Reasons to Write: Exscribing the Garden

Here are two passages by Jean-Luc Nancy, to which I'd like to return in further posts. The first is from a text whose history bears mentioning. The initial version, called "Reasons to Write," appeared in 1977. Eleven years later, it was taken up in another text called L'excrit. Yet another version, bearing the second title, once again "combined" and rewrote the texts. The occasion of its english translation prompted still further changes....
If I mention this restless, unrelenting rewriting it is because it says something about what writing means for Nancy. It also says something about what the text attempts to address through writing ( its own rewriting, but also that of Blanchot and Bataille): community, communication, communism. Without a doubt, I've said this too quickly, for one should not too quickly think one knows what such words mean. And yet doesn't one have a sense of what they mean, a sense which perhaps doesn't amount to knowing, but which is, at once, so easy and so impossible to communicate?

Here, then, is the first passage, from the very "beginning" of Exscription:

Two texts are joined here, but the second alone can explain their common title. (...) The writing of the second one brought me back, however, and unexpectedly, to the first. A continuity was inescapable: that of a community with Bataille that goes beyond and can do without theoretical debate (...) Therefore, this community also goes beyond the commentary, exegesis, or interpretation of Bataille. It is not without distance or reservations; but these are, precisely, theoretical. It is a community in that Bataille immediately communicates to me the pain and the pleasure that result from the impossibility of communicating anything at all without touching the limit where all meaning spills out of itself, like a simple ink stain on a word, on the word "meaning." [ Cette communauté tient à ceci, que Bataille me communique immédiatement la peine et le plaisir qui tiennent à la impossibilité de communiquer quoi que soit sans toucher à la limite où le sens tout entier se renverse hors de lui-même, comme une simple tache d'encre à travers un mot, à travers le mot "sens".]

This spilling and this ink are the ruin of all theories of "communication," of the conventional chatter that attempts to promote reasonable exchange and serves only to obscure violence, betrayal, and lies, leaving no possibility of measuring oneself against powerful follies. But the reality of community, where nothing is shared without also being removed from this kind of "communication," has already, always, revealed the vanity of such discourses. They communicate only the postulation of the communication of "meaning," and of the meaning of "communication." Bataille, beyond and sometimes apart from what he says, communicates community itself -- that is, naked existence, naked writing, and the silent, haunting referral of the one to the other, which makes us share meaning's nakedness: neither gods nor thoughts, but the us that is imperceptibly and insuperably exscribed.
("Exscription," in Birth of Presence, 1993)

A few years later, during an interview, Nancy was asked about the "concept" of l'excrit. Here is his response, in my translation:

It is a word which has occurred to me in reaction to a craze for writing, the text, salvation through literature, etc. There is a sentence from Bataille: "Language alone indicates the sovereign moment where it no longer has any currency." It is my daily prayer. He means: there is assuredly only language, but what language indicates, is non-language, the things themselves.... This reminds me of a very early meeting with Ricoeur, at his home in Châtenay. He had just read my first book on Hegel and, after opening the garden door, said: "This is all very well, but what about the garden in all that?" I have never forgotten: the "excrit" is the garden, the fact that writing indicates its own [propre] outside, is decanted and shows things.
("Le partage, l'infini et le jardin," Libération, February 17, 2000)

Comments

[David]

Fascinating passages, Amie. A question: is the "ex-crit" different from "ex-sistence" -apart from the answer that what is ex-scribed, exists (ex-sists?) first of all outside a written text?

[Mark]

I must say, Amie, am rather at a loss as to what to make of these passages. But let me isolate one little bit, the final bit – where is the garden in all this. The notion of the garden as the ‘outside’ seems to me a curious image for the following reasons. The garden is of course literally outside the house, but also lives in symbiosis with it and acts as its counterpoint; it is fully part of - & ‘inside’ - the domestic spatial economy etc. It is to the house as Sunday is to the working week. It is not simply the ‘outside’, but the house’s own chosen and appropriate outside. Without making too much of this ( I may already have done) there are also front and back gardens: It is the façade presented to the world, or it is the ‘secret garden’ at the back of the house. If this is an image of the text’s outside, it is an outside which in no way radically upsets domestic comforts??

[amie]

David, the "connection" of existence and exscription is precisely what I would like to follow "in" Nancy's texts.
Here is another passage from the L'excrit:

The nakedness of writing is the nakedness of existence. Writing is naked because it "exscribes"; existence is naked because it is "exscribed."
La nudité de l'écriture est la nudité de l'existence. L'écriture est nue parce qu'elle "excrit", l'existence est nue parce qu'elle est "excrite."

[Joseph]

Some nice barbs for the "anti-theory" advocates in there, though doubt they'll rise to the bait unless it's made painfully obvious.

[Jodi]

Nakedness of writing and existence combined with gardens. Well, I'll add something stupid: any time I hear that someone is dining al fresco my first reaction is to think that this means they are dining naked. Maybe the fact of exposure underlies my too often made silly response. (Which then reminds me of something IT said about not wanting to eat in public, another kind of exposure.)

[Matt]

I thought it was a lovely passage, though one perhaps best taken in a tall glass over the ice of Foucault's comments on Blanchot and the 'outside'. "Decanted" is a lovely word, but is that the 'outside' Agamben is referring to here, that of Blanchot? Ricoeur would seem to have a sense of humor, anyway.

[amie]

well, I have certainly gotten more comments than I bargained for.

Matt, yes the reference to Blanchot is very much there; the Exscription text ends with a Blanchot quote of which the last line is, "Books themselves refer [renvoient] to an existence." Sounds so evident doesn't it?

Jodi, funny that you should mention it, but like IT, I seem to have trouble eating in public. As for speaking/writing in public, I'm often reminded of Bataille's comment,
"when I speak in public I feel like a whore undressing."

Mark, I've been thinking of your comment a lot, and will try and respond. It might be a tad long and maybe unsatisfying; would you be interested?

David, I really didn't know how to respond to you briefly, hence the brief quote, since your question is precisely what i would like to think 'with' Nancy. Maybe in another post, if anyone would be interested?

Thanks all for your comments.

[Mark]

Amie - yes, i'd be interested in your response. It's how much emphasis you put on the garden image. In one sense it was fairly off the cuff (Riceour), but on the other, it clearly struck all kinds of chords with Nancy.

[David]

"...since your question is precisely what I would like to think 'with' Nancy."

My question wasn't supposed to be that profound; I was just wondering how the two neologisms - "ex-sistence" and "ex-crit" - are connected. But I'm glad it gave the impression that I'm the ideal reader.

Anyway, yes, please write more on this.

[Alain]

Amie

Wonderful passages. Your quote from Bataille above is very similar to something in the Accursed Share: True philosophic thinking is like a whore undressing, or something to that effect. Not sure if there is a connection.

[amie]

Mark, thanks very much for your comment regarding the garden. It certainly gives me a lot to think about. I think one could go on about that little 'scene,' the host opening the door and telling the visitor, while waving at the garden ( his garden? ) where is all that in your (?) book! And a book on Hegel, no less, who better than anyone, explained how to appropriate the outside! It's quite funny!
But, as you note, the remark remained with Nancy, so you are quite right to question why.

Where I have trouble following you, is when you posit that the garden is "fully" domestic, an outside entirely appropriated by the home. Is there ever a fully (en)closed domestic interior? I can think of much that happens in "domestic interiors" that is almost impossible to appropriate -- birth and death "for example," and quite a bit in between.
Let me put this in very general "philosophical" terms. All the famous "metaphysical oppositions" have something in common, that is, they rely on positing an absolute opposition: precisely that of inside/outside. What happens when the "bar" constituting this opposition is taken as less than absolute, not in the sense of lifting the bar entirely ( which is Hegel's way of making one side of the opposition lift and "sublate" [relever] the other, ) but rather in the sense where the one and the other side are somewhat ex-posed? Which is to say, the inside and the outside are not exposed to each other as oppositions, but rather are ex-posed to their own outside.
So the garden is not posited as outside as opposed to an inside. Everywhere, here and there, close to home or far, the response to "where is the garden?" is "it's out there, outside." Which is not to say that the garden is some distant or mythical place, it is right there, as you say, so near the home, yet outside. A little worldly bit of earth, outside. A topography of the garden would have to account for a very singular ex-graphy!
And, a garden is not just a spatial thing, a garden has seasons. " I have never forgotten," Nancy says of the garden, thereby (re)marking the time(s) of the garden, a finite time. Another name for the garden, for the outside, is death. Can death ever be "fully domestic", or does it not ex-scribe in the most intimate "inside" something that ex-poses it?( The text of the "L'excrit "addresses this, though it might not be "explicit" in the the passages I quoted/translated.)
And then, the garden not only involves spatial/temporal questions, but that of language, that there is something outside language, which Nancy says " is his daily prayer." huh? piety? But what to make of a prayer that is not an interior monologue with God ( and one can one wonder if God is not the ultimate resource and impossibility of interior monologue? ) but which is written, an everyday ex-crit ( and perhaps one can hear the cry [cri ]) exposed every day to the absence of response. If language is the house of being per MH, what is the house of l'excrit?

You mentioned being at a loss regarding the Nancy passages. Perhaps such a sense of loss has something to do with spilled ink stains that don't make sense? And yet, can one write or make sense without dipping into such spilled ink stains?

To mop up the spilled ink, the ex-crit, is to efface ex-istence, to enclose and make existence something without issue. Which would be my definition of hell, without a garden.

[Mark]

You’re right to mention the temporality of the garden, which I’d forgotten about, a temporality other than the clock on the mantelpiece.

Might also be interesting to think about that word ‘domesticate’ and what it means and whether it is ever complete. It’s almost always pejorative, carrying the implication of ‘make safe’, tame, emasculate even. 'Domestic' in fact almost always sounds bad, as opposed to home, homely etc

As to whether the garden falls ‘inside’ the domestic economy, well, no, probably nothing does, as you suggest. Even the family pet retains some unimpeachable otherness. But that presumably doesn’t mean that some things aren’t more ‘inside’ than others.

I think your reply probably brings up various things about the unhomely-ness of home, the sense – which you get in certain US movies – that when the home becomes too homely (the proverbial white picket fence, the smiling mom etc) it becomes really unsettling. Or, when domesticity is indeed ‘complete’ you find you’ve actually passed through it and come out somewhere else, somewhere spooky and unsettling. In this sense, the non-domestic is actually the necessary support of domesticity. Once the non-domestic has been eradicated, you’re left with an uncanny hyper-reality.

The idea of some dark thing at the ‘bottom of the garden’, incidentally, might also point to the way that images of the domestic are ghosted by the threat of their reversal or destruction from within. Or the ‘family secret’ – notions that what sustains the domestic scene is something unspeakable, some fearful silence. Again, the secret, or the dark threat, seems to be one of the fantasies that domesticity throws up and which acts as its very support.

This is several miles wide of your original post, however, so do excuse my, erm, leading you down the garden path.

[Derrida]

"I consider it an act of cultural resistance to pay homage publicly to a difficult form of thought, discourse, or writing, one which does not submit easily to normalization by the media, by academics, or by publishers, one which rebels against the restoration currrently underway, against the philosophical or theoretical neo-conformism in general (let us not even mention literature) that flattens and levels everything around us, in the attempt to make one forget what the Lacan era was, along with the future and the promise of his thought, thereby erasing the *name* of Lacan. As you know, there are countless ways to do this, sometimes very paradoxical ways; in his lifetime, Lacan underwent the experience dubbed "excommunication." Some of those who claim to draw on Lacan's name, and not just his legacy, can be not the least active or the least effective in this operation. Here, once again, the logic of he "service rendered" is highly tricky, and censorship, suturing, and defense of orthodoxy do not in the least exclude--quite the contrary--a facade of cultural eclecticism. Whether one is talking about philosophy, psychoanalysis, or theory in general, what the flat-footed restoration underway attempts to recover, disavow, or censor is in fact that nothing of that which managed to transform the space of thought in the last decades would have been possible without some coming to terms *with* Lacan, without the Lacanian provocation, however one receives it or discusses it--and, I will add, without some coming to terms *with* Lacan in his coming to terms *with* the philosophers.

With the philosophers rather than with philosophy: I have always been seduced by the dramatization in which Lacan broke with the commentary or the historiography in use by many professional philosophers either when they give a more or less competent account of philosopher's lives or when they reconstitute the structure of systems. Instead, he staged the singular desire *of the* philosopher and thereby contributed considerably to opening the space for a sort of new philosophical culture. In which we are situated, despite efforts to make us forget it so as to turn back the clock. In Lacan, the being-with or the coming-to-terms-with the philosophers attained a refinement, a scope, an unexpected illumination of the "searchlight effect" ["coup de phare"] of which there are few other examples either in the community of professional philosophers or in that of psychoanalysts. Therefore rarely to this degree will a frequenting of philosophers, a being-with philosophers, have--and I say this in the sense of the greatest favor or fervor--*merited discussion*, merited that one discuss *with* Lacan the manner in which he will have managed his relations *with* the philosophers. Lacan's refinement and competence, his philosophic originality, have no precedent in the tradition of psychoanalysis. The return to a Freud-philosopher would have been from this point of view a regression or weakness. Later on I will say a brief word about the paradoxical and perverse consequences that flow from the fact that Lacan is so much more aware as a philosopher than Freud, so much more a philosopher than Freud!

Having thus accepted with pleasure the invitation to participate in this reflection, this discussion, and this homage, I did not think I ought to take offense or become discouraged, as others might legitimately have done, and as some perhaps wished I would do, when they put forward the pretext of a rule according to which only the dead could be spoken about here and therefore, if one insisted on speaking of me, one could do so only under the condition that I play dead, even before the fact, and that I be given a helping hand when the occasion arose...

At bottom, beneath the question that I will call once again the remaining [resistance] of the archive--which does anything but *remain* in the sense of the permanent subsistence of a presence...there could take shape, at least for the time of a session, the silhouette of everything that...deserves to be discussed, since we are here to discuss or to continue discussions. By this I mean the silhouette of what seemed to me to deserve discussion not *with* Lacan *in general* and certainly not in the name of philosophy *in general* (on the subject, in the name, or from the point of view of which I have never spoken, no more than of antiphilosophy, as a consequence, which has always seemed to me the thing least deserving of interest in the world). Thus, not *with* Lacan *in general*--who for me does not exist, and I never speak of a philosopher or a corpus in general as if it were a matter of a homogenous body: I did not do so for Lacan any more than for any other. The discussion has begun rather with a forceful, relatively coherent, and stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of the collection and binding of *Ecrits*, in other words, in 1966."

("For the Love of Lacan," _Resistances_, 46-49)