Jean-Luc Nancy's The Birth to Presence
trans. Brian Holmes, et al (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993)
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Sections Covered:
§ Introduction: The Birth to Presence (pp.1-6) § Identity and Trembling (pp.9-35) § Abandoned Being (pp.36-47) § Finite History (pp.143-66) § The Heart of Things (pp.167-88) § Corpus (pp.189-207) § On Painting (and) Presence (pp.341-67) § Laughter, Presence (pp.368-92) |
§ Introduction: The Birth to Presence (pp.1-6)
§ Identity and Trembling (pp.9-35)
BRIEFEST OUTLINE:
- § Indifferent Identity (pp.9-12)
- Key questions: “What can make A tremble?” (12) & What about the difference of the collective or between the sexes (10)?
- Identity = subject = self-consciousness
- Subject’s identity related to difference in three ways
- Where does difference come from?
- Before difference is identity itself, difference proper
- Indifferent identity: what can account for identity that can differentiate identity
- A = A … A carries its difference within itself
- § Thanatos, Genesis, Hypnos (pp.12-15)
- Death, Birth, and Sleep
- Key: For the subject, death, birth, and sleep are all already past
- And the subject is already awake
- § Hypnosis (pp.15-18)
- Key: Consciousness is consciousness because death, birth, sleep/awakened from double indifference
- In waking: experience a feeling, sensation
- Hypnosis: awakening and differentiation of sleep
- I is pure affection
- § Hypnotism (pp.19-23)
- Key: Pathos and morbid states
- This stage is only a darkness of spirit
- The hypnotic/affected state = diseased, pathos
- Immobilized death
- § The Knowledge of Affection (pp.23-26)
- Key: gestation
- Death borders on birth (happening –> gestation)
- Gestation is the truth of the soul deposited as feeling
- Immemorial knowledge (discussion of philosophy re: affect)
- Magical relation: the mother and child
- § Identity and Trembling (pp.26-32)
- Child: individualized passivity
- The indifference of the difference
- Happening
- Trembled through of the same; its identity; trembling differentiates identity
- Child: individualized passivity
- § Genius (pp.32-35)
- Key: mother is the child’s genius
- Passivity trembles away from the individual; draws the individual away from itself, adds therein a space of pulsation
- Impartation = signifies birth
- Subject never ceases to be born
- Difference comes to identity by occurring to it
- Identity that is born thus comes to pass, never ceases occurring to its identity; cannot be indifferent
- Identity for itself is indifferent
- Identity singular & different is always given, always occurs.
IN BRIEFEST SUMMARY (of what the essay sets as its problem and topic for exploration):
- If Self-Consciousness is identity, A = A by A ≠ B, where does difference come from?
- –(i) Difference must be within identity (for) itself: indifferent identity
- –(ii) Only identity without difference can constitute and determine an identity as difference proper, different from difference (pp.10-11).
- Re: (i): this difference is indifferent in two ways:
- Identically valid for all individuals (indifferent difference)
- Includes within itself indifference to self and to itself (the self is already one and the same to itself: A=A)
- Thus: Indifferent identity divides itself
- Re: (i): this difference is indifferent in two ways:
- Indifferent identity does not tremble before death and its own differentiation (instead, it maintains itself; this is the dialectic of the subject)
- But … it does contain this moment of death—moment of gaping difference—thus, contains its indifference from itself [has = is … i.e., a subject relating itself to itself]
- A carries difference within its identity—difference as such—as identified.
- But, from where, then, can difference come to identity?—(Difference unidentified)--i.e., where can a different identity come from? From where does B come to A; or, what makes difference tremble?
- Hegel knew this (problem and its answer) by way of a defective knowledge: a somnambulist knowledge.
FLUSHER SUMMARY (through the whole essay):
The opening section--§ Indifferent Identity—sets up the problem, the topic of the essay: This is an exploration of the Hegelian issue of the how/from what a self-consciousness is/has self-consciousness. The self-consciousness is a subject, an identity, a self relating itself to itself. Self needs identity; identity needs difference to be an identity—thus, where does this difference come from? Identity must carry difference within itself: difference as such … but this exploration shows this difference is identified (difference as/is its identity) (indifferent identity). So, still need to find the origin/genesis of difference itself … i.e., Identity as difference proper is given by difference without properties … from where does this latter difference come? Hegel knows this problem; he seeks the answer by way of a “defective knowledge”, a knowledge that was somnambulistic.
Hence, Nancy does into—§ Thanatos, Genesis, Hypnos—death, birth, and sleep, showing that all three are already past, and the ‘subject’ is already awakened … but awakening of the soul is only partially the awakening of soul itself. So awakening of soul as such is only a half awake stupor (not the same as natural spirit).
So, next—§ Hypnosis—consciousness is only consciousness in having been born, dead, and awakened from double indifference. How does this actually awaken the whole of reason? The soul is not because it has slept, but because it passes from sleep to waking—must distinguish itself from the originary being awakened. Finitude passes; waking is infinite. In the passing: sensation and feeling (feels within itself). This is a simple inwardness that constitutes individuality (17). This individual identity does not yet constitute the identity of the subject (it is simple A, not yet A = A or A ≠ A).
... to be continued ...
Hence, Nancy does into—§ Thanatos, Genesis, Hypnos—death, birth, and sleep, showing that all three are already past, and the ‘subject’ is already awakened … but awakening of the soul is only partially the awakening of soul itself. So awakening of soul as such is only a half awake stupor (not the same as natural spirit).
So, next—§ Hypnosis—consciousness is only consciousness in having been born, dead, and awakened from double indifference. How does this actually awaken the whole of reason? The soul is not because it has slept, but because it passes from sleep to waking—must distinguish itself from the originary being awakened. Finitude passes; waking is infinite. In the passing: sensation and feeling (feels within itself). This is a simple inwardness that constitutes individuality (17). This individual identity does not yet constitute the identity of the subject (it is simple A, not yet A = A or A ≠ A).
... to be continued ...
§ Abandoned Being (pp.36-47):
BRIEF OUTLINE:
- Ontology:
- Wherein abandonment remains sole predicament of being (36)
- Is thus a phonology (45)
- Is an anthropology; its object: the dereliction of being (its pollakōs) (47)
- Abandonment sums up and exhausts the pollakōs legetai of being, carries it to “extreme poverty of abandonment” (abandons all categories, all transcendentals)—thus, “being has ceased to speak itself in multiple ways”—but no destiny, no end (36).
- Being’s speech: the pollakōs legomenon = the spoken-in-multiple-ways = the gathered = what is let lie = the open
- “If from now on being is not, if it has begun to be only its own abandonment, it is because this speaking in multiple ways is abandonment, is in abandonment, and it is abandon (which is also to say openness). It so happens that ‘abandon’ can evoke ‘abundance’. There is always a pollakōs, an abundance, in abandon: it opens on a profusion of possibilities, just as one abandons oneself in excess, for there is no other modality of abandon” (36-37).
- Abandoned being corresponds to: (37)
- Exhaustion of transcendentals
- Immobilization of dialectic
- Obstruction of initial position of being (truth of nothingness)
- Abandoned being finds itself returned/left to the pollakōs it was (37).
- “At the end of dialectic … being no longer speaks itself in multiple ways. … Being speaks itself …: it is” (37).
- Once uttered as I am … the it is the true I
- I speaks itself, requires voice—voice is already abandonment
- It requires nothing that being has not already arranged in silent being
- It is nobody, no dialogue, no monologue; it is Sphinx—many names, none can utter
- “Abandoned being is abandoned to the pollakōs” (38)
- “Abandonment is not nothing” (38)
- Pollakōs is under surveillance of the monōs legetai (39)
- The Oblivion of Being can be read in two ways:
- Oblivion of being—thought keeps form and nature of immense reminiscence; Being of being comes forth and silently dictates its own it is … the oblivion of being is oblivious to being’s abandonment.
- Oblivion in and as oblivion, understands what is forgotten is not being, but its abandonment as a condition in the sense of its miserable condition (not a condition of possibility); it understands itself as inscribed, prescribed, promised in abandonment and oblivion safeguards no reserve of recoverable, curable memory (39).
- There is no memory, no history, no narrative of abandonment.
- Being is not its abandonment (40).
- But, there is abandoned being,
- And, There is ≠ It is & There is ≠ es gibt (40)
- We have known this (40):
- Greek & Tragic (Oedipus)
- Jewish & Exiled (Moses) both are defined by and fated by abandonment (at birth)
- Christ–the third figure–mediates Oedipus and Moses at his death:
- “Why have you forsaken me?”
- LOVE … alone abandons. By the possibility of abandonment, one knows the possibility of Love
- AMOR FATI … ECCO HOMO … (41)
- The TIME of abandonment … the wavering, the instantly abandoned instant
- Time abandons itself
- Abandons is only in the transition (42)
- No permanence of abandoned being
- Impossibility of fixing it … this is what renews and revives it
- Oedipus, Moses, Jesus, Roland, Robinson, etc., … these are not figures of an essence; instead, this is pollakōs.
- No idea, no memory, no presentiment (42);
- “Being came to pass by means of an abandonment: we can say no more. There is no going back; being conveys nothing more ancient than its abandonment” (43).
- Does this constitute a positive possibility? No.
- “Thinking.”
- Abandonment (43-44):
- Bandon: order, prescription, decree, permission, and the power that holds these freely at its disposal.
- ‘To Abandon’: to remit, entrust, or turn over to such a sovereign power and to remit to its ban, to its proclaiming, to its convening, to its sentencing (44).
- One always abandons to a LAW
- Compulsion to appear absolutely under the entirety of the law.
- Banished one thereby abandoned completely outside its jurisdiction.
- Law of abandonment is the other of the law, which constitutes the law.
- Abandonment RESPECTS the law … it cannot do otherwise.
- ‘Respect’: is a gaze, a regard (44); a look back, turned to the before of abandonment where there is nothing to see, which is not to be seen (45).
- Consideration of abandonment
- Turns back: not to perceive itself; but to receive itself
- Mettre à ≠ Donner à
- Mettre à ≠ est gibt
- Law does not give; it orders;
- Abandons to a law
- Abandons to a VOICE
- Bannon: *bhâ : speech, declaration
- Fari, phanai, phone, fatum
- Amor Fati
- Fari, phanai, phone, fatum
- Bannon: *bhâ : speech, declaration
- Ontology is a Phonology … the law is voice
- Ecce Homo (46): BEHOLD … constative as prescriptive as imperative
- Behold … but it orders to what cannot be described
- The HERE is not shown
- Orders to the ECCEITY of man … presence for itself in its here of its essence
- Being abandoned to the being-there of man, as to an order
- Categorical imperative (46)
- HERE & THERE (47)
BRIEF ATTEMPT TO IDENTIFY the WHAT & WHY of the ESSAY:
Nancy’s opening sentence begins with two clauses: “We do not know it, we cannot really know it,” before then identifying the unknown, unknowable ‘what’: “but abandoned being has already begun to constitute an inevitable condition for our thought, perhaps its only condition” (36). The thought specified in the second sentence is classified as ontology, specifically, “an ontology in which abandonment remains the sole predicament of being …” (36). He later further elaborates this ontology as a “phonology” (45) and an “anthropology” whose sole object is the dereliction of being, its pollakōs. I encourage attention to these ideas—that there is a not knowing and cannot know concerning an ontological thought to which we are called, or, simply, unknowing, thinking, and ontology—as a way of considering the ‘for what’ it is that we are investigating ‘abandoned being.’
What summons us would be a “thinking” “at the end of words” (43). One wherein spiritual exercises must give up will, exercise, and spirit (43). That must renounce “thinking” and the “renunciation might be nothing” (43).
The thinking of our time claims abandoned being (being-thrown-to-the-world in dereliction) constitutes a positive possibility of being-in-the-world … but Nancy counters: “But this positivity posits nothing and is not itself posited” (43). (Here, let us think towards his later depiction of ‘law’.)
There also seems to be a denial of possibility otherwise: repetitions of “no idea, no memory, no presentiment of a world that does not abandon us” (42); “we can say no more. There is no going back; being conveys nothing more ancient than its abandonment” (43); “oblivion safeguards no reserve of recoverable, curable memory” (39); “there is no memory. There is no history of this abandonment, no knowledge or narrative of how, where, when, and by whom it was abandoned. This is not impossible to know: very simply, it is not” (40); and “abandonment’s only law … is to be without return and without recourse” (47).
So, what is the thought and ontology we are called to do now? Proceeding via negativa, we can identify three things that it has not or is not: it has exhausted transcendentals; it has immobilized the dialectic; and it obstructs and forsakes the initial position of being (37). In affirmation, it acquires two identifiers: it is a phonology (45), and it is an anthropology (47). More specifically, ontology is a phonology insofar as we are abandoned to the law, which is to the voice, to that which constitutes the law, that which is the law (45). What the law/voice orders is no act; it orders ecce homo: behold, but, behold that which can be neither described nor shown: the ecceity of man: the presence for itself in its here. (Ecceity, or haecceity, is the thisness gathered from Aristotle’s Greek to ti esti, the what (it) is, by Duns Scotus to identify the discrete properties that identify a thing as a specific individual thing, and then by Husserl to designate the neither essence in general nor a common genus, not a ‘what’ (the quiddity), but a pure form of a ‘this’ that appears by a unity of appearances that establish an individualization.) A couple pages later, ontology is then identified as an anthropology wherein its object is solely the dereliction of being, its pollakōs (47). (The pollakōs having been initially identified as the multiple ways being speaks itself in which “abandonment adds nothing to the proliferation … [instead] It sums up the proliferation, assembles it, but by exhausting it, carrying it to the extreme poverty of abandonment” (36).)
So: what is Nancy arguing? Is this essay—perhaps in contradistinction to The Birth to Presence’s first chapter, “Identity and Trembling”—rejecting origin-seeking? Is it an admission of or persuasion to the unhappy insight that being is not cast out to pure possibilities? (Although, it is only by the possibility of abandonment one can know the possibilities of love (40).) Is it a renewed chastisement of our reliance on the vain hope of an empowered having of will for self-determination?
Surely what we can say: abandoned being is a fundamental condition determining today’s thinking; today’s thinking is a variant of ontology moved toward the voice, which is the law, and focused anthropologically on individual thisness of individuals, that is, on what can neither be shown nor described. Our fundamental condition and that which also conditions our thinking of being is neither demonstrable nor amenable to expressive demonstration: we do not and cannot know it, it hasn’t memory or history or narrative—but it is something we have long known, Greek-ly or Jewish-ly (40), even if only partially, like Nietzsche knew amor fati (41) or Plato already knew the un-utterability of the Sphinx’s many names (38); we do not and cannot know it, but it carries the weight of a categorical imperative (46); and being is not its abandonment, but there is abandoned being (40).
What summons us would be a “thinking” “at the end of words” (43). One wherein spiritual exercises must give up will, exercise, and spirit (43). That must renounce “thinking” and the “renunciation might be nothing” (43).
The thinking of our time claims abandoned being (being-thrown-to-the-world in dereliction) constitutes a positive possibility of being-in-the-world … but Nancy counters: “But this positivity posits nothing and is not itself posited” (43). (Here, let us think towards his later depiction of ‘law’.)
There also seems to be a denial of possibility otherwise: repetitions of “no idea, no memory, no presentiment of a world that does not abandon us” (42); “we can say no more. There is no going back; being conveys nothing more ancient than its abandonment” (43); “oblivion safeguards no reserve of recoverable, curable memory” (39); “there is no memory. There is no history of this abandonment, no knowledge or narrative of how, where, when, and by whom it was abandoned. This is not impossible to know: very simply, it is not” (40); and “abandonment’s only law … is to be without return and without recourse” (47).
So, what is the thought and ontology we are called to do now? Proceeding via negativa, we can identify three things that it has not or is not: it has exhausted transcendentals; it has immobilized the dialectic; and it obstructs and forsakes the initial position of being (37). In affirmation, it acquires two identifiers: it is a phonology (45), and it is an anthropology (47). More specifically, ontology is a phonology insofar as we are abandoned to the law, which is to the voice, to that which constitutes the law, that which is the law (45). What the law/voice orders is no act; it orders ecce homo: behold, but, behold that which can be neither described nor shown: the ecceity of man: the presence for itself in its here. (Ecceity, or haecceity, is the thisness gathered from Aristotle’s Greek to ti esti, the what (it) is, by Duns Scotus to identify the discrete properties that identify a thing as a specific individual thing, and then by Husserl to designate the neither essence in general nor a common genus, not a ‘what’ (the quiddity), but a pure form of a ‘this’ that appears by a unity of appearances that establish an individualization.) A couple pages later, ontology is then identified as an anthropology wherein its object is solely the dereliction of being, its pollakōs (47). (The pollakōs having been initially identified as the multiple ways being speaks itself in which “abandonment adds nothing to the proliferation … [instead] It sums up the proliferation, assembles it, but by exhausting it, carrying it to the extreme poverty of abandonment” (36).)
So: what is Nancy arguing? Is this essay—perhaps in contradistinction to The Birth to Presence’s first chapter, “Identity and Trembling”—rejecting origin-seeking? Is it an admission of or persuasion to the unhappy insight that being is not cast out to pure possibilities? (Although, it is only by the possibility of abandonment one can know the possibilities of love (40).) Is it a renewed chastisement of our reliance on the vain hope of an empowered having of will for self-determination?
Surely what we can say: abandoned being is a fundamental condition determining today’s thinking; today’s thinking is a variant of ontology moved toward the voice, which is the law, and focused anthropologically on individual thisness of individuals, that is, on what can neither be shown nor described. Our fundamental condition and that which also conditions our thinking of being is neither demonstrable nor amenable to expressive demonstration: we do not and cannot know it, it hasn’t memory or history or narrative—but it is something we have long known, Greek-ly or Jewish-ly (40), even if only partially, like Nietzsche knew amor fati (41) or Plato already knew the un-utterability of the Sphinx’s many names (38); we do not and cannot know it, but it carries the weight of a categorical imperative (46); and being is not its abandonment, but there is abandoned being (40).
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“It is has the tremendous adherence to itself, mute and immobile, of a stone sphinx in the desert, in our desert.
The sphinx calls itself God, Nature, History, Subject, Illusion, Existence, Phenomenon, Poiesis, Praxis --- but it is always a single mass of stones, fugitive versions of the unique it is that no one utters. For no one can utter it: Plato knew this already.” ~~Jean-Luc Nancy, “Abandoned Being,” The Birth to Presence, p.38. |