The Question of Otherness in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy

GOLDSMITHS Research Online Thesis (PhD) Rugo, Daniele Powers of Existence: The Question of Otherness in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy You may cite this version as: Rugo, Daniele, 2010. Powers of Existence: The Question of Otherness in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths. [Thesis]: Goldsmiths Research Online. Available at: http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/2643/ COPYRIGHT This is a thesis accepted for a Higher Degree of the University of London. It is an unpublished document and the copyright is held by the author. All persons consulting this thesis must read and abide by the Copyright Declaration below. COPYRIGHT DECLARATION I recognise that the copyright and other relevant Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of the above- described thesis rests with the author and/or other IPR holders and that no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. 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This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. http://eprints-gro.goldsmiths.ac.uk Contact Goldsmiths Research Online at: [email protected] Jean-Luc Nancy: The Question of Otherness Daniele Rugo Goldsmiths, University of London For the Degree of Ph.D. in Philosophy All the work presented within this dissertation is my own. NOTE: Citations are footnoted in Chicago style. ABSTRACT While the present work analyzes three distinct motifs – body, world, with – in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, the dissertation intends to investigate Nancy’s reading of Heidegger, with particular focus on the question of Being-with. Given the nature of the reflection – opening the question of otherness from within Heidegger – the research will also articulate a dialogue between Nancy and Levinas. Through the examination of Nancy’s reading of Heidegger, the dissertation will then endeavor to establish the original gesture of Nancy’s contribution to philosophy, which will be identified in the concept of powers of existence. Under the light of the analysis of the three concepts which structure the work, the conclusions will define powers of existence as singular resistances of existence to the mastering decision of philosophical work. This being the case philosophy will in turn continuously loosen its categories and key words in the attempt to decide its course according to what happens between us. The opening of a series of incommensurable measures responds to the demand existence casts on philosophical work. The problem of otherness is thus resolved as the work of powers of existence. Table of Contents Introduction p.4 EXPOSURES – Chapter 1 p.15 Introduction – 1.1 Heidegger: a review – 1.2 Situating the body – 1.3 Banality of bodies – 1.4 From Kafka to Levinas – 2 Spinoza: the liberator of the body – 3 Touching the word. Body as photographer – 4.1 Body’s origin: esse in se – 4.2 ‘Bear in mind Dear Friend…’ – 5.1 Idea of the body – 5.2 Body and the wound – 6.1 An interesting situation. Welcoming Levinas – 6.2 Levinas’ Position – 6.3 ‘Living from…’ – 7 In between bodies – Conclusions. BETWEEN US - Chapter 2 p.120 Introduction – 1 What happens between us – 2 The world of bodies – 3 The World is without a why. Deconstruction of the World – 4 Cinema as philosophical model – 5 Contrapuntal close-ups – 6 Pan-orama and dis-stance – Conclusions. SEPARATIONS – Chapter 3 p.201 Introduction – 1 We are the world – 2 A matter of hyphens – 3 Desire-in-the-world – 4 Two versions of originary otherness – 5 Ambiguity of the Third – 6 The sky over Justice. Return of Neutrality – 6.1 The aporia of Justice; Conclusions; POWERS OF EXISTENCE – Conclusions p.311 Filmography p.358 Bibliography p.359 INTRODUCTION 4 The aim of the present work is neither that of tracing Nancy’s career, nor of introducing Nancy’s thought. Instead the analysis endeavors to follow Nancy’s reading of Heidegger in order to investigate to what extent the Heideggerian project motivates Nancy’s writing. The conditions for describing the originality of Nancy’s thought will emerge from the creative frictions between the two. This plan will be tracked in particular with regard to the notion of Being-with, which has been identified in the present work as the moment where Nancy’s appropriation of Heidegger becomes at once most distant and most productive. This same question that guides the research motivates the presence of a third interlocutor: Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas has been one of the most attentive readers of Heidegger, engaging specifically the question of sociality. Finally dismissing the Heideggerian solution – because rooted in a philosophy of the world, where the Other is confronted simply as a moment in an otherwise individual and solitary trajectory – Levinas formulated the original command of otherness as epiphany of the face of the other human being. Jean-Luc Nancy never explicitly engages with the thought of Levinas, while at the same time one has the impression that his ‘return’ to Heidegger with regard to the theme of sociality and otherness works as a response and critique to the radically anti-Heideggerian position of Levinas. The dialogue between the Levinas and Nancy runs perhaps the risk of remaining sterile due to their conflicting readings of Being and Time. Nonetheless Nancy’s ‘interpretation’ of Heidegger lets us envisage a possible reopening of the Levinasian question from within Heidegger himself. If Levinas shifts the interest from Being to the Other, Nancy’s reading of Heidegger situates the two on the same level. Instead of posing 5 an absolute otherness, Nancy’s conception of the co-essentiality of Being and Being-with opens the question of otherness at the heart of Being. Nancy seems to start at the point where Levinas finishes his work. Overall this research will thus attempt to read Nancy’s effort as directed to a disarticulation of Heidegger’s thinking of sociality (normally considered to be the weakest part of his thinking; Sartre, Levinas, Arendt all agree on this). Nancy’s reading though is almost never an historical or literal one; it is rather a reading that Heidegger himself suggests, one that aims at appropriating the underlying ground of existential analysis. Nancy explicitly states his engagement with Heidegger’s notion of finite being in his reworking of the idea of finite thinking, by trying to deliver finitude to its own openness, liberating it from a certain Heideggerian rhetoric. In a footnote to ‘A finite thinking’ Nancy writes ‘We don’t know finitude ‘in itself’ […] It is with this that we need to concern ourselves, and not the rhetoric of the modesty of thinking within which Heidegger remains trapped’1. Nancy starts precisely from a question that Heidegger has left unanswered, that of the body, to articulate finite existence at the crossing of materiality and thought. The question ‘What a body can do?’, posed by Spinoza, allows Nancy to force Heideggerian thought to a territory of incommensurable measures. In Spinoza Nancy finds a model where the body is consigned neither to pure materiality nor to the simple extension of the mind, but precisely inhabits a space that is incommensurable to one or the other, opening both from within and making a clear distinction problematic. It is from this consideration of the 1 Jean Luc Nancy, ‘A finite thinking’ in A finite thinking, Simon Sparks ed., trans. Edward Bullard, Jonathan Derbyshire and Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), footnote 4, p.321 6 body that ensues the questioning of finite worldhood, which Nancy approaches in many works, but which is dealt with in a decisive manner in his volume on film. For Nancy cinema offers the possibility of reopening within the finitude of sense the infinity of its destination, namely the impossibility of grasping the sense of sense once and for all. By addressing the evidence of sense, cinema insists on the blind spot that the inscription of sense itself is. The world of finite sense opens in itself an infinite measure of sense. This touch of infinity on which finite sense rests, allows one to read the encounter between Nancy and Levinas at the moment where the latter invokes the notion of justice. Levinas advocates the intervention of the divine in the concept of justice. Levinas’ idea of justice springs from the breaking apart imposed by God on the face to face. In so doing Levinas seems to introduce a leap of faith, an impasse where the face to face is outclassed by the encounter with God. A number of commentators have argued that this moment impinges Levinas inasmuch as the distinction between the neutrality of the il y a and the intervention of the divine to guarantee justice remains uncertain. Nancy overcomes this difficulty by obliterating, in particular in the two volumes of the Deconstruction of Christianity, the clear distinction between secular and religious as well as that between finite and infinite.

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