The Fragile Skin of the World. Jean-Luc Nancy
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title (The Creation of the World or Globalization) sought to mark a distinct contrast between emergence and transformation, between mutation and modification.
Here is the passage:
To create the world means: immediately, without delay, reopening each possible struggle for a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of a global injustice against the background of general equivalence. And to conduct this struggle precisely in the name of this: that this world is coming out of nothing, that it is without preconditions and without models, without any given principle or end, and that it is precisely this that forms the justice and the sense of a world.6
What is entirely new, and what perhaps comes about without past or future, is the escape from all terminal signification. It is the sense that we do not control our ends and that they do not control us either, because all of this belongs to the domain of logics of investment and usage whose aim is an interminable renewal of a power that is as productive as it is destructive. We do not control the sense of the world, but nor, perhaps, are we controlled by power, if we are on the contrary employed (gebraucht), used, gamed [mis en jeu] by no master, by no signification, but by the simple fact of our being put into play [mise en jeu]. Our existence, according to the presence that comes and that comes to us, may be that which only exists by and for itself, for its own fructification (I allude here to the frui of Augustine, to the ‘enjoyment’ that Heidegger approximates to his Gebrauchtsein. Not enjoying oneself, as with the Hegelian spirit, but being enjoyed . . .).
Here, now, I am employed, used, called upon, exploited, enjoyed by an infinity that is neither a subject nor a scheme – that thus has nothing in store for me and makes no profit from me – but that is my very existence, the fact that this existence is sent, expedited to its sole actualization of being – this body, these words, this thrust, this chance in the sense that all of these are here and now exposed, dedicated, abandoned to infinitely more than themselves.
It is not a thought that is easy to grasp, and it is not a thought at all: it is a praxis, an ethos, a lived and living disposition that in a sense we are already familiar with without even knowing it. Because it is not an object of knowledge. It is rather the fact of a jolt, of a gap with respect to the usual logic that uses us up and wears us out. A disjunction, a breakdown – as well as a divine surprise.
Notes
1 1 Lecture given at the ‘Thinking with Jean-Luc Nancy’ conference, organized in Oxford in March 2019 by Marie Chabbert and Nikolas Deketelaere; the initial version is forthcoming in the conference proceedings.
2 2 Octavio Paz, ‘A Tale of Two Gardens’, The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957–1987, ed. and tr. Eliot Weinberger, New York: New Directions, 1987, p. 295. Praise be to Hélène, to a degree commensurate with the revelation of this face. [TR: I have slightly modified the translation. The original reads: ‘la otra cara del ser,/la vacía,/el fijo resplandor sin atributos’. Weinberger translates the second line as ‘the feminine void’.]
3 3 Paul Valéry, Cahiers II, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1974, p.1533. [TR: My translation.]
4 4 Ibid., p.1352.
5 5 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, tr. Hans Jonas and Davis Herr, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 11. [TR: I have modified the translation to bring it more into line with Nancy’s French version, which runs thus: ‘d’assurer la permanence d’une vie authentiquement humaine sur terre’.] More than twenty years ago, Élisabeth de Fontenay formulated very nicely that which prevents us from relating to authenticity: ‘The lack of criteria compels us to respond in the absence of all points of reference, to maintain this empty demand that precedes the subject and exceeds all authority’ (‘Quelque chose comme du donné . . .’, Paris, Autrement, série ‘Morales’, no. 14, ‘La Responsabilité’, 1994).
6 6 [TR: Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, tr. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007, pp. 54–5, tr. mod.]
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