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:
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