Jean-Luc Nancy OnKawara

7/29/2019 Jean-Luc Nancy OnKawara

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The Technique of the Present1

Jean-Luc Nancy

1.

Poetry, before being the name of a particular art, is the generic name of art. Techn poitik:productive technique. This technique, that is, this art, this calculated operation, this procedure,this artifice produces something not with a view to another thing or a use, but with a view to itsvery production, that is, its exposition. The pro-duction of the thing puts the thing forward,presents and exposes it.

To expose is to depart from a simple position, which is always also a deposition, a relinquishing

of the contingence of a passing moment, a circumstance or a point of view. What is exposed isplaced in the order of absolute, immutable and necessary presence. The wordpoiesis is derivedfrom a word family that designates ordering, arrangement, or disposition. Poetry disposes. Art isdisposition. It disposes the thing according to the order of presence. It is the productivetechnique of presence.

Presence is not a quality or a property of the thing. Presence is the act by which the thing is putforward:prae-est. It is put forward or in front of its nature as a thing, and of everything whichimmerses this nature in the world of its connections: origins, relations, process, finalities andbecomings. The nature of the thing is in its birth, as the word "nature" indicates, and in itsunfurling within these relations. It can subsist only in this movement, and its permanence is in

the passing. But presence is the act that subtracts a thing as it passes. In this way it subtractsthe thing from its thingness, or it withdraws the thingness from the thing that is, all the reality ofthe res in the single foregrounding, in this single advancement.

This advancement is that of the present. The present is not ahead in time, for that which isahead in time in relation to a past, is immediately behind in relation to a future. Unless thecontrary is true. But in either sense, the present in time is nothing: it is pure time, the purepresent of time, and thus its pure presence, that is, the negativity of the passing. From "alreadyno longer" to "not yet", is a passage without pause, a step not taken, neither disposed norexposed, inexposable, only and ceaselessly deposing all things.

On Kawara's question is how this inexposable can be exposed. (In a certain sense, it is perhapsa question which the arts never cease to take up and pass between themselves: how to graspthe ungraspable of passing, how to grasp the pure conjunction of passing and presence, offleeing and stasis?)

The present of presence is not in time, it is ahead of time, in front of time. Or it is within it, not inits course, but in its most intimate heart or hollow. It is pure time subtracted from temporality: thespace in which pure time opens out and inexposes itself. Space does not represent time, like aline that would be the immobile figure of a mobile process, but space opens time, distends time,distending the very moment to expose this present that does not pass, and that is time itself,

negativity imposed for itself. Space is thus the origin of time. It is simultaneously its point ofnullity and the whole extension of its successivity. It is the opening of time, the simultaneity of itsspacing.


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On Kawara's art is a productive technique of this spacing, which, in effect, does not produceitself. It is not in nature. In nature, there is only the passage, the passing or the pass of time.Only outside nature can there be time itself. Outside nature: in a technique, in art.

The spacing of time, or space opening time as such and as a totality, is before time, outside oftime in this "outside" that is not another place, because it is outside all places, but which is thetaking-place of place in general and of all places. A place is always the curving or collecting of acertain closure (with its thresholds and outlets) within absolute spacing or rather: a curving ofthis very within. There is thus no place for the pure spacing presupposed by every place. In the

same manner (and it's the same thing), there is no world in which the creation of the world takesplace. Thus creation does not take (its) place. But what it is, or what it does, puts in place anypossible place, and any taking-place.

How, despite everything, can creation itself or absolute spacing be put in place? How can timeleave time? What ruse, what detour, what skill can be used?

On Kawara's art proposes a technique to put in place spacing itself, to put forward and exposespacing itself according to the curve, the contour, the frame of a place, in its local color.

For within time, the spacing of time does not present itself. Space-time itself does not open itscreative hollow in time and space. A technique must be used for that: a technique, in sum, torecreate the creation that has not taken place.

There must be a technique, just as there must be a technique to measure passing time. Clocksand calendars put chronometric techniques to work. They measure the number of time. But hereis a chronometry that measures time's spacing, its opening, preceding and spanning its gap. It ischronomorphic poiesy.


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2.

On Kawara gathers the time of men, measurers of time. A million years back, a million yearsahead. Between the two, the space where we are: we here now, as much as and as everyone,at every moment and in every place. But everyone, also, in the present of he who makes thework, and who withdraws from it as he opens it, who withdraws from it as he exposes it.

Two million years do not constitute a history: they are history itself along with prehistory andposthistory in the totality of its span and sway. Not history as a grandiose or confused

movement of the destiny of peoples, nor as the monumental heaping together of culture andbarbarity, nor as an adventure of events, but history as the simultaneous presence of its millionsof histories, present history, presentified history.


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In Greek, the meaning ofhistoria is a collection or recollection of occurrences. On Kawaraexposes the recollection of humanity past and humanity yet to come, subtracted from memoryand expectation. The collection of a considerable number of years is in itself merely thelogarithmic index of the monstrous or prodigous number of those that have passed and thosethat will pass. The "million" is not a count, it is the numeral or the code of the incommensurable,in the shape of a common measurement. All are present together, already past not yet arrived,unnamed, not anonymous, bound in a unique, complex collection: not "men" but representativesof the present.

Those who open space-time each time, those who from within nature distance nature, thetechnicians of presence: makers of steles, stanzas and instants. They are there grasped in theirformidable absence, indistinguishable and unfigurable, artists, artisans, artificers.

There is nothing to read in this long collection, nothing of their histories, nothing but theexhausting numerals of a computation that refers to no founding or revolutionary event, to nofeast or celebration. (Of course, the western Christian calendar is used, but its only function is asa universal indicating technique: in itself, it is merely the technical dissolution of its occidentalspecificity, and B.C. or A.D. no longer have sense, but are merely formal codes of location.) Theonly solemnity is the very idea of the solemn: that which takes place once a year, and here, it is

the year itself insofar as it returns, identical and different, the solemn return of the annual.

The year presents the annular space of a cycle of life and death. Beyond this, there is no cycle,there is history with its great rhythmic irregularities; but still further beyond, there is thesimultaneous eternal present. Nothing distinguishes one year from another but the difference ofa numeral, and nothing presents the perennial but the simultaneity, here, of all thesedifferences. Their self-same sameness.

What can thus be read in this collection and what is read aloud, pronounced by the alternating


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voices of a man and a woman, recorded and broadcast in this very hall are the numerals thatform the numbers of the years. The numbers have no signification. They constitute an order.They force a reading of the ordering of difference in identity, like that of the identity of theirenunciation in the sexed difference of the voices. The reading of the collection this readingthat is more or less impossible and nonetheless available is strictly ordered by its writing, bythe reproduction of the traces of numerals one after the other, one by one and side by side, inthe minuscule time of the mechanical strokes. Poetry without letters or words, poetry ofcadenced regularity, numeral after numeral, going to the next line as the number changes, to theversus of the line, verse after verse, caesura after caesura, calculated discretion.

3.

July 21, 1969: the date of the first moon landing of human cosmonauts. It's the date on whichthose who mark time, its artists, concretely open up the cosmic spacing of time. There is no

longer a sublunar world of time, and a supralunar world of pure presence. The moon is nolonger a signal of the partitioning of spheres, but is itself merely one of the points from which thespace of time opens out simultaneously in all directions in the universe, one of the innumerablepoints stochastically disposed everywhere where there is someplace.


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There is no art that is not cosmological, because the productive technique of spacing producesthe world each time, an ordering of the world, the world in whole or in part, but always the wholein each part each time. The world is never anything but the indefinite reference of all its pointsbetween themselves, and what is called a work of art is each time a singular, monadic andnomadic solidification of the cosmos.

On July 21, 1969, something happens in the history of painting, and of poeisy in general. Theheavens are no longer celestial. They are neither the province of light above all figures, nor theregion of transfigurations. They are no longer heavens but space, and the night of space whose

sole figure is the date: the arbitrary notation of its obscure opening. They are neither ground norform, but the universal spacing of spaces, from all points to all other points: the ensemble ofopenings to the ensemble of what is open.

Thus, the painting entitled July 21, 1969 paints the heavens because it covers one space amongmany with paint, a space identical to all spaces, and which is, as much as any other, at thisinstant, here and now, the origin or center of all spacing. It is not man's conquest of space, butspace's request of man.


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4.

It is therefore the sacred, sacred painting, which is in question. That is to say, not painting usedto represent religious themes, but the sacred proper to painting itself and, in general, to the re-productive technique of the world. The sacred operates by setting aside or setting apart, insofaras this distancing is the condition of the relation or of communication or more precisely, insofaras this gap is the condition of the infinitude of the relation. (The sacred is nothing other than theordinary condition of communication: reserve, threshold, access without access.)

Painting cuts out a space the most basic sacred gesture, the trace of the templum. Thetemplum is the cut-out of the heavens, the caeli lucida templa that Lucretius speaks of and also

calls magnas caeli cavernas.2 The templum is a hollowing-out of the heavens which definesrelations, and, consequently, non-relations as well.

The triptych is a classical form, or format, of western ecclesiastical painting. It is often placedabove or before an altar. It can often (and originally, it always could) fold onto itself. It forms anarticulation of spacing, a space that can open or close onto that which can be considered bothas part of itself and as another space. It exposes the fold and the unfolding of space.

Viet-Nam persists as the proper name of a time when the world had to learn of another kind ofpartitioning than that practiced by imperial domination. The principle of an empire is beyondspace and time. It is a punctual and immobile power which extends indeterminately, and virtuallyinterminably. Empire crushes the distances it extends. It is a spreading out, not a spacing.

The dismembering of empire is a dis-location which distinguishes places. Here, Viet-Nam, opensthe present, 1965, of a partitioning of spaces which put a relation in place. It is a matter ofunderstanding how each thing one-thing, the "one" and the "thing" intrinsically linked has itsown place, puts its place in place, and puts equal places in equal relations.

A place is opened and delimited by the always similar taking-place of an event that is always

different. Taking-place is merely the intersection of time and space its opening. This opening issingular, producing each time its own localcolor or rather, the place itself as a color: it is thetopology of geographical maps. This color, here, the color of the triptych Viet-Nam, is called"magenta" or "red magenta". This is the name of a battle in which the troops of an empire were


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vanquished, in 1859. In 1860, the dark crimson coloring was discovered and given the name ofthe deadly battle of the preceding year. This color is the datum of a bloody spatter.

Painting does not use colors, it produces the color of a place insofar as this place is an origin ofthe world. On the one hand, the place is independent of all places, and each locality is absolute:it instantly colors the totality of a world. But on the other hand, the place is merely localized byits relation to and distance from all places. It is ordered by its coordinates to the very ends of theworld.

The painting entitled Location paints the place of locality in general, painting it by the


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coordinates of a singular place. Latitude is a given measured in relation to the equator, which isthe greatest length of land along the axis which does not connect the poles. Longitude is a givenmeasured in relation to an arbitrarily selected meridian (at least, according to the arbitrary choiceof making localization occidental and, in the Occident, English: the imperial place of geography)."Meridian" means "partitioning of the day": it is the line along which time (the hour) is the samefrom one of the Earth's poles to the other. Place is the intersection of the two measurements,according to space and according to time, the point where the one and the other prove to haveno dimension, merely the crossing of two lines.

Nothing subsists in a point, except for the simple exteriority of points in relation to each other. Apoint consists of nothing (it has no "inside"): it is merely relation to other points. There is no pointof space nor point of time (as if it were a little particle of the one or the other), but space andtime are the one-outside-the-other of punctuality itself. Thus puctiform space immediately openstime which goes from one point to the other and time opens space as the truth of its trajectory(the point which is already not the one and not yet the other). The encounter of space and time:here-and-now.

This is not in the least abstract: it is the concrete itself and it is what is present here. For thispainting does not represent the coordinates of a point (which can, moreover, be found on a map

and situated in the desert of North Africa). It does not represent: it gives the coordinates. Itpresents the truth of the point: its non-existence outside of its relation to all the points of thispainting itself, its concrete absolute. The point pointed to here is in a determinate relation,always calculable, with the precise place where the painting is hung or placed. It is the concreteitself abstracted, that is, withdrawn from all that is not itself in its very concreteness. Hard as agrain of desert sand.

(A brief word on "conceptual art": On Kawara has often been presented as a conceptual artist.He himself strictly refuses this classification. Indeed, it has no more justification than most ofthese sort of qualifications, "abstract art" or "minimal art", etc. If art can be conceptual, it is in thesense that "conceive" signifies gathering and containing in the self, giving place, space and formto a presence. But in this case art is always conceptual and, most importantly, the conceptmust always end by conceiving of itself as art.)


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5.

This painting which foregrounds the spacing of time as such foregrounds exposes that

which, precisely, is not as such. It is not possible to say whatthe spacing of time is as such,because it is negativity for itself.3 Negativity cannot pose itselfas itself (which would alsosuppose that it can be taken as something else, as another kind of thing): it can only open, itopens, it hollows out or punctures, it has no genre, not even its own. Unexposable, absoluteexposer.

The spacing of time is not a being, nor an operation of being or in being. If there is something init, whatever it might be, it takes place only on the condition of the spacing of time, which istherefore anterior or exterior to being. Or more precisely: the spacing of time is the act of being but not in the sense of the action of a subject. It is an act coextensive and cooriginary to being

itself. It is thus so little "something" that not only is it not in space nor in time, but it is neitherspace nor time, and it is, insofar as it is, closer to this: space and time are two names, a doublename, rather space-time for the necessarily double nature of that which is essentially outsideitself (that whose essence consists in the outside-itself).


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Space-time is the unity of that which is outside itself in its very unity (or rather: outside it). It isthe opening of the world, of creation but creation without a creator, without which space andtime would only be in God, and thus, being in him, led back to a subsisting unity with neitherspace nor time. The one and the other, or rather, this one-other which they form together, arethe originary extroversion of that which does not subsist in itself. Space is the condition oftemporal passage, and time is the condition of spatial passage: the universal outside of thenetwork of referrals which makes the inside of the world.

The present is the negation of the double passage, or the pure grasping of the passage as such,

immobilized on itself in its very movement: the instantaneous point and the punctual instant. Thepure present is that which is purely outside the world, like its creation. But outside the world,there is no outside of the world: neither space, nor time of creation. Outside the world there isthe outside of the outside: the intimacy of the opening.

Poetic technique is devoted to presenting this present, what we call "re-presenting" not in thesense of recopying, because there is nothing here that can be copied, but in the sense of puttingin front, putting forward. This art is devoted, like all art, perhaps, from its own angle, to puttingforward that which remains buried, putting into the world that which is outside-the-world.

With On Kawara, this technique is devoted to this project under a condition which may at firstseem purely tautological. The date says nothing but itself. It could happen, moreover, that thetautology is multiplied in the redundancy of several canvases painted on the same day, bearingthe same date. In saying nothing but itself, the date says nothing of itself: this time it is the dateof nothing, of no event. It says of itself only (and it doesn't say it, it isn't visible): that it is paintedthe very day. In French, one can say, with all the resources of ambiguity: it is painted of the veryday/ on the very day.

Moreover, it is in this and only this way that the date can speak in painting, that it is, effectively,and there again in all its ambiguity, the subject of the painting: it does not discourse on a story, itonly announces itself, utters itself, offers itself. Nothing but a point in the network of all the datesof the world of all the dates that the world is, being nothing else and itself dateless. That's whythe date is not readon the canvas: it is not interpreted, it does not enter into a story, but one canonly hear it. One hears a voice, although this time there is no recording to accompany the plasticand graphic work. One hears a voice, that is, a timbre and a tone, not a word. One hears time [le

temps], one hears the which of the date [le tant],4 as is said in French to indicate anundetermined date, the date in general or the idea of the date: "le tant", "on est le tant"[whatdate is it?]), the tantum quantum, the quantity of measured time, not according to its duration,but according to its occurrence. Furthermore, what one hears in this way, before the canvas andcoming from the canvas is not a foreign voice given the task of reporting the date, giving theinformation about it. One hears oneself saying the date: I see the canvas and I pronounce its

date, thus repeating that which makes the canvas itself. With a canvas voice, matte and flatagainst the wall, each person says the which of the date [le tant] again.

Reference to events is not absent, if one refers to the canvas' protective box, also exposedsometimes, containing one page of a newspaper from the day and the place where the canvaswas made. But the properly pictorial gesture consists precisely in separating the date from itsuse as a point of reference for events and information.

Tautological painting of the date makes the date what it is: a pure datum, with no otherreference. "Date" comes from the formula littera data, "given letter," consigned on this day. The

date is the being-given of the given, or the given as such.

As such, the given is only present: posed, deposed, being-there, without past and without future,without provenance and without destination, without donor and without recipient. The pure given


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as such in itself cancels the gift, reabsorbing the giving. Thus, strictly speaking, it is no longergiven. The Date paintingerases the date: it reinscribes it outside its giving, outside its dating.This date no longer dates: it is eternalized by the Date painting. For this reason it multiplies itindefinitely: the erasing is infinite because it is still on the date that the date erases itself. On thedate of the painting - the day itself but also the date of each reexposition of the painting.

Such is the logic of the present: at this precise moment, the moment erases itself, and this ishow it is a moment. The voice becomes silent, sticks to the canvas, and this is how it resonates:and its resonance is painting. The instant is unstable, and in this way it is an instant. The

present is a spacing in which presence conceals itself. That is to say that it does not subsistthere. It is not given, posed, deposed, available as an object, as a thing. The present opposespresence: it ruins it, abducts it, in the same movement by which it brings it.

The most one can say is that presence gives itself: it gives itself and conceals itself, in the samegesture of the present, in the same comings and goings of the present. But giving itself isprecisely not to be given. Giving itself is the act of a subject and it may very well be theexemplary act of the subject. But this assumes that it takes itself from this side of itself in orderto deliver itself beyond itself. In this gesture, the selfsubtracts itself. It is nothing if it can besaid to "be" but the distance between this side of it and its beyond. This distance "is" thus the

self "itself", the present of the self not its presence: the space it needs to be itself, to attain theself as much as to return to the self.

The date is here the subject. That is to say that the subject of this painting is the subject,absolutely. What must then be understood here is that the subject, here, paints itself. Or rather,if one wishes, that painting, here, subjectivises itself. These two propositions are correlative andreciprocal. Painting and subject identify the one with the other, and the one by the other.

(It must be immediately specified that this may have something, or nothing, to do with theindividual subject On Kawara, with his anxiety or with his certainty of being himself, and being apainter, and existing in general, etc. In this respect, all hypotheses are equally possible, andthey are equally indifferent, at least in respect to what is presented to us, which is painting, andnot an encounter with a person. There is no presence of no one: nothing but the present ofpainting.)

The subject can only be present as [en tant que] a painted subject. Painting can be present onlyas [en tant que] a painting of the subject. Painting is the presenter (or giver) of the subject justas much as the subject is the presenter (or giver) of painting. The present cannot be such as it is[en tant que tel] except in the spacing of the present, that is, of time itself. The subject can beonly the subject of a retreat on this side, and not beyond, its own presence.


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6.

From this group of interdependent propositions, the Date paintings allow for verification on fourbroad axes:

1) painting itself, that is, the pigment, paste, diligently applied, smoothed to the limits of the pureplane without, nonetheless, doing away with the traces of the brush, affirming that a ground iscovered over, making the ground come forward - the pure thickness obscure in itself like aground that surfaces, the presentation of a ground, like the side of a cut-off corner where theground opens the eye: it itself opens like an eye that looks at us by opening our eyes. What canbe seen in this way is painting emptied by the present of its own execution. I paint the date onwhich I paint. As if each painting, here, was an enlargement of one of the corners where thepainter has painted the date the painting was completed. But also: as if the date were a nakedground which had to be painted. Painting, in this sense, is first of all the affirmation of a surface.Why paint the walls of a room? Not to "beautify," but because without paint the walls disappear,

melt into a groundless ground, taking the dwelling with them. Now, there must be a dwelling[demeure]: sojourn, lateness, remaining, repose, and even reserve, delay. The present heldback against the precipitation of time, the present extracted from time, spaced.

2) the color of the painting, which is the vibration of the surface: the trembling, quivering,shivering, shuddering or brushing of the present, the noise and rustle of its restraint. Thenumerals and letters of the date are painted in white. White is the color beyond colors, the colorof their simultaneous presence, which also causes their disappearance: the color of puresimultaneity remains.


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But the ground (or the surface emptied by the date), the ground is at bottom that which the date,here, designates (that it designates and dates at the same time, that it designates in dating), theground that is thus the referent of the date - its thing, its substance, its dated- is each time butone color. This color varies, dark or sky blue, green, brown or dark gray, sometimes cadmiumred, the tendency is to somber colors, but this darkening is not obscurity: the day is neverconsumed by the dark, in real black. No black out, but gradation, relation and difference,chromatism, that is flesh, the complexion (chroma comes from chrs, surface of the body, skin,

flesh), the light brushing of its proper nuance, the perceptible distancing of an imperceptibledistinction, grasped at the moment of its detachment, of its distancing within a limited butinfinitely reduced specter: when one speaks of an imperceptible "gradation", that means that thepresent of the leap has not been felt, not grasped at the instant it passed, the presence of theleap. Each canvas, size and color, only detaches itself from the others, opening between themthe series, the rhythm and the syncopation of presents. Difference in the identity of the present.

3) the calculation ofmimesis, or the fiction of presentation. The presence of the present must bemade, fabricated, composed, modeled and thus feigned. Thispoiesis is necessary to grasp theungraspable. Thus, the painted date is immediately destabilized: it is as feigned as it is true. Itstruth (being the date of the date of the painting) has no other attestation than itself, which could

nonetheless have been painted on another date. In a parallel fashion, its truth (being the verydate of the very date) is lost as soon as the date is over, and the painting with it. At midnight,this truth is no longer current, but the painting is ready to expose it. But in this way it is a truth:by conserving itself across time, the immobile repeated acute present of an vanished present. Inexposing itself as this date this given it exposes that the given absolutely conceals the gift.But this concealed gift is that which gives itself again each time, at each exposition: it gives itselfagain, withdrawn into its feigning. Each date announces: I am a present which has passed asthe present that it says, and which perhaps, in saying it, feigns only to have been, but which isno less incontestably present as this saying and as this feigning.

This is exactly what another great fictioner says, at the height of his feigning - Descartes, whenhe pronounces: ego sum, ego existo. The certitude of the ego sum is coextensive with the timeof its enunciation (or its thought). Outside of this present, my being or my existence may benothing but a fiction. But this present, precisely, repeats itself incessantly, it does not cease toarrive. Here, the certitude of the date is coextensive with its exposition. It is immediately, at theinstant, my certainty as a spectator: that I see this date, and that I am myself, here and now, itstruth. I am not before an old calendar. I am before the repetition in the present of the present ofthis date. I am the present of each date. Today- the title of the series is each time the today ofthe exposition.

4) the exposition as such: the position-before, there-before, over there before us. The date is

subtracted from the course of time, and from its referential function. It coordinates nothing; itdoes not allow an act to be situated in a succession. It exposes the simultaneity of an act withitself. "I am painting this painting" On Kawara wrote on 1/18/1966. And ten days later: "I amdating here."


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But a date, in English, is also an encounter. And to date can mean: "go to an encounter." Thedate is the possibility of an encounter, with the indication of a place, that is, of the point orderedby the punctuality of the encounter. Here, the place is here. That is, anywhere: in any placewhere I am dating here, that is in any place where a date paintingcan be exposed. On Kawarasets a date anywhere, anytime, he sets a date with "the date" itself. The painting announces:find me there where I am, and we will meet. You will recognize me by this, that I am only therefor the encounter. And I will recognize you by the same. We will be there, you as well as I, onlyto find ourselves there. (In the same way, a museum, a gallery, is a place made to be a place)."Find ourselves there", s'y trouver, in French, can mean both "be there" and "meet each otherthere, find each other there again". We will find each other by each other. Something to seewhich finds itself there only to be seen, and a seer who finds himself there only to see, to regard that is, with regard for the visible. It's sight's date with vision. The encounter of sight with itscapacity to have regard for its own opening, for its own gaze, that is also for its own ideality:seeing the very form of seeing.

The form of seeing is the opening of the eye, and in it the spreading of the pupil. This spreadingadjusts itself to light, which allows the present of a form with its color to penetrate in the orifice this little mute mouth open in the center of the iris. No form without color, no color without form.The simultaneous solidarity of form and color makes the present of vision. Vision sees the

present, but only because the present opens the eye, and disposes it to its presentation.

The present is this disposition which exposes the thing to its vision. That is, to its desire to beopen to itself. Seeing and knowing are the same thing. Veda, Sanskrit, oida Greek, wissenGerman. The thing seen and known is the thing which is not left to its opaque thickness. It is thething cut by the present which distances it from itself by the plane that colors and exhibits it.

It's the thing as this thing. The thing at an encounter with itself. My gaze is this encounter. It isnot the representation of the thing, nor am I the subject of a representation nor of an intention(for me, in me, absorbed by me, consumed, appropriated, filled). I am the staring present of thepresentation. I am the place of the date. I am only that, and "I" ego means nothing else. Thespacing of a point which is nonetheless not the spacing between two points. A single distendedpoint: not the infinite divisibility of space, but the division of the indivisible product of all division.The non-dimension as distention. No intentionality. But the precise date of the end of intention,on this side of all aims. Poetry is the productive technique of this end. For what one wants to feelis nothing but this: this end, each time, this overflowing of the present in any presentwhatsoever. That's what one strives to fabricate, behind the immense and perpetual flowing ofpresence. But where, behind where, and when? There where time opens.

Translated by Alisa Hartz

NOTES

1 Lecture given in January 1997 at the Nouveau Muse during the exposition of On Kawara'sworks, "Whole and Parts 1964-1995". The text was read in the exhibition halls, and thespeaker moved his way through it, along with the audience. Parts 1 and 2 were read in the


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gallery consecrated to "One Million Years", part 3 in the gallery containing "July 21, 1969", part 4in that containing "Title, 1965" (the Viet-Nam triptych) and "Location painting" (Lat. 31*25'N/Long8*41*E), 5 and 6 in that containing "30 Years Date Painting1966-1995". I would like to thankJean-Claude Consa for his active collaboration on this stroll, and also Jean-Louis Maubant,Pascal Pique and the entire team of the Nouveau Muse for their kind reception.2De rerum natura, I, 1014 and IV, 171.3 Hegel, Encyclopedia, b257 sq.4 Tr. note: in French, the two words temps and tantare homonyms, both pronounced [t].

Jean-Luc Nancy OnKawara

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Transcript of Jean-Luc Nancy OnKawara