Nancy and Visual Culture

Nancy and Visual Culture GIUNTA 9781474407496 PRINT.indd 1 08/12/2015 10:22 Critical Connections A series of edited collections forging new connections between contemporary critical theorists and a wide range of research areas, such as critical and cultural theory, gender studies, film, literature, music, philosophy and politics. Series Editors Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong James Williams, University of Dundee Editorial Advisory Board Nick Hewlett Gregg Lambert Todd May John Mullarkey Paul Patton Marc Rölli Alison Ross Kathrin Thiele Frédéric Worms Titles available in the series Badiou and Philosophy, edited by Sean Bowden and Simon Duffy Agamben and Colonialism, edited by Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall Laruelle and Non- Philosophy, edited by John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith Virilio and Visual Culture, edited by John Armitage and Ryan Bishop Rancière and Film, edited by Paul Bowman Stiegler and Technics, edited by Christina Howells and Gerald Moore Badiou and the Political Condition, edited by Marios Constantinou Nancy and the Political, edited by Sanja Dejanovic Butler and Ethics, edited by Moya Lloyd Latour and the Passage of Law, edited by Kyle McGee Nancy and Visual Culture, edited by Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus Forthcoming titles Agamben and Radical Politics, edited by Daniel McLoughlin Rancière and Literature, edited by Julian Murphet and Grace Hellyer Balibar and the Citizen/Subject, edited by Warren Montag and Hanan Elsayed Visit the Critical Connections website at www.euppublishing.com/series/crcs GIUNTA 9781474407496 PRINT.indd 2 08/12/2015 10:22 Nancy and Visual Culture Edited by Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus GIUNTA 9781474407496 PRINT.indd 3 08/12/2015 10:22 © editorial matter and organisation Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun − Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0749 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0750 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0751 9 (epub) The right of Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). GIUNTA 9781474407496 PRINT.indd 4 08/12/2015 10:22 Contents Acknowledgements viii List of illustrations vii Introduction: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Image of Visual Culture 1 Adrienne Janus 1. Cutting and Letting-Be 21 Martin Crowley 2. Dancing Equality: Image, Imitation and Participation 39 Christopher Watkin 3. A Question of Listening: Nancean Resonance, Return and Relation in Charlie Chaplin 55 Carrie Giunta 4. The Image: Mimesis and Methexis 73 Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Adrienne Janus 5. On the Threshold: Visual Culture, Invisible Nature 95 Adrienne Janus 6. Pornosophy: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Pornographic Image 109 Peter Banki 7. Presentation and Disappearance / Présentation et Disparition 129 Translated by Adrienne Janus 8. Writing in the Place of the Animal 144 Phillip Warnell v GIUNTA 9781474407496 PRINT.indd 5 08/12/2015 10:22 vi Contents 9. Together at the Limit: Jean-Luc Nancy, Art and Community 164 Lorna Collins 10. Turning Around the Written Mark, Opening from a Weight of Thought 181 Robert Luzar 11. Uncanny Landscapes of Photography: The Partage of Double-exposure After Jean-Luc Nancy 199 Chris Heppell Contributors 215 Bibliography 218 Index 000 GIUNTA 9781474407496 PRINT.indd 6 08/12/2015 10:22 Illustrations 1.1 Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’, 1960 © Tate, London 2015. 29 3.1 The Gold Rush © Roy Export S.A.S. Scan Courtesy Cineteca di Bologna. 59 4.1 Image © 2015 The Barnes Foundation. 84 5.1 John Wood and Paul Harrison, The only other point, 2005/13’44”/HDV/Courtesy the artists and Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, London. 98 6.1 Amber is a film about the push-pull of erotic edgeplay and the curious brutality of love. Directed and performed by Gala Vanting and Frank Ly. © sensate films 2012. 122 8.1 Ming of Harlem film still © Big Other Films, 2014. 154 9.1 Lorna Collins, 2014, still from Flashback (4.24mins 8mm film and VHS video transferred to DVD, and mixed media installation). 172 10.1 Photograph by Ollie Harrop. 190 11.1 Time out of Joint series i) Photograph by Chris Heppell. 204 11.2 Time out of Joint series ii) Photograph by Chris Heppell. 207 vii GIUNTA 9781474407496 PRINT.indd 7 08/12/2015 10:22 Acknowledgements Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus would like to thank: Carol MacDonald, our editor at EUP, for encouraging us to frame the volume around Nancy and Visual Culture; James Williams, for prompting the initial discussion; and the whole editorial team at EUP for their support. We are grateful to Jean-Michel Rabate for giving us permission to retranslate and reproduce the dialogue between Jean-Luc Nancy and Soun-Gui Kim from the Slought edition. We extend our sincere appreciation to Jean-Luc Nancy for his support and generosity in allowing us to retranslate his essay, ‘The Image: Mimesis and Methexis’, and to the seven other contributors to the volume, with special thanks to Robert Luzar for the cover image. Carrie Giunta is especially grateful to: Chris Kul-Want and the Art and Philosophy Research Group at Central Saint Martins; Janet McDonnell and CSM Research; and Robert Luzar for his participation in the pre-stages of this project. viii GIUNTA 9781474407496 PRINT.indd 8 08/12/2015 10:22 Introduction: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Image of Visual Culture Adrienne Janus Whether we are artists, scholars, curators, collectors, casual admirers or a combination of each, our encounter with images is rarely innocent. The proliferation of images in contemporary culture − of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, of pictures, painting, photography, cinema, television, video and internet − has been accom- panied by an extraordinary increase in the number of discourses on what images are or do, what we should or should not do with images, what they mean, represent, what they show or tell, what value they have, and how we should or should not look. If these discourses set the general terms of debate in the study of visual culture,1 it is a debate often framed at its (post)modernist and historicist poles by the question of whether the proliferation of images in contemporary culture marks a new epoch in the West (the oft-proclaimed hegemony of the image over the book, the visual over the textual),2 or is merely a culminating moment in a history of ‘visual turns’ as old as the biblical or Byzantine battles between iconoclasts and iconophiles that have emerged throughout Western history at times of competing world views and socio-political uncertainty.3 In one characteristically pro- vocative response to this question, delivered with a dose of playful self-irony, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that either way, this doubled proliferation of images in contemporary culture and of contemporary discourses on the image often makes us ‘look cross-eyed’. We have one eye on the image, ‘the other on discourse [. .] One eye empirical, the other theoretical. One eye on the exhibition wall, the other on the text of the catalogue.’4 How then do we resist the strabismus Nancy describes here? For Nancy, as for this critical appraisal of Nancy’s immense contribution to the arts of what we call ‘visual culture’5 (a conten- tious term in itself, and one that Nancy does not use, preferring 1 GIUNTA 9781474407496 PRINT.indd 1 08/12/2015 10:22 2 Nancy and the Political terms such as ‘the arts’ or ‘the image’), the effort to resist this kind of cross-eyed vision would not mean producing a better, more adequate account of what an image is, an ontological theory from which we might derive a practical ethics or politics that would somehow allow us to ‘see straight’.6 Nor would it mean developing new and improved ‘practices of looking’, if these practices were restricted to the hermeneutics of the image in terms of cultural expression or cultural critique.7 Rather, for Nancy, to resist looking cross-eyed involves provoking productive interfer- ence between discourse and image, between the theoretical and empirical, in order to expose the ‘reality of the image’. This reality is neither equal nor inverse to ‘the image of reality’: it is neither the ‘representation of reality’, nor the recovery of some invisible ‘real’ below or beyond ‘mere’ appearance. To expose the ‘reality of the image’ is, for Nancy, to expose the multiple ways in which any particular image, and every singular ‘work’ of art, comes to presence as the intelligible, sensory reality that it is. To ex-pose8 – one of the operative terms in Nancy’s effort to think our relation to images in terms of relations of exteriority as partes extra partes, or parts outside of parts9 – would not then be to set out or posit the image as an object before a subject. This ex-posing would rather be a dynamic, untotalisable taking-place of a distinct actuality (this image, this work of art, at this instant), which resists being absorbed into any ‘visions of the world, representations, imaginations’.10 Nancy’s emphasis on the singularity of each work of art as a distinct modality of bringing to presence or taking place that has multiple possible formations, deformations, and reformations makes him resistant to general categorical formulations (such as the term ‘visual culture’).11 Nancy writes: Art is never in general: it is always such and such an art.

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