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Right Outta’ Nowhere: Jean-Luc Nancy, phenomenon and event ex nihilo

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… un événement, comme ils disent, en nous fatiguant un peu…

… an event, as they say, tiring us a bit…

J. Derrida, Le Toucher- Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract

This essay proposes to read Jean-Luc Nancy’s references to creation ex nihilo as both an intervention in the French debate concerning eventness, and as a transformative rethinking of the status of phenomenality. Nancy’s position is roughly triangulated relative to key remarks from other thinkers and, above all, its distinctive components (temporality, negativity, spatiality) are elucidated through historical glosses. Articulating the overall architecture of this theory serves to illustrate the Heideggerian access to the event debate. It also deepens aspects only elliptically alluded to in Nancy’s own writing.

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Notes

  1. Nancy (1996) contains our matricial text, “La Surprise – de l’événement.” We have articulated some dimensions of these ideas in English already in Zangeneh (2010) and most extensively, in French, in Zangeneh (2009).

  2. Romano (1998, p. 28). This is but one of Romano’s criticisms of Heidegger. We shall return to others in passing, though without truly being able to do justice to them. Among the most provocative, we should mention the idea according to which Dasein would be that being to which nothing ever happens; Dasein itself happens, but nothing ever happens to it.

  3. This is why a discourse on the event of being cannot be reduced solely to a variant of the Eleatic being/becoming opposition.

  4. Derrida (1972, p. 65).

  5. We use this term here despite a wariness, not in order to contribute to its inflated use, but in order to show its continuing explanatory import despite the over-usage. Needless to say, we are inflecting the notion in one particular direction.

  6. The history of this distinction is almost as old as the history of philosophy itself. Pierre Hadot (1963) had attributed it to the ‘anonymous commentary’ (possibly by Porphyry) on Plato’s Parmenides, while Jean-François Courtine (1990), arguing against Hadot, insisting on the terminology of energeia-dynamis in the commentary, has claimed an Aristotelian author. Relatedly, Kevin Corrigan (1996, pp. 105–129), has defended the possibility of reading certain Plotinian texts as sources for the distinction between to on/to einai, and therefore as the source for quid/quod.

  7. See e.g. Deleuze (1988) chap. 6. The passage in question is in section 14 of Leibniz’s text.

  8. Derrida has noted that this refusal of a definite article is a recurrent trope in all of Nancy’s writings. See Derrida (2000, p. 35). It is also exploited by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense and will be familiar to students of the Stoic analysis of language. Taking the Deleuzo-Stoic conception to the extreme would mean that instead of analyzing propositions of the form S is P, and constructing a metaphysics correlative thereto, we should instead begin with phrases of the form gerund1 performs gerund2, or G1 G2 s, i.e. ‘arborescence greens’ as opposed to ‘the tree is green.’ This obviously calls for a different logic than the Aristotelian one, and will also imply a different metaphysical system too.

  9. Romano (1998, p. 21).

  10. Nancy (2001b, p. 97).

  11. The thinking of neutrality that we are advancing here, with help from Nancy, is not to be confused with the ‘negative dialectics’ of an Adorno, or of a young-Hegel. For the latter, see Klaus Düsing (1976).

  12. Deleuze develops at length the idea of a neutral event. Romano too frequently affirms a neutrality in his event philosophy.

  13. See above all Blanchot (1955) and also Blanchot (1980).

  14. Blanchot (1980, p. 182): “le non-travail du désœuvrement.” But one could also pursue the thematic of unemployed negativity in Bataille.

  15. On patience see Blanchot (1980, pp. 160–162).

  16. See ibid., pp. 33–53, esp. pp. 48–49.

  17. While it is plausible to construct a genealogy of syncretic readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology in France, pursuing, in some manner, a vague synthesis of Hegel and Heidegger, it would be mistaken to confuse Blanchot wholly with that movement—to say nothing of Nancy! This other, less Kojevian, less Phenomenology-centred, genealogy would be distinguished, in our opinion, by its affirmative appropriation of Structuralism.

  18. Many would try to distance Blanchot and Heidegger on death. Perhaps, we should speak of a speculative sameness, without identity. Derrida, for his part, accentuates the asymmetries in Demeure, (1998), but is more interested in deconstructing the opposition between them in Apories (1996).

  19. Ibid. p.121.

  20. Ibid.

  21. See his remarkable Hamacher (1993). His remarks on Nancy’s relation to Heidegger are still the most astute to date.

  22. For example in the Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, §16, §32, Schelling (1995), AS 2. This is Schelling in 1801, i.e. very much in contact with Hegel’s early conception of logic.

  23. Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen (1810), Schelling (1995), AS 4, p.40.

  24. Die Weltalter. Erstes Buch: Die Vergangenheit Druck 1, (1811), Schelling (1995), AS 4, p.245.

  25. Ibid., p.238: “It is this existential Sameness [Gleichheit] … that we have referred to as Equi-valence or Indifference [Gleich-Gültigkeit oder die Indifferenz]. Critics …have taken this existential Sameness for a Oneness [Einerleiheit] of the Principles, a confusion which cannot be excused by the sloppy expression both are one [beyden seyen Eins].”

  26. Nancy (2001a).

  27. Merleau-Ponty, for example contrasts this type of space with the one of chair in his writings on painting. This has been developed quite far by aestheticists working in his wake (e.g. H. Maldiney, E. Escoubas).

  28. Nancy (2002). For a Begriffsgeschichte of distension see Zangeneh (2009).

  29. Schönberg (1922).

  30. Nancy (2003).

  31. Romano (2002, p. 9). In this more recent text, the author repeats his double gesture towards Heidegger, but this time comes even closer to the approach we are adopting, connecting a concept of nothingness with phenomenality.

  32. The present author has elaborated this in Zangeneh (2009). As have, in albeit distinct ways, Romano (passim., implicitly), and Schnell (2010), explicitly, among others.

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  1. California State University, Stanislaus, CA, USA

    Hakhamanesh Zangeneh

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Zangeneh, H. Right Outta’ Nowhere: Jean-Luc Nancy, phenomenon and event ex nihilo . Cont Philos Rev 45, 363–379 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9224-y

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