SubStance

We must be able to think a world, and therein lies the question that is not artistic at all, in the sense of not at all decorative, which is our question. Our question, or rather our categorical imperative, or again our necessity in the sense of our poverty and our way of being needy because we have no world, but we must be able to imagine a world. To imagine the total impossibility of thinking a world immediately leads to madness, to death. We must be able to think a world, thus there is a necessity for this possibility and the possibility of its necessity. It is possible that this world may be necessary, that every world may be—that of all people and that of each person—even though none of them shows either its reasons or its ends, but perhaps that's what a world is—that which shows neither a reason nor an end. Anything that can show—or about which one can show—reasons or ends, is perhaps in a world, but it is not a world, it does not make a world. Thus, based on this possibility and necessity of a world—that is, of a totality of meaning, I am attempting to read these paintings.

(Nancy, Transcription, 20)

Anyone closely following the philosophical and political reflections of Jean-Luc Nancy, especially his analysis of the disjointed articulation of the cum in community¹ (community without communitarianism, exposed, shared, held in common) and his critique of the concept of sovereignty and its ontotheology,² or again the huge project that traverses his writings concerning the deconstruction of Christianity, will still have only a partial view of the breadth and extent of this thought if he fails to grasp the important role Nancy confers to art. The question of art is pregnant in many guises in all of Nancy's recent essays, whether about dance,³ cinema (see Nancy and Kiarostami, L'Evidence du film,2001), painting and photo,⁴ music (see his À l'écoute, 2002), sculpture (see Nancy and Parmigianni, Coeur ardent, 2003), ceramics (see his Miquel Barcélo—Mapamundi, 2002), and even about urban architecture or the landscape.⁵ Nancy questions the so-called specificity of each "art" devolved or dedicated to one particular "sense" (painting to sight, music to hearing, [End Page 104] etc.). He strives to underline the divisibility of each sense, or of each medium, in all senses. It is in Dehors la danse that he lays out most clearly his views on this question of the "difference among the arts/difference among the senses as a constitutive difference (not secondary or accidental)," stressing the fragility of this representation of art when one attempts

to distribute, if not to differentiate the arts (not just painting and music, etc. but also, for example, painting and drawing, musical composition and execution, cinema and video, installation and sculpture, etc.), nor less to divide up the "senses" (for example, the sense of distance and the sense of order, sense of color and of texture, of dampness and dryness, etc., in their relationships to the canonical "five senses"), not to mention the well- known difficulty in qualifying the former by the latter (is music an art of time, painting an art of sign? Are they only that? etc.).

(Dehors la danse)

If Nancy still acknowledges some usage in this current, "ordinary" representation of the relationships (not always equal) of the different arts within the heart of "art," if he acknowledges their intermedial capacity to establish correspondences among the different senses, or, for each art or medium, to cultivate an internal heterogeneity, he stresses the fact that there is no true isolation (of sight in painting, of hearing in music), but that "all of art is at play every time in an art, and all the senses in a sensation;" "each sense/art play[ing] in its fashion the difference (and the contact)" (ibid.). In "Séparation de la danse" he adds, "and perhaps it is even necessary to say that each art, in...