_Nancy's Concept of Body -J. M. Garrido.pdf

© 2009. Epoché, Volume 14, Issue 1 (Fall 2009). ISSN 1085-1968. 189–211

Jean-Luc Nancy’s Concept of Body

JUAN MANUEL GARRIDOUniversidad Diego Portales

Abstract: This article carries out a systematic exposition of the concept of the body

in Jean-Luc Nancy, with all the risks of reduction that such an exposition entails. First

it is necessary to return to Western philosophy’s founding text on living corporality,

that is, Aristotle’s treatise on the soul. The oppositions that can be established between

the Greek thinker’s psyche (soul) and Nancy’s dead Psyche are not so radical as may

at fi rst be thought: In both it is a question of thinking the soul as the difference, the

retreat or departure in which the exposition of bodies consists. The article continues

with an analysis of touch and the self and concludes with an elaboration of the idea of

the body within the general program of the deconstruction of Christianity.

1. Life and Death, Body and Soul: Rethinking Aristotle’s Concept of psychê

When, in 1994, Jean-Luc Nancy was invited to participate in a conference on “The Body” in Le Mans, the title he chose for his talk was “On the Soul.”1

This was not a provocation, or at least not only a provocation. “On the Soul” is the title of a well-known treatise by Aristotle, which precisely deals, fi rst and foremost, with the body, and specifi cally with the living body. Indeed, according to Aristotle, the soul is the “principle” of living bodies,2 their form or cause. Soul is the life or the very corporality of living bodies. To speak “on the soul,” therefore, means, for Nancy, to speak on the essence or on the being of body.

Body is essentially something that appears itself or exposes itself by the simple fact of being a body, that is, by its simple “weight” (poids) or “weightiness” (pesée). Body places itself out of itself (hors de soi) and imposes its own body (fait corps). Body consists in such an exposition. Hence “soul,” the being of body, will refer to the very movement of rupture through which body imposes itself, stands as body and places itself out of itself. “With the soul, there is an effect of rupture, a

190 Juan Manuel Garrido

rupture which is body itself. . . . When I speak on ‘the soul’ I just want to indicate this: ‘on the soul’ or ‘on the body out-of-itself ’” (C, 112–113).

“Soul” is then the rupture or the disruption by which body comes to ap-pearance—the disruption that a body consists in as such. “Soul” therefore does not mean another body, another kind of substance, for instance a more subtle or “spiritual” substance, lying behind or within the body like a pilot in his ship. “Soul is not another body, a spiritual body” (C, 113). Soul “does not represent something different to body, but rather body itself out of itself, or this other that body structurally is to itself and in itself ” (C, 113). Indeed, if a body essentially is exposition, and if the movement of such an exposition is always disruptive, a body is by defi nition another body (in itself and to itself). In this sense, soul is the name of that which makes the constitutive otherness of bodies.

On account of the fact that soul is not “something different” to body, but the rupture that places body out of itself, it is important to maintain at the same time that soul is not a body—this or that particular body. In that sense, soul essentially differs from body, or better it is in itself the difference (and the otherness) that makes the being (the exposition) of body. “Soul is the difference of body in regard to itself, i.e., the exterior relation that a body is to itself [le rapport de dehors qu’un corps est pour lui-même]” (C, 114). Here lies the pertinence of keeping the word “soul,” which a whole tradition had identifi ed with something that basically has to be distinguished from body. “Soul” has always been the name and the problem of the difference itself between soul and body, therefore the name of any attempt to think the problem of the being of body. In the conclusion of his talk, Nancy says:

If soul has been dealt with, if our entire tradition has spoken of soul, and in so many ways, this is because after all, and partly in spite of this same tradition, soul has not been thought by itself but in the difference between soul and body, the difference in which body consists itself, for itself. (C, 127)

Nevertheless, to treat corporality under the title “On the Soul,” has implied, in “our tradition,” weighty decisions concerning the ontological meaning of the “being” of body. Indeed, as long as corporality has been thought as soul—or as the difference between soul and body—Western Philosophy has interpreted it fundamentally as life. The soul, hê psychê, is not, indeed, the principle for bodies of any kind but specifi cally for living bodies. In other words, according to tradition, body “exposes” itself or “appears” where there is life—i.e., generation, nutrition, perception, imagination, desire, thought. . . . Nancy’s concept of body, inasmuch as it takes root in such a tradition, will also be determined by this interpretation, even when it displaces it or deconstructs it. Our fi rst task will be then to render these displacements apparent.

In his treatise On the Soul, Aristotle thinks of soul as being the “form” of living bodies, the “matter” being the potentially living body.3 As form, soul is not a sub-stance existing by itself, which would arrive and in-form an independently existing

Nancy’s Concept of Body 191

material substance (the body). Soul (form) is rather the living body itself (the matter) considered in its actuality, as performing vital functions.4 Soul is nothing but the animation of animate beings (empsycha), and their “specifi c” appearing as such animate beings, that is, what distinguishes them from this other species of beings that we call inanimate (apsycha). Body, in its turn, is “organized” matter, the suitable stuff able to perform vital functions, and it shows itself as such while performing these activities. That is why the soul cannot come and in-form any kind of matter, say this stone or this table, nor can it re-animate the corpse of this man who just died. And that is why a corpse of a man—i.e., precisely a body that cannot longer perform vital functions, even while maintaining the same shape as a living body—is for Aristotle a man’s “body” only in name (I will return to this point). As I said earlier, for Aristotle there is body only insofar as there is life (nutrition, generation, sensation, imagination, desire, etc.).

In this point, there seems to be a radical opposition to Nancy’s conception of soul. As Derrida says, “Aristotle’s Peri Psychês [On the Soul] is a treatise on the pure life of the living. Now, Nancy’s Psyche sees herself treated as dead woman.”5 Derrida makes this statement at the conclusion of a commentary to a short text of Nancy entitled “Psyche.”6 This text began by quoting the last sentence of a note written by Freud on August 22, 1938, one year before his death. It corresponds, as Derrida says, to “the last sentence of a sick man’s penultimate note, which almost looks like that of a dying man”7—the last note of Freud was indeed written on this same day. Here is the sentence: “Psyche is extended, knows nothing about” (Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weißt nichts davon). At the end of his short text, Nancy writes:

Psyche is extended in her coffi n. Soon it is going to be shut. Among those present, some are hiding their faces, others are keeping their eyes desperately fi xed on Psyche’s body. She knows nothing of this—and that is what everyone knows around her, with such exact and cruel knowledge.8

Treated as a corpse, lying in her coffi n, Psyche is singular and not universal. Hence we are not dealing with a simple inversion of Life into Death, but with this particular dead body surrounded by other bodies. Soul is that body, whose pres-ence is separated, inaccessible, other—in sum “sacred,” to speak like Nancy.

This same scene is found in another text, published much later, entitled “On the Threshold,” where Nancy elaborates an ecphrasis and analysis of Caravag-gio’s painting The Death of the Virgin.9 The gravitational center of this scene is located in the powerful presence of the corpse of the Virgin, lying on a bed and surrounded by observers. As in the scene of “Psyche,” some of the observers are hiding their faces, while others keep their eyes fi xed on the Virgin’s body. There is a general mood of despair at the irrevocable departure of Marie. This corpse is not, however, “the presence of an absence,” say the presence of the “soul” of Mary, now departed. This body lies, on the contrary, totally abandoned by any presence or absence of the soul: it lies there after having expired and before the


funeral, “slackened in a posture not yet arranged.”10 It is a corpse that is yet to be washed, and cannot yet be the object of ablutions, of mourning. This body is nothing but its own massive and naked presence, imposing itself with its whole, swollen, intolerable weight.

The naked presence of the dead body is “naked” because it does not stand as the presence of something absent (as its sign or symbol). It does not stand, for instance, as “remains” reminding us of the “full” presence of the Virgin now gone, nor as the singular “phenomenon” of the universal idea of Death. On the contrary, the nakedness of the body consists in referring to nothing but to its own exposition, and thus presenting its own presenting or presentation as such. This presence, here, is therefore the “presence of presence” or presence exposed by the absence or the retreating of any other (absent) presence. When Nancy speaks later of “resurrection,” it is the concept of such a presence that he has in mind. Indeed, “resurrection” is not to be understood as reanimation or rebirth to immortality, but as affi rmation of death and of the peculiar mode of presence that the dead body has. Resurrection is the appearing body as such, its surrection or insurrection (its “raising,” levée) in its entire alterity and heterogeneity. Its is presence imposed by its own weight, presence that we no longer can turn into a “sign” of something else, in sum an apparition “of the other and of the one who disappears in the body itself and qua body” (NMT, 29).

Body exposes itself or comes out-of-itself in the retreating of soul or as this retreating. That is why body seems to “appear” eminently in death, as corpse, and that is why Nancy characterizes it in these scenes showing dying bodies. But the “corpse” is taken here as the condition of any body, it exposes the truth not only of dead bodies but of living bodies as well:

not the dead body, but the body as dead, and there is no other. (C, 49)

During its whole life, body is at the same time a corpse, the body of someone dead, of this dead man that I am while I live. Dead or living, neither dead nor living, I am the open, the grave or the mouth, the one within the other. (C, 16)

Now, Aristotle’s view on the soul and life of the body is perhaps, on this point, less opposed to Nancy’s than one might suspect at a fi rst glance. Aristotle’s con-cept of psychê corresponds, true, to “the pure life of the living,” but sometimes this pure life is thought precisely in its retreating, while abandoning body and thus offering it as such. Even though the passage from life to death is, according to Aristotle, a “destruction,” i.e., a substantial change and not only an accidental one—which means, as I said earlier, that a corpse of a man and all its parts, insofar as it stops performing life functions, is a man’s body “only in name,” as much as a hand drawn upon a stone is a hand only in name11—the corpse, at least during a short time—right before showing itself under another form, while it still shows


the shape (schêma) of a living body, in sum: when “it is no so clear to see” if it is alive or not—shows itself as such, as the “matter” or the “stuff ” itself of the liv-ing body (“fl esh and bone”), or better as the dead matter that body essentially is during its whole life.12

If soul is understood, as in Aristotle, as the pure life of the living, then “pure life” means life in its departure, as retreating from the living. One must not forget that in On the Soul, Aristotle was not concerned with just any kind of life, for instance the life of heavenly beings, but specifi cally with the life of those beings that may pass away, life as it occurs in mortals (en tois thnêtois).13 The life of heavenly bodies, on the contrary, would be beyond life and death, since it is higher than the life of men, plants or animals. On the Soul is concerned with things that perish, at least numerically or individually—since qua species they are eternal. We can even say that life as such (“pure life”) is to be defi ned through its difference in regard to death: “living is what distinguishes the animate from the inanimate (diôristhai to empsychon tou apsychou tôi zên).”14 This eventually means that body, or the being of body, is in itself the presentation of the difference between life and death.

In close relation to this, we can quote again a passage from Nancy’s text about Caravaggio’s The Death of the Virgin, in which he writes about the relationship between life and death by describing the bodies of the two women, the dead Virgin and the sad grieving Mary:

They hold each other, answer to each other, the one thrown back and the other thrown forward, the one showing her face, the other her back, linked by a whiteness of cloth, from the sheet to the bodice, from the shroud to the shift. . . . They answer each other across the two shores of death, and between them there is not death itself; there is nothing but light and the thin line of shadow that runs along the edges of bodies, the folds of the linen and the clothes. The one and the other woman, before beyond death. Neither life nor another life, but brightness of their alternate presences, from the breast of the one to the shoulder of the other, from the inside of the one to the outside of the other. . . . Death: we are never there, we are always there. Inside and outside, at once, but without communication between inside and outside, without mixture, without mediation, and without crossing. (M, 60)

Let us conclude, then, the fi rst part of this paper by saying that soul is the dif-ference life/death that exposes bodies. Soul is not the “ontic” or “specifi c” difference between animate/inanimate, but the difference animate/inanimate embodied as such in the exposition of bodies: the departure that makes the nakedness and the weight of bodies, the “ex-” of their exposition. “Life,” the “pure life” in which soul consists, is thus interpreted by Nancy “in existential [or ex-istential] sense.”15 The psycho-logy of body is properly speaking ontology of body, and the ontology of body, inasmuch as it deals with the pure exposition of existence, is ontology as such. Body


exposes that the essence of existence is to have no essence. That is why the ontology of body is the ontology itself: being is in no way something previous and underlying phenomena. Body is the being of existence. How could we take death more seriously? And how could we say that existence is not “for” death, but that “death” is the body of existence? There is no such thing as “Death,” as an essence we were devoted to. There is body, the mortal spacing of body, inscribing that existence has no essence (not even ‘death’), but only ex-ists. (C, 16–17)

2. Touching: Corpus Singular Plural

Each body is limited by contact [haphêi] with the neighboring part, so that in a sense each of such bodies is many.16

A body is essentially something singular.17 Think one more time about the corpse of the Virgin, I mean, that singular and unrepeatable corpse of Caravaggio’s painting: it is “fi rm, whole, intact in its abandonment” (M, 59), surrounded by other bodies despairing of not having an access to it—and surrounded by us, bodies observing the painting. Now, the singularity of body touches us with this very inaccessibility. It touches our fi nitude with its own fi nitude. “Touching,” as we will see in more detail, is fi rst and foremost the sharing of fi nitude. In this sense a body is always “another body”—the body of the other18—whose intimate otherness is necessarily given with the otherness of my own body. Any singular body, qua singular, shares then in singularity with every body. For that reason, body, living or dead, goes along with a plural exposition of singular bodies. In this sense soul, the ex-position of bodies, is corpus singular plural: not this or that particular body but their co-appearing, their spacing, the “among” itself in which they appear.

How is the singularity of bodies produced? How is it formed? If body is es-sentially singular and therefore essentially distinct from any other singular body, singularity takes place as de-limitation of bodies. Singularity as such is formed at the limit, by the limit and as limit. It is in order to describe how this de-limitation of bodies takes place that Nancy speaks of “touching.” Indeed, for a limit to appear qua limit, something has to be “touched” rather than “seen” or “heard.” A limit essentially is that we are in touch with. Even when we “see” or “hear” the limit, we actually touch it with our vision or hearing.

In this sense, limit is always experienced in absolute proximity. But what is absolutely close, adjacent or contiguous in touching is precisely the other body, and therefore its inaccessibility or impenetrability: in sum, its distance. The separation and distinction of the other body appear in the experience of inaccessibility, and this experience can only take place in absolute proximity. Touch is therefore the


absolute proximity of absolute distance: the very distinction of bodies. “Touch is proximate distance,” it makes us feel “the proximity of the distant, the approxima-tion of the intimate” (M, 17). And this approximation or contact of distance may occur at physical or ontic distance, as when our eyes touch,19 or when we watch a dancing body20—or when we read, or think a thought.

Touching means to be outside of what is touched upon, and touching touches nothing but this outside—otherwise there would not be any touch at all. Even when I touch myself, or even when I sense myself touching (or in general sens-ing); even in the most intimate of feelings like joy or anxiety, there is separation and distinction. As long as there is sensing (touching), there is ex-position, and therefore I become inaccessible to myself. It occurs as when an “internal” organ of my body, say the heart, is sensed: it becomes another body, an “intruder” in my body, producing an outside or a distinction within me. And precisely because I am for myself the closest to myself, precisely because I cannot sense anything without sensing me, it is with myself that I experience more radically and more constantly the absolute distance of touching.

It is not surprising that Nancy’s concept of touch, as Derrida shows with ac-curacy, does not lead to the dimension of the phenomenological “proper body” (corps propre). On the contrary it interrupts it—with the interruption that touch-ing is in itself. Quoting Derrida, Nancy explains that “touch is ‘this interruption, which constitutes the touch of the self-touching, touch as self-touching.’ Touch is the interval and the heterogeneity of touch” (M, 17). This means that the refl exive dimension of “to sense oneself sensing” (se sentir sentir), because it is structured as touching, does not perform the self-appropriation of the pure living of fl esh, intimately related to itself in refl ection, but rather exhibits its radical inappropri-ablility, the very impossibility of being all one with itself. Touching “is to lose the proper at the moment of touching,” says Derrida again,21 and, in the conference “On the soul,” Nancy explains:

There are well-known analyses of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on this issue concerning “touching oneself,” the “touching themselves” of my own hands. Cu-riously, and this is something constant in the whole tradition, everything turns into interiority. The phenomenological analyses of “touching oneself ” refers to a prior interiority. But this is not possible: I touch myself through my skin. I touch myself from outside, I cannot touch myself from inside. (C, 117)

Now, if whenever I touch something or myself, I precisely have the experience of inaccessibility, of distance; if whenever I touch, I touch the outside of things or of myself; then touching simultaneously means to be touched upon by what is touched on. Each time, what I touch is only the following: that I am being touched upon by what I touch on. To touch the outside of something (or myself) simultaneously means that this outside touches us. It is not possible to decide which term is here the “agent” and which the “patient.” The “object” of touching


is the “subject,” and vice versa. Nancy often speaks in this sense of a “passive transitivity” (SW, 61).

What touches is not some agent or some patient, nor some agent being the patient for itself, but touching itself, or the outside itself, in sum the limit that touches both agent and patient. That is the reason why Nancy sometimes prefers to speak of “the touch” (la touche) instead of “touching” (le toucher): this empha-sizes the very event of contact, which makes the constitutive heterogeneity that touching is for itself. Touching occurs when “the touch” occurs, when the limit, and only the limit, touches, being in itself, qua limit, something untouchable (in the sense of “inappropriable,” “inapprehensible,” “unperceivable,” “inorganizable,” whether as subject or object of touching).

Insofar as there is no “agent” or “patient” of touching, but only the limit (“the touch”), it is not pertinent to speak of a “sense-organ” of touching. Even “fl esh” is fi rst and foremost exposed to the outside of things and to itself. Flesh does not seize, perceive, apprehend or organize anything—nor is it organized (instrumentalized) by any kind of “perception.” Flesh, no more nor less than any other “sense-organ,” can only sense limit. Hence fl esh—or any other sense-organ—is constitutively skin, if by “skin” we understand the principle of extension and exposition of bodies rather than, again, some kind of functional tool for perception. Between me and the world and between me and myself, there is this impenetrable surface that exposes (“expeause,” Nancy sometimes writes) both me and things of the world. Even the “supreme organ” or the “sense of senses” that Aristotle thinks to be the heart,22 sense sensing oneself sensing oneself in intimate refl ection (if we indulge in an easy reading of Aristotle’s concept of “common sense”), is, in truth, skin. Skin is the name of what takes place (or se peause, if I may use artifi cial French, following Nancy) at the limit and qua limit.

The body, the skin: everything else is anatomical, physiological or medical literature. Muscles, sinews, nerves and bones, humors, glands and organs are cognitive fi ctions. They are functionalist formalisms. The truth is the skin. It stands in skin, as skin: authentic extension exposed, both entirely turned toward the outside and envelope of the inside, of that bag bursting with odors and borborygms. Skin touches and is touched upon. (C, 160)

It is needless to insist that there cannot be “transcendental conditions,” or any condition in general, for touching. Nothing can dispose, constitute, determine or rule a priori the possibility of touching. Once again, touching is neither the action of an agent nor the passion of a patient, but the event of the limit, of the exten-sion, of “skin.” In other words, touching is not of the order of what Kant would have called “experience.” “Here there are no ‘a priori forms of intuition,’ nor ‘table of categories.’ The transcendental lies in the indefi nite and spacious [spacieuse] modifi cation and modulation of skin” (C, 16). Touching, as touch of the limit, is in itself something un-conditioned. Not only does the empirical realm coincide


with the transcendental (at the limit, indeed, skin and space are both at once a priori and a posteriori), but the event of touching is in itself the condition or the “archi-”condition for both the empirical and the transcendental. Rather than being conditioned by the pure forms of intuition and thought, then, touching is the unconditioned formation of the pure forms themselves of intuition and thought.

Touching—the touch of the limit—is the ex-position—or expeausition—of bodies, that is, what we have shown to be for Nancy the “soul.” In Aristotle, the sense of touch designates the fundamental modality of sensation, which is ultimately the fundamental modality of life in animals. In the same way that the living body in general is defi ned as having the capacity of being its own agent of growth, which is the function of the nutritive soul (hê threptikê psychê), animals are specifi cally distinguished from the other living beings by sensation, which is the function of the sensitive soul (hê aisthêtike psychê). Now, among the dif-ferent modalities of the sensitive soul in animals, the one that cannot be absent, according to Aristotle, is touch.23 Without touch animals would not even be able to nourish themselves.

In Nancy, touch is the “fundamental” modality of soul in a quite different way. Above all, as we have seen, touch is not “sensation,” be it described as perception (apprehension, identifi cation, organization, instrumentalization, appropriation, etc.) or as an activity performed with a view to self-nutrition, self-growing, self-generation, etc. In addition, given the fact that, for Nancy, the ex-position of bodies is precisely not interpreted as “pure life”—but rather as the retreating of life or as the difference between life and death—touch is not privative of animate beings, and this means that it is to be situated at a pre-vegetative stage! In The Sense of the World, Nancy analyzes touch in relation to Heidegger’s thesis concerning the worldlessness of “stones.”24 Since stones do not dwell in the world—not even “poorly,” as animals do—they cannot seize, identify or perceive anything within it. No world surrounds stones. They have no relation with other bodies, they are not open to them. Of a stone that we encounter in the way, Heidegger explains, we would not say that it “touches” the ground, as we would not say of the chair against the door that it touches it, unless of course we are speaking metaphori-cally.25 The stone is in contact with the ground, but it does not touch the ground. The stone does not “encounter” the ground as I encounter the stone: it does not identify or apprehend the ground.

Now, although the stone does not “touch” (betastet) the ground—in the way my hand touches the head of a child or a lizard touches the stone upon which it lies during a sunbath—the stone is still in touch with (elle touche à) the ground in passive transitivity: out of itself in touch with the impenetrable ground that cannot be apprehended but which offers back the surface that de-limits the stone. To touch is not to reach (reichen) nor to possess (besitzen) things. To touch is not


habitation (habere, habitare). To touch is nothing but the event of surface, or rather of the network of surfaces that constitutes the world in its infi nite disclosure: stone against ground, trees against trees, earth against heaven, “one thing with another, each on the border of the other, at the entrance yet not entering, before and against the singular signature exposed on the threshold” (SW, 60).26 Touching is thus much less being in the world than the being singular plural of world itself.

Bodies are exposed or formed as bodies in touching. But touching means pre-cisely that the formation of bodies does not depend on an agent, by itself subsistent (another body, physical or spiritual), that would come to embody or to in-form matter. On the other hand, bodies are not agents of their own formation—they are not autopoietic substances. Touching means that bodies do not form “themselves” except insofar as they are in touch with other bodies. Their “selves” are formed by the other, at the other, with the other, through the other. Touching—ourselves or others—is the event that ex-poses self out of itself and out of the regime of “self-hood” in general. We should not even speak of “the” self as something subsisting before being subjected to the other. Neither “self ” nor “other” (I mean, “another self ”), but one with another, touching reveals that “self ” is in itself and by itself a remission to the other/to itself. This relation is not an “accident” that would oc-cur to a pre-subsistent self (in other words, here “relation” is not a predicate of substance). Relation makes the whole substance of the self, and sub-jectivity is the restlessness of the relation of one to another or to itself from out of itself, and not a presupposed self behind this relation, supporting or bearing it.

A self is nothing but a form or function of remission [renvoi]: a self is produced in a remission to itself, or a presence to itself . . . —even though this remission were infi nite and the point in which a subject in substantial sense occurs were this remission. (E, 24–25)

Touching is not a modality of “life,” but it might reveal this truth of life in general: even self-nutrition, self-generation or self-motion, are not activities of some pure “self ” (to autos) isolated in itself, but are possible only insofar as they are actualized in touch with the other, by such a touch or as such a touch, occur-ring out of the self or at the limit of it. Even nutrition is possible only by means of an exposition that has already opened the self radically to the other: “to eat is not to incorporate, but to open our body to what is being swallowed, to exhale the inside with fl avor of fi sh or fi g” (C, 151).

Before fi nishing the second part of this paper, let us say a bit more concern-ing this notion of “self ” and of “subjectivity” in Nancy. Even the “ego,” the subject supposed to be one and the same in self-refl ection or self-intuition, is not itself but in touching, and therefore in relation to itself (intimate distance). Every time I open my mouth and say “I,” or every time I have “I” in mind, I am not I or I is not “me.” I am already separated from “I” (from “me”), “I” is already something other. When I pronounce (or conceive) “ego sum,” “I” lose all substantiality


grounded in the presence and identity to myself. “I” is only, as Kant would say, “I or he or it (the thing) that thinks” and accompanies all the representations.27 When “I” pronounce(s) “ego sum,” “I” feel(s) “I” coming from the diaphragm up to my (its) mouth as a vibration exhaling myself (itself) out of any identity to myself (itself) (ES, 152). “Ego sum”—in the mouth or in the mind—is thus es-sentially distinction, exposition (expeausition), being out of itself, and therefore the evidence of this, that I am (or I is) body. “Ego is to be outside of the ego. Ego is to be a body” (C, 121).

Ego (I or he or she or it) is formed at the other, through the other or with the other: ego is distinction, from itself and from the other. Ego has no more proxim-ity to itself than to any other thing from which it distinguishes itself. Thus ego becomes one among others, it becomes some-one. The “one” of “someone” is precisely not the “only one,” absolutely and totally one. In order to be ab-solutely one, the one would have to be detached from everything else and be one alone (al-one), deprived of any relation to and of any distinction from the other or itself. Now, if that were the case, “one” would be nothing at all.

One [l’un], as purely and simply one, one absolutely one, one and nothing else, the subject being its own substance, destroys itself. . . . If there were only one there would be nothing. If there were only one, not even dividing itself, how could it ever be possible for this one to appear? In order to be present to itself, there must be a relation, hence more than one. (US, 98)

“Someone” is not the “individual,” at least not in the sense of an auto-nomous being serving as the basis (substance) of singular features (accidents). “Someone” is not a “particular” participating in the oneness of a species, or in some com-mon destination (as the individual of the nation-state, for instance). “Someone” can be related to “individual” only insofar as the latter essentially is something in itself indistinct, and at the same time distinguished from everything else.28 “Individual,” in this sense, does not share with others in a species or in a com-mon destination, but in the very distinction that puts it among others. Now, what performs this distinction is, of course, body. Body is the singularity that exposes every one to the other and makes the singular-plural sharing of ones. Only body, or the singular-plural touch of bodies, opens the intimate distance in which there is one among ones. In this sense, “someone” is somebody. As Nancy remarks: “here the English expression somebody fi nds its whole meaning,” because only through body “someone exposes himself and engages his unicity with the unicity of the others” (US, 102).

This unicity is not the “person,” or in general some kind of substance thought as bearing the “singular features” of appearing. This unicity is to be found in the very punctuality of such singular features: “I never run into Peter or Mary, but one or the other under this ‘form,’ in that ‘state,’ in that ‘mood,’ etc.” (ESP, 27). Thus, when, for instance, we think of someone that we know (or someone unknown),


we do not have in mind some personal identity, but, on the contrary, we visual-ize such infra-personal differences. In the same text I have just quoted, Nancy also analyzes the expression “people are strange” (les gens sont bizarres). At fi rst glance, we would think that whenever such an expression is spoken, we mean a sort of agglutination of bodies in some anonymous whole (“the people”). If we pay enough attention, however, whenever we use this expression, our representa-tion of “people” cannot be detached from singular features. “‘People’ is not here the anonymous rumor of the ‘public realm,’ but silhouettes at once imprecise and singularized, voices’ sketches, behaviors’ schemes, moods’ shadows” (ESP, 25).

3. Hoc est enim corpus meum: Body and “Deconstruction of Christianity”

Before exploring the place of body in the large program of thinking that Nancy calls “Deconstruction of Christianity,” I will say a few words on the sense of this prima facie provocative expression. The deconstruction of Christianity is not the demolition of Christianity, the denial of Christian religion, culture and philosophy. The deconstruction of Christianity is, rather, the philosophical inquiry into the foundational elements and conceptuality of Christianity in order to eventually disclose new possibilities within it. However, this is far from being a call to give new breath to Christian “faith,” and does not assume any form of “return of re-ligion.” On the contrary, the deconstruction of Christianity takes note of the fact that Christianity is a “horizon that no longer breathes life to us” (D, 201). Indeed, humanity no longer lives history as the history of redemption. This is the reason why it would be inappropriate to associate Nancy’s research with some “religious” or “theological turn” in Continental Philosophy. The deconstruction of Christian-ity is to be linked with a philosophical tradition of works on Christianity whose closest referents are philosophers such as the young Hegel, Feuerbach, or Nietz-sche. In this tradition, what is at stake is the genealogy of Christianity insofar as it aims at the grounds of its historical provenance, and this within the context of an interrogation of the identity and historicity of Europe and the West.

If there is any provocation in Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity, it is rather against we atheist philosophers who may think that we are done with Christian-ity. Have we suffi ciently thought our Christian provenance? Have we suffi ciently thought the Christian provenance of “atheism”? As the exergue of the essay “La déconstruction du christianisme,” published in La Déclosion, Nancy quotes these words from Nietzsche: “theologians and everything that has theologian blood in the veins: our entire philosophy” (D, 199). Our entire philosophy: presumably then not only German Idealism but the whole tradition of Western philosophy. Not only Kant or Hegel but also Plato, Aristotle or Marx, and since it is Nancy who re-inscribes these words, let us add Husserl, Heidegger, and why not Derrida—


given the fact that “deconstruction” itself, “as a gesture that is neither critique nor perpetuator, and as a gesture showing a relation to history and tradition that one cannot fi nd in Husserl, Hegel nor Kant, is not possible but within Christianity, even though it is not expressively formulated within it” (D, 215–216).29

Thus, “Christianity” here is not in the least considered as a doctrinal corpus (as a religion among others, or against others—Islam, Judaism, even Buddhism or paganism). “Christianity” is rather a general matrix or scheme for approach-ing the sense and destination of philosophy—therefore also science, ethics, art, politics, etc.—in the West.30 If this analogy does not harm the understanding of Nancy’s particular view, I would say that “Christianity” here has a similar status and function as Nietzsche’s notion of “Platonism,” which refers to the original structure of all Western philosophy (and not only to Plato’s particular doctrine), or to Heidegger’s notions of “metaphysics” and “onto-theology.” In this latter context, however, it would also be necessary to show how Nancy’s concept of “Christian-ity” displaces and rethinks Heidegger’s “onto-teology,” since it aims at rendering explicit the Christian structure of metaphysics itself.

A “deconstruction” of Christianity aims at the “unthoughts” of Christianity, which will be brought into light insofar as work is done disassembling its foun-dational structures. Christianity has to be seized “before” its construction, or in retreat from it. This is not a procedure of going back to the past—as though there were some untouched or unexploited “nature” of Christianity to be discovered and presented in the present time—but a task to come. To turn our gaze toward the “unthoughts” of Christianity means to give them a chance, that is, to repeat Christianity in its unknown and not yet occurred—and thereby still “to-come”—possibilities. The deconstruction of Christianity is essentially a dis-closure of Christianity (“closure of metaphysics,” clôture de la métaphysique, is a well-known expression of Derrida). “We have to reach a provenance of Christianity deeper than Christianity, a provenance that could make another resource appear” (D, 206). Undoubtedly, such a gesture of thought has uncertain—not to say risky—results. But it is no more uncertain or risky than indulging in the belief that we are done with Christianity.

Let us move now to the question of body. When Nancy affi rms, at the begin-ning of Corpus, that body is “our invention” (“Who else in the world knows it?” he asks in C, 9), he means above all a Christian invention, from the crucifi ed body or, before that, from Plato’s body-cavern up until the “proper body” and the “fl esh” of Modern phenomenology. All the possibilities of the understanding of body, in the West, are somehow contained in the sentence of Jesus: hoc est enim corpus meum. This sentence, Nancy explains, expresses our obsession with showing that—God, soul, the absolute or the unconscious—in “this,” “right here.” Hoc est enim corpus meum is


our Om mani padne . . . , our Allah ill’allah . . . , our Schema Israel. . . . But that in which our formula is different gives a measure of our most intimate dif-ference: we are obsessed with showing some kind of this, and of persuading (ourselves) that such a this, here, is what one cannot see, nor touch, neither here nor elsewhere—and that this is that not in any manner but as its body. The body of it (God, absolute, as you wish), and the fact that it has a body or that it is a body (hence, one might think, that it is the body absolutely): there it is our haunting. The this presentifi ed by the Absent par excellence. (C, 7–8)

Christian body, or body as such, is the body of the Other (God, Absolute, etc.) in this body, here embodied. Christian body is thereby the body of the Incarnation. “The word became fl esh” (verbum caro factum est): this thought, while holding that “caro is the glory and true coming of verbum,” says also, “in a totally different sense, that verbum is the true presence and the meaning of caro” (C, 58). This “true presence” and “meaning” are not, of course, what we have seen to be the extended soul, ex-posing or presenting body in its naked weight. The presence of fl esh, here, in this, is such a presence only insofar as it presents the presence of that which is absent, and whose nature is totally different. (This is the reason why, in “Incarnation,” we are dealing with a “mystery.”) Hence “it is in darkness and as darkness itself that body has been conceived” (C, 59). It happens like in the other foundational myth of corporality: body “has been conceived and confi gured in Plato’s cavern, as the cavern itself: the prison or the grave of the soul” (C, 59).

Incarnation is thus not understood as the exposition of body in its singularity (“this”), quite rather it is as the occupation of the body by “some non-corporeal entity” (C, 124). “Incarnation” is the concept of something impossible: that “what is without being in a place, what exists without exteriority, without form, without matter (God), comes to fl esh” (C, 124). From that moment on, the body will be interpreted as the exteriority that essentially remits toward interiority. All appear-ing of the outside will be understood as the “expression” of the inside. The “this” and “here” of body becomes, in Incarnation, the sensible certainties that are to be sublated by their remission to the inside. The body of Incarnation is the exten-sion that must disappear as extension and turn into pure interiority. The body of Incarnation is the de-extended, de-exteriorized, de-corporized body. “Incarnation structures itself as decorporation [décorporation]” (C, 61). Body is a presence that presents something only insofar as it re-presents something else.

In other words, in Incarnation body is essentially conceived as sign. Its extension coincides with signifi cation. Even more, Christian body—i.e., the em-bodiment of Word—embodies signifi cation as such. It constitutes in itself the prototype and the sign of signifi cation in general. Body is “the total signifi er of a sense whose sense consists in show itself as body [faire corps]” (C, 66).

Lux in tenebris, the body of incarnation is the sign, absolutely. The sign, i.e., the sign of sense, i.e., not the coming of sense but a remission to sense as interior-


ity, as ‘inside.’ The body is remission from the ‘outside’ that it is to the ‘inside’ that it is not. Instead of being in extension, body becomes expulsion toward its own ‘interiority,’ to the extent that sign annihilates itself in the presence of what it is meant. (C, 60)

Sign of itself, or being-self of sign: double formulation of the body in all its states and in all the possibilities that we recognize in body (insofar as what we ‘recognize’ comes a priori from the realm of sense). The body signifi es itself as body (of the) signifying interiority [intériorité sensée]: it is only a question of seeing everything that we let say to human body, to its upright standing, to its opposable thumb, to its ‘eyes where fl esh becomes soul’ (Proust). Thereby the Body presents the being-self of sign, that is, the accomplished community of signifi er and signifi ed, the end of their exteriority, the sense displayed in the sensible realm itself—hoc est enim. (C, 64–65)

Following “incarnation,” there is such a thing as body insofar as, and only in-sofar as, there is signifi cation. Body is what it is on condition of becoming what it is not, of turning (or expelling) its outside toward the inside. In a correlative way, “soul,” instead of being the extension of bodies, their ex-position, collects itself from this extension—which will from now on be perceived as alienation. Thus soul becomes Spirit: “in the soul body comes, in the spirit it departs (s’enlève). The spirit is the sublation (la relève), the sublimation, the subtilisation of any form of bodies” (C, 67). Body is now the prison retaining Spirit, and for the truth of such a body to be revealed, it must be penetrated, even destroyed, so that Spirit will be free.

This is not unconnected with certain “apparitions” or “images” with which our culture represents bodies as things “to be read,” “deciphered.” Bodies in our culture essentially are “written bodies,” even when—or perhaps specially when—we are dealing with “exotic bodies” (foreign bodies, bodies of “the other,” in sum repre-sentations of bodies modeled after our images of the other, of the stranger), or when we are dealing with sexuality. And this “writing” of bodies does not exclude some of those images bursting with signs that one might fi nd in “body art.” In everything our civilization calls “body,” something is to be read, to be sublated, erasing the naked weight of it. “Strange foreign bodies [étranges corps étrangers], subtracted to the weighing of their nudity, doomed to be concentrated in them-selves, under their skin bursting with signs until the revocation of all senses into a white and insensible sense” (C, 10). Later on:

“Written bodies”—incised, engraved, tattooed, healed [cicatrisés]—are treasured bodies, preserved, reserved as the codes of which they are the magnifi cent engrams: thereby we are not dealing with the Modern body, the body that we have thrown, left there, before us, coming to us, naked, nothing but naked, and beforehand exscripting itself from any writing. (C, 13)


We should not speak of this “penetration” of the body only in a metaphorical way, that is, as the movement of recollection and intellection of spirit. If the truth of the body is to be found in decorporation, the extreme way to accomplish this truth is precisely to wound. The sense of body (i.e., sense absolutely speaking) is brought about only in its annihilation as body (as exteriority, as extension). Blood—i.e., what is “retained” within the body, blood that bears pneyma, the Spirit itself that breaths life into body—blood becomes the absolute sense, the signifi ed in itself and for itself, signifying by itself. “Spirit concentrates what wound frees: in both cases the body subsides, more and less than dead, deprived of its own measure of dead, blemished, tormented” (C, 68). “The openness of blood is identical to that of the sense” (C, 92). The truth of body eventually lies in its tor-ment, in its sacrifi ce. For that reason, the most accomplished form of incarnation is the bloody body of Christ on the Cross.

Even when Incarnation receives more complex and subtle formulations, for instance when it is no longer conceived as the coming of a non-corporeal substance into body but as the coming of body itself to itself in the absolute prox-imity to itself; even, then, when body is the self-signifi cation of its “properness,” as happens with the “proper body” of phenomenology, we have not abandoned the semio-theological structure of body. Of course, here there is no longer some spiritual interiority captive in body, but only because the entire body has become Spirit. Body itself has become recollection, concentration, self-refl ection. It is the body-cavern entirely “full” of spirituality, by intentionality and life. “Body is the signifying ‘outside’ (the ‘zero-point’ of orientation and intention, origin and receptor of relations, unconsciousness), and in this case, the ‘outside’ appears as a dense interiority, a full cave, bursting with intentionality” (C, 61). In sum,

the signifying body does not cease to exchange inside and outside, to abolish extension in the single organon of sign: where sense forms itself and from where it takes form. Particular philosophical perspectives will not change much to this: dualism of “soul” and “body,” monism of “fl esh,” cultural or psychoanalytic symbolisms of bodies, body will always be structured as re-mission to sense. . . . The signifying body—the entire corpus of philosophical, theological, psychoanalytical, semiological bodies—embodies only one thing: the absolute contradiction of not being body without being the body of a spirit that decorporizes it. (C, 61–62)

Incarnation deconstructs and discloses itself exactly at the point in which this contradiction becomes apparent. This deconstruction occurs when body retreats itself from signifi cation, when it exceeds or interrupts it, when it stands apart or in reserve from it. In a word, body discloses itself whenever it exscripts itself from the “signifying body”—or from the realm of “signifi cation” in general.

But how does this exscription occur? In the following, I will analyze this recall-ing the interpretation of the “Last Supper” that the young Hegel performed in his


posthumous Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. This text describes, with extreme accuracy, the “contradiction” of incarnation mentioned above and might offer different hints for understanding the disclosed possibilities of “incarnation.”

The very act of drinking and eating together, Hegel explains, especially among Arabs, is in itself an act of love and not merely a “sign” (Zeichen) of love. Between eating and drinking together and love, there is no conventional and objective bond, but common feeling of union, which itself is union.31 Now, when Jesus took the bread and the glass of wine while pronouncing: “this is my body, this is my blood,” he was not only celebrating friendship, but he meant something else. From that moment on, bread and wine become the signs of Love and Spirit—and quite peculiar signs since they are deprived of any objective or conventional bond with their signifi ed. Jesus does not say: let us share this bread and this wine as if we were sharing my sacrifi ce and my spirit, but his words were supposed to present immediately—while uttered—their content.32 Bread and wine, concludes Hegel, were meant to be mystic signs, and thereby the act of the Last Supper was meant to be a religious act (even though it will fail as such an act, as Hegel will show later).

Bread and wine “objectify” Love and Spirit, turning them into something sensible that can be seen and tasted. But this signifi cation of bread and wine is only possible among people already initiated in Christ’s teachings. An indiffer-ent viewer of the Supper, for instance, would see only a completely banal act of friendship. Bread and wine are not like the beautiful statue of Venus, which turns love into an objective and sensible reality for whoever contemplates it. Hegel re-marks, however, that bread and wine offer this advantage: since they are eatable and drinkable, i.e., susceptible of being “incorporated,” they present, “for external feeling,” the movement in which the Spirit of Christ is accomplished.33 Everything happens like the act of reading—the analogy is from Hegel. A (subjective) thought becomes a sensible thing in written words, which are by themselves dead elements (without “life,” without “feeling”) waiting for the reading that will breath them into life again. The act of reading recollects (legere) the signifi cation of words, i.e., performs the movement of interiorization in which intellection consists. Word is not a word unless it signifi es, and in order to signify it has to be read. Likewise, bread and wine do not mean what they mean unless they become Spirit, Love, and for this to occur, they have to be the body and blood of Jesus himself being incorporated, eaten, digested.

And yet, explains Hegel, the objectifi ed reality of Spirit in the ritual of com-munion will have only the splendor of a truth that lasts the time of manducation. We still need a “synthesis” performed by thought, able to turn bread and wine objectively into Love: we need them as signs, what precisely contradicts the sense of a religious act. Thus the act of drinking and eating proves to be a “confusion between subject and object rather than a unifi cation, [given] the fact that love here


becomes visible in and attached to something which is to be destroyed.”34 Bread and wine (as things given to taste) on one side, feeling of Love (as given to faith) on the other side, pertain to totally different realms. The ritualistic and semantic value of bread and wine lies in that they are destroyed, but this destruction is their ruin, since no objective reality remains any longer as divine presence.

After the supper the disciples began to be sorrowful because of the impending loss of their master, but after a genuinely religious action the whole soul is at peace. And, after enjoying the supper, Christians today feel a reverent wonder either without serenity or else with a melancholy serenity, because feeling’s intensity was separate from the intellect and both were one-sided, because worship was incomplete, since something divine was promised and it melted away in the mouth.35

Now, if what is given to the mouth shows itself as not being the Spirit given to faith; if the digestion of bread and wine is not the incorporation of Love, but a materiality or exteriority that, while dissolving in the mouth, resists its spiritual meaning; if what is in correlation with this, the “decaying body”36 of Jesus that disciples will grieve, is not the image of a redeemed humanity, all this is due to the fact that body exposes itself as body, in its nudity and weight of body. Body is: what one cannot incorporate, decorporate, what excripts itself at the very moment of being eaten and digested, or understood or signifi ed. Body, or the weight of body, exscripts itself—body is this exscription—from “Incarnation” in all the senses that we may confer to this concept: as prison of soul, as proper body, as pure presence of divinity. Nancy writes:

Neither prison of soul (sensible or faded body), nor expression of interiority (“proper” body or “signifying” body, what I would even call the “sublated” body of certain modernity), nor pure presence (body-statue, sculpted body, re-divinized body in the polytheistic way according to which the statue is itself the whole divine presence), but: extension, spacing, expansion [écartement] of swoon itself. (D, 127)

The ex-position (or ex-scription) of body, such as it has been characterized throughout this paper, is therefore nothing but the disclosed truth of Incarnation. What is properly disclosed in or through this mystery, I mean, the unthought that is given as a task for thinking, is that God becomes fl esh insofar as it has already been exceeded by Himself and has already been brought out of any spiritual concentration: in short, that God is the truth of body, of extension. In incarna-tion, divinity disperses, loses breath, expires, hollows out (as in Paul’s kenôsis). Incarnation is the ex-position of divinity—or it is nothing at all. Incarnate body, Christian body, “is nothing but ‘spirit’ out of itself or out of its simple identity” (D, 126). And this is not a mere “accident” that occurs to spirit, but on the contrary


the divine spirit of Christianity is already out of itself (there it lies its Trini-tarian nature), and certainly we have to look at the monotheist god common to the three religions “of the Book” and consider that this god is already, in itself, essentially placing itself out of itself through and within a “creation.” (D, 126–127)

NOTES

This paper belongs to a research project sponsored by FONDECYT (Government of Chile). Project Nr. 11060465.

1. This lecture was published in C, 107–28. See the bibliography for abbreviations used in citation of Nancy’s works.

2. On the Soul, I, 402 a 7.

3. Ibid., II, 1, 412 a 21.

4. I will briefl y recall Aristotle’s view on “matter” and “form.” A thing, a substance, is a “compound” (synolon) of form and matter. Think for example of this statue in bronze: the “matter” corresponds to the metal of which it has been made—the bronze itself—and the “form” is the aspect of its idea (to schêma tês ideas) (Metaphysics, VII, 3, 129 a 4–5)—i.e., the shape and function that makes possible that I recognize it as a “statue.” “Matter” and “form” are not two different things, each one existing by itself or separated from each other; on the contrary, they are two perspectives or two abstractions that we can work out in examining the constitution of one and the same thing (compound). In other words, the bronze is not by itself matter, but the matter of this statue that I am considering now as being a bronze statue. As soon as I want to consider bronze “independently” of the statue, it becomes itself a “compound” whose form is now the shape and function of the idea of “bronze” and the “matter” some copper alloy. The bronze is “matter” only inasmuch as further possibilities of this metal are considered: when it is potentially a helmet, a weapon, a statue; and the statue is the “form” only inasmuch as it offers this particular actualization of mat-ter (and not a helmet, a weapon, etc.). We can even say that form is the matter, i.e., not only what gives shape to it but also “materializes” it as the matter of this or that compound, and the matter is the form, i.e., what simultaneously gives body to it and “forms” it as the form of this or that compound. Matter and form are one and the same (touto kai hen), once considered as potentiality, once as actuality (Metaphysics, VIII, 6, 1045 b 18–19). When Nancy resorts to Aristotelian terminology of matter and form in order to characterize body and soul, he precisely emphasizes their unity, thus adopting an anti-dualistic position: “the form of a body is above all the body itself. If there is a body, it must have a form—but to say so is not fair enough, since the verb ‘to have’ might let us think of some exteriority of form with respect to body. Body is form.” (C, 114)

5. Derrida, On Touching, 19.

6. This text was published in 1978. There is an English version in BP, 393.

7. Derrida, On Touching, 12.


8. I am quoting from the Irizarry’s version included in On Touching, 13.

9. Derrida suggests that this text on Caravaggio is in dialogue with his own about “Psyche” of Nancy, fi rst published 1992 and then reprint for On Touching. Nancy would be therefore returning consciously to this motif of Psyche dead.

10. Here is the complete passage: “She did not die here. They have carried her to this makeshift bed where they deposited her body, slackened in a posture not yet ar-ranged, to wash it before the funeral. Her hands have not been placed in a manner that would imitate prayer. Someone has just pulled back the covering in which she had been wrapped. The body and the face are swollen, the hair is undone, the bodice unlaced” (M, 58–59).

11. On the Soul, II, 1, 412 b 17–25; Metaphysics, VII, 10, 1035 b 24; The Generation of Animals, 734 b 25–735 a 9; Parts of Animals, I, 640 b 34 ss, 641 a 20–23; Meteorologica, IV, 12.

12. This applies especially to “homogeneous parts” of body (fl esh and bone, blood, sinews, etc.), whose functions are less evident than those of the “non homogeneous parts” (face, hands, eyes, etc). In Meteorologica, IV, 12, Aristotle says the following (the emphasis are mine): “a dead man is a man only in name. And so the hand of a dead man, too, will in the same way be a hand in name only. . . . But in the case of fl esh and bone the fact is not so clear to see, and in that of fi re and water even less. For the end is least obvious there where matter predominates most. . . . A thing really is itself when it can perform its function; an eye, for instance, when it can see. When a thing cannot do so it is that thing only in name, like a dead eye or one made of stone, just as a wooden saw is no more a saw than one in a picture. The same, then, is true of fl esh, except that its function is less clear than that of the tongue.” Of this kind of parts, “we cannot state the form accurately, and so it is not easy to tell when they are really there and when they are not unless the body is thoroughly corrupted and its shape only remains. So ancient corpses suddenly become ashes in the grave and very old fruit preserves its shape only but not its taste” (389 b 30–390 a 16). The “matter” of which it is here a question corresponds to what Aristotle calls “ultimate matter” (hê eschatê hylê) of the compound (cf. Metaphysics, VII, 10, 1035 a 33–34): “ultimate” not in the sense of the merely anonymous matter, totally formless, “fi rst material subject of everything (hê prôtê hekastôi hypokeimenê hylê),” including of becoming the four simple elements (Physics, 191 a 7–11). On the contrary, “ultimate” matter is the “proximate” and the “closest” to the hylemorphic compound, as the bronze in the bronze statue or the fl esh and bones of Callias body.

13. On the Soul, II, 2, 413 a 32.

14. Ibid., II, 2, 413 a 21–22.

15. I am quoting Heidegger in the Heraclitus Seminar, where he says, speaking to Fink: “A human is embodied only when he lives. The body in your sense is to be understood thus. Thereby, ‘to live’ is meant in the existential sense” (146). This affi rmation would need to be worked out in relation to the lessons of winter semester 1929/30, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.

16. Aristotle, On the Heavens, I, 1, 368 b 8–9.

17. “Singular determination is essential to body” (C, 116).


18. “The other, if it is other, is another body. I don’t reach it, it stays at distance” (A, 139).

19. Derrida, On Touching, 1–8.

20. Speaking of dancing: “L’autre corps se rejoue dans le mien. Il le traverse, il le mobilse ou il l’agite. Il lui prête ou il lui donne son pas. . . . L’autre, là-bas, proche dans son éloignement, tendu, plié, déplié, déjeté, retentit dans mes jointures” (A, 139).

21. Derrida, On Touching, 111. So far as concerns the differences between Nancy’s concept of body and the phenomenological concepts of “fl esh” (“der Leib,” “la chair”) and “proper body” (corps propre), the work that is to be referred is chiefl y Derrida’s On Touching. Nancy does not establish himself such a discussion; in his work, references to phenomenological tradition are scarce and elliptical. As a matter of fact, to solicit Nancy’s thought around “touching” as a “main” problematic is already an interpreta-tive decision, as Derrida himself declares in the Foreword of On Touching (ix–x). This does not mean, however, that Derrida’s interpretation is arbitrary, or personal, and that Nancy’s scholars might ignore it. The fact that Nancy himself, after 1992 (when Derrida wrote the fi rst version of “On Touching”), will constantly refer to and elaborate on Derrida’s interpretation, constitutes in itself a reason for not ignoring it. In any case, Derrida is far from aiming at a simple “appropriation” of Nancy’s thought to his own interests; on the contrary, it is in the attempt of showing Nancy’s philosophical singularity and by examining the peculiarities of his writing, that he discovers such a distinctive yet not systematic treatment of the concept of touching.

22. On Youth and Old Age (in Parva Naturalia), 469 a 6–8.

23. On the Soul, III, 13, 435 a 16–17.

24. Which is one of the three thesis concerning the being of world in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (§ 42): stone is worldless, animal is poor in world, man is world-forming.

25. Cf. respectively Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, § 47 and Being and Time, § 12.

26. “Why does one have to determine ‘access to’ a priori as the only way of making-up-a-world and of being-toward-the-world? Why could the world not also a priori consist in being-among, being-between, and being-against? In remoteness and contact without ‘access’? Or on the threshold of access? (And this a priori would be identically the a posteriori of the material world, the indefi nite grouping of threshold with threshold, one thing with another, each on the border of the other, at the entrance yet not entering, before and against the singular signature exposed on the threshold)” (SW, 59–60).

27. Critique of Pure Reason, A 346/B 404.

28. In US, Nancy analyzes the notion of “individual” from St. Thomas’s defi nition: Indi-viduum: quod est in se indistinctum, ab aliis vero distinctum (103).

29. Nancy even suggests that the Jew-Greek Derrida speaks of in Writing and Difference may precisely be the Christian: “In other words, one might wonder if the ‘Jew-Greek’ Derrida speaks of in the end of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (this ‘Jew-Greek’ in which, as he says, our history consists) is not the Christian. One might wonder as well why do we systematically turn our gaze away from the Christian, why do we squint toward the ‘Jew-Greek’ as if we did not want to look at the Christian” (D, 204).

30. It is due to the “generality” of this concept of Christianity that sometimes Nancy prefers to speak of “Monotheism,” whose “most European form—hence the form that has


accompanied the most, until the middle of the XXth Century, the occidentalization of the world—is the form of Christianity” (D, 51–52).

31. “To eat and drink with someone is an act of union and is itself a felt union, not a con-ventional sign” (Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 248; I am modifying translation).

32. Here “things heterogeneous are most intimately connected,” notes Hegel (ibid., 249).

33. Ibid., 250–1.

34. Ibid., 251.

35. Ibid., 252–3.

36. Ibid., 291.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. JEAN-LUC NANCY’S QUOTED WORKS AND ABBREVIATIONS

À l’Écoute (E) (Paris: Galilée, 2002).

Allitérations (A) (with M. Monnier) (Paris: Galilée, 2005).

The Birth to Presence (BP), trans. B. Holmes et al. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).

Corpus (C) (Paris: Metailié, 2006).

La Déclosion (D) (Paris: Galilée, 2005).

Ego Sum (ES) (Paris: Flammarion, 1979).

Etre Singulier Pluriel (ESP) (Paris: Galilée, 1996).

The Muses (M), trans. P. Kamuf (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Noli me Tangere (NMT) (Paris: Bayard, 2003).

The Sense of the World (SW), trans. J. S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Une Pensée Finie (PF) (Paris: Galilée, 1990).

“Un Sujet?” (US) in Homme et sujet - La subjectivité en question dans les sciences humaines, avec A. Michels, M. Safouan, J. P. Vernant, dir. D.Weil (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1992).

2. OTHER QUOTED WORKS

Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), vol. 13.

, Metaphysics, trans. H. Tredennick and G. C. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979, 1982), vols. 17–18.

, Meteorologica, trans. H. D. P. Lee, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), vol. 7.

, On the Heavens, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939), vol. 6.

, On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), vol. 8.


, Parts of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck and E. S. Forster, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), vol. 12.

, Physics, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford, Loeb Classical Library (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), vols. 4–5.

Derrida, J., On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. C. Irizarry (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).

Hegel, G. W. F., Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).

Heidegger, M., Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).

, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

Heidegger, M., and E. Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, trans. Ch. H. Seibert (Evanston, Ill.: North-western University Press, 1993).

Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965).

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