The Pulse of Sense

Jean-Luc Nancy is a philosopher. He is not simply a “thinker” or a “theorist” (as he himself insists below). Of course, philosophers spend their time thinking, often in the most theoretical and abstract ways possible. However, being a philosopher means something rather more specific: the philosopher is a thinker situated by a particular tradition. In the West, this tradition is the history of metaphysics. This history provides the philosopher with a field of activity, namely, the many authors – from Parmenides to Derrida – making up that history. It equally provides them with a task or vocation, as topical and pressing now as it was in the sixth century bc, namely: the thinking of being – or, as Heidegger understands it, thinking the meaning of being. In other words, the thinking of philosophy is one that accomplishes the relation of being to the human being that both is and thinks, that precisely “is” insofar as it “thinks” and vice versa, through history and as its very history.

For Nancy’s generation of philosophers, however, “metaphysics” functions almost as a pejorative whose “history” requires deconstruction. If we are to believe Heidegger – that generation’s sternest of teachers – , this is because the historical development of metaphysics has distorted the “essence of thinking” as it concerns the philosopher: “By and by philosophy becomes a technique for explaining from highest causes,” he complains in his famous “Letter on Humanism,” “One no longer thinks; one occupies oneself with ‘philosophy’” (Pathmarks 240, 242).¹ Philosophy becomes a technique to “solve” the “problems” we can nowadays find treated in various handbooks of metaphysics (personal identity, necessity, free will, etc.), but in doing so undoes itself by neglecting its true concern (the thinking of being): “Thinking comes to an end when it slips out of its element,” when it neglects “what enables thinking to be a thinking” (241).² Being belongs to thinking as the element in which it maintains itself as thinking: “as the belonging to being that listens, thinking is what it is according to its essential origin” (241). However, this element is precisely being, i.e., being beyond any determination of beingness, and as such thinking is never simply “theory”: “The characterization of thinking as theoria and the determination of knowing as ‘theoretical’ comportment occur already within the ‘technical’ interpretation of thinking,” Heidegger insists, meaning that “Being, as the element of thinking, is abandoned by the technical interpretation of thinking” (240). Our task as philosophers, then, is to “free ourselves from the technical interpretation of thinking” (241). The contributions collected here intend to demonstrate the many ways in which Jean-Luc Nancy takes to heart this task of freeing thinking from its technical interpretation so that it might be able to maintain itself in its own element and thus truly be thinking.

Yet, the mysteries animating the history of philosophy are really only wrapped up rather than unfolded in the designation of being as the element of thinking. Without pre-empting the many contributions that follow, we may therefore already provide an initial and provisional indication of the way in which the element of thinking requires further specification so as to clarify their status as texts that, we suggest, should be considered “encounters” with Jean-Luc Nancy. Sticking with Heidegger, we remember that he understands this element first of all as the being of the human being, more specifically as its existence: “The ‘essence’ of Da-sein lies in its existence,” as he famously states in §9 of Being and Time (42/40). He repeats it in his “Letter on Humanism”: “Ek-sistence can be said only of the essence of the human being, that is, only of the human way ‘to be,’” meaning that “the human being occurs essentially in such a way that he is the ‘there,’ that is, the clearing of being” (Heidegger, Pathmarks 247–48). In other words, thinking must maintain itself in the element of existence, because it is through the finitude of its being-in-the-world that the human being has an understanding of being and thus that its thinking might be a thinking of being. Thinking, as a thinking of being, is a thinking of existence for Heidegger. Nancy takes a similar approach to the specification of the element of thinking but radicalises it by emphasising that, if the element of thinking is said to be finite, not only what it thinks is finite (existence) but so too is the way in which it thinks. In short, the thinking of existence, as a thinking of the finitude of being, must itself be a finite thinking, precisely because thinking must maintain itself in its proper element (i.e., the finitude of being that is existence):

Finitude corresponds simply to the matrix-formula of the thought of existence, the thought of the finitude of being or even the thought of the sense of being as finitude of sense. And this formula? “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence.” (Nancy, A Finite Thinking 74)

Nancy understands his vocation as a philosopher in this way, namely, producing a finite thinking of finitude, a thinking of existence from existence, of being from being-there:

a finite thinking makes itself adequate to the existence it thinks. But this adequation is itself finite, and it is there that access to the missing sense, or its inappropriation, obtains […] Here, thinking burrows back to its source. It knows this source, its very being, as what is, in itself, neither thought, unthought, nor unthinkable, but the finite sense of existing. (29–30)

It then likewise falls to us, contributors to this special issue, to think about Nancy by engaging with him and to a certain degree writing to him from wherever we happen to find ourselves. In other words, the special issue is not so much a collection of treatises on Nancy as it is an attempt at staging a series of encounters with him: abandoning any pretensions of being comprehensive, the contributions collected here can only provide an infinitely finite overview of his work.

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How does Nancy think (being’s) finitude in a finite way? Indeed, how are we to do so in our thinking encounters with him? In a magisterial essay on Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” Nancy follows him in looking at the being of the human being, but now defines this being more specifically as action: if, as Heidegger suggests, “man is insofar as he has to act,” then action “is not a specific aspect of his being, but his very being itself” (Nancy, A Finite Thinking 174). Otherwise put, because the human being, as being-there, is the clearing of being; it is its existence, the act by which or in which the human being is there, that creates the clearing, that makes – or, rather, clears – the space for it. This action thus expresses the relation of existence (Dasein) to being (Sein), namely, as the human being’s being-there (its clearing of being). As Nancy puts it:

because the difference between being and beings is not a difference of being (it is not the difference between two kinds of being), it is not a difference between two realities, but the reality of Dasein insofar as it is, in and of itself, open and called to an essential and “active” relation with the proper fact of being. (175)

He then continues by understanding both this act and the relation as one of sense, the key motif of his entire oeuvre: “This relation is one of sense. In Dasein, it is a matter of giving sense to the fact of being – or, more exactly, in Dasein the very fact of being is one of making sense” (175). In other words, the relation is one of sense, which is to say that the act establishing it is that of making sense. “To be is to make sense” (175), Nancy writes, and being in its finitude is thus itself likewise understood as sense: Dasein’s relation to being, i.e., being revealed in terms of our being-there. However, we said that this being is understood as action by Nancy, so the “making” of sense that is being cannot be conceived of as production: “This ‘making,’ however, is not a ‘producing.’ It is, precisely, acting, or conducting oneself. Conduct is the accomplishment (Vollbringen) of being. As sense’s conduct, or as the conduct of sense, it is, essentially ‘thinking’” (175). So, to say that “to be” is “to make sense,” is to say that existence consists in a particular way-of-making-sense (a way-of-being-there that Nancy here calls “conduct”), through which it accomplishes its relation to being and only as such lets being be (in its finitude as being). This is what thinking is, and it is in that sense that the vocation of thinking is to let being be: it does not produce being or sense, but lets it be (sensed); it ek-sists being, ex-poses it there. “Making-sense is not the same as producing sense,” Nancy explains:

If action is an “accomplishment,” that is because being itself accomplishes itself in it as the sense which it is. But being is itself nothing other than the gift or the desire of or for sense. So making-sense is not of sense’s making; it is making being be, or letting it be. (177)

He summarises: “Sense’s conduct – or the conduct of sense – makes being as being acted by and as Dasein” (178).

This conduct, and Nancy’s emphasis on it, is a consequence of finitude: given our finitude, being is never present to us except in terms of the action that comprises the human being (namely, existence as the letting-be of being), nor is sense ever given except insofar as it is made in and by this action (namely, existence as the making-sense of being) – which are the two sides of the same coin (namely, finitude). In other words, finitude (namely, the displacement of sense or being as given) necessitates the accomplishment of being as sense (namely, the action of making sense that lets being be):

being still has to be exposed to – and as – the action of sense as such, or as the gift of the desire of and for this action, as, in other words, the non-given of sense, which is the very fact of being as sense – and thus as finitude. (Nancy, A Finite Thinking 178)

Finitude then means existence, the human way to be, first of all understood as characterised by a desire for sense in the absence of its givenness: the action in which being ek-sists and through which sense is made. “It is ‘ek-sistence,’ the way or conduct of being as being ‘outside’ of itself,” Nancy explains, “in other words, as being-to-sense, or, again, as making-sense or action” (179).

That this action (the making of sense or letting be of being) is necessitated by finitude (the non-givenness of being or sense) is the reason why Nancy understands it as “conduct” (existence’s accomplishment of being as sense). It translates what Aristotle refers to as the ethos (literally, the “abode”) of the philosopher – as exemplified by Heraclitus, whose ordinary and humble dwelling astonishes some visitors who had expected something rather less mundane of the great thinker (De partibus animalium I: 5.645a17–23). Yet, Heidegger writes in his “Letter on Humanism,” this “abode” must be understood in a very particular way:

Ethos means abode, dwelling place. The word names the open region in which the human being dwells. The open region of his abode allows what pertains to the essence of the human being, and what in thus arriving resides in nearness to him, to appear. The abode of the human being contains and preserves the advent of what belongs to the human being in his essence. (Pathmarks 269)

Nancy spells this out more explicitly by suggesting that “abode” (ethos) indicates, not so much a place, but an action: namely, the specifically human way of being that is being-there (existence). He explains:

Ethos needs to be understood as “abode” (following Heraclitus’ saying: ethos anthropoi daimon). The abode is the “there” in that it is open. As such, the abode is much more a conduct than it is a residence; more accurately, “residing” is principally a conduct, the conduct of being-the-there. (Nancy, A Finite Thinking 188)

In other words, the human being’s ethos is the way it conducts itself, the way in which its being consists in the ek-sistence of being, the way in which its existence consists in being-the-there. It indicates the particular way in which human beings are: letting being be and making sense by being-there. Existence, or the human being’s ethos, makes sense by conducting being through the there that lets it be in its finitude:

“Being-the-there,” however, implies that being properly ek-sists as its “clearing.” By this “clearing” we need to understand not, or not in the first instance, an illumination or revelation that brings being to light, but being itself as an opening, a spacing-out for possibilities of bringing to light. Being ek-sists (is) in that it opens being. The there is the opening in which, right at an existence hic et nunc, making-sense is at issue. The there is the place in which, on the basis of it, on the basis of its opening, something can take place: a conduct of sense. The ek of ek-sistence is the conduct proper to being the there in full measure […], in which, by being the there, by being that there is there an existence, being is sense. (Nancy, A Finite Thinking 181)

The conduct of sense (the ek-sistence of being), then, is the response to the desire for sense (the non-givenness of being): it conducts being through the there and makes sense in thus conducting it (lets being be as sense).

It is this conduct, which lets being be in its finitude by accomplishing it as sense in the way it conducts being through the there of human existence, that forms the true object of a finite thinking of finitude: it maintains itself in its element (i.e., the finitude of being) either as the letting-be of being in its finitude (Heidegger) or the making-sense of being in existence (Nancy). Indeed, as Heidegger puts it, as “the thinking that inquires into the truth of being and so defines the human being’s essential abode from being and toward being,” this thinking precisely “ponders the abode of the human being” (Pathmarks 271). Thinking therefore belongs essentially to the being of the human being, specifically as a thinking of (its) being, insofar as (its) being consists in the infinitely finite conduct of sense.

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Conceived in this way, thinking in general and Nancy’s thinking in particular confronts anyone writing and thinking about him with an incredibly urgent question: how do we conduct ourselves when making sense of him? Here, it might be useful to remind the reader of the many meanings Nancy’s sens has in French: aside from those that easily carry over into English, i.e., everything to do with “meaning” and “the senses”; it indicates not only the results or products of these familiar processes of making-sense, but at the same time also includes the “way” they are “conducted,” the “direction” they take, the “thrust” or “pulse” in which the very circulation of sense exists. To make sense then means to conduct being through the there: to take it, or to let oneself be taken by it, in a certain direction that is precisely determined as such in light of where we already “find ourselves” (as Heidegger understands the there in §29 of Being and Time). In other words, in our respective encounters with Nancy, we all come to him from somewhere. From there, we take him, and are taken by him, somewhere else. The writings collected here can then only be reports on this process of “making-sense,” notes “along the way,” documenting “encounters” as moments of “(re)direction” and recording the “pulse” of sense that animates them. They are not so much studies of as responses to Jean-Luc Nancy – and it is thus entirely fitting that several of these essays are personal in nature – , for they do not deliver a definitive summary of his position on any given issue, but rather seek to join him in the making of sense: throughout these pages, thinking

commits itself to sense and thus to a sense that is still to come, to sense’s future, rather than merely describing or delivering sense as if it were already in place. Philosophy in this sense exposes rather than proposes; more accurately, its propositions (its meaning or its truth) are indissociable from the exposition through which it commits itself, promises itself, and risks itself. (Nancy, A Finite Thinking 293)

In that spirit, Nancy himself has provided each contribution with an “echo” in which he, in turn, responds to each author and thereby continues their mutual encounter.

Thinking, both for Nancy and with Nancy, is an attempt at ascertaining or sensing the very direction of sense (i.e., the way in which sense is made), a direction that directs or is sensed as the very conduct of existence (i.e., the way in which the being of human beings consists in being-the-there). In light of that, the goal of this special issue is not to explain Nancy, but to let his thinking be, to make his work make-sense, to truly bring (his) thinking into ek-sistence as the pulse of the only thing it ever can be: an infinitely finite set of interpretations in which sense is made to circulate. In their plurality, however, these interpretations do all share sense in a specific way. As will become clear to the reader, each contribution draws attention to a certain force emanating both from and existing as (Nancy’s) thinking: the movement or drive that carries it along and involves it in the circulation of sense as such. It is that sharing, singularly plural and infinitely finite, that makes up what we are calling the pulse of sense: the almost (in)tangible movement and thrust that comprises life in the world as the circulation of sense. This pulse, however, is not a “force” in the sense of a strong and inexecrable pushing forward. Instead, it is delicate and frail, forceful only in its resistance: “the powerful and fragile resonance,” as Nancy describes it below in an essay entitled “The World’s Fragile Skin,” “of all that arouses a form or tonality of existence.” Indeed, it is very much like the skin under which the animating pulse is only detected as such in the first place, secure and yet incredibly vulnerable at the same time: “Openings of blood,” as Nancy writes elsewhere, “are identical to those of sense” (Corpus 105).

We have divided the issue into four sections. The first section deals with what we might call “the fragility of sense” in Nancy’s thinking, starting with his own elaboration of it in relation to the world and the body. This is followed by a consideration of the interplay between force and fragility in Nancy’s thinking of sense, wherein Irving Goh skilfully demonstrates the reciprocal nature of this interaction, namely: the fact that force lies equally in its own fragility. According to him, attending to the weakening or exhaustion of force – as Nancy does throughout his work – , demands courage, namely: the courage to confront, tirelessly, the fatigue of existence. Indeed, it is no less important than the cultivation of life-force, for it means attending to what is both most precarious and insistent in existence. An illuminating counterpoint to Goh’s contribution is offered by Peter Gratton, who suggests that, in Nancy’s thought, ontological fragility can equally be found in an indefatigable exposure to disruption. In doing so, Gratton draws attention to the juridical – indeed, jurisprudential – potential of philosophy, namely: how it exposes, through the force of judgement, both the fragility and resilience of being as a disruption that is given the full force of law. The final contribution in this section then deals with the fragility of thinking itself. Indeed, in addition to recognising the philosophical inspiration for and importance of Nancy’s interest in the undecidable “in-between” as constitutive of philosophical thinking in its ongoing dialogue with literature, Leslie Hill specifically questions a potential point of fragility in Nancy’s own thinking, namely: its engagement with the work of Maurice Blanchot.

The second section of the issue then moves on to a consideration of the role of experience in Nancy’s thinking as the very thrust and pulse of sense. Specifically, Benjamin Hutchens elaborates Nancy’s conceptualisation of the experience of freedom and interrogates the role of the empirical within philosophical discourse, rather than as part of a philosophical “empiricism,” by way of an illuminating etymology of the word of “ex-peri-ence.” It is also this notion of experience beyond “empiricism” that Nikolaas Deketelaere’s contribution considers, but this time focusing on the specific though paradigmatic experience of faith. He compares Nancy and Søren Kierkegaard’s respective understandings of faith in terms of how they both conceive of it as a privileged experience of and as existence itself: the pulse of existence which therefore comprises the very thrust of experience. As an experience that makes lived-experience possible, faith appears to take priority over the experiences considered by classical phenomenology, which is why he suggests turning phenomenology into a poetics. By looking at the ancient understanding of the poet as an interpreter of the gods, Gert-Jan van der Heiden then turns to the experience of speech at the limit of communication in Nancy’s thinking. By comparing and contrasting the poetic voicing of the divine with the calling of the prophet Jeremiah and Saint Paul’s reflections on the glossolalist, he interrogates the phenomenon of the double voice and the experience of inhabiting the very threshold of communication in a poetics of sense that takes its cue from Nancy. An interest in the interrupted and interruptive poetics of the double voice likewise drives John McKeane’s contribution, the final one in this section. McKeane looks at aesthetic experience in the work of Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, interrogating their respective ways of making sense of Hegel’s suggestion that, with the flight of the gods of polytheism and the rise of the monotheistic God, art essentially exhausted itself at the end of Greek antiquity.

The third section deals with the pulse of sense, of our world in its infinitely finite unfolding, in a more intimate way by seeking to embody it, to make felt the incessant movement of a vein underneath the surface of the skin, to make evident our world as the circulation of sense in the same way that a rush of blood turns the cheek pink and lively. Aukje van Rooden starts by emphasising the importance of romantic love and sex in Nancy’s thinking. Nancy’s philosophy of love, she suggests, should be understood in the same vein as German Romanticism insofar as it fosters a thinking of the relationship between love, thinking, and literature – i.e., a thinking of relation itself. This relation, along with the thinking of it, becomes explicitly corporeal in Emmanuel Falque’s dialogue with Nancy. At the crossroads of phenomenology and theology, Falque compares his own notion of the “spread body” (corps épandu) to Nancy’s “exposed body” (corps expeausé). These two notions share an understanding of corporeality as neither belonging to what is lived by consciousness nor to what remains inert in matter, but rather exposing the very fact of existence along the surface of the skin. Yet, Marie-Eve Morin asks in her contribution to the issue, should this skin be considered a human skin? Skilfully navigating the various “new realisms” to have emerged recently, from “speculative realism” to “object-oriented ontology,” she considers their shared demand for the rejection of the privileged position of the human as the centre of the universe. Morin suggests that Nancy offers an innovative response in the form of a “flat” ontology that avoids both the pitfalls of an anthropomorphic approach to the natural world as well as those of a residual human exceptionalism that deprives human beings of any agential role in the unfolding of the world. In the final contribution to this section, Ian James further interrogates the continuity between human and non-human life. Looking specifically at how emotions are generally understood as embodied – insofar as they consist in subjective first-person experiences dependent on objective biological conditions – , he suggests that Nancy’s thinking of sense and touch unlocks a philosophy of the emotions in terms of a fundamental affectivity proper to all biological life, whether or not this life is human.

The exercises contained in the final section continue Nancy’s project of the “deconstruction of Christianity.” The first two contributions of this section focus on the end and overcoming of metaphysics as a process of philosophical secularisation. Drawing on Derrida’s critique of Nancy’s project, Joeri Schrijvers investigates whether our present condition should be considered a continuation of or rather a break with our Christian heritage (and therefore also the history of metaphysics). Looking more specifically at the contemporary exhaustion of various theories of secularisation, and drawing on authors like Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, Erik Meganck proposes the notion of desecularisation as a means of thinking secularisation beyond metaphysics. Adding to Meganck’s argument, Laurens ten Kate considers the extent to which the philosophical “return of religion” opens new theological perspectives and vice versa. Drawing in particular on Nancy’s treatment of the resurrection and the structure of the gospels themselves, Ten Kate articulates an understanding of truth as “parabolic,” i.e., truth and falsity entangled with one another. The final two contributions consider the deconstruction of Christianity in terms of its political and anthropological significance. Refusing to debate Nancy’s project on Derrida’s terms, both Marie Chabbert and Christopher Watkin suggest that the former provides the impetus for a radical politics of difference and emancipation. With Nancy, Chabbert shows how the logic of “return” at play in the “return of religion” should be understood along the lines of an eternal return of difference. This would then provide us with new resources for thinking the increased fluidity and diversity of the category “religion” in our supposedly “post-secular” age. Watkin in turn explicitly engages the question of political emancipation by drawing attention to Nancy’s understanding of deconstruction as a gesture of self-surpassing: the rejection of the modern narrative of emancipatory progress, he notes, results from the fact that this narrative is itself far from emancipatory. Consequently, he argues that Nancy should be considered a thinker of radical emancipation: a thinker whose thinking, and for whom thinking, sets us on or takes us down a path of transformation and redirection, open to both continuity and change.

Once more and for a final time, we let ourselves be carried away with and by Jean-Luc Nancy at the end of this issue. His concluding reflections retrace his international trajectory throughout his career. Indeed, they form a coda to the issue, but these closing words do not in fact close-off anything: they retrace a path taken, the path of Jean-Luc Nancy and (his) thinking; a path that is to be and undoubtedly will be continued, in many different directions, across and around the world. Faithful to his own thinking, by way of “An Accordion Tune,” Nancy here continues to “restrict myself to what is, after all, the essential: a gesture of an opening or reopening in the direction of what must have preceded all construction” (Dis-Enclosure 189n8). In continuing to walk this path, wherever from and wherever to, we hope to be likewise faithful to Nancy’s thinking: that is not to say that we are to follow in the footsteps of the master, but rather that in retracing his path we are equally proceeding in a new direction, we are ourselves carrying further what carried us away initially – since that is the only way for us to make sense (of it).

Notes

1 See also Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 5.

2 See also Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 65.