Jean-Luc Nancy and the Spacing of the World

Abstract

Moving between Jean-Luc Nancy's reflections on world-forming, community and the artwork, this article argues that the question of space in Nancy's work raises key issues which connect the ethical and the political to the aesthetic. Nancy configures space in terms of the sharing and distribution of singular plural beings, as that which disperses the totality of the global and extends as the condition of justice. Tracing this elaboration of space through Nancy's writings on sculpture and painting—attending in particular to questions of distinction and demarcation—this article suggests a reading of Nancy's thought as a perpetual attempt to do justice to the infinite and inexhaustible spacing of the world.

Keywords:

• Jean-Luc Nancy
• Space
• Justice
• Ethics
• Politics
• Aesthetics

Notes

1. For a definitive account of Nancy's engagement with questions of space, and of the various philosophical legacies on which it draws, see James (2006: 65–113).

2. Though my focus is on the essays collected in Multiple Arts: The Muses II, it is important to note that Nancy addresses the arts across a range of works, including The Muses, The Ground of the Image and Visitation: de la peinture chrétienne.

3. On the artwork's non-representational relation to ethics and politics, see “Art Today.”

4. On the relation between the presentation of the artwork and the condition of our being-in-common in Nancy, see Crowley (2010), and Michaud (2005, 2010).

5. “Sense” [sens] is a privileged term in Nancy's writings: “sense” is always already manifest in the world and makes meaning possible; it is prior to yet in excess of signification; see, for example, The Sense of the World. For a detailed discussion of “sense” in Nancy, see James (2006: 89–97, 105–113).

6. All emphases are as in the original texts.

7. Conversely, the political is described as “the opening of a space”—an opening to which Nancy also assigns another name: freedom (The Experience of Freedom 78).

8. At stake here is Nancy's thought of an infinite excess within finite existence, as James has demonstrated (“Jean-Luc Nancy and the Visual”).

9. On the image as “distinct,” see The Ground of the Image (particularly Chapter 1).

10. Here the term “exposition” can be understood as gesturing both to the presentation of the artwork (as explored, for example, in Les Muses) and to being itself (see, for example, Corpus).

11. In “Held, Held Back”, sculpture is also briefly discussed in terms of techné (177).

12. “If the look regards that upon which it casts itself and cares for it, it will have taken care of the real […]” (The Evidence of Film 18); “Images then define a world where the given must be given again: it must be received and recreated to be what it is” (34).