When will this labour end?

Labouring against work. Mulling over the contributions and remarks made during the course of these readings, this is what strikes me as the first paradox, which is also the specific paradox of abstract labour and concrete labours that, in turn, characterises Marx's distinctive account of capitalism, that which brings all others paradoxes to the fore and makes them boil over. It's all about specificity, the difference and the cut. And is there anything more paradoxical than communism, a class politics that gears itself toward the abolition of class society? Operaismo - ie., workerism - against work. And Tronti's essay is nothing if not paradoxical.

Who would have guessed that a discussion of the refusal of work would result in so much toil?

Continue reading “When will this labour end?”

Until the End of the Day

A (very young) old advisor of mine once (way back in 1993) wrote a joint review of Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community and Gianni Vattimo's The Transparent Society.  It holds up pretty well, I think.  (Though in anticipation of certain precise and no doubt singularly convincing comments, I'm happy to be corrected.)  Thanks to the generous funding Long Sunday has just received from the Association of Abstruse Kitsch and Kantians, we are happily able to make the full text available to you here right now, indeed, without your having to click anywhere for at least a full 65 seconds.  As the themes are still as relevant (and what is surely unfortunate, as dogmatically contested) as ever (though just imagine, back in 1993 nobody was yet nostalgic for the good ol' days of postmodernism), and albeit at the risk of somewhat belaboring the topic:  please enjoy.  Personally I think the essay goes a great way toward advancing this conversation, the one John S. Ransom (the "S" being silent) has so wonderfully begun (though in another direction and one with which he may, of course, disagree).

The following then, is penned by Heesok Chang and it first appeared in 1993 in Postmodern Culture:

I. Philosophical Homelessnes

    Readers of the young Georg Lukacs may recall this memorable citation from _The Theory of the Novel_:    "'Philosophy is really homesickness,' says Novalis: 'it is  the urge to be at home everywhere.'"   

    According to Lukacs that is why "integrated civilizations"--where the soul feels at home everywhere,  both in the self and in the world--have no philosophy.  Or  "why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are  philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy.  For what is the task of true philosophy if not to draw that  archetypal map?"^1^ 

    Needless to say (especially in the [virtual] pages of  the present journal) this endorsement of philosophy's  "utopian aim" would not find many adherents today.  If anything, the "task" of contemporary philosophy would be to debunk the notion of its universalizing, "archetypal" vocation.  The subsumptive mapping of the world by reason is no longer an unquestioned telos of occidental thought.

Update: Relatedly, please see Adam Kotsko's valuable new review (PDF) of Nancy's as-yet-untranslated work, Déclosion : Déconstruction du christianisme, 1, in which Nancy begins to formulate a response to the essays by Derrida, particularly "Faith and Knowledge," collected in Acts of Religion (not, incidentally, Derrida's title).

Continue reading “Until the End of the Day”

Regarding Images

The ceremonies which commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the nazi concentration camps, necessarily reopened the question of their impossible representation. The following is an interview in which the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy discusses the profusion of images that accompanied these ceremonies.

Q: What does the current unfolding wave of images that attempt to show the "unimaginable" inspire in you?

JLN: Nothing in particular. It is normal that images proliferate: there is no reason to reject them, it is not a matter of being an iconoclast, but of interrogating, each time, the nature of the image: does it "saturate"? does it exhaust a meaning [sens], or not? A film like Schindler's List exhausts its meaning, Lanzmann's Shoah does not.

But this last is not the only film nor the only image possible. The question is that of an inscription in the image of an opening, of a non-completion, of an unimaginable. There are images for regards and images for voyeurs: the second want to see the invisible. That is pornography, a wanting-to-see [vouloir-voir] rather than a seeing, a wanting-to-enjoy-seeing [vouloir-jouir-de-voir]. Thus, the images published by Georges Didi-Huberman ( that certain have criticized ) do not pertain to voyeurism, but to dread [l'effroi] -- which is a form of regarding.

Continue reading “Regarding Images”

An-other Anger

Anger is the political sentiment par excellence. Anger concerns the inadmissible, the intolerable, and a refusal, a resistance that casts itself from the first beyond all it can reasonably accomplish -- to mark forth the possible ways of a new negotiation with what is reasonable, but also the ways of an intractable vigilance. Without anger, politics is accommodation and influence peddling, and to write of politics without anger is to traffic with the seductions of writing.

Jean-Luc Nancy, La Comparution, 1991

Continue reading “An-other Anger”

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:

Continue reading “Reasons to Write: Exscribing the Garden”