landscape and the image as a post-theological or an atheological event of appearing,9 an event whose most primordial structure is situated between two fields: (a) the field of beings and presentation and (b) the field of the nothing, the ground of nonpresentation, non- being, and nonsense from which presentation is ripped and against which presentation appears as nonpresentation’s contrary. A pagan or Christian representation of a natural scene will indeed also offer a view of things and their relations, but a pagan or Christian representation will not be coupled with the ground of nothing that is the contrary or converse of Nancy’s atheological or post-theological paysage. Where behind or above Millet’s Christian natural scene there was understood to

5 J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 58 (Au fond des images, p. 112). 6 J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 20 (Au fond des images, p. 43). 7 J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 59 (Au fond des images, p. 114). 8 J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 58 (Au fond des images, p. 113). 9 Nancy’s description of Christianity and his assessment of its contemporary currency will surely not meet with everyone’s approval. So far as the present essay is concerned, however, Nancy’s crucial philosophical point is not about Christianity per se, but about the way that works of art – landscape paintings in the present case – properly present themselves (and present the viewer in the moment of seeing) in the absence of an overarching meaning system that would locate the authority or determine the significance for this event of art elsewhere than before one’s senses. robert hughes 192

be a primordial power and purpose organising the physical and metaphysical elements and signs, in Nancy’s post-theological landscape art, grounding the image is nothing. Beyond appearance: nothing, chaos, flux. By way of contrast, consider the sublime, but distinctly non-theological vision of the world offered in one of the most famous ‘earthscape’ photographs ofthe twentieth century. The photograph – a photomontage actually – is called ‘Pale Blue Dot’ and was taken in February 1990 by the American spacecraft Voyager 1, which was then ten years flight beyond Saturn. Earth, seen here from a distance of about 6.45 billion kilometres, from beyond the orbit of Neptune, is the ‘pale blue dot’ right in the centre of the sun’s scattered light rays, toward the right side of the photograph (fig. 2).

Carl Sagan, a prominent science communicator of the late twentieth century and a member of the Voyager Imaging Team, was impressed with the way the photo seems to be revealing to ourselves our true circumstances and he offered his reflections in a book called Pale Blue Dot (1994). In a poetic rumination on this earthscape, he suggests something of Nancy’s post-theocentric vision:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggre- gate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and tri- umph, they could become momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how fre- quent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 193

yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.10

Sagan’s own ‘literary landscape’ is sublimely beautiful and deeply human and yet avowedly neither anthropocentric nor theocentric. Instead, it describes a world aimlessly adrift in a cosmic sea of unimaginable vastness. Insofar as we can claim as our own this ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’, we claim it by happenstance and default and not by natural or supernatural appointment. But, while the pathos of Sagan’s writing surely borrows from the uniquely cosmic scale of his image, as I read Nancy, every proper landscape offers a similar vista on the puniness of man’s fate and powers of action in contrast with the immensity of his place and the wildness or indifference of the mighty powers that prevail there. Indeed, does not Eduard Ole’s Haapsalu sadam give us much that same sense, with its two tiny human figures dwarfed by the vastness of the landscape and the limitless sky overhead? If these human beings were smudged back into the green earth and if even the buildings beyond were to melt back into the ground, still, the world would keep turning, the clouds keep rolling, and the wind keep blowing, entirely undisturbed by their loss. So Nancy’s declaration that the landscape image is ‘the contrary of a ground’ is both a theoretical structural description concerning the opposed fields of presentation and nonpresentation as well as an indication of the curious aesthetic sense that the presentation particular to landscape art seems to offer at the same time an obscure presentation of presentation’s contrary, the ground of non-presentation. In the landscape, something appears – the pitchy lake, some clouds rolling overhead, tree trunks standing out amid the forest darkness, the oddly luminous hills, the painter’s unnatural edging of his natural elements – a pale blue dot, a scattering of light rays caused by a lens facing too nearly the sun – but together with these elements there persists the obscure sense that these appearances are the contrary of something else, not a field of supermeaning, but rather a depthless field of nonpresentation and nonsense, a field in which one might lose oneself, where one’s oneness might lose its sense or consistency.

10 C. Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Random House, 1994, pp. xv–xvi. robert hughes 194 Art exposes the subject as other to itself in the event of art

Thus far, the present essay has avoided a rather fundamental question: where does this ground of the image lie? We have been considering the question as if it might be a quality of the world as represented in the painting (might it lie under Mägi’s dark lake?). We might also wonder whether the ground of the image might reside in some quality of the artistic technique or style (might it lurk between the very characteristic lines of Mägi’s edging of his objects)? But, for present purposes, I think we might most profitably consider the matter by thinking of art not as an object, but as an event, something that happens: a chance encounter between (1) an art object of particular sensuous qualities and representational content and (2) a receptive human subject, aesthetically constituted in ways that are describable philosophically and psychoanalytically, but also aesthetically constituted according to the subject’s cultural and historical moment and according to the accidents of personal experience, taste, and temperament. Nancy’s philosophy asks us to conceive of the event of art as staging for the subject a very intimate and profound analogy between the image and the subject, and, correspondingly, between the ground of the image and what Lacan might call the unsignifying, unimaginable real of the subject. So that the play of the image and its contrary, of a painting’s coherence and its hidden discontinuity, this all reso- nates in some uncanny way with the subject’s own constitutive tensions between coherence and chaos, self-image and disidentity. As we have already seen, Nancy claims that in landscape art, the viewer’s vision suffers a certain dépaysement, an uncanny displacement or unsettlement, through the way that, in the absence of a frame subordinating the scene to theological or ideological determinations, the space and the immensity of the vista open up a sense for human being specifically as insubstantial and fleeting, purposeless and arbitrary. Nancy also argues that art points to an essential split in the subject, something that one might figure as an unsettling gaze issuing from the painting itself to challenge the place and the identity of the viewer. Nancy’s word for this is ‘exposition’. Exposition here is not simply putting on view something that was formerly hidden. As the Latin etymology would have it, ‘ex-position’ is a ‘putting-out’: placing something outside and before one’s vision or thought. The reference for Nancy is ultimately the ‘exposed’ existence of the subject, who thinks him- or herself as if exterior to (and at a distance from) him- or herself. In other words, it is not just the world that is exterior. Art exposes the subject as exterior to him- or herself. One might say that it is the essential work of the work of art to formally grasp, isolate, and present, in a singular aesthetic event, the exteriority and exposition at the essential heart of the subject.11 We have already broached this gaze issuing from the painting in the case of Richard Sagrits’ Sügis Kundas. What, we asked then in passing, do those workers see, when they turn their gaze to face the painter and his eventual viewers? But let us consider a landscape without any evident human figure, one which delightfully literalises this gazing forth of the image. Viive Kuks’ Paganamaa (1980, collection

11 J.-L. Nancy, The Muses. Trans. P. Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 18 (Les Muses. Édition revue et augmentée. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2001, p. 37). An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 195 of the Estonian Society for Nature Protection) offers at once a vision of the hills and dales of the South Estonian border country, as well as – fantastically! – a sky with a cloud formation (or oddities of afternoon light) with all the appearance of an animal’s eye, clenched shut, according to a young art critic of my acquaintance. Nancy declares that ‘the image makes an image in resembling a gaze’ and twice cites Heidegger to the effect that it is ‘as if [the landscape] were looking at us’.12 Troping the existential unsettlement of art as a disconcerting gaze is in fact remarkably widespread, considering how fanciful it is at the objective level. Another French philosopher of art, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his Eye and Mind (1961), memorably cites the painter André Marchand to point toward the confusions or reversals of the self as simultaneously seeing and seen, touching and touched, much in the manner of Nancy’s philosophy of the exposed subject of art: ‘In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me….’13 One might also think of Heidegger’s famous reading of Van Gogh’s shoes, which he stages as staring directly back at the viewer: ‘From out of the dark opening of the well-worn insides of the shoes the toil of the worker’s tread stares forth.’14 It may be significant that Kuks’ landscape gives her viewer a sketch with the inhuman eye of the heavens shut fast, but I think for our purposes, an eye shut is always potentially an eye open, so that, even closed, Kuks’ eye situates the viewer as a potential object of reciprocal vision. The arresting gaze of the world works as it does because it is understood to issue from a locus internal to, but otherwise than, the sensate, now disidentified subject. Through sense, one is subjected to a ‘going outside oneself [sortir de soi]’15: there is the subject’s sense of the object and then there is also the sense of the sensate subject – as if the sensate subject were him- or herself also an object of sense. Put differently, there is another gaze that turns upon the subject him- or herself and makes of the subject an object, effecting a kind of displacement, insofar as one is simultaneously here, say, looking at a reproduction of Kuks’ picture and observing the distant summit of the hill in Kuks’ picture, and also there, in the clouds beyond, or on the surface of the picture itself, gazing back upon oneself from an entirely other vantage point. An uncanny question is thus opened up at the heart of the subject’s self-identity and his or her presumed co-extensiveness with his or her body: am I here or am I there? and what does it suggest about my subjectivity if I am both here and there at one and the same time? It is in this way that Nancy claims that exteriority and exposition are intimately bound up together in the event of art more generally: in exposition, one senses oneself sensing, subject and subject-qua-object jostling each other in a subtle uncanny displacement.

12 J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, pp. 86–87 (Au fond des images, pp. 156, 158). 13 M. Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind. – The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Ed. G. A. Johnson. Trans. M. B. Smith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993, p. 129 (M. Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’Esprit. Paris: Gallimard, 1964, p. 31). 14 M. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track. Eds. and trans. J. Young, K. Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 14 (M. Heidegger, Holzwege. Hrsg. v. F.-W. von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994, p. 19). 15 J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 68 (Au fond des images, p. 129). robert hughes 196

So, Nancy’s philosophy of art looks like (and is) a phenomenology of the world coming to sense – but only in part: it is at the same time a phenomenology of the subject’s self-exposition and a phenomenology of aphenomenality. Nancy’s care is to see what there is to be seen and to sense what there is to be sensed, but, for Nancy, what appears is indissociable from appearing as such and from a certain sense of what does not appear and what cannot appear. Which is to say that what appears is marked or inflected by the presentation of sense itself and by the presentation of an absence: the absence of a given order, the absence of the everyday rule of the sign, and the presentation of the indistinct sense of presentation’s contrary: the ground of non-presentation, nonsense, and non-being. A painting like Konrad Mägi’s Kasaritsa järv places one in the world, under the clouds, by the lakeside, in the strange light of an overcast late afternoon, even as it awes us with the unreach- able secret of its dark lake and stirs us with an image of a world upside-down. The humpy hills of Viive Kuks’ Paganamaa invite our embrace and call for a caress of their branchy textures, but even as we reach out with our mind’s eye to compre- hend the scene, the eye in her sky catches us with the thought of an unsuspected reciprocity: that we are in the world not as actors at the centre of creation, but as sensate beings exposed to other possible gazes in an uncentred cosmos, vulnerable to powers and visions indifferent to our fate, and cast upon our own comparatively meagre resources to create a sense for the world. For Nancy, humanity is not at all defined by its place within an otherworldly order nor, strictly speaking, by its rationality, but by its estranged or dépaysé way of being in the world – and by the art that forces one’s sense of strangeness to oneself. So the singularity of this aesthetic thought pertains to its thisness, the concreteness of its being-there: this body, this image, this sense, this moment, this event, this existing – but also this encounter with the finally irreducible exteriority of the world, this sense of the senseless ground from which the discernible is ripped, this event of sense exposing the unanticipated and unrecognisable otherness of oneself in its plural loci of vision and judgment. Nancy’s philosophy of art, like our consideration of Estonian landscape images here, suggests a kind of existential ethics: that in the name of the philosophical love of truth, one must see the world as one is passing through it, or in the name of a greater authenticity of being, one must be ‘existed’ through some event of vision such as is given in the event of art, or in the name of a truer sense for such freedom as the modern subject has, one must forsake one’s domestic garden fantasies and as- sume one’s unheimlich exile or dépaysement in the paysage, the landscape, or, finally, in the name of such heroism as one can summon in the face of the immensities and nothingnesses of existence, one must cultivate one’s ties and create one’s places and rip one’s own truth from that very nothingness. An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 197

1. Konrad Mägi. Kasaritsa järv (u 1915–1917). Õli. Eesti Kunstimuuseum. Konrad Mägi. Lake Kasaritsa (ca. 1915–1917). Oil. Art Museum of Estonia.

2. Päikesesüsteemi portree: Maa kui „Kahvatu sinine punkt” (1990). Solar System Portrait – Earth as ‘Pale Blue Dot’ (1990).

Visible Earth: A Catalog of NASA Images and Animations of Our Home Planet. Image courtesy of Visible Earth; image owner: NASA. http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view. php?id=52392 (accessed 20 April 2013).