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Notes
Andrew Benjamin's comments and suggestions were most helpful. I thank him also for his generosity in reading this piece, and the time spent in discussion.
André Gide, Fruits of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) 196. Gide is referring to “metamorphosis” and how we witness it but seldom consider the marvel of it. I have applied it to the wider context of finitude itself.
William Corlett, Community without Unity: A Politics of Derridean Extravagance (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1989) 29. This is an idea of Charles Taylor that finds expression through Corlett on the topic on community.
Jean‐Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney, foreword by Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991) 97.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 60.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 35.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000) 83. Nancy thinks “the origin” as ordinary: recreated or renewed infinitely by singular with plural. On page 15 he writes: “Finitude is the origin; that is, it is an infinity of origins. ‘Origin’ does not signify that from which the world comes, but rather the coming of each presence of the world, each time singular.”
Two meanings: with and witness, have been fused (and di‐fused by a slash) since “the with” accommodates attestation of any testimony and because “voice must be understood, in the first instance, as happening entre‐nous (and that, correlatively, our entre happens as that voice),” as James Gilbert‐Walsh suggests in “Broken Imperatives: The Ethical Dimension of Nancy's Thought,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 26.2 (2000): 34. The relation that withholds singular plural can be traced by voice but cannot be traced back to “itself,” as Nancy implies.
Gide, Fruits of the Earth 200.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 11.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 96.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 96.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 102.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 78.
Georgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990) 14.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 79.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 62.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1992) 212.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 477.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 477.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 478.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 65. Nancy is quite specifically referring to literature as a site of deferral or the product as unworking itself. I have deployed it in this context because literature enacts mythic interruption. It therefore shares this commonality with discreet spacing.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 78.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 76.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 60.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 62. This idea appears in and is developed in Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. and with a foreword by Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997).
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 33.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 34.
James Gilbert‐Walsh, “Broken Imperatives: The Ethical Dimension of Nancy's Thought,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 26.1 (2000): 35.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 10.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 92.
Agamben, The Coming Community 90.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990) 167.
Simone Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. and intro. by Siân Miles (London: Virago, 1986) 76.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 76.
Gide, Fruits of the Earth 33. Gide uses this expression in the context of happiness. “Happiness is a chance encounter and at every moment stands beside you like a beggar by the roadside.” On page 25, however, he remarks: “God and happiness are one.” I have used it in the context of an encounter: the human with divine, and the human with each other.
Gide, Fruits of the Earth 44. Here, Gide is describing clouds disappearing into an azure sky. The context has been altered because it captures the encounter mentioned in n. 35.
Gide, Fruits of the Earth 26. Nancy has a similar idea; he writes: “Every one is eschatological. Each is the end of the coming without end of sense …” in Nancy, The Sense of the World 71.
Agamben, The Coming Community 68. Nancy would agree up to a certain point. Whilst all things take place within alterity, taking place is possible and impossible because of the coexistence of origins. In Being Singular Plural 13, Nancy asserts: “The outside is inside; it is the spacing of the dis‐position of the world; it is our dis‐position and our co‐appearance.” And on page 11: “The ‘outside’ of the origin is ‘inside’ – in an inside more interior than the extreme interior, that is, more interior than the intimacy of the world and the intimacy that belongs to each ‘me.’” What he appears to be de‐scribing is that there is no “in” only with, so that it is no longer possible to say inside/outside but with.
Agamben, The Coming Community 14.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 25.
Agamben, The Coming Community 90.
Thomas Keneally, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972); cited hereafter as TCJB.
Frank Clune, Jimmy Governor (London: Horwitz, 1959); cited hereafter as JG.
Corlett, Community without Unity 197.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 58.
Clune, Jimmy Governor 26
Clune, Jimmy Governor 12. Clune doesn't tell us how this was possible but Keneally does. James was taken away from his family for the express purpose of giving him a white, Christian education under the care of the Methodist Minister the Revd H.J. Neville, BA. Neville's great goal in life is “‘that he had imbued one of them with decent ambitions!’ Until Jimmie Blacksmith had vanished, Mr Neville thought that he had a chance of bringing off the trick with eager, sober, polite Jimmie Blacksmith” (4). Jimmie vanishes only long enough to be initiated into tribal manhood. Keneally juxtaposes his initiation with Mr Neville's Easter service, implying that to Jimmie's family his initiation is akin to his “coming back from the dead” (6). That the indigenous continue their ritual practices, their initiation, secretly, without Neville's knowledge or permission, is, I believe, equivalent to coming back from the dead, for they appear to have embraced a Christianity that embraces their tribal practices.
Michel de Certeau, The Certeau Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 326.
Agamben, The Coming Community 86–87.
Agamben, The Coming Community 86, 87.
Agamben, The Coming Community 44.
Agamben, The Coming Community 44.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 17.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 20.
For Keneally, the manner in which the Newby murders were committed reflects the rate at which dignity could be severed (79). To the indignity of Jimmy Blacksmith could be added the “system” of “dignity” built on the removal of the Aborigines.
Agamben, The Coming Community 14.
Agamben, The Coming Community 14–15.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 93.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 93.
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 164.
If the central criterion – whether it is stated or tacit – of assimilation hinges on race or skin colour, assimilation becomes an interminable task in that it can be achieved only by extermination and/or by interbreeding. This was the dual process of turning the indigenous people “Australian.”
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 165.
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 166.
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 170.
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 170.
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 166.
Keneally, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith 53. The woman Jimmie marries is a white servant girl from a farm. She was a mere rung up from him in the pecking order of privilege. Keneally and Clune have different opinions on how this woman was treated once she married James. In Keneally's novel she is, to some extent, accepted by the whites provided that she accepts their consistent pleas to leave Jimmie. And the men treat her as a “loose woman,” that is, in the way black women are treated. In Clune's version, Jimmie's wife is treated the same way that Jimmie was: humiliated and rejected.
Jean‐Françoise Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1979) 64.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 56.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 52.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 55.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 57.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 58.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 58.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 59.
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 170.
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 171.
Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology 32.
Agamben, The Coming Community 65.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 73.
Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology 84.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 93.
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 166.
Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology 94.
Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe and Jean‐Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997) 127.
Lacoue‐Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political 127.
Lacoue‐Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political 127.
Lacoue‐Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political 127.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 62.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 63.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 15.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 64.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 61.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 28.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 56.
Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988) 47.
Lacoue‐Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political 129.
Lacoue‐Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political 126.
Lacoue‐Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political 141.
Agamben, The Coming Community 79.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 49.
Lacoue‐Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political 128.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 219.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 481.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 21.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 7.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 13.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 17.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 21.
Agamben, The Coming Community 1. There are some similarities between Nancy's “someone” and Agamben's singularity. Whilst there is a detailed discussion of singularity in Being Singular Plural, it is the singularity sketched by Nancy in the sense of the world that is of interest. As Nancy explains, each one “is the end of the coming without the end of sense. As such, it offers three distinct traits: it is ‘unique,’ it is ‘whatever,’ it is ‘exposed’” (71). In a sense it is all three in so far as it exists and consists with one or more singularities, and this is the point that is not clear in Agamben's singularity.
Agamben, The Coming Community 1.
Agamben, The Coming Community 1.
Agamben, The Coming Community 67.
Agamben, The Coming Community 18
Agamben, The Coming Community 18.
Agamben, The Coming Community 68.
Agamben, The Coming Community 67.
Agamben, The Coming Community 19.
Agamben, The Coming Community 43.
Agamben, The Coming Community 22.
Agamben, The Coming Community 15.
Agamben, The Coming Community 12.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 41.
Jacques Derrida, “Différance” in The Continental Philosophy Reader, eds. R. Kearney and M. Rainwater (London: Routledge, 1996) 461.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 94.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 29.
Christopher Fynsk, foreword: “Experiences of Finitude” in The Inoperative Community x.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 5.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 58.
Agamben, The Coming Community 82. Agamben suggests that it is the spectacle itself that communicates (i.e., language) and “what hampers communication is communicability itself” (82).
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 60.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 96.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 73.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 83.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 92.
Agamben, The Coming Community 94.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 96.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community 97.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 83.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 84.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 85.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 8.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural 8.
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