![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
This essay recognizes the insistent force of Jean-Luc Nancy: not only his life force or his physical and mental fortitude in living through a heart transplant and other illnesses, but also his force of thought or his influence on generations of thinkers. The optimistic and resilient spirit of this force oftentimes finds itself reaffirmed in Nancy’s writings especially on freedom, community, the world, sense, love, and existence, as Nancy insistently asserts their always possible new re-beginnings despite their apparent closures at certain times. Yet, as this essay underscores, the other aspect of force must be acknowledged too: force that is waning, weakening, sliding into entropy, if not atrophy. This is force that is more pessimistic, not unlike a negative affect, which can be found in Nancy’s “L’Intrus” and “Dialogue Under the Ribs.” This essay argues that it is important to elucidate this other force because it allows us to take into account the fragile or precarious dimension of existence, or the undeniable pain and fatigue of existence, all of which insist no less in existence.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Kindly see my The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion After the Subject and L’existence prépositionnelle.
2 See of course Williams’s “Structures of Feeling” in Marxism and Literature. To be clear, locating “structures of feeling” within the personal or the individual does not mean that affects begin with the personal or the individual. Faithful to affect studies, I take affect not to be a product of a will or intention of an individual. Like Raymond Williams, Sara Ahmed, Jonathan Flatley, Lauren Berlant, and other affect theorists, I would say that there is a larger historical, social, material, and psychic field that is not only coextensive but also precedes and supersedes the individual, from which affects can form and within which they can circulate before touching the individual in ways that the latter cannot ignore.
3 “Exscription,” according to Nancy (see especially the essay “Exscription” and Corpus), is the process by which sense gets inscribed in and as writing. However, sense is not henceforth locked in writing but exceeds writing and traverses back out in the world. That is why it is “ex-scription,” which is to say, writing (“scription”) that writes itself to the outside (“ex”). One could argue that there is a certain resonance between Nancy’s “exscription” and Derrida’s notion of writing or écriture, the trace of which Derrida puts it precisely in terms of force in “Force and Signification” and Of Grammatology.
4 Perhaps one could hear in this an echo of Derrida’s argument in “By Force of Mourning” that force and existence are ineluctable. For Derrida there, force is something virtual that gives form to existence (and this recalls his notion of force in “Force of Law,” which inaugurates everything), but it also has its “dynamo-logic” (145), allowing it to escape all presence, to be indifferent to any necessity of becoming an actuality [passage à l’acte], hence always remaining open to the uncalculated event of its own arrival in unexpected forms, that is, open to, in Derrida’s rhetoric, its “to-come.” It is force as such that, according to Derrida, it precedes, traverses, and exceeds ontology.
5 At this point, allow me to say that the way I am thinking “insistence” here with regard to the question of force in Nancy can be compared to Derrida’s reading of “desistance” in Lacoue-Labarthe. For Derrida, desistance is that which is structurally “ineluctable” (“Introduction: Desistance” 1) from anything, for example, the constitution of a subject. It is something always already occurring to whatever is in the making, and therefore belongs, or is an integral part of, the latter: “a certain constitutive desistance of the subject” (2). But it is also outside the will or decision of the latter, and as such, its trace or “pre-inscription” or “pre-impression” (2) might even run counter to one’s desire. Thus, desistance might appear to pose as an opposing force, but one must recognize that it “doesn’t mark anything negative” (1). It is just the other side of the same thing. (Or, to put it as Deleuze once did with speed, acceleration and deceleration are but the two aspects of it, and one must not think that deceleration is a negation of speed.) In that respect, desistance is “a (de)constitution, rather than a destitution” (2), in the sense that it resists any illusion that the thing in question is constituted once and for all. To any such illusion, desistance is there “to cease, to stop, to leave off” (4). It exposes the unavoidable aspects of the thing, “even the worst: mistakes, weaknesses, misapprehensions, inhibitions, omissions, compromises” (10). I hope how “insistence” shares some of these aspects of desistance will become clear as this essay progresses. For another variant of “insistence” in Nancy, it is useful to see Ian James’s “The Persistence of the Subject: Jean-Luc Nancy.”
6 One might see here a contest of forces, which can be found in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, and Deleuze would put it in terms of active forces vs. reactive forces, strong forces vs. weak forces. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze inclines toward active/strong forces, which are “appropriating, possessing, subjugating, dominating,” if not have the effect of making a body “a self and define the self as superior and captivating [surprenant]” (Nietzsche and Philosophy 42; trans. mod.). This is not the space to elaborate on the differences between Deleuze and Nancy on force, but let me just say that Nancy’s conceptualization of force would take distance from Deleuze’s.
7 On another note, and to be sure, this “resolution,” if not the resistance of worldly sovereignty that Nancy talks about in the Libération piece, is not the decision of a single subject, that is, the singular sovereign subject. This is not the space to go into details, but for Nancy, such a subject deconstructs itself, which is to say, such a subject can be revealed to be only a fantasy, and likewise his or her supposed sovereignty, which he or she presumes to solely possess (for a more in-depth discussion of Nancy and the auto-deconstruction of the subject, kindly see my The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion After the Subject). If there were such a thing as sovereignty for Nancy in this case (I leave aside his inclination toward Bataille’s formulation of “sovereignty is nothing”), I would say that it inheres in the fact of existence, a fact common to all existents in the world. As Nancy says, via a reading of Heidegger, the fact of existence is “the decision of existence” (“The Decision of Existence” 83). In other words, quintessentially, there is no single sovereign subject that decides. There is only existence that decides, without any need to declare a state of exception but simply in its “mundanity” (82). That is also to say that there is essentially no single subject exercising sovereignty over others. Just as the fact of existence is shared by all existents in the world, sovereignty, then, is also divided or distributed among these existents. To follow Derrida here, one thinks of “another politics” that will involve “the sharing of sovereignty” (“Le souverain bien – ou l’Europe en mal de souveraineté” 110; my translation). Such a shared sovereignty, if not a sovereignty without subject, to return to a rhetoric closer to Nancy, aligns furthermore with the idea of resolution or resistance here as political affect. Affects, as scholars such as Ahmed and Flatley remind us, are independent of the subject: preceding the subject, they are independent of the subject’s will or intention. On “sovereignty without subject” in Nancy, see my essay of the same title in Nancy Now.
8 See previous note on Nancy’s “decision of existence.”
9 In my view, there is a certain blunting, if not a hasty glossing over, of the force of penetration here. It is no doubt problematic, and I tried to address it with Nancy in The Deconstruction of Sex. I leave aside any discussion of this problematic in this essay, therefore. What I am trying to emphasize here is the supplementary positive or optimistic perspective on violent force.
10 See “Shattered Love” 98.
11 On this point of the “broken heart,” Nancy also says that “the break is nothing more than a touch [une touche], but the touch is not less deep than a wound” (98).
12 I note here that the hyphen, or the trait d’union in French, is important for Nancy in the chapter “The Judeo-Christian” in the first volume of The Deconstruction of Christianity, but this is not the space to go into it.
13 Here, I am also thinking of Cixous’s Insister: à Jacques Derrida, particularly at the point where she recalls Derrida saying to her, “You are my insister [in English in the original].” Cixous will go on:
What pleases me wonderfully in this word, by which you allow me to come to presence [dont tu me fais présent], your finding [ton trouvé], your ingenious discovery, this feminine or masculine untranslatable, is that I can likewise turn it round on you. You too, you are my insister [in English in the original]. My insister. He who insists me [Mon insisteur]. (41)
14 On Agamben’s “impotentiality,” see his “On Potentiality.” Also, I am thinking of Nancy’s phrase in Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative: “The negative is the prefix of the in-finite” (12). This phrase calls for explication, which I am unable to do so here. I simply want to stress the force of the negative in the prefix in-.
15 “Wavering of the mind” is taken from Spinoza (Ethics 178), when he writes of the individual caught between two conflicting emotions or affects. I bring in Spinoza here also because the notion of affect in Nancy is one closer to a Spinozian genealogy than a Freudian one, which largely informs contemporary affect theorists such as Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Sianne Ngai.
16 I demonstrated this in a reading of Édouard Levé (in relation to Nancy) in “Exscription, or the Sense of Failure” and in another of Eve Sedgwick and Kate Zambreno in “Auto-thanato-theory.”
17 Nancy also recounts his youngest son call him a “living-dead” (13).
18 See “Abandoned Being” 41–42.
19 See Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture.
20 By silence here, I am referring to what Nancy says of Being freed from all its multiple ways of enunciating itself: “It requires nothing that being has not already, always, arranged in its silent being” (“Abandoned Being” 38). With regard to suffering, pain, and hurt, I am thinking precisely of the section “Pain. Suffering. Unhappiness” in Nancy’s The Sense of the World. As I read it, Nancy considers pain, suffering, and misfortune at a worldly dimension, that is to say, touching on the general (i.e., mankind at large) rather than particular, or even personal, experiences. I also find that the discussion of pain there gets abstracted to an epistemological anxiety, that is, to the pain of inadequate meaning-making. Clearly, I am resisting such abstraction of pain from the experiential and/or existential realm.
21 While Nancy in “L’Intrus” says of the intruder that comes from the outside, he will say, in “Shattered Love,” that “love does not stop, as long as love lasts, coming from the outside. It does not remain outside; it is this outside itself, the other, each time singular, a blade thrust in me […]” (97).
22 One could argue that Derrida, likewise, is not forthcoming with negative affects. The one moment of exhibiting one’s weakness (that is, fear, or anxiety) in the face of the thought of finitude, mortality, or death, though, comes through in Derrida’s final interview, published as Learning to Live Finally, where he confesses that the only thing that he has never learned is learning to die: “I remain uneducable when it comes to any wisdom about learning-how-to-die or, if you prefer, knowing-how-to-live” (25).