The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes 9780226113371

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The Decision Between Us

The Decision Between Us ��� ��� ������ �� ��� ���� �� ������

John Paul Ricco

University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

John Paul Ricco is associate professor in the Department of Visual Studies and Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14   1  2  3  4  5 ����-13: 978-0-226-71777-7 (cloth) ����-13: 978-0-226-11337-1 (e-book) ���: 10.7208/chicago/9780226113371.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ricco, John Paul, author.   The decision between us : art and ethics in the time of scenes / John Paul Ricco.     pages ; cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ���� 978-0-226-71777-7 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ���� 978-0-226-11337-1 (e-book)  1. Arts and morals.  2. Aporia.  3. Art—Philosophy.  4. Art— History and criticism.  I. Title.   ��180.�8�53 2014   700.1—dc23

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a This paper meets the requirements of ��������� � 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Bill Haver, for his writing and friendship, and for Jeff Reinhart, who remains right next to me, shoulder to shoulder, as we face out in the same direction— an outside infinitely shared between us, in the intimacy of its distance.

Writing passes through the book, accomplishing itself there even as it disappears there; we do not write for the book. The book: a ruse by which writing goes toward the absence of the book. ������� ��������, The Infinite Conversation

Contents

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Part I · Name No One �: Name No One Man  19 �: Name No One Name  48 Part II · Naked �: Naked Sharing  73 �: Naked Image  98 Part III · Neutral and Unbecoming �: Neutral Mourning  127 �: Unbecoming Community  173 �����  209 ��������� � � �  237 �����  245 Gallery follows page  156

Acknowledgments

In the course of writing this book, I greatly benefited from conversations with many friends, colleagues, and students. Along with various public and academic audiences and readers, they have granted me what I—perhaps like any other thinker and writer—am most grateful for: insight and feedback truly grounded in the most generous and empathetic listening and reading. This has been one of the principal sources that continues to motivate me to push further with my ideas and arguments and to hone and reshape my thinking’s written expression. The following acknowledgments no doubt constitute an incomplete list of those who have played a role in the shaping of this book, and I apologize up front if I have overlooked anyone who deserves to be named here. Indeed, I am well aware not only of the ways in which this project has developed under the auspices of academic institutions and cultural organizations where I have taught and/or presented my work in progress, and the excellent people I have en­ countered there, but also the ways in which it has materialized for me along a whole series of more brief and less easily recognized, sanctioned, and perhaps even remembered contexts and occasions, which are no less important or indeed auspicious due to their “small” scale—quite the contrary, in fact. I want to thank the following lecture and conference organizers for their invitations to present early versions of this work, and those who took the time to attend and engage with me. Lorelei Stewart at Gallery 400 at the University of Chicago; Beth Hinder­liter and the “Collectivity and Collaboration” lecture series at Buffalo State University; the organizers of the Feeling Photography conference at the

University of Toronto; my colleagues Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak and the Visual Studies Pro-Seminar at the University of Toronto; Lauren Berlant and Condace Vogler and their colloquium series “Sex & Ethics in the Classroom” at the University of Chicago; Connie Cortez, Brian Steele, and Joe Arredondo, who invited me back to the School of Art at Texas Tech University to present two chapters of this project; and many of my former colleagues and students who attended those events and so warmly welcomed me back. And finally I would like to thank John David Rhodes, Brian Price, Meghan Sutherland, Sorin Cucu, and Olga Pyrozhenko for their invitation to participate as guest faculty in their 2011 Open Society Summer Seminar on Philosophy and Media in Bodrum, Turkey. For the past eight years I have had the great fortune to teach at the University of Toronto, and to be a part of an intellectual and scholarly community of colleagues and students that inspires me every day. First I want to thank my colleagues in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga (UTM), where I hold my undergraduate teaching appointment, who have read or heard portions of this project at various points in its development: Jill Caskey, Kajri Jain, Louis Kaplan, Evonne Levy, Christof Migone, Brian Price, Meghan Sutherland, and Alison Syme. In addition I am grateful for the support of my former and current graduate chairs: Elizabeth Legge, in the Department of Art, and Neil ten Kortenaar, in the Centre for Comparative Literature. Several undergraduate research assistants have provided invaluable help at various stages of the project: Steve Kahn and Ricardo Segura with their bibliographic research, and Deena Alreefy with her assistance in managing the task of acquiring images and reproduction rights. I thank them for their dedication to the project and their enthusiasm. At the University of Toronto I am also fortunate to work with some of the most intelligent, sophisticated, and critically imaginative of graduate students. The work of Irmgard Emmelhainz in film and contemporary art, Etienne Turpin in architecture and political philosophy, Tyler Kowalchuk in contemporary continental philosophy and aesthetics, and Tenzan Eaghill in religion and continental philosophy has been and continues to remain a source of inspiration, and with each of them I share what is nothing less than intellectual friendship. � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  

It has been wonderful to discuss my work with them, and each has offered useful insight and perspective. I also want to acknowledge how much I have learned from all of the students in my graduate seminars Queer Theory, Sexuality, and Visuality; Jean-Luc Nancy: Retreating the Aesthetic; and Late Barthes: Photography, Neutral, Mourning. I am honored to have Susan Bielstein as my editor, and to retain my affiliation with the University of Chicago Press. This book has benefited so much from her impeccable judgment, and I am indebted to her support over these past several years. Susan and the Press are simply the best in the business. In addition, I want to thank Anthony Burton at the Press, whose guidance and assurance have been indispensable, and who has made the task of assembling this project into a book so much easier. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Susan Cohan for her impeccable copyediting of the manuscript, and for her patience, thoroughness, and sense of humor throughout the entire process. Finally, I want to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, both of whom read it with great care and wrote thorough, precise, and meaningful reports that guided me throughout the revision of my writing. Finally, I am extremely fortunate to have a group of friends here in Toronto (my acolouthia, as Roland Barthes would say) who sustain me intellectually and emotionally to a depth and degree that they might not even realize or imagine. They have made my expatriated life here in Canada feel like home, and in a whole myriad of innumerable ways this book would not have been possible without their unwavering faith in me and in it. They have been patient and understanding every time this project drew me into the quiet and solitude of my writing, and they have been there to help me celebrate at those times when it felt as if the words might be worth keeping (and reading). To Ritu Birla, Art Blake, Elspeth Brown, Nicholas Brinckman, Blair Chivers, and Christine Shaw, here is a big arms-open-wide thanks for making me laugh, for dancing with me, and for your unbeatable style, taste, and grace. This book is dedicated to Bill Haver, from whom I have learned the most about the thrill and risk of thinking. The chapters of this book cannot approximate the essay form that he has perfected. Not so long ago I discovered that I share with the contemporary Ameri� � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  xi

can short story writer George Saunders the same two simple yet not always easy to come by things that evidently we both need in order to write: a quiet place of solitude, and being happy. This book, then, is also for Jeff Reinhart, with whom I share a life (and more) and who over the past year has made it possible for me to write, by making me happy every day.

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Introduction

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Separation is the spacing of existence, and is, by definition, never solitary but always shared. It is what affirms that for anything to exist, there must be more than one thing, each one separated from each other one, together partaking in the spacing between that is opened up by separation. Existence, therefore, is relational and shared, and hence is always to be understood as coexistence. Not the coming together of solitary and autonomous beings, but existence as sharing or partaking in separation as the there is of existence—the spacing (there) of being (is) together. If separation is the spacing of existence, and if existence is always relational and shared, then sharing in separation is the praxis of coexistence—of being-together. Any reader familiar with contemporary continental philosophy will no doubt recognize these to be some of the principal terms in which French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has conceptualized the sense of existence, and in particular, his emphatic use of the French verb partager, meaning “to share” and “to divide” (or separate). This single word holds together and in tension sharing and dividing and thereby semantically affirms their mutual resonance, which for Nancy, and for us here, in the reading of his work and in the accompaniment of his thought, is the resonance of a syncopated rhythm of the spacing and sense of existence that is sustained by art, aesthetics, and ethics. In being shared, separation is also the spacing of decision. Nancy stated this most clearly when he wrote as part of a comment on Heidegger’s thrownness: “The separation, the stepping-out-of-oneanother, is at the same time, Entscheidung, decision: it is the decision of Being, the decision of nothing into being or to being . . . the whole

of existence as an ensemble or partition of singular decisions.”¹ Which is not only to say that existence consists of singular decisions, shared (“an ensemble”) and separated (“partition[ed]”), but that each singular decision, as Nancy has also noted, is the decision of existence and further that in its singularity, it is the decision of existence not once and for all, but each time, in and as the finite singularity of existence infinitely open in its decision. Yet further and in a way that underlines the entire study to follow, to the extent that existence is separated in its spacing, and decision is always the decision of shared existence, then the decision of existence is always the decision of shared-separated spacing, and sharedseparation is the very spacing and praxis of decision (again, not decision “itself ” but here, now in each singular decision). This study is dedicated to thinking decision as a space, specifically as the spacing of shared-separation that is sustained in and as ethical and aesthetic exposition and presentation, or what I will refer to as the scene. By theorizing the ethics and aesthetics of being-together as scene of shared-separation, this book not only asserts that the sense of coexistence lies in its spacing and decision, but this theorization also has the potential and intended effect of displacing the binary terms of sameness and difference that continue to prevail as the most dominant modes for theorizing sociality and relationality (including in much queer theory and cultural studies today). In other words, this study professes to be neither an ontology nor phenomenology of existence nor a philosophy of decision and its “event.” The semantic resonance of shared-separation is to be heard, read, thought, and felt in each of the three principal words that make up the title of this book, and that the book sets out to deconstruct. Decision, between, and us: shared-separation is the source of the sense of each of these terms and all that they might mean, as well as the relations between and among them. The contention is that the “secret” of our ethical sociality is our sharing in the separated spacing between us, including in the sense that the Latin for secret translates as “separation” and “dissociation,” which is also to say, distance and exteriority. Separation, then, is the word that can be said to be secretly “kept” and passed between us, as the very password, passage, place, and sense of being-together. Or as Nancy put it, “The between-us is, very precisely, the place of the sense of sense, passage in every sense of the � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  

term: transmission and transgression, the step from one to the other as well as the step from the other beyond the one.”² Passage and step meaning that what separates us and that we share is the outside, such that our coexistence is always a coexposure. Being-with is always being with-out, in which the hyphenation writes the scene of beingtogether as the sharing-with of sharing-out in the separated spacing (hyphen) between us. In a word: decision. The exposure that we share to the outside is not the partaking in a common ground, substance, or exchangeable object (i.e., community, communion, or commodity), but corresponds, if  you will, to the “extra” of partes extra partes (parts outside of any parts of a greater whole or totality). Such that the spacing of the extra is the “part” that is not a part (e.g., a fragment), and it is this extra-spacing—its excessivity—that lies no place other than just between us. Following Maurice Blanchot, death is the name given to this shared separation and exposure, precisely in terms of its immeasurable distance and proximity—the name for our common incommensurability. When I speak, death speaks in me. My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition of all understanding.³

The scenes discussed in this book are scenes of being-together to the precise extent that they have been staged through various forms of retreat and withdrawal via the force of finitude: erasure, intrusion, erotics and sex, neutral, offering, and death. It is argued that these scenes do not represent but rather present, exhibit, and performatively open up and stage “the distance that separates us, but . . . also . . . prevents us from being separated.” While we might stop short of stating that these scenes contain the condition of all understanding, I do want to argue that they operate as ethical and aesthetic sustainings of the spacing of separation that is shared as the decision between us. As in my previous and in my next book, the principal locus for my thinking here continues to concern a sociality of a shared sense of— � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  

and non-traumatic relation to—withdrawal, retreat, loss, and death. An infinite sharing right up to the limit of what can be shared, an exposure to finitude that remains absolutely inappropriable (death, my own and that of every other one), and where thereby is maintained the incommensurable as our common measure—a sociality of finitude, and of existence as being-with-out.⁴ Art and Ethics In this study, I argue that separation is the archi-spatiality or spaciousness of existence; the aesthetic is the technique and praxis of standing in this groundless ground, or as Nancy has put it: “the art of standing, what permits in general having or maintaining a standing in, including and especially, where there is no longer any support or firm basis for whatever stance there is”;⁵ and the ethical is the decision of this stance, of taking and suspending the step that in its separation is the scene and decision of existence. Art and ethics are two principal measures of our incommensurability. As originary spacing of existence and sense, separation is the deconstruction of the origin, the Kantian a priori of space, and other metaphysical ways of conceiving the spatiality of the fore-. This might even be evidenced in the etymology of the word, given that the prefix se- means “without” or “apart”; and parāre means “to make ready” or “to prepare.” I think we can draw at least three theoretical inferences from this: (1) to separate is to act without or apart from preparation; (2) to prepare is to make ready prior to, or apart from, making ready; or (3) which is sort of a combination of the first two, and is the one that I am inclined to favor: that without, apart (“se”) is the spacing by which any preparation is not a matter of making ready or of being ready-made, but is already unmade. Where preparation and beginning anew would now consist of withdrawal and retreat, as when John Cage, in speaking of his close friend Robert Rauschenberg, said that in order for the artist to begin again, he erased the de Kooning drawing (see chapter 1). Or when the scene as fore- (yet perhaps without being primal or principal) means that the bed is alreadyunmade (see chapters 3, 4, and 5), the sheet of paper is already the scene of erasure (chapters 1, 2, and 6), the scene of sexuality is al­ready

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unconsummated (chapters 3 and 5), and the ellipsis is the punctuated end, already extended out (chapter 5). Which also means that separation-as-preparation would, in its own right, put the prefix pre of preparation under-erasure, to the extent that separation, now conceived as the archi-spacing and force of the fore-, is not simply preliminary as though initial and that which is necessarily to be overcome or eclipsed, but rather is the spacing that needs to be sustained. As the spacing of being-together, separation is what needs to be sustained by being shared-out. So we might name and define that thing called existence as neither  res cogitans (thinking thing) nor res extensa (extended thing), but res sēparāre—separated thing. Inheriting the double valence of the French word retrait, each of the scenes in this book is the retracing of retreating and withdrawing and, as such, is taken to be various ways of posing the question that Nancy asked nearly twenty years ago, in his seminal essay “Being Singular Plural”: The retreat of the political and the religious, or of the theologicopolitical, means the retreat of every space, form or screen into which or onto which a figure of community could be projected. At the right time, then, the question has to be posed as to whether being-together can do without a figure and, as a result, without an identification, if the whole of its “substance” consists only in its spacing.⁶

The anonymous, someone(s), the intruder and the stranger, retreating aesthetics, already-unmade, naked sharing and naked image, neutral mourning, the invitation and the offering: these are some of the figures and phrasings that are taken up in this book and that might begin to serve as various responses to Nancy’s question, providing us with a series of scenes and senses as to what it might look like, but also how we might partake and participate in beingtogether without figure, identification, representation, project and projection, destination or enclosure. What Nancy was asking after, and what his work remains committed to thinking and enabling to remain open, is a praxis of sense and existence in which neither are given, revealed, or represented

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(poiesis), but remain to be created, invented, and decided, through a praxis that is also technē and ars. Yet a technique or an art that in the retracing of its retreating, and the retreating of its retracing, is an aesthetics of the already-unmade (which then is also the retreat and withdrawal of the given and the readymade). An already-unmade (or retreating) aesthetics is not the poietic production of being or becoming, but the inoperative praxis (Nancy) and worklessness (Blanchot’s désoeuvrement) that is unbecoming, and thus offers the sense of existence and its place, neither as readymade (yesterday, in the past) nor as yet-to-be-made (tomorrow, in the future), but as already-unmade here and now at every “decisive” moment. On the largest and yet most singular scale, it is not only a matter of making the world, but of unmaking it as well, and therein lie the political, ethical, and aesthetic questions of existence. The Time of Scenes With “Scene: An Exchange of Letters” (1996),⁷ longtime collaborators Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy published a series of letters written to each other in which they resume an ongoing debate regarding their respective readings of Aristotle’s Poetics, and in particular the issue of the proper translation and understanding of the notion of opsis as: scene, presentation (Nancy), or spectacle (LacoueLabarthe) in the ancient Stagirite’s theory of drama and stage production. The theoretical discussion and debate between the two philosophers primarily concerns a question centered around the issue of the figure, figuration, and figurality, one that Nancy summarized as follows: if there is a scene, is there, then, always a figure, and vice versa, if there is a figure, is there, then, always a scene/stage? It is an extremely engaging and important discussion, and one that within the context of this introduction cannot receive the kind of detailed analysis that it deserves. For our purposes, it might serve us well simply to note that Lacoue-Labarthe privileges enunciation and recitation (reading aloud) of the dramatic script, and largely abhors, in his words, “the rest—props, costumes, even lighting, not to mention acting, often pitiable or grotesque, of the actors—singers,” all of which “seemed to [him] accessory.”⁸ Contained in this resistance is LacoueLabarthe’s commitment to a poetics and aesthetics of defiguration, � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  

and in its anti-spectacular/sensational critical perspective, his position is closely aligned with Aristotle’s own famously discreet and one might say “Apollonian” poetics of aesthetic restraint. Nancy, on the other hand, while also not endorsing the spectacular, nonetheless will insist that where there is enunciation, there is always a body, writing, and performance—i.e., staging and mise-enscène—going so far as to write at one point: “ ‘Body,’ meaning already a stage.”⁹ For Nancy, the principal question is the “stage” itself, which is to say, the spacing of performance and the performative, and further and more precisely, as “the opening of the exterior as such, of ‘outside’ as ‘outside.’ ”¹⁰ The exposure to this opening, exterior, and outside is the very exposure that, as we noted above, is shared in the separated spacing (the with) of our being-together. Nancy envisions this in terms of “an extremely complex line of division . . . the line of the ‘body,’ the outline of the ‘figure,’ the delimitation, as well, of the ‘stage.’ One could well show how such a line organizes everywhere an intimate division and synthesis of all our identities and individualities.”¹¹ For Nancy at the time, this was a scene of “ontological figurality” that he had already presented just a few years earlier, in his book Le sens du monde (1993),¹² in which he speaks of a sort of configuration of space [that] would not be the equivalent of a political figuration. . . . It would trace the form of being-to-ward in being-together without identifying the traits of the toward-what or toward-whom, without identifying or verifying the “to what end” of the sense of being-in-common. . . . Of being-in-common, it would operate a transitivity, not a substantiality. But still there would remain something of the “figure,” something of the outline.¹³

As we have already encountered in the second section of this introduction, three years after the publication of The Sense of the World, Nancy will go further and, without exactly asking it, will present the question “as to whether being-together can do without a figure, and, as a result, without an identification, if the whole of its ‘substance’ consists only in its spacing.” If the figure or outline had been understood to be the remnant, vestige, and trace of the retreating that the body performs and stages in its finite singularity among, between, and around other bodies, then scene might be the name for the spacing and transitivity of being-together (the to or toward of shared � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  

exposure), which perhaps even does without a figure and identification or any other substance, including the subject (and intersubjectivity). As Lacoue-Labarthe notes, there are two stages, “of which one is assuredly the stage of the exhibition of figures and the other, which I do not know how to name, is in withdrawal of the exhibition.” I want to suggest that what I outlined above begins to describe this other stage, and in this book I propose “naked image of naked sharing” as the name for this scene of withdrawal and retreat of figures and partaking in this exposure to the outside.¹⁴ As Nancy makes clear, beyond or other than representation, presentation is not the presentation of but simply is the there is of existence in and as its opening to the outside. This is the archi-spatiality briefly discussed above, and what in chapter 4 I theorize, along with Nancy and Freud, as the fore-scene, in which the archi-/fore- is the originary spacing of sense/existence as division and separation, ensemble and partition. Further, it is an opening to the outside, an exteriority that in the distance of its proximity can be said to lie right around, and thereby allow us to say that the spacing of the fore-scene is at once archi- (originary) and peri- (around). In our thinking of each decision between us as a scene of aesthetic and ethical exposure, we replace formalism with the performative and, taking our cue from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, more specifically with the peri-performative, as that which lies prior to, around, and in lieu of the performative utterance, enunciation, exposition, or presentation.¹⁵ In doing so, it is as though we have joined Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of the scene in Aristotle’s Poetics with our reading of Aristotle’s Peri Psuches, his treatise on, or literally “around” (peri-), the soul, which, as I discuss in chapter 3 on Nancy’s writing on a posthumously published note by Freud, enables us to think of the soul or force of life and death as the extension and exposure of the body—its opening around and to the outside. In its three-part division and in the most schematic of terms, this book begins with anonymous scenes of drawing and erasing, intrusion and encounter (part 1: “Name No One”), moves to naked images and scenes staged by (as) outstretched and extended bodies in their shared naked exposure (part 2: “Naked”), and then to scenes of exposure to the anteriority of loss, withdrawal, and retreat in photography � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  

and among the offering of and partaking in the infinite expenditure of readymade things (part 3: “Neutral and Unbecoming”). Inspired and informed by Derrida’s early essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” chapter 1, “Name No One Man,” is an extended theoretical meditation on Robert Rauschenberg’s famous work Erased de Kooning Drawing, from 1953. I argue that by withdrawing drawing by drawing with erasers, Rauschenberg not only performs the scene of drawing as scene of erasing, but through this very workless technique and praxis draws the with of shared-separation, such that it can be said that in this work, drawing and erasing, Rauschenberg and de Kooning are incommensurably drawn together, and the spacing of decision is sustained. Following Derrida’s deconstruction of the trace, erasure is archi-writing/drawing’s originary force of intrusion and interruption, in which the seemingly blank sheet of paper and its non-evidentiary and non-signatory traces are here theorized as the fore-scene of being-together. In the contemporary era of hyper-securitization via identification and its technological verification, we also need to think about paper as a space of exile and of disappearance, along the various axes of these systems of surveillance and documentation. Omnipresent and ordinary substrate and material support of the trace, we know that paper is, nonetheless, something more than simply a nominally ephemeral medium (“just a piece of paper”), while at the same time it tends to be overlooked and made nearly invisible, something like a fore-surface that infinitely recedes into its ground. It is in this way that paper marks the shift from modernity and things, to scenes, including scenes of writing, erasing, and other modes of sharedseparation, such that what we are calling the decision between us might be further understood as the paper (non-contractual or otherwise) between us. Paper is a body and can come to constitute a corpus, and with this comes the notion of paper, its body, being sacrificed in order to become pure medium. But what might it mean to think in terms of a non-sacrificial relation to paper, one that would lie outside of the logics and economies of exchange, the gift, currency, and other such systems of general equivalence (commensuration)? These questions are raised and addressed in the final chapter of this book. Chapter 2, “Name No One Name,” is a reading of Jean Genet’s essay “What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Little Squares All the Same � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  

Size and Shot Down the Toilet” (1967), and in particular his philosophical reflection on his anonymous encounter with a stranger on a train. As in the previous chapter, intrusion is theorized as the force of coexistence and its sense that separates and thereby opens up sense to sense (its outside) and is spacing that can be shared in its incommensurability. Yet here intrusion is a way to understand Genet’s own sudden sense that every man is equal to every other, or as Nancy might put it, “the equality of persons in the incommensurability of singularities.”¹⁶ By sensing “that everyone is unique, but with a unicity that exceeds the ‘one’ of everyone,” and by sensing that everyone is equal, but an equality that exceeds the commensuration of everyone, we might say that Genet heeds what “naked existence calls for”: an extension and exposure toward the outside, and of sustaining the spacing of “decision,” “between,” and “us” as unmade.¹⁷ Following Derrida, I would argue that a date is always the mark of the event of a signature, one that inscribes the distance and proximity between the singular and the plural; intrusion and invitation; the name and the anonymous; and drawing and erasing to the precise extent that the historicity (spatially and temporally) of any signature lies in it being the trace of former presence now absent yet remaining, and thereby at once unique and iterative. As their respective titles suggest, chapters 1 and 2 and the works discussed therein concern a series of questions around naming and counting, and their irreducibility to any one person or name or to any common measure of their equality. In addition to the works already mentioned, others that are drawn upon here in which no one man or name is named or counted include Maurice Blanchot’s The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, and Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, both published in 1953. To the precise extent that they bear the mark if not “of the event of a signature” then of the trace of that signature’s erasure, they share a date with Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing—as though 1953 were a date of inscribed erasure, again and again. A sheet of paper from which figurative drawing has been erased is something like an unmade bed. With this analogy we mark the relation between part 1 and parts 2 and 3 of this book, and the move from our discussion of a sheet of paper as scene of drawing/erasing, � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  10

to an unmade bed and its sheets as scenes of bodies in their retreat. Whether as the scene of erasing or the scene of withdrawing, these scenes are to be understood not as “empty,” but as unmade. So that, if following Nancy, body means already a stage, then in part 2, “Naked,” and its two chapters, I theorize naked image as the scene alreadyunmade by bodies in their proper expropriation and separation, which is also to say in the shared (naked) exposure to their incommensurable singularity and finitude. Yet in the move from surfaces seemingly empty, blank, and abstract to others that are unmade, retraced/retreating, and opened to the outside, we might also recognize the historiographic difference between Clement Greenberg’s medium-specific formalism and that aesthetic ideology’s radical displacement by Leo Steinberg. For as we recall, it was in lectures and essays from the late 1960s, such as “Other Criteria,” that Steinberg interrupted Greenberg’s “flat picture plane” by surgically inserting into that phrase a simple single word: bed, now grafted onto the word flat. In other words, I want to suggest that by coining the phrase “flatbed picture plane,” Steinberg not only famously pointed to a historical shift in the axis of painting, drawing, and other two-dimensional visual art forms from the vertical to the horizontal, a shift that he argued was inaugurated by a number of artists in the years immediately following World War II, and most importantly by Robert Rauschenberg, Steinberg also made further inescapable the relation between works of art and beds, in which both are heteroclite surfaces and scenes of exposure to the outside. While we obviously can find a principal example in Rauschenberg’s Bed painting of 1955, I want to suggest that his Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953 is its own flat unmade bed picture plane. Following Rosalind Krauss and her own recent intervention into the critical discourse of medium specificity, we might conceive of the unmade bed as a principal “technical support” of modern and contemporary social-sexual aesthetics, thereby marking a shift from medium to scene (what Krauss calls “the post-medium condition”).¹⁸ As scene of a workless aesthetico-ethical technique and praxis, the unmade bed would, at the same time, however, put a certain pressure on the “support” aspect of its “technical support,” and require us to replace the notion of supporting with that of sustaining—in particular, the sustaining of the spacing of shared-separation (its � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  11

tension, suspension, and suspended tense and sense—irreducible to any “post-” even). Remarkably, this is presented in artist Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain (1984–2003), one of the “two moments from the post-medium condition” that Krauss has recently championed. In Calle’s work, a missed encounter between lovers is labeled “Unhappiness,” and represented by a series of photographs of unmade beds in hotel rooms. In contrast to Calle/Krauss, we are here theorizing the unmade bed as a scene of sex in the event of neither unhappiness nor happiness, but as a scene of sex in (and as) withdrawal and retreat. A certain salutation and bidding adieu, to both happiness and unhappiness, and instead a partaking in a sense of being-together that is more incommensurable than either of the other two. This would be a pact or promise of a non-consensual future; a shared commitment to a relation, rapport, and spacing of incommensuration (rather than Krauss’s “invagination”).¹⁹ This study goes no further in its discussion of Krauss’s technical support or Calle’s Exquisite Pain, but it does examine other scenes, including, in chapter 3, “Naked Sharing,” Freud’s posthumously published note from August 22, 1938, on Psyche, extension, and space.²⁰ In that note, Freud suggests that, contra “Kant’s a priori determinants,” “space may be the projection of the extension of the psy­ chical apparatus,” and that “no other derivation is probable.” The last line reads: “Psyche is extended; knows nothing of it.” It is this line that Nancy will highlight beginning in the late 1970s, including in his own short note on “Psyche,”²¹ and that he will return to again and again and that will remain central to his thinking and writing on corpus, body, soul, spacing, and through his reading of Bataille, what he will refer to as non-knowledge, in which exposure is prior to any form of extension (let alone “projection”). This is what Derrida means when he writes (somewhat against Descartes’s extensio and as part of an attempt to translate Heidegger’s own use of the word Erstreckung, or extension, distinct from Descartes’s use): Erstreckung names a spacing that, “prior to” the determination of space as extensio, comes to extend or stretch out being-there, the there of being, between birth and death. As an essential dimension of Dasein, the Erstreckung opens the between that binds it at once to its � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  12

birth and to its death, the movement of suspense by which it itself tends and extends itself between birth and death, these two receiving their meaning only from that intervallic movement.²²

Extension is the ex-posed tension (literally, the ex-tension) of separation. In the time of scenes, this is what, in the movement of its suspension, is aesthetically and ethically sustained as the decision between us, in the infinite binding of our incommensurable births and deaths. For as Nancy recently stated, “If we are ‘finite’ insofar as we are mortal, this finitude configures our access to the infinite.”²³ For, according to Nancy, to be exposed toward-the-world, and therefore to partake in its sense, is to be exposed to the incommensurability of the world, experienced as the shared naked exposure to the force of finitude (including in the form of pain, suffering, intrusion—including the intrusion that is life and that is death). Neither as object, Idea, horizon, or other point of return, this naked sharing is simply the presentation (exposition, naked image) of exposure to the nakedness of existence itself—in and as its very retreat and withdrawal from presence and substance. It is the sense (aisthesis) of this that we infinitely “suffer” in the finitude of our being-together as shared-separated bodies or, to quote Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille, as “living beings, in danger of life.”²⁴ Existence is precisely the risk that we take in living. It is “that strange turmoil of crossing through life for nothing—but not exactly in a pure loss.”²⁵ And it is the decision to run this risk of existence that is to be decided each time in our exposure to the there, an “intervallic movement” that is no place other than right here, just between us. Chapter 4, “Naked Image,” looks at Marguerite Duras’s récit The Malady of Death, and The Anatomy of Hell, Catherine Breillat’s filmic redaction of the Duras story, as literary and cinematic presentation of the scene of naked sharing between bodies, when one body—that of a naked woman in both works—lies outstretched and extended and, like the figure of Psyche for Freud and Nancy, is the very body of nonknowledge in its exposure to the in-appropriable outside. The chapter ends with a brief meditation on the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s photographic image of an unmade bed. The discussion of the interrelations between beds, the alreadyunmade, and photography is continued into the third part of the � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  13

book, “Neutral and Unbecoming,” and its first chapter, “Neutral Mourning,” in which I read Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, via a theorization of perigraphic writing, reading, and photography through which Barthes opens up a space for a shared sense of the future anteriority of loss and death, with us, his readers. Neither subject to tragic or traumatic paralysis in the face of loss (including in the form of melancholia) or catharsis and its release from such constraint (end-pleasure), I point to the ways in which by writing his book on photography focused around the recent death of his mother and in the midst of his inconsolable mourning, Barthes returns to the theme of the neutral, and thereby approaches a sense of what it might mean to speak in terms of neutral mourning in, around, and through photography and the anteriority of its loss in the future to which photography is one particularly affective scene of exposure. The final chapter of the book, “Unbecoming Community,” returns to the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, this time by focusing on his gallery installations of paper stacks and candy piles, in which those who encounter the work are faced with a series of possible decisions regarding their interaction with the work. Exhibited as part of a potentially infinite number of large, monochromatic sheets of paper, the blank sheet of paper reenters our discussion, once again raising questions of number, counting, numeration, and anonymity, no one, and some thing, now presented in the singularity of its multiplicity: a sheet of paper of an indefinite and innumerable many other sheets of paper. So too with the pieces of candy, in which, by accepting the offer to take a piece, someone comes to partake in the sustaining of the work’s infinite expenditure and its status not as readymade, but as already-unmade. The audience in-completes the work and, by radically shifting the Duchampian paradigm, shares in a separation among and between themselves and things, such that the only community constituted is one that can be said to exist neither in the presence of its being nor in the potentiality of its becoming, but rather in the actuality of its infinite finitude, which is to say, as unbecoming. As the very last line of  “Res ipsa et ultima,” the coda to the English version of his book A Finite Thinking (and hence the very last line of the book), Jean-Luc Nancy writes—somewhat enigmatically—“The time of modernity is followed by the time of things.”²⁶ In thinking about � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  14

the spacing of shared-separation that a work of art is, in its presentation, exhibition, and exposition, which thereby aesthetically stages and sustains the space of decision, I not only want to argue that decision is an ethical and aesthetic scene, but also that the time of things may be either followed by or coincide with what we might call the time of scenes. For if, as Gonzalez-Torres and the other artists and authors in their own respective ways suggest, the decision between us may not be located in any one thing or in some imagined gathered totality of things (objects, works, commodities, gifts, fetishes, sacrificial substances, etc.), but lies in sustaining—by sharing in and out—the spacing of separation as the only place of existence. The scenes that it remains for us to decide, each time. Maurice Blanchot perhaps expressed this most beautifully, and in a way that would almost seem to touch upon each of the chapters and themes of this book, when, in The Infinite Conversation, he wrote: This time, it is no longer a question of seeking to unify. In the other I no longer want to recognize one whom a still common measure— the belonging to a common space—holds in a relation of continuity or unity with me. . . . What is now in play, and demands relation, is everything that separates me from the other, that is to say the other insofar as I am infinitely separated from him—a separation, fissure, or interval that leaves him infinitely outside me, but also requires that I found my relation with him upon this very interruption that is an interruption of being . . . the unknown in its infinite distance. An alterity that holds in the name of the neutral.²⁷

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�: Name No One Man

Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) counts as the most distinct image in twentieth-century art, and perhaps in the entire history of art (fig. 1). Given that the work consists of a single sheet of drawing paper (matted, labeled, and framed) and that this sheet of paper appears to be almost completely absent of any visible marks, thereby granting it a legibility limited to the ordinary and unremarkable, it would seem that the claim that I have just made about the work is insupportable. Based upon the evidence, it can easily be argued that the sheet of paper doesn’t bear anything remotely resembling an image, and that in its sheer ordinariness, the semantic limits of any meaningful sense of distinction are pushed to the breaking point. Nonetheless, in what follows I will argue that through its signature deployment of erasure, its refusal of the evidentiary, and its partaking of archival logics, the Erased de Kooning presents us with a whole series of questions about the act of counting, about what and who counts, about the accounted and the unaccounted for, and about what it might mean “to occupy without counting.”¹ Through a praxis of  withdrawal and retreat that is guided by the palindromic imperative to name no one man, the Erased de Kooning Drawing is the exposition of an image of shared sociality, and thereby a thinking of the political that has never been more crucial and is the mark of the work’s political in addition to ethical and art historical distinction. What follows, then, is just as much an issue of legibility as it is of visibility, and more precisely, in the form of the aporia of reading what remains unwritten in writing, and of seeing what remains unforeseeable in that which is seen. These are political questions, in

Figure 1. Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953; traces of ink and crayon on paper, mat, label, and gilded frame; 25¼ in. ´ 21¾ in. ´ ½ in. (64.14 cm ´ 55.25 cm ´ 1.27 cm); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase through a gift of Phyllis Wattis. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

that, as Jacques Rancière affirms, politics is always a policing of visibility and invisibility, and so to make the political happen as something other than a sanctioned form of politics, it is necessary to break through this dialectical trap by a movement toward that which is unforeseeable and imperceptible, and that which exists outside the boundaries and mandates of compulsory and confessional visibility and identification, and violent visual oblivion or disappear� � �   �  20

ance. The fact that paper has been one of the principal material surfaces, objects, and spaces for these contestations over who and what counts is of great consequence for us here, in our consideration of Rauschenberg’s drawing in terms of its political-aesthetic and ethical import. Rauschenberg and the Scene of Erasing In this chapter, we turn to various scenes of writing and drawing, beginning with Jacques Derrida’s 1966 lecture “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” In it, Derrida addresses the metaphors of writing in the historical development of Freud’s theories of perception, the unconscious, and memory, all of which might be said to culminate in Freud’s 1925 paper “A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad.” However, from as early as 1895, in his book Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud had been seeking a technological analogy that would serve as a conceptual model for the structure of the mental apparatus, the psyche. Specifically, he was seeking some sort of apparatus of writing that in its ability to illustrate this structure and its operation would need to satisfy a double requirement: it would need to possess “a potential for indefinite preservation and an unlimited capacity for reception of the inscriptions that have been made on it.”² A single sheet of paper will not qualify, since as Freud writes, “The receptive capacity of the writing-surface is soon exhausted”—filled up, and hence with no more room for any additional legible marks or traces to be made on it. Alternatively and for opposite reasons, a chalkboard also will not qualify, since while it retains its infinite capacity to receive traces and marks, it does so through the necessary process of wiping away some or all of those that had been previously made, hence negating its potential to preserve. Confronted with this relation between the properties of writing and erasing to be one of mutual exclusivity, Freud will only find a resolution to his dilemma in the Mystic Writing Pad (Wunderblock), a device—in fact, little more than a child’s toy (as Derrida reminds us)— that came onto the market not long before Freud’s writing, and that many of us today are still familiar with from our own childhoods. It is one of those three-layered tablets, consisting of a translucent celluloid sheet below which is attached along one edge a sheet of wax � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  21

paper, both of which are then attached along a single edge to a thin wax slab. Only a stylus is necessary to write or draw on its surface; no ink or graphite is required. By lifting the first and second sheets up and away from the wax slab, whatever marks have been registered on the pad are effectively erased, clearing the surface for more marks and traces to be made upon it. Now, this would seem to be as much of a disqualifying feature as the simple sheet of paper or the chalkboard, except that, as Freud points out, if one looks at the wax slab under certain lighting conditions, one can perceive traces—in the form of impressions in the waxy surface—of the marks that had previously been made with the stylus. Thereby the wax slab, and by extension the Mystic Writing Pad, functions as an apparatus of infinite receptivity and preservation of traces. As Freud satisfyingly concludes: Thus the Pad provides not only a receptive surface that can be used over and over again, like a slate, but also permanent traces of what has been written, like an ordinary paper pad: it solves the problem of combining the two functions by dividing them between two separate but interrelated component parts or systems.³

While Freud finds in the Mystic Writing Pad an analogy for the relation in the mental apparatus between unlimited reception and indefinite preservation, the quotation above makes it clear that this is based upon his understanding of the apparatus (psyche and child’s toy at once) as one that maintains a structural division between this reception and preservation, thereby maintaining these as “two separate but interrelated component parts or systems.” But of course things are a bit more complicated and, shall we say, entangled, in that what enables this writing apparatus to work in the way that Freud wants it to work requires it to be entirely dependent upon the process of erasure, and in such a way that, as we shall see, it becomes difficult to construe the relation between writing and erasing as antonymic, and the division and maintenance of their separation to be ever truly possible. In the last sentence of his “Note,” Freud hints at this, when he imagines what would seem to be an impossible two-handed writing-erasing: If we imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Writing-Pad while another periodically raises its covering-sheet � � �   �  22

from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way in which I tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of the mind.⁴

Toward the end of his essay, Derrida states that in the “Note,” Freud “performed for us the scene of writing. [Then immediately goes on to say] But we must think this scene in other terms than those of individual or collective psychology, or even of anthropology. It must be thought in the horizon of the scene/stage of the world, as the history of that scene/stage.”⁵ Note that Derrida does not say “the history of the horizon of the scene/stage,” but instead “the history of that scene/stage.” The difference may appear to be so slight as not to warrant comment (or notice), and yet what lies in this seemingly infinitesimal gap is nothing less than the difference between the sense that writing-erasing is the stage of history and the scene of the world as infinitely finite—the retracing of its retreating—and of writing (and erasing if it can even be adequately recognized here) as nothing more than the representation of the world as a finite relation to the infinite. Which is to say, as beholden to some metaphysical force, of which writing would be little more than a predetermined exercise of transcription rather than the undetermined praxis of mise-en-scène—the latter of which is the space of decision, including the very decision of existence and world, together. Following quite closely the trail that Derrida had opened all those many years ago, we can say that “what we are describing here as the labor of writing [drawing] erases the transcendental distinction between the origin of the world and Being-in-the-world. Erases it while producing it.”⁶ Erasure is the source of creation, including the “creation of the world,” so to speak. This is, then, a path-breaking force and space at once, that in its breaching makes any outline, partition, or limit (including any sense of horizon) neither permeable/transparent nor impermeable/ opaque. For Freud it is Bahnung; for Derrida, frayage; and for us, a retreating retracing—all of which semantically resonate as the breaching and fraying of every edge that would otherwise coalesce as the confinement of an outline, partition, or limit (including a horizon) and render the scene a tableau of representation. Which is to say that the labor or praxis at issue here cannot be spoken about in the conventional terms of creation or destruction, but of distinction, in which � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  23

fraying’s frayed edge is the force and space of distinction. I shall return to this. At the same time, while we will want to preserve a degree of the conceptual open-endedness and indetermination of content that is found in Freud’s statement (from the 1895 book) that “in what pathbreaking [sic] consists remains undetermined,” we will nonetheless assert that when Rauschenberg performs for us the scene of drawing/ erasing, it is in the mode of neither representation nor transcription, and therefore calls for a method of analysis, if not in fact a discipline, other than that of interpretation. For in the Erased de Kooning Drawing, we would not say that Rauschenberg has represented erasing, or drawing, or his authorial presence or de Kooning’s artistic absence— propositions all of which make little to no sense here. And while we now know that Derrida was quite insistent about the need to think the scene of writing that Freud performs for us as the scene/stage of the world, as readers of Freud we cannot help but hear in that phrasing a reference to the one most commonly associated with Freudian psychoanalysis—namely, the primal scene. In fact, in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety Freud draws exactly this analogy between writing, spatial movement, and sexual acts when he writes: As soon as writing, which entails making liquid flow out of a tube onto a piece of white paper, assumes the significance of copulation, or as soon as walking becomes a symbolic substitute for treading upon the body of mother earth, both writing and walking are stopped because they represent the performance of a forbidden sexual act.⁷

Following upon this, and confronted with the Erased de Kooning, we might want to ask what kind of “performance of a forbidden sexual act” is enacted when the scene of writing (or drawing) becomes the scene of erasure; and further, whether running if not walking might not be (at least partially) a more accurate way of describing the treading upon the body of another artist as seems to have taken place here. In what follows, I try to think the sociality and spatiality of other scenes and surfaces that imply neither the masturbatory nor the incestuous acts suggested by Freud, but some other equally forbidden

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alliance, and a path-breaking all its own. One that I will argue is the opening onto, and exposure to, a sociality of shared-separation, a distinctly incalculable shared sociality that is, at times, also a traitorous collaboration. Neither a psychological, anthropological, or perhaps even political community as the being or becoming of a collective totality, but rather the sociality of what we might name the unbecoming community. I shall begin, then, with two divergent statements, each in response to work made by the artist Robert Rauschenberg in the early 1950s. The first is that of an exasperated Barnett Newman, who, upon seeing Rauschenberg’s unpainted canvas paintings, exclaimed: “Humph! Thinks it’s easy. The point is to do it with paint.” The second is part of the epigraph to John Cage’s essay about his close friend and collaborator Rauschenberg, addressed to an anonymous addressee, and intended to clarify an issue of historical chronology: “To Whom It May Concern: The white paintings came first, my silent piece came later— J.C.”⁸ The White Paintings referred to by Cage are a series of works that Rauschenberg executed in 1951, using nothing more than ordinary white house paint and canvas, and of course “my silent piece” refers to Cage’s perhaps most well-known and often discussed composition, 4'33" (1952)—four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Clearly, Cage and Rauschenberg understood the potential of an artistic practice that effectively, and yet through the simplest of methods, could fundamentally alter conceptions of painting and musical composition, in which, for instance, an unpainted canvas and a specific duration of silence, which are none other than that unpainted canvas and that specific period of silence, are the persistence of existing as painting and as musical composition. In the White Paintings, 4'33", and Erased de Kooning Drawing, the work of art exposes and is exposed to the potential to be and to not-be at once, an exposure that is what William Haver refers to as “art’s work.”⁹ Art’s work runs the risk that is the full force of potentiality, such that in the wake of the White Paintings it will be difficult any longer to ignore the retreat of image that is the condition that enables any image to be registered, just as Cage’s piece performs silence as the outside that insidiously dwells within all sound and enables the latter to be heard.

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Erasure Erasure turns drawing, turns a—and perhaps any—drawing around. It turns on drawing by betraying drawing, and hence within the realm of drawing, erasing cannot be trusted or counted on. As we have said, the incalculable, that which cannot be counted, is a predicament that we may not be able to, nor want to, overcome. The questions of calculation, of how many count and even more so, of how one counts and of who counts (both as counter and counted), all of these, it appears, must remain only partially answerable. For when it is a matter of drawing, does erasing still count, even if, as I have already suggested, it cannot be counted on—that is, trusted? When it comes to drawing, what can one count on? In the case of Willem de Kooning, it seems justified to say that not only did he continue in the artistic tradition of preliminary sketches, drawings, and studies, but that he was a consummate draftsman— not simply one who drew, but who masterfully exhibited the classical qualities of disegno, that artistic achievement enshrined by Giorgio Vasari and academically maintained for centuries. Presumably this played some part in Rauschenberg’s decision to approach this well-known older artist and request one of his drawings for the purposes of erasing it. Evidently, and not too surprisingly, de Kooning initially balked at the idea, but eventually relented, and decided to give the young artist not simply any drawing, but one that was thoroughly and heavily covered with pencil, crayon, charcoal, and so forth. Yet, as Leo Steinberg suggested in one of his last lectures on Rauschenberg, there may be another reason why he, Rauschenberg, was drawn to de Kooning, one that has less to do with de Kooning’s drawing practice than it has to do with his, de Kooning’s, own erasing, or more accurately the fact that, in Steinberg’s words, “De Kooning was the one who belabored his drawings with an eraser.”¹⁰ One might go so far as to argue that de Kooning’s expert draftsmanship was predicated upon his approach or exposure to drawing’s potentiality, including its potential to not-be—namely, its exposure to the force of erasure. The relation between drawing and erasing, then, is not oppositional as much as it is an infinite folding of the two across each other. Erasure is the undrawing or better yet the with-drawing � � �   �  26

of drawing, of drawing with the eraser that is the withdrawal of drawing, without necessarily being drawing’s negation or annihilation. Decreation rather than destruction, worklessness rather than the total absence of work. As Rauschenberg has said, he wished to “use the eraser as a drawing tool.”¹¹ In all of this we cannot help but hear an idiomatic resonance with Heidegger’s own philosophical formulations, a resonance that is at once somewhat purposeful, unavoidable, and yet not entirely coincident in its philosophical or aesthetic import. As we recall, when in his discussion of the work of art bringing into the open the truth of the relation between things and earth, Heidegger writes that Albrecht Dürer (another one of those consummate draftsmen from the history of art) “did after all make the well-known remark: ‘For in truth, art lies hidden within nature; he who can wrest it from her, has it.’ ” Heidegger then goes on to explain, by way of a truly virtuosic performance of rhetorical poetics: “ ‘Wrest’ here means to draw out the rift and to draw the design with the drawing-pen on the drawing-board.” The onomatopoetic quality is even more audible in the original German, which reads: “Reissen heisst hier Herauscholen des Risses und den Riss reissen mit der Reissfeder auf dem Reisbrett.” As David Ferrell Krell explains in an editorial note to Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” lecture, “In German der Riss is a crack, tear, laceration, cleft, or rift; but is also a plan or design in drawing. The verb reissen from which it derives is cognate with the En­ glish word writing. Der Riss is incised or inscribed as a rune or letter. Heidegger here employs a series of words . . . to suggest that the rift of world and earth releases a sketch, outline, profile, blueprint or ground plan. The rift is writ.”¹² The rift between earth and world is to be understood here as the place of nature, which in turn is to be understood not as the site of a “natural writing” but as a site that only exists in writing, or more broadly speaking, as technique. Nature (physis) is therefore wholly of the technological (technē), and if it has a relation to “truth,” it is one only born by the latter. A bit earlier in the lecture, Heidegger makes a point that will be of importance to our ongoing discussion here, when he emphasizes that this lacerating strife that is opened up by writing/ drawing is not simply a space of separation, but also one of intimacy, and comes to constitute a common ground. As he writes: � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  27

Strife is not a rift [Riss], as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other. This rift carries the opponents into a provenance of their unity by virtue of their common ground. It is a basic design, an outline sketch, that draws the basic features of the upsurgence of the clearing of beings. This rift does not let the opponents break apart; it brings what opposes measure and boundary into its common outline.¹³

In other words, it is breaching as fraying rather than of being sewn up, and therefore is the force of path-breaking and space of pathsharing. However, whereas Heidegger speaks in terms of unity, we will think in terms of “shared-separation,” and whereas he will locate the source of this unity in a common ground, if we wish to retain the notion of a common ground, it will only be in terms of a shared scene of withdrawal and retreat. Which is then to say that this is no longer a scene of unconcealment, as Heidegger argued, but of mutually shared exposure to an exteriority that lies no place other than just between us. This is the spacing of decision, the ethical profile of which is always a question as to how this outline is retraced in its retreat. This, in turn, then, is a question of technique—one of erasing just as much (if not just the same) as writing or drawing, a relation that is without predetermined measure, and that remains to be decided. It is in this way that we can say that by drawing out, bringing to the fore, and staging the space of division and separation, by withdrawing drawing (retreat), erasure is at the same time drawing the scene of decision as an opening out or rupture of the “with.” Through with-drawing drawing by drawing-with erasing, Rauschenberg performs for us the scene of erasure as the mise-en-scène of drawing, its fore-scene if not its origin. Or, its origin in the sense that erasure is the abandonment of its site, the path or trail that drawing accedes to in its retracing of erasure’s withdrawal and retreat, which is to say, through the path-breaking access that it draws out. I take it that this is what Derrida meant when he wrote, “Traces thus produce the space of their inscription only by acceding to the period of their erasure.”¹⁴ The retracing of the trace’s assent to the periodicity of its erasure is what Jean-Luc Nancy has theorized as the distinct. For, as he reminds us, and as the word’s etymology affirms, the distinct is not simply that which is separated, but more precisely “what is separated � � �   �  28

by marks . . . what is withdrawn and set apart by a line or trait, by being marked also as withdrawn [retrait].”¹⁵ As Nancy further points out and goes on to argue: while religion is the name for the establishment of a bond, sacrifice is the attempt to appropriate that which is separated in an attempt to secure a bond (and in a sense to attempt to erase erasure). Now, given the way in which Nancy theorizes the image as that which breaches the distance of withdrawal all the while maintaining separation through the mark of its retreat, the image is consecrated neither to religion nor to sacrifice but to an a-theological sacred that is the mark of its distinction. Such that, as Nancy states: “Through the mark that it [the image] is, it establishes simultaneously a withdrawal and a passage that, however, does not pass”—passage as impasse, which of course is nothing other than the spacing of the aporia. The image is rapport and relation; the offering of an opening and exposure unto separation; an access to an infinite relation or rapport to finitude. Image is the spacing of the unbinding bond of sharedseparation. There is no image other than an aporetic image. The image is not the representation, picture, or even a form of this force of separation-in-contact, but rather is the staging, presentation, and exposition of the intimacy of this shared-separation. Image is the scene of a shared exposure to the infinite finitude of existence. Or as Nancy puts it, “This intimate force is not ‘represented’ by image, but the image is it, the image activates it, draws it and withdraws it, extracts it by withholding it, and it is with this force that the image touches us.”¹⁶ As Nancy goes on to explain, the image-function entails a double separation/distinction, yet these are two ways or steps that can neither be distinguished from, nor should be confused with, each other. The image is pulled away from a ground (fond), and the ground comes to the fore, yet a “fore” not to be confused with being before, but rather as the coming forward of ground as image/surface. The image is cut out within a ground, creating edges and outlines by which the image is framed, spaced, or sketched out. As a result, “In this double operation, the ground disappears. It disappears in its essence as ground, which consists in its not appearing. One can thus say that it appears as what it is by disappearing. Disappearing as ground, it passes entirely into the image. But it does not appear for all that, and � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  29

the image is not its manifestation, nor its phenomenon. It is the force of the image”¹⁷ (and not the form, say, of Kantian and Greenbergian formalism). The image is the force of this passage of the image, of this syncopation of ground that, in an accompanying essay, Nancy will refer to as “distinct oscillation.” And so, contra Heidegger, Nancy can conclude that image as art “marks the distinctive traits of the absenting of truth, by which it is the truth absolutely.”¹⁸ Following upon all of this, to argue—as I wish to do—that the Erased de Kooning Drawing is a distinct image is at once to group it with any and all other images, and to separate it out as exceptional in its presentation and exposition of the kind of distinction that any image is in its force, as opposed to its form or content. It is in this way that we can speak of the work as performative, and of Rauschenberg performing for us erasure that is the staging of the scene of socalled originary writing or archi-trace. Which is then also to understand the presentation of erasure as the ground of the image, and the fore-scene of drawing, which not only “produce[s] the space and materiality of the sheet [of paper] itself,” but does so in a way that affirms that that very sheet of paper is not readymade, but already unmade. Indeed, we can attest that the sheet of paper is never empty, yet is never not withdrawing and disappearing—first and foremost from itself. For Derrida, this is a claim for the ontology of paper: Hasn’t “withdrawal” always been the mode of being, the process, the very movement of what we call “paper”? Isn’t the essential feature of paper the withdrawal or sidelining of what is rubbed out and withdraws beneath what a so-called support is deemed to back, receive, or welcome? Isn’t paper always in the process of “disappearing”—dying out—and hasn’t it always been?¹⁹

Erasing, as an unworking of the work of drawing, puts into question what it is we mean when we speak of the work of art, and of artistic practice as productive. Erasing is a process or act, a performative means of doing as a means of undoing, in which a matted and framed sheet of paper, as work of art, is the inessential residue of art’s work as unworking erasure. Erasure is the event of wanting not to or, as Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, might say, of preferring not to, draw in drawing. Yet it is a withdrawing that remains, residually and inexhaustibly, with drawing and within the space of drawing. Eras� � �   �  30

ing is potentially infinite, and defies closure or completion, such that Rauschenberg could never have erased enough. It is this inexhaustibility of erasure, with which he leaves us, or offers us, as though as a gift, here at the exhaustion of drawing. Between the two, drawing and erasing, is the disaster, not as mediating event or third term, neither as work nor the absence of work, but instead the disaster as the force of unbecoming, such that it might be said that it is this unworking that drawing and erasing share, in and as the intimacy (and distance) of their touch. It is here, in this zone of the incalculable, where drawing and erasing can be said (even if not seen) to coexist, that one encounters what might be understood, in all of its indeterminacy, as “originary writing”—that which, according to Derrida, “if there is one, must produce the space and the materiality of the sheet itself.” This is a shared space—of spacing as sharing—yet not in the sense of an equal partaking of some completed whole, but rather as that which, in its persistent open-endedness, always remains to be shared (partager of partes extra partes). The disaster that unverifiably marks the touching of drawing and erasing, their coexistence, at the same time leaves both drawing and erasing untouched and thereby hauntingly registers a rhythm that they share, and marks their eternal recurrence as that which is without complete reclamation or preservation. Neither a depthless bottom nor an absolutely superficial exteriority, the Erased de Kooning permanently disjoins “the two empirical certainties” that Freud believed he found in the Mystic Writing Pad. These being, according to Derrida, “infinite depth in the implication of meaning, in the unlimited envelopment of the present, and, simultaneously, the pellicular essence of being, the absolute absence of foundation.”²⁰ Rather, we might say that here, drawing is beside itself, and not just here now, but always, located at that nonlocalizable borderline or limit where drawing ends and erasing begins. One might also say that here, drawing is beside the point, including the point—or is it points (?)—to draw with. So to rephrase and reverse Newman’s statement, the point is “not to do it” with the pointed end of the pencil. But what is the “it” that is being done (Newman’s and Rauschenberg’s and even my own)? The answer as to what is at stake here might be something like: art, drawing, or perhaps something else as well, which remains imperceptible, again, � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  31

not only here and now but always and infinitely or, better yet, as infinitely imperceptible right on the very surface of the sheet of paper. Imperceptible but not hidden, the graphic trace of retreat that we are faced with here is one that by coining a new term, we might name eragraphic (Latin, eras: “to scrape or rub out”). For the moment, let us remain with drawing, and say that the point of erasing is to do it—namely, drawing—in reverse, a restating of drawing that is literally a turning back on the act of drawing, perhaps of turning one’s own back on drawing, and at the same time a turning again of, or within, drawing, that opens up or exposes drawing to its potential return (reinscription) or its potential abandonment. Erasure, then, is a drawing over, which inversely draws over drawing, and returns drawing to its former self—namely, erasure. Which is to argue that erasure, rather than being inevitably destined to follow drawing, precedes and is anterior to drawing—it is drawing’s pure potentiality. It is not that erasure exists on top of drawing, as some sort of epigraphic or superficial trace (clearly an impossibility), or that it simply and necessarily follows drawing as postscript, but that drawing is, that drawing happens, always under-erasure, thereby affirming erasure’s prior, or originary, status (again, as what Derrida refers to as archi-trace). Drawing’s origins, like all origins, are nothing more than a beginning again, a repetitive re-turning of drawing that is predicated upon erasure’s reversing or turning (its) back on drawing. One only draws to the extent that erasure has already happened, calling for or demanding drawing’s return. John Cage, in that essay on Rauschenberg cited earlier, writes, “The door is never locked. . . . It’s a joy in fact to begin over again. In preparation he erases the De Kooning.”²¹ As Derrida had repeatedly pointed out, “An unerasable trace is not a trace.”²² Which is to say that unless there is something to erase, drawing cannot be said to exist. This condition might be rephrased by the question: In what way can a drawing still be considered a drawing if it cannot be erased? Drawing presupposes erasure as originary absence, as that which enables drawing to be recognizable as drawing. Drawing is then to be understood as an inscriptive amnesia, the forgetting, and the getting over, of erasure. Ironically, then, erasing is the remembering of this absence within drawing; it is what helps drawing remember its own forgetting, not only what drawing forgets,

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but speaking ontologically, what drawing is—namely, an inscriptive forgetting. Drawing is one of those technologies, in this case, perhaps older than almost all others, through which forgetting is (at least momentarily) forgotten.²³ An erased drawing, such as the one presented by Rauschenberg, is, then, a forgetting of drawing’s amnesia, yet something other than the image of a representable memory. In its imaging of forgetting and absence, the Erased de Kooning might be understood as an example of what used to be called an imago. In the essay “Distinct Oscillation,” Nancy calls our attention to this word, and the way in which it (the word imago and the particular image that it names) designated the effigy of the absent, the dead, the ancestors, and the frayed line that draws out a lineage that at the same time marks a tear in that very same relational fabric. As Nancy writes, “It [imago] does not repair the rip of their [ancestors’] death: it does less and more than that. It weaves, it images absence. It does not represent this absence, it does not evoke it, it does not symbolize it, even though all this is there too. But, essentially, it presents absence.”²⁴ If, as Nancy goes on to define it, the image—any image—is the presentation of “the empty place of the absent as a place that is not empty,” then the Erased de Kooning is not only an image, but in its performative presentation and miseen-scène of erasure, is one of  immeasurable distinction. As the scene of a performative undoing, the Erased de Kooning is a staging of the ground of the image that, by the withdrawing of its erasure, draws out the “with” and brings it to the fore, as a scene of being-drawn-together by—with—erasure. A matter of neither the gathering nor the expulsion of signs, but a cosignatory drawing/erasing, this two-handed entanglement (and double-handed collaboration) clearly calls for an entirely different consignation. Signatures In a word, no draftsmanship. And even in 1953, he sensed where he was heading—toward a visual art that had no further use for the genius of drawing. He may himself have begun to use the eraser, not in De Kooning’s manner, constructively, but to see drawing expunged.²⁵

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While in a certain sense it seems quite correct to say, as Steinberg does in this statement just quoted, that by executing the Erased de Kooning Drawing, Rauschenberg effectively announced the deprivileging of draftsmanship within the art historical and aesthetic criteria of judgment, ironically, it might also be said that he reveals the most fundamental aspects, one might go so far as to say the ontology, of drawing. It may not be that following Rauschenberg’s erasing, drawing must be proclaimed dead (clearly an impossibility, even beyond the obvious history that it has subsequently enjoyed), but that the force of erasure in drawing—that is, drawing’s potentiality— will be all the more difficult to deny. Which is to say that once erasure happens, as in the way it happened back in 1953, it is difficult to erase erasure. This is affirmed by the title of the work, in which the retention of the word drawing bears the persistent and inextricably folded relation between drawing and erasing. Yet this understanding of the ontology of drawing also seems to be affirmed by Steinberg himself, when he calls our attention to the historiographic eminence of this very drawing within de Kooning’s oeuvre. For it can be argued that this is de Kooning’s most famous drawing, an assertion to which one might add that the same can be said for Rauschenberg.²⁶ Yet perhaps more perplexing than this mutual sharing in a similarly strange basis of recognition is the way it can be said that the Erased de Kooning Drawing is both de Kooning’s and Rauschenberg’s most famous drawing. It is here that the question of calculation necessarily arises, as one asks how it is that two artists, without working together on the same project, can receive fame from a single work. How might one account for this doubling of signatures, once drawn and once erased? In terms of collaboration—but of what sort? Claims have been made for two signatory presences, all the while based upon signatory traces that are in fact negligible to the point of being illegible. So: two signatures and no signatures, at once. The Erased de Kooning Drawing is a ghosting of signatory traces that, as traces, must be understood to be ghostly. Here, therefore, is a mutual haunting: of Rauschenberg and de Kooning, and of erasing and drawing. Ghosts (French: revenants) are literally the ones who return (French: revenir, “to come again” and “to come back”), and in this

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case, both artists can be said to have a ghostly presence. De Kooning in a persistence of inscribed traces that can never be completely erased; Rauschenberg in a turning drawing back, a returning to drawing through erasure that returns drawing to its originary condition, yet origin in the sense of remainder, return, and revenant. Both artists are present and absent, mutually and in reverse: de Kooning is absent as the one who draws, and Rauschenberg is present as the one who erases—absent in drawing and present in erasing, but in such a way that absence and presence no longer adequately serve as descriptors (perhaps suggesting that they never have and never will be adequate). This might be taken as a perverse inversion of the logic of absence and presence, yet no more so than any other instance of writing and rewriting. If we think of the sheet of drawing paper as the material space in which these two artists are drawn together by erasure, then we can begin to understand how it is that, with the Erased de Kooning Drawing, and the adding up of signatory traces—which is to say accounting for this doubling of signatures, and thereby addressing what appears to be a legal bind—it is necessary that we name no one man. For this drawing/erasing absolutely disrupts the logic of the first-person present indicative from which the validity and legitimacy of the signature is derived. Is this, then, a two-handed affair, or is it perhaps four? Who’s counting, and how? In an early essay on what she referred to as Rauschenberg’s “materialized images,” Rosalind Krauss observed that the surfaces of the artist’s early works existed as places where a certain equalization of things and a sense of sameness were achieved.²⁷ In his essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes famously argued, “A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet [he emphasized, and in a way that is not unimportant to the remainder of my own argument] this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.”²⁸ I would like to argue that the single sheet of paper that is the material basis of Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing is just such a “single field,” where a relation between artists takes the form of a non-identitarian and impersonal sameness,²⁹

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which is effected by a directionality that brings them, and drawing and erasing, together. This is an issue both of spacing and of temporality, including in terms of the becoming-space of time that defined the differing and deferring of Derrida’s notion of différance.³⁰ In his discussion of the temporal structure of the Mystic Pad, Derrida noted how it might be characterized according to Kant’s three analogies of experience— namely, permanence, succession, and simultaneity. In turn, he pointed out that in “reconstructing an operation, [Freud] can reduce neither time nor the multiplicity of layers” to any single time or space, so too might we think of the Erased de Kooning in terms of a scrambling of Kant’s three modes of time/experience, such that we might say that in its entanglement of hands, an in-operation is maintained by the very maintenance (French derivation: sustaining and holding between hands) of drawing/erasing’s periodicity and distinct oscillation. This is a manuscription, if you will, one that maintains that when it comes to shared-separation (partager), it is no longer possible to name one man, even though we don’t know at this stage exactly how many more men there are to be counted, because we still don’t know which men count and which do not. We might proceed, nonetheless, by giving ourselves over to a palindromic reading and writing practice, in which sameness is generated regardless of whether the reading or the writing follows a forward or backward direction. For what the Erased de Kooning Drawing attests to is that at the conjunction/disjunction of drawing and erasing that is the very space and materiality of sharing of sameness in difference, there is one single demand: name no one man. It is this phrase, exemplary in its palindromic effect that, in the case of this work, is the demand for a bidirectional multiplicity and unicity. A palindromic logic is structured through reversibility: a moving in two opposing directions that nonetheless yields an undeniable sameness. In terms of the correspondence between these two artists, it might be said that Rauschenberg is behind de Kooning, following the older artist, yet at the same time, de Kooning, as creator of the drawing, is behind Rauschenberg. However, Rauschenberg, as a newcomer, is now in front of or ahead of de Kooning. De Kooning has turned his back on the young artist, and has endorsed Rauschenberg’s erasure by putting his drawing behind him, and yet Rauschenberg, in turn� � �   �  36

ing back to de Kooning’s drawing, returns it or takes it back—expropriates it—by erasing it. They are, then, both traitors and collaborators, and it is in this traitorous collaboration of drawing and erasing, this nearly secret and imperceptible intimacy, that they await and haunt each other, and share in their mutual coming and unbecoming. Rauschenberg approaches de Kooning in a movement that is a matter of neither a directional back-to-back (implying succession, opposite ends, divergence), nor front-to-front (as in a mutual faceto-face, implying fusion, union, closure, confusion), but of front-toback and, at the same time, back-to-front (of approaching or being approached from behind; of taking the door alluded to by Cage in his discussion of this erased drawing, as a back door; of “doing it,” from behind or in reverse, as in coitus a tergo, or sex from behind, backto-front). It is through such a sexual-spatial positioning, such a dierectionality, that a non-relational relation occurs, that is also a nonrelational betrayal (again, the other meaning of collaborator), through a sameness that is not identity, and that makes it difficult to name one man in the space of drawing-erasing, and to be confident that there are ever simply two. This is also the position assumed by the German soldier Erik and the young French collaborator Riton, on a Parisian rooftop during the liberation of Paris, in one of the final scenes of Jean Genet’s 1953 novel Funeral Rites. Funeral Rites is Genet’s elegy to his lover Jean Decarnin (the doubling of first names should not be overlooked in such scenes of writing), who, as a Communist member of the French resistance, was picked off the barricades by a French collaborator whom Genet names Riton. More specifically and subversively, it is elegiac, by way of what Genet forces us to consider as a positive form of betrayal. For Genet imagines avenging the death of his lover and affirming the suffering he experiences over his loss, by falling in love with the collaborator and the enemy, with an intensity equal to that he felt for Jean. Leaning back against the brick monument, facing a Paris that was watching and waiting, Erik buggered Riton. Their trousers were lowered over their heels where the belt buckles clinked at each movement. The group was strengthened by leaning against the wall, by being backed up, and protected by it. If the two standing males had � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  37

looked at each other, the quality of the pleasure would not have been the same. Mouth to mouth, chest to chest, with their knees tangled, they would have been entwined in a rapture that would have confined them in a kind of oval that excluded all light, but the bodies in the figurehead which they formed looked into the darkness, as one looks into the future, the weak sheltered by the stronger, the four eyes staring in front of them. They were projecting the frightful ray of their love to infinity. . . . Erik and Riton were not loving one in the other, they were escaping from themselves over the world, in full view of the world, in a gesture of victory.³¹

Rauschenberg and de Kooning also share in the same direction, or perhaps it should be said that they share a non-relational space in which drawing and erasing are no longer diametrically opposed but rather expose them, together and in the same place, to an inexact sameness. This spatial relationality and directionality is neither intersubjective fusion nor some oedipal conflict, but the pleasure and joy of facing in the same direction, which leads to an expenditure of all signatory traces (i.e., identities), and is the dissolution of distinctions between self and other, absence and presence, creation and destruction. Together, they face in the same direction, onto a future without individual artistic egos and the sociality that is the relation of ego to ego that typically goes by the name of community. A reversal, or perhaps more radically an undoing of the structural logics of the indexical trace and the rhetorical apostrophe, the Erased de Kooning Drawing effects what I take Leo Bersani to mean when he speaks of an anonymous, relational narcissism, which is neither a mirror reflection of the self nor a representation of the other but the sense—without image—of an affective bond that interminably awaits its completion, as it is cast out and returned back, inscribed and erased, at once. Such a non-identitarian narcissism (that is, without individuation and ego) is, according to Bersani, the pleasure of losing oneself and inaccurately and yet never fully finding oneself replicated outside oneself, in which the self has obviously become something other than a subjective interiority and the outside is now understood to be the extensibility that is the ontological self, “itself.” � � �   �  38

A self, then, that is neither split nor doubled but singularly plural, and therefore exists in a non-alienating relation to the world, an indexical relation that is not the inscribed mark of a now-absent presence but the erased traces that mark a ghostly and multiple copresence. This is at once a collaborative labor and its deconstruction, and perhaps even a way of defining deconstruction as a certain kind of traitorous collaborative labor. As a coupled incompletion (including the infinite incompletion of the sociality of “the couple”—of its deconstruction), the enunciation of this mutual in-finishing of finitude and any sense of completion is barely audible. On the verge of silence and yet resounding in a space of anechoic resonance, the withdrawal of sound that resonates within the saying of the word—the unsayable word that is nakedly concealed in the saying of the word, and even in the word word. A mute word, barely a murmur or a mumble of a strange speech-act, no doubt, that in its performative undoing on the auditory level, resonates with what Rauschenberg performs on the perceptual level of visuality. It is to the mute resonance of the word that Jean-Luc Nancy has attuned our ears, at the opening of “Interlude: Mute Music,” a chapter in his book Listening. Formatted as a series or chain of one-sentence lines that extend for approximately the first page and a half of the text, each of which captures the auditory-linguistic refraction and inflection of the word word, we might take this to be an inspired poem or hymn to mute music, including that which opens up and sustains the play between silence or sound—not as an interlude or intermission between the two, but as the sonorous interlude that silence and sound strike, in their inextricable shared-separation. Mining the depths of its inaudible origins, Nancy begins at perhaps the only place where one might: with the literal, corporal, and buccal. The chapter begins: “Taken at its word: mot, ‘word,’ from mutum, an emitted sound deprived of sense, the noise produced by forming mu.” We understand Nancy here taking the word word (mot) as readymade, and more precisely as the readymade trace of its alreadyunmade emission: the mutum (retreating sound) of mu. Remarkably and within a single sentence, Nancy has effectively transported us from the domain of a national-linguistic literality to what we might � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  39

imagine to be the “first” echo chamber or cave of early, or shall we say primordial, utterance, and in so doing has deftly demonstrated not only that an inaudible sense lies within each, but that when listening to both of them, it may be impossible to tell them apart. In other words, the sound of the cave resounds in all of those forms of utterance that have come to articulate themselves as speech, enunciation, and language. Which is also to suggest that the already-unmade forescene is the “common” ground that they share, as the spacing of their distinct resonance. I will return to this, and the questions that are implicitly raised concerning politics and community, below. For the moment, however, I want to introduce into our discussion a work from earlier in the history of modern art than the moment in 1953 that we have been examining (yet entirely a part of its genealogy), all the while remaining within the vicinity of the French language, and even of the word mot. The work is Marcel Duchamp’s painting Tu m’ (1918), and I want to use it here as something of a sounding board, and by allowing our continued reading of Nancy’s “interlude” to infiltrate the discussion, to gain yet another critical valence on mutual incompletion as the deconstruction of collaborative labor, and more broadly as the staged presentation of the spacing of being-together as an already-unmade scene.³² The title of the Duchamp is a linguistic fragment of a French phrase, in which a portion of the phrase is missing, leaving open to question which of any number of transitive or reflexive verbs beginning with a vowel might be the missing one. (Again, the question of number and calculation arises.) Effectively, then, the action that the subject being addressed in the second-person familiar form (Tu) is doing, or has done, or is about to do, to the enunciating subject represented by the first-person reflexive form (m’ as the abbreviated form of moi) remains unwritten, and, one might suppose, unreadable and unspeakable. Yet it is this supposition that I seek to question, not through the projection of some imagined content into the space of this seemingly empty space of absence, but in a certain sense by accepting what might be taken to be an invitation by Duchamp to resist such temptations of representation, spurred by a desire for completion. In other words, not to fill in or to add to what is not there but instead to accept it as it is, by taking the word at its word, which � � �   �  40

here means in its very open-ended incompletion as trace of its retreat as already made, and to try to listen to what that sounds like. And not only what it sounds like, but how “You [. . .] me” opens up and sustains a spacing of shared-separation—which might very well be a way of thinking the resonance of decision. This would seem particularly to make sense here in the domain of the readymade. For in Tu m’, Duchamp not only calls for us to take the readymade word as already-unmade (the moi as m’), he also presents this as a performative speech-act in which incompletion is mutually enacted in its enunciation. The work or task here—at once Duchamp’s, ours, and the painting’s—is on the order of “Mutmut facere: to murmur, to mutter—muzō, to do mu, mu, to say m” (Nancy).³³ To make murmur, and “to do mu” as though there is not much to do, and so to say m, and thereby to mutter, as perhaps one of Duchamp’s alter egos, R. Mutt, might do! In fact, we might even perceive Tu m’ to be a quasi(or pseudo?) palindrome of R. Mutt. Although here, not even going so far as to self-name and enter into the realm of identity (even pseudonymously), but instead to “not say a word: just m or mu, muttio, mugio, to moo, mûnjami, mojami” (Nancy). So to say, in French, Tu m’ is not to say a word, but instead to emit the sound that is on the verge of a word, as though on the verge of the acquisition of language, and so according to Aristotle, of still being an animal, one that only makes noises and sounds, and does not utter a word. For even if that animal is one with udders, it is still left to moo. Yet it is this Aristotelian conceit that is undermined, given how difficult it is to tell the difference between the sound of to moo and Tu m’. An incompletion of a proper French phrase, and yet sounding so utterly French, Tu m’ is the enunciation of the “muteness, motus” that is a distinctive aspect of the French tongue, its style and air—its art of the “disappearance of a phoneme [amuïssement]: of the t at the end of the word mot” (Nancy). As we know so well by now, in his rereading and redirection of Heidegger, Nancy grants ontological priority to the “with” or “mit” of Mitdasein (the-with-being), although he even concedes that we cannot even speak of “the with” but simply of “with.” However, perhaps at this point, we might feel the need to go further, as we sense that even with is too much of a word for the kind of inaudible sharing that we wish to speak of here. Therefore, as we find ourselves seeking a � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  41

word that in its performative enactment in speech would be the undoing of with, we might draw from the withdrawal enunciated in Duchamp’s Tu m’ and hear the m’ in it, as the un-mot or un-mu even, as the undoing of the mu. Or better still, and even more apropos (which is to say resonant) given our prevailing discussion, not un- but um-, as though we could read and hear in um- a palindromic resonance of sameness: UM MU. Duchamp’s work points to this, in part through the painted image of a hand with index finger extended, visible near the lower middle of the painting. The hand’s resemblance to the kind of iconic graphic images of such directional pointers is not a coincidence, given that Duchamp hired “A. Klang,” a sign painter, to execute it, and thereby to serve as an artistic collaborator in his own right. Following the finger’s directional arrow, we notice that the hand is pointing to a white rectangular field painted next to it and that this image resembles a single blank sheet of paper. It is as though Duchamp is not only orienting our vision, he is also giving us directions that enable us to map the relation between the work’s title and one of its images, as though the pointing finger and white rectangle, in their pairing, function as a rebus for the title of the work. Such reading is possible, if we allow ourselves to see the rebus as the icon of an index: the painted iconic image of an index finger pointing to another image that as white surface is the scene of erasure—the erasure that, as we know, is the force that runs through every indexical trace, and from which every indexical trace draws its power and that it points to at the same time as the force of its undoing. For us here, we might say that Tu m’ is triply indexical, in that by pointing to a white field or sheet as scene of erasure, it also points us back to the Erased de Kooning, and the way in which the technique of its coupled incompletion presents a scene of shared sociality (i.e., you and me) as a space that neither drawing nor erasing can ever fully appropriate, and that is perversely indexed as a single sheet of paper. Like the Duchamp, this is a scene enunciated by speech in its enacted retreat, and as I have been suggesting, needs to be understood not in temporal-formal terms as though on the verge of communicative (constative) speech (i.e., the speech-to-come), but instead in terms of inoperative force (withdrawal, retreat) and spacing (fore-scene). Which is to say that erasure does not enter the scene of writing� � �   �  42

drawing, but is the very means by which that scene is staged, in the retracing of its retreat. A non-technological mode of technē, a path-breaking rather than an end-reaching, the Erased de Kooning Drawing is the inoperative performative presentation of exposure and withdrawal not on but as the surface where drawing and erasing meet—namely, the very sheet of paper. Therefore, I will shy away from theorizing this as an “event,” in the way that Tom Conley might in his analysis of the brief reference made to the literature of Jean Genet by Deleuze in the Cinema 1 book, and instead argue that the image exhausted of content might be more accurately designated as a “scene.”³⁴ Or perhaps as an exposure and withdrawal that is at once prior to, and in the wake of, any instant that might be identified as an “event.” Deleuze made it clear that the evidence of violence enacted in Genet’s literature takes the form of neither an image of action nor the representation of a scene, but rather lies in the latency and immobility of things—including hands—that effectively render them abstract. As Conley explains, in taking his cue from Genet’s Journal d’un voleur (Thief’s Journal), Deleuze is interested in the way in which “the affect that would have been felt at the sight of a lover’s (or a mother’s) hand becomes unnameably violent merely by being seen in the latent force it can arouse without recourse to symbols or any ploys of representation.”³⁵ And while for Conley this is the latent force of the partial object, I would want to argue that it may be more a matter of the exposure that deconstructs such an object and renders it as nothing more (or less) than partes extra partes, Conley does make it clear that this level of “abstraction [is] suffused with an erotic charge that at once valorizes and abuses its essence.” For Genet and Deleuze, the latent violence of this scene is suffused not by just any kind of erotic image, but specifically that of “male homoerotic scenarios,” which Deleuze believed James Dean embodied in Rebel without a Cause. Yet while we have theorized the manuscription of the Erased de Kooning as an equally traitorous collaboration as that found in Genet’s Funeral Rites, I will venture to argue that the archi-trace of the former, as the presentation of an originary drawing-erasing, is the betrayal of sovereign subjectivity and any form of authoritative or exceptional presence, and hence of any scene or scenario of identity, including that which might be labeled homoerotic. This is not to go � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  43

against but to further advance my theoretical claims of the erotics of traitorous collaboration in general, and between men in particular, by suggesting that the coming-together of writing and drawing is a conscription so perverse that it effects an exemption from identity, in the same way that one might speak of being exempt from military conscription. Indeed, not only must we name no one man, we will be forever uncertain as to which men might be named, difficult as it is to assign proper names or social identities to those who come together through the man-u-scription of such exemption—something like the eros of the eragraphic. Therefore, I want to argue that in the presentation of a sheet of paper as space of shared-exposure to the force of finitude as force of withdrawal and retreat, Rauschenberg performs for us the scene of erasure that (quoting Conley) “requires a perpetual violence of latency expressive of a ‘lyrical abstraction’ that must remain static, destined only to repeat or to degrade itself.”³⁶ Such latency and abstraction can no doubt be found throughout Genet’s novels and plays, but for us here it perhaps finds its most pronounced resonance in the white spaces and sheets of paper of the artist Alberto Gia­cometti, which Genet wrote about in such compelling ways, in his essay “The Studio of Alberto Giacometti.” As Genet writes, “Thanks to these white spaces, where an invisible drawing can be implicitly understood, the sensation of space is obtained with a strength that makes this space almost measurable.” “Almost measurable,” but not quite, this is a sense and sensation of space, the latent strength of which lies in the invisible drawing that remains implicit in the visible use by the artist of the white spaces in drawing. A couple of paragraphs farther, Genet makes it clear that for Giacometti, and hence for him, these white spaces constitute the principal (fore)scene of drawing: About the drawings, I wrote: “Infinitely precious objects. . . .” I meant also that the white spaces give the page an Oriental quality—or one of light—the lines used not so that they take on a significant value, but with the sole purpose of giving all significance to the white spaces. The lines are there only to give form and solidity to the white spaces. Look carefully: it is not the line that is elegant, it is the white space contained by it. It is not the line that is full, it is the white space.³⁷ � � �   �  44

While we may not wish to accord this white space the significant and formal plenitude that Genet does, as we read further, we realize that he understood this ennobling to be utterly material, and perhaps in the end to be less about the white spaces than about the presentation of the sheet of paper itself: Giacometti is trying to give a perceptible reality to what was only absence—or if you like, indeterminate uniformity—that is to say, the white space, and even, more profoundly, the sheet of paper. It seems, once again, that he has given himself the mission of ennobling a sheet of white paper that, without his lines, would never have existed.³⁸

An image of neither absence nor emptiness, the Erased de Kooning Drawing is the scene of a certain palindromic sameness that in its uniformity will remain forever indeterminate, given the infinitely finite labor of its traitorous collaboration. As Genet has shown us—for instance, in the scene of Erik and Riton fucking on the rooftop—collaboration is always as much erotic as it is political. We then inferred that the kind of artistic collaboration in which we theorized Rauschenberg and de Kooning to be engaged is also erotic, and precisely to the extent that it is traitorous. But perhaps we did not go far enough in thinking about the ways in which this traitorous artistic collaboration is also political. In raising this question, I am not suggesting that the Erased de Kooning is an image of the political or even a political image. Instead, I want to argue that it stages the political through its various aporetic techniques and spacing, including the betrayal that is inextricably tied to any mode of collaboration, whether artistic or political. The attraction of traitorous collaboration, the lure that draws one toward the other traitor is not the traitor’s identity, but the betrayal of identity that is enacted and sensed in the exposure to a mutually shared abandonment and expropriation. The pleasurable attraction to this mutually shared exposure is erotic, and based as it is upon the lawless law of absolute equivalence, it is at the same time political. Political in the precise sense that Genet understood the singularity of existence (what he called “solitude”) as the quality of “being exactly equivalent to every other human being.”³⁹ The law of absolute equivalence is lawless in that it is a matter not of being equal � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  45

to and commensurate with anything/anyone else so named (logos), but is the equivalence of “someone” in the multiplicity of its singularity. We might even take this to be semantically registered in the near portmanteau conjunction of “some” and “one”—as the partes extra partes that belies the social-political imperatives of identitarian and communitarian sameness. As Jacques Rancière defines it, “Politics is the sphere of activity of a common that can only ever be contentious, the relationship between parts that are only parties and credentials or entitlements whose sum never equals the whole.”⁴⁰ To be attracted to betrayal and to become a traitorous collaborator is to join forces not against but with this force of incommensurability that in its separation of sense stages this separated spacing as the scene of coexistence. The sustaining of this shared-separation as the very space of decision is what we are here calling the ethical—the sustaining of the decision and the decision of this sustaining, at once. In the traitorous collaborative performance of the scene of erasure, betrayal is presented as a political, ethical, and aesthetic necessity for the retreat and disappearance of any and all of the identitarian and communitarian forms of relationality, that, in their insistence on the sovereignty of subjecthood and consensual collectivity, will always represent the annulment of the political, the ethical, and the aesthetic as something other than the appropriating production of the proper (i.e., signatory authorship, work of art, sexual identity, nationality, disinterested aesthetic judgment). It is in this way that the Erased de Kooning is a work of art of distinct political import, given the way in which it, like any example of what Haver calls “art’s work,” “exposes us to the very impossibility of establishing a ground that would sanction any political order, to the impossibility of the justification of any politics. It is for precisely that reason that the work of art exposes us, in our multiplicity, singularity, our identity, our equality, and in our anonymity, to the ontological priority of the political.”⁴¹ The inability to say who, the impossibility to testify, it is this incommensurability of identity that is the language of those without community, those who refuse to be counted—traitorous collaborators. This calls for a different method of calculation, one that can register the incessant and imperceptible coming of two or more men, which is neither a coming together nor apart, but simply prior; as a � � �   �  46

mode of sociality that is a non-relational sharing in equality, without being reduced to the unitary oneness of identity or the collective totality of community. Neither exactly documented nor undocumented, “with papers” or “without,” this would be the community of those non-sovereign “someones” who have been divested or have divested themselves of their claim to identity (subjective or communitarian), and only carry cards, cast ballots, present passports, and lay claim to certificates that bear the traces of retreated and withdrawn signatures.

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�: Name No One Name

What remains of a de Kooning evenly erased across its surface and matted and framed and hung on the wall? The phrasing of this question has been appropriated from the title of Jean Genet’s essay from 1967, which reads: “What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Little Squares All the Same Size and Shot Down the Toilet.”¹ Genet’s question, in its implicit attack on the archival logics of art history, might immediately bring to mind Marcel Duchamp’s suggestion that a Rembrandt be taken as a readymade object and used as an ironing board, which was nearly as hypothetical a proposition of refunctioning as the question Genet posed about an act of destruction. Poor Rembrandt. Our opening question, directed at de Kooning and Rauschenberg is, in a sense, situated between Genet and Duchamp, partaking of Duchamp’s notion of the readymade and, through our introduction of the notion of the already-unmade, becomes a means of rethinking the force and form of destruction conveyed by Genet’s image of little torn squares, and so often misattributed to Rauschenberg’s act of erasing. Yet for us, worklessness vis-à-vis the work of art is not a hypothetical, as it was for Genet and Duchamp, given that, as I have argued, it is the already-unmade of the readymade that the Erased de Kooning presents. Which is also to say that Genet’s and Duchamp’s hypotheticals, while no less disruptive and consequential, are, nonetheless, without the kind of material object and remainder that we are left with in the form of the Erased de Kooning Drawing as archival and museological artifact. By not allowing this fact and these conditions to dominate and colonize our opening question, we ask once

again: what remains of a de Kooning evenly erased across its surface and matted and framed and hung on the wall? In light of the discussion in the previous chapter, we respond: traitorous political-erotic collaboration (as presented in Genet’s Funeral Rites, of 1953) and the betrayal of (in) artistic collaboration (as presented by Rauschenberg, also in 1953). By turning our attention to Genet’s “Rembrandt” essay, we will be able to extend and expand this analysis, and not in fact by focusing on his discussion of Rembrandt per se, and the imagined terms of “a Rembrandt” being torn into tiny pieces and flushed away, but to the other half of the essay, the place where Genet provides us with what William Haver has characterized as “nothing less than what we might call, with certain qualifications, a social ontology.”² Specifically of “an experience of sociality as nothing but experience” that, perforce, would need to be understood as an ontology of sociality and of experience, at once. Which is to say, in and as their inextricable happening. The textual presentation of Genet’s twofold discussion of art’s work and social ontology is formatted as two vertical columns of text, in which the right-hand column is dedicated to a discussion of Rembrandt’s praxis, and the left-hand to an anecdote of an encounter that Genet had with a stranger on a train and its philosophical meditation toward a sense of social ontology.³ Once again, we find ourselves confronted with a two-handed affair in which artistic praxis and social ontology exist on a single surface of shared-separation, and that thereby stages a scene that is a path-breaking all its own. I want to suggest that by reading Genet’s essay alongside of, and in the wake of, our discussion of the Erased de Kooning, our discussion can be extended toward a thinking of intrusion as the force and field of this path-breaking. Intrusion: a force and field that functions as the measure of neither social relationality nor artistic representation, but of what remains incommensurable “within” each of these. Intrusion is the force of spacing that renders spacing always incommensurable. This includes the space that is shared between artistic praxis and social ontology, the impossible measure of the distance and proximity between political-erotic collaboration and the betrayal of artistic collaboration, for instance. It is also the spacing that Genet’s essay textually

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stages in its two-column format. To make note of this is, however, exactly not to say that the anecdote of the encounter with the stranger on the train (and its extended philosophical meditation) is to be read as evidence of some sort of performative sociality of Rembrandt’s praxis, nor, conversely, that Rembrandt’s paintings are to be read as distilled representations of a sociality with strangers. Nonetheless, the two columns are to be read alongside each other, and yet only through a doubled and divided attention that renders such reading impossible, and as such, performs the incommensurable spacing that the text stages. Therefore, by betraying Genet’s two-handed writing, this reading remains true to the text’s own traitorous collaboration— namely, the scene that is shared between artistic praxis and social ontology. Out of this emerges the sense of intrusion as the force and field of what I will call the “shared incommensurability” of (that is) the social. Further, we note that while the subject in the title of Genet’s essay is Rembrandt, such that the title might be understood to point to the right-hand column of the text and its discussion of the Dutch artist, a possible response (if not an outright answer) to the question posed by the title lies in the left-hand column, containing the anecdote from the train. In other words, the directional flow and sense of the essay would seem to suggest that what—ontologically speaking—remains of a Rembrandt torn into little squares all the same size and shot down the toilet is accessible through the scene on the train. Which is to say that the scene on the train, as a scene of intrusion, provided Genet (and thereby us, in our reading of its written recounting) with the sense of intrusion as the ontological force and field of what I am calling “zero-degree sociality” and stamping with the date: 1953. This deliberately resonates with the title of Roland Barthes’s first published book, Writing Degree Zero, and is meant to name the uneventful, accidental, wholly unremarkable, and one might say “neutral” sociality that we find resonant in the title of Maurice Blanchot’s récit The One Who Was Standing apart from Me. That both of these books were published in 1953, the same year as Genet’s Funeral Rites, and of Rauschenberg’s own zero-degree drawing, is a fact of historical dating that, without wanting to make any grand historicizing claims, I cannot regard as an entirely meaningless coincidence. � � �   �  50

Nonetheless, I want to suggest that whatever meaning might lie in this coincidence entails the need to retain the sense that it is without proper measure in the full force of its critical juxtapositions. Therefore, in this chapter we are dealing with two forms of incommensuration: one that exists as the relation between the various texts and works from 1953, and a second that is the theory of sociality as shared incommensurability that is based upon the first. This, then, is just as much a matter of incommensurability in answer to what remains as it is a matter of a number of incommensurable remains. Questions pertaining to method, including perhaps the ethics of gathering these into a written exposition, inevitably arise, and an attempt will be made to address this. For now, let it be said that structuring this chapter into a series of texts that are neither incomplete fragments nor extended aphorisms has been the structural means chosen to retain some sense of this shared incommensuration. With that, we now turn our attention to Genet’s essay, and specifically its left-hand column, containing the anecdote from the train. In the left-hand column of the Rembrandt essay, following a single paragraph that is partially separated from the rest of the left-column text by a single dotted line, and that functions as something of an internal epigraph to it (and that in its statement puts forth the notion that false and non-demonstrable truths are the “ones that must be exalted by the work of art”), Genet’s anecdote about the encounter on a train opens in the following way: Something that seemed to me like a rottenness was in the process of corrupting my entire former vision of the world. When, one day, in a train compartment, while looking at the passenger sitting opposite me, I had the revelation that every man is worth as much as every other, I did suspect—but that’s not true, I knew it obscurely, for suddenly a layer of sadness engulfed me, and, more or less endurable, but always perceptible, it never left me—that this knowledge would bring about such a methodical disintegration.⁴

With clear evidence of an attunement to the spacing that exists between himself and “the passenger sitting opposite me,” Genet goes on to describe what of the man lies beyond mere visual appearance, and is “farther away, and at the same time miraculously and � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  51

distressingly close.” It is this very proximity-in-distance to which Genet is exposed when the other’s look butts up against his own. Accidental, unwilled, inadvertent, and entirely without premeditation, Genet makes clear that this is not the scene of an intersubjective exchange of gazes but of two gazes that butt up against and collide with each other, nearly simultaneously and for just an instant.⁵ It is there and then that, Genet writes, “I discovered, experiencing it as a shock, a sort of universal identity with all men.” Certainly we would not want to overlook the way in which this sense of equivalence is precipitated by the body of a “dirty old man,” so vividly described by Genet that we sense that we can smell as much as visually imagine what this man was like. Yet without being able to describe it, Genet senses that something flowed out of his body and that of the fellow traveler, and that this is what allows him to know he is identical to that man. “What was it, then, that had flowed out of my body—I fl . . . —and what part of the traveler flowed out of his body?”⁶ Not only is this incorporeal thing not named, but even what would seem to be the verb flow is left only partially articulated, written as the letters fl, which are then followed by an ellipsis, as though to graphically perform and trace the elliptical sense of this incorporeal flow. So to retrace Genet’s steps thus far: from “the revelation that every man is worth as much as every other,” which almost purports an economy of general equivalence of value, to “a sort of universal identity with all men” in which we might, following Nancy, place the stress on the “with,” and then to the other man allowing Genet “to detect, what made him identical to me,” only to have that sense immediately reversed in its direction so as to read “I knew I was identical to this man.” At which point Genet then asks, “Was that because every man is identical to every other?”⁷ Within the space of a page, Genet will then write, quoting himself, “Every man,” I said to myself, the revelation had come to me, “behind his charming or to our eyes monstrous appearance, retains a quality that seems to be like a last resort and that makes him, in a most secret, perhaps irreducible domain, what every man is.”⁸

As Haver demonstrates, it is this quality—irreducible to any predicate—that is the difference, exteriority, and separation that we are � � �   �  52

exposed to, in the shared sociality of our singular abjection. Abjection, in other words, is at once the source of the affective sense of equivalence and of affective repugnance and disgust, and even further for Genet, names the transitive relation between the two as the source for the other. Roughly speaking: for Genet, a sense of repugnance leads to a sense of equality, and a sense of equivalence and identity induces a sense of disgust. The equivalence being described here is not sociological or anthropological; it does not belong to the fraternal order of a universal brotherhood, nor does it operate, as we noted earlier, through the logic of resemblance. Rather, it is ontological of a singular multiplicity, and it thus marks the passage from “this knowledge that every man is like every other to the idea that every man is all other men.”⁹ Yet Genet in fact tells us that the capacity to perceive how he made this passage from what we might term a knowledge of likeness to the idea of being is not one that he possesses, thereby suggesting perhaps that such a sense of co-ontology not only lies outside the bounds of knowledge but does not even belong to the capacity of a perceiving subject, yet all the while being a part of him, without doubt. Here is how the passage reads: How—I was incapable of seeing—how did I pass from this knowledge that every man is like every other to the idea that every man is all other men? But the idea was now inside of me. It was there like a certainty. More precisely—but I’m going to spoil it—it could have been expressed by this aphorism: “In the world there exists and there has never existed anything but one single man. He is entirely in each of us, thus he is ourselves. Each one is the other and the others.”¹⁰

Not certain whether Genet’s concern over spoiling it is meant to be understood as referring to disclosing too soon the upshot of his meditation/argument (in the same way that the comedic effect of a joke can be spoiled by revealing the punch line too soon), or whether it is referring to the aphoristic rhetorical form, in which it is expressed, we can be certain that Genet is not thinking this singularity of man in terms of a universal metaphysical Idea of Man, of which all actual men would be nothing more than inadequate copies. The guarantee of this lies in the agrammatical phrase “he is ourselves,” followed by “each one is the other and the others,” that together must only be � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  53

understood as describing a singular multiplicity, in which each one (man) is, only to the extent that (he) is the other of other singular ones. For as Genet will go on to state in the next two sentences, just as much as he sensed this singularity in a mutual yet non-reciprocal exchanged look, so too was any risk of singleness immediately and infinitely divided. As he writes: In the abandon of night, a clear, exchanged look—drawn-out or fleeting, I ignored technical details—made us aware of it. Except that a phenomenon, for which I don’t even know a name, seems infinitely to divide this single man, splits him into the accidents of appearance, and makes each of the fragments foreign to us.¹¹

It is at this point that I would like to propose “intrusion” as the name we might give to the ontological force that infinitely divides this single man, such that in his division he is all men. Intrusion thereby breaks open what would otherwise be the precious shell of individual enclosure (as Genet describes it), the kind of atomizing egg that leads to the error of thinking sociality according to the binary opposition of self-other. Rather, the “accidents of appearance” are not the properties of any one individual, including the stranger on the train, but must be understood as only ever those belonging to the appearance of a common and shared exposure to nothing but the “with” that is the incommensurable spacing between us—what JeanLuc Nancy has named compearance.¹² Compearance is the sharedappearance of separation at the heart of each encounter, the substance of which is nothing other than the “extra” of partes extra par­ tes. It is the exteriorizing effect of intrusion that opens up this “extraspacing” and that, as Genet states, “makes each of the fragments foreign to us”—which is to say: as us, incommensurable with each other.¹³ As we have briefly mentioned, at various points Genet describes the temporality of mutual intrusion as an instant “so brief ” that its intensity and “fresh suddenness”—as he describes its periodicity—lie in its unrepeatable abandonment. It is a mutual exposure to the outside and the stranger that happens at once, although not only once, and yet in its suddenness betrays all sense of temporality, and therefore � � �   �  54

has led Haver to describe it in terms of an “atemporal disjunct simultaneity.” The sociality evidenced on the train is not predicated upon two strangers suddenly confronted with each other at the same time and place, as though in the familiar scenario of two passengers who arrive at the only empty seat remaining, and find themselves confronted with one of two options: either to graciously offer the seat to the other person or to aggressively fight over one’s claim to it. Such a scenario of liberal sociability (or its breakdown, as the case may be), in its reduction of the social and the space of decision to a negotiation over self and other, is precisely not what Haver means by “atemporal disjunct simultaneity,” nor what we take it to be that Genet experienced in his encounter with the dirty old man on the train. For the sense of sociality that Genet experiences there is based upon a persistent yet indefinitely sustained (atemporal) sense of separation (disjunct) in the encounter (simultaneity) with the other man. What binds them together is neither a joint or we might say collaborative claim to common property (one seat: let’s both sit on it) nor the negotiated settlement of property rights, exchange of deeds, or the forced or willed acquiescence or abandonment of spatial occupation. No, instead, this is a form of sociality that bears the distinct sense that its only proper ground is one that is the property that belongs to no one—no one man, or all men together—and thereby remains inappropriable in its spacing. Which is to say that what brings them together and gives them a sense of themselves as coexisting with each other is nothing other than the force and field of intrusion. Not only can we say that their coexistence did not exist prior to intrusion, we must go further and affirm that they themselves, as the coexisting bodies that all bodies most properly are, did not exist prior to, but instead are drawn from out of, intrusion, and thereby drawn together. Intrusion is the ontological force and field of sociality and the “source” of its spacing. With this, we arrive at some fundamental questions regarding the relation between space, intrusion, and spacing. In an attempt to clarify things a bit more, we need to work from the following philosophical suppositions. First, that there is no such thing as space (as in the Kantian sense of the term) prior to intrusion. A space that hasn’t been intruded upon, and that somehow would exist undivided from itself, � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  55

and remain as what has been called at times (in its full colonialist and gendered/sexual resonance) “virgin territory.” Instead, in its splitting, dividing, and separating, intrusion is the originary force through which space comes to exist as that which is spaced out, has room, and is shared out. As originary force, intrusion intrudes upon any sense of an origin prior to intrusion. Intrusion originarily intrudes upon the origin—immediately and multiply. Which, then, is also to say that intrusion intrudes upon itself—rending it always already split, divided, and separated. We give the name “spacing” to this split, division, and separation. In the immediacy of its force—that is, in the intrusion of intrusion—intrusion is immediately multiple. The immediacy of intrusion is also the force that deconstructs any sense of the immediate. So, for instance, when Maurice Blanchot, in his reading of Hölderlin’s “The Most High,” gleans from this poetic fragment that “there cannot be an immediate grasp of the immediate [given that] the immediate excludes everything immediate,” we might read this as containing within it the further sense that it is in the immediate intrusive force of the immediate that the immediate imme­ diately excludes everything immediate, and thereby renders any sense of immediacy impossible. The force of intrusion that renders any sense of immediacy impossible is also intrusion’s temporal abandonment. The time of intrusion is the instant of the intrusion of time—of time intruding upon itself, and opening up to its spaciosity. Through its interrupting and partitioning force, intrusion “imparts places”¹⁴ and marks (visibly and invisibly) the sense of difference, division, and distance of spacing, including between any sense of being here or there.¹⁵ To the extent that such an understanding completely coincides with Nancy’s own understanding of the abandonment of being, we can rewrite his articulation nearly word for word while simply transposing and substituting intrusion and its cognates for his term aban­ donment. Again, we are not speaking of the ontology of intrusion and the particular force and field that it is, but of intrusion as the force and field of ontology. For to the extent that there is existence, there is intrusion, and existence is yet another name for the praxis of intrusion—

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the sustaining of its immediacy and multiplicity. There has never not been intrusion insofar as there has been anything. As ontological force and field of, intrusion renders us, in our existence, intruders. Birth is the intrusion of existence, just as we bestow the name “death” to that instance of intrusion, the force of which is the absolute impossibility of its immediacy, including in the form of what would be recognizable as an instant. Such that, just as the temporal force of the immediate—its immediacy—is intrusion, by which everything immediate is excluded, so too is the spatial force of the immediate—its intimacy, if you will—also intrusion, and as such, is the ontological force and field of whatever comes to be shared between us. In raising the issue of the instant of death and the intimacy of the intruder, we might turn our attention to other short essays whose authors, similar to Genet in the “Rembrandt” piece, use an incident of intrusion in their personal lives as an occasion to write a philosoph­ ical meditation on the incommensurable relation between themselves and an intruder. One is The Instant of My Death, written by Maurice Blanchot (1994), and the other is “The Intruder,” written by Jean-Luc Nancy (1999).¹⁶ Based upon Haver’s reading of Genet, we can say that what all three essays share is thought’s confrontation with the “material impasse [of ] abjection,” of which death is its absolute immanence.¹⁷ In The Instant of My Death, Blanchot presents what appears to be an autobiographical account of an incident that occurred in 1944, during the occupation of France, in which his family’s château was invaded by soldiers, its residents evicted, and he was made to stand in front of a row of armed men—the firing squad of which he was the human target.¹⁸ Nancy’s account of intrusion centers around his undergoing heart transplant surgery at a time when, all things considered, he was, like the man in the Blanchot text, still a relatively young man. So, clearly these are two stories in which their respective authors recount their own personal experience with the sense of mortality and finitude, an experience that occurred from out of an instance of intrusion: for Blanchot, by enemy soldiers into his home; and for Nancy, obviously by the heart transplanted into his chest, but as he makes clear, also by the heart with which he was born and that, in its failure to adequately function, proved itself to be not entirely at

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home in his body. His heart was betraying his body, in a way not unlike the risk that came with the newly transplanted heart rejecting its grafted incursion. Yet what is remarkable about each of these incidents is the way in which the thing that intruded upon their lives and exposed them to the force of mortal intrusion was the very same thing that rescued each of them, and in a real sense pulled them from the brink of death, by withdrawing the force of finitude through the force of intrusion. For Nancy, of course, this took the form of the foreign body organ, the heart of a stranger that was intimately installed in and as the heart of his body. The lifesaving intrusion that Blanchot underwent is equally if not that much more remarkable, given that it contains what can only be described as traitorous collaboration in the full import of its surprise. With guns aimed at him, Blanchot describes the elated sensation of being exposed to death in a nearly unmediated way that, precisely as such, it remains questionable: I know—do I know it—that the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting but the final order, experienced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however)—sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death?¹⁹

At which point, at that instant, and immediately following the next paragraph, we read: At that instant, an abrupt return to the world, the considerable noise of a nearby battle exploded. Comrades from the maquis wanted to bring help to one they knew to be in danger. The lieutenant moved away to assess the situation. The Germans stayed in order, prepared to remain thus in an immobility that arrested time. Then one of them approached and said in a firm voice, “We’re not Germans, Russians,” and, with a sort of laugh, “Vlasov army,” and made a sign for him [the would-be-executed] to disappear.²⁰

Not only were the intruding gunmen not occupying German soldiers, they were Russians, and not only were they Russians, but they were, in their decision not to execute Blanchot, traitors. And in their traitorous act, they intruded upon their own militarized intrusion, and in breaking from their assigned path, transformed the impasse that is the instant of death into a path-breaking passage not so much � � �   �  58

out of and beyond death, nor back into a life without intrusion, but into an atemporal disjunct simultaneity between the two, such that the relation between life and death would remain incommensurable—as incommensurable as that relation (or more properly nonrelational relation) between life and death ever and always is. It can be said that Blanchot and Nancy were rescued from death by death, or as Blanchot himself phrased it in the first sentence of  The In­ stant, “I remember a young man—a man still young—prevented from dying by death itself.” What this means, quite simply, is that intrusion, right up to and including the intrusion that is death, intruded upon dying and, in doing so, at once rendered dying distinct from death, and opened up life again to its ongoing and incomplete existence. Absolute in the impossible immediacy of intrusion, death is prevented from intruding upon itself, but can only prevent dying, by intruding upon it. Which is also to say that not death, but only dying, can be prevented. For if death itself were to be prevented from happening, that would be nothing less than a miracle, or a resurrection. Or, as Nancy makes clear in his essay “Blanchot’s Resurrection,” for Blanchot “the resurrection in question does not escape death, nor recover from it, nor dialecticize it.”²¹ Therefore, as Nancy goes on to explain, it is less a matter of resurrecting than it is of resuscitating, and aligned with what we have been arguing here, is not a resuscitating of the dead (e.g., a miraculous return of the dead from death), but a resuscitating of death. Resuscitating death is the praxis of keeping loss alive, of sustaining an exposure to finitude and death, such that they are neither mediated nor rendered immediate but are infinished—infinitely undone—through a worklessness that is the betrayal of work and death. Neither putting death to work nor bringing work to its own death—perhaps both in the name of “life”—but something like death’s collaboration with dying: of not betraying the ultimate betrayal that death is, but of remaining faithful to its betrayal, such that death intrudes upon dying and traitorously collaborates with it. This is what we take it to mean when Blanchot writes of being “prevented from dying by death itself,” which in turn is what Nancy means when he defines life as standing in death, erect.²² This is the unexpected intrusion of the intruder in his or her intrusion, which persistently intrudes upon life and death, and interrupts the gravity of any mediation or immediacy that might be said to � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  59

lie between them. In the very last sentence of his text, Blanchot tells that “all that remains is the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance.” In other words: what remains is the force of finitude in its infinite intrusion. Other than the intervention of a transcendent sovereign or the disclosure of a groundless abyss, the infinite finitude of existence’s intrusion happens no place other than in the immeasurable distancein-proximity between the wall outside the countryside château and the guns with their sights trained toward the human target of its backdrop, or the cavity at the sternum’s recession that is opened to receive the organ that might beat again, or (by way of folding Genet’s anecdote with that story of Blanchot’s, this time from 1953) in the companionate spacing that is shared between me and the one who is not accompanying me.²³ Not the other passenger per se, but the spacing that is opened up in the intruding passage of the passerby in his passing. Genet makes it clear that if “the unknown passenger” as intruder answers to the question who, it is in terms of neither the single man (the individual) nor of all men in general (the collective). For as we are told, he is the object of neither moral affection, erotic attraction, nor a sense of preciousness—all of which would constitute various forms of affective individualization and valorization: tenderness, seduction, and meaningfulness. The third of these, given that, as Nancy reminds us, “the Latin word pretium, whose sonority we hear in precious is associated by linguists with the Latin interpres,”²⁴ such that the precious thing is the interpretable thing, and the interpretable thing is, at once, the meaningful, affective, and valuable thing. Genet repeatedly uses the word precious, as it also underlies his understanding of erotic attraction as that which is drawn to individual appearance precisely to the extent that it accords with evaluative systems upon which conventional notions of beauty and its judgment are based.²⁵ At the same time, it is in the betrayal of such conventional systems of meaning and evaluation that the intruder is also the force that interrupts any sense of the presence of a common term or unit of measure that would situate him within a system of general equivalence, as one man among the collective of all men in general. In the joint assertion and application of a common term and measure, both erotic at� � �   �  60

traction and collective sociality reproduce relational systems of signs of commensurable value, and thereby are opposite to the sense that every man is equal to all other men, which Genet intuited in the encounter with the unknown passenger on the train.²⁶ Which is to say that this sense of equality does not involve any desire for a singular and unique presence and value, nor is it the experience of a law of general equivalence and relation of equal value among all men, as these men are measured in their relation to a single absolute value. No, rather, it is an exposure to a sense of all men being equal to all others in that this equality remains incommensurable—existing without measure, which is to say, without a comparative term. Not equal to (whatever predicate, quality, or characteristic is being used as common term and unit of measure), but simply equal and absolutely, in the sense that Nancy speaks of being “immediately equal to equality.”²⁷ For to be equal to equality is to be equal to no other measure, including any term of comparison, other than equality itself. This is the very mark and definition of equality’s incomparable incommensurability. So this is absolute equality not in terms of absolute value (which still would be the structuring of a comparative relation), but of absolute sense, as that which is equally incommensurable as the spacing of the shared exposure of existence. This scene is the scene of ethics: without values, without price, without evaluation, and without comparison. It is the instance and interruptive instant of intrusion, each time, anew, just this once. Not as precious individuals of a general collective, but whatever singularities that we are in the sharing of existence as that which is without comparison, and in its lack of a comparative term, remains incommensurable. De­ cision, then, as the ethical spacing of existence is not one of comparison but of intrusion. Yet another possible way in which to think the immediacy of intrusion’s interruption of these various systems of mediation is in terms of intrusion’s neutrality. For, like intrusion, the neuter is not a mediating term for a middle or third term between two other polaropposite positive and negative terms. At least this is the way in which both Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes have enabled us to think of the neuter. In the chapter “René Char and the Thought of the Neutral,” Blanchot writes: � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  61

The discretion of the French language, which does not possess a neuter gender, is awkward but finally not without its virtue, for what belongs to the neuter is not a third gender opposed to the other two and constituting for reason a determined class of existents or beings. The neuter is that which cannot be assigned to any genre whatsoever: the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the nonparticular. It refuses to belong to the category of subject as much as it does to that of object. And this does not simply mean that it is still undetermined and as though hesitating between the two, but rather that the neuter supposes another relation depending neither on objective conditions nor on subjective dispositions.²⁸

While in the late 1970s Barthes will devote one of his lecture courses at the Collège de France to the topic of “The Neuter,” we note that as early as 1953 in Writing Degree Zero, in his discussion of what he calls “colorless writing” (in the chapter on “Writing and Silence”), Barthes will resort to a similar analogy, this time drawn from linguistics, and speak of “neutral writing,” of which Albert Camus’s Outsider is cited as original example and reference for Barthes. Yet whereas in 1953 Barthes remained relatively loyal to the linguists’ sense of the neuter as third term, by 1975 he puts forth a definition in contrast to the earlier one, including in its distance from the notion of zero degree. So it is in the section of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes titled “Le neuter ~ The neutral” that we read, “The Neutral is therefore not the third term—the zero degree—of an opposition which is both semantic and conflictual; it is, at another link of the infinite chain of lan­ guage, the second term of a new paradigm, of which violence (combat, victory, theater, arrogance) is the primary term.”²⁹ For both Blanchot and Barthes, the neuter is not the common term for the conception of some common ground of the social that would stand in a mediating position/role between binary or opposed terms. Rather, the neutral is that which interrupts and displaces what for Blanchot is the law of genre, including a genericism of social relationality (“objective conditions and subjective dispositions”). Equally, for Barthes, the neuter is a social praxis that forcibly interrupts what he calls “scholastic antinomies,” as when he writes, at the very outset of the section from which the quotation above was taken:

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The Neutral is not an average of active and passive; rather it is a back-and-forth, an amoral oscillation, in short, one might say, the converse of an antinomy. As value (proceeding from the region of Passion), the Neutral would correspond to the force by which social praxis sweeps away and renders unreal the scholastic antinomies.³⁰

So what I am suggesting here is that just as much as Blanchot and Barthes enable us to begin to think the intrusive force of the neuter, they also enable us to think the force of intrusion as a certain force of neutrality that is neither immediate nor mediating, but incommensurable. The spacing of the neuter is an interval through which all intermediary mediation is intruded upon and made to retreat, which, as we shall see in chapter 5 below, is, for Barthes, the exemption from meaning and a casting of the neutral as though between parentheses. It is notable and instructive, then, that Blanchot, in The Infinite Conversation, formats key parts of his extended discussion on the neuter in italicized text and places these parts of his book under the title “parentheses.” There, in chapters of part 3 (“The Absence of the Book: The Neutral, the Fragmentary”) of The Infinite Conversation, chapters on “René Char and the Thought of the Neutral” and “The Fragment Word,” Blanchot speaks of the neutral as that which is not left to “definitive equalization” (305), and instead that every encounter “is already marked, already fringed by the neutral.” Which is to say that in its non-mediating intrusion, the neutral frays the edge of shared spacing that would otherwise come to constitute a common place and space, thereby negating the “with” and rendering the space of decision null and void. Rather, it is the neutral that calls upon our “faculty of interrupting movement” as the means of tracing the retreat that is intrusion’s movement, the force and field of withdrawal through which our singular existences are drawn together-apart. Just as much as the faculty of interruption is distinct from and perforce is the interruption of a faculty of reflection and its closed circuit of doubled identity and distanced contemplation, so too is its temporality not to be described as a “tranquil delay.” For as we find in Blanchot’s The One Who Was Standing apart from Me, the answer to “May I reflect on it?” is always “Yes, but for how long?” In the constant refrain

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of this question, and in particular in its response, lies neither the insistence of expediency nor the license to indefinitely prolong (thought, decision, etc.), but rather the rigorous need to remain in the space of thought and decision, precisely because the sense that one has (as we say) “all the time in the world” is what immediately in­trudes upon us in its inassimilable reserve at every interruptive instant. At this point I am compelled to insert a parentheses of my own into our discussion, in order to cite a definition of the neuter provided by Nancy and in virtue of its deep resonance not only with Blanchot and Barthes, but perhaps even more so with Genet and his sense of any one man being equal to any other one. Nancy writes: Neuter does not mean “neither one nor the other.” It means one or the other, any one at all, but always one. One and one and one. Never one, therefore, as in “there is a thing [and there is only one].” Not one. Any one at all, indefinitely. To exist: to be in the middle of all that. And all that is an indefiniteness of centers.³¹

Therefore, the singularity of the neuter interrupts the notion of the absolutely autonomous thing, body, or encounter, but instead, in its neutrality, is always the any one of any number of other ones, expressed as the indefinite equalization of “one and one and one,” as opposed to the definitive equalization of all in one, once and for all. Like Genet on the intruder, Blanchot tells us that the neutral “does not seduce, does not attract,” and this, he goes on to say, “is the vertigo of its attraction from which there is no safeguard” (311). This is the risk of intrusion as the very risk of existence—the presentation of which is the infinite task that Genet and Blanchot (and others) take on as writers in their writing. It is, as Nancy puts it in the very last sentence of his essay “Blanchot’s Resurrection,” the difference between metaphysical practices and literature, wherein “metaphysical practices always designate a ‘forward, march,’ the future of a renaissance, a kind of possible and of power, whereas literature only writes the present of what has always already happened to us, that is, the impossible into which our being consists in disappearing.”³² Based upon this difference, we can further advance our understanding of the spacing of intrusion as not only non-penetrating and noninvasive spatial occupation and appropriation, nor as oppositional � � �   �  64

confrontation, even in the most benign sense of a face-to-face encounter, but also as not the forward advance of some military pha­ lanx or vanguard troop force. For just as much as we had sought in the previous chapter to trouble the spatial disposition of the bodies of Erik and Riton fucking on a rooftop during the liberation of Paris, by seeing in their traitorous political-erotic collaboration a shared exposure to an open-ended futurity that is not a metaphysical forward march to transcendence, given that their mutual intrusion involved a palindromic spacing that could be read front-to-back as well as backto-front, and thereby broke a path through, by way of their withdrawal and retreat from proper social-sexual identity, so too might we now imagine Genet and the unknown passenger sitting across from him as two separate trajectories that only appear to share the same single path because they are on a train together that is headed in one direction. Us: a name for our mutually shared intrusion, and the fact that nothing lies between us—nothing but intrusion as the non-antagonistic (neutral) infinite complicity and partaking in the infinite task of decision. Quoting Nancy, we might say that “here, the mind pushes against nothing: nothing to know, nothing to understand, nothing to sense. The intrusion of a body foreign to thought. This blank will stay with me like thought itself and its contrary, at one and the same time.”³³ Intrusion is at once the inauguration and the interruption of thought, each time, just this once, and yet, again and again, as thought’s interruptive inauguration. It is this blank that remains, as the nothing that stands between us, the zero-degree drawing together-apart as the “with” of zero-degree sociality. Entering (by intruding) into this, unaccompanied yet not alone, it is the companionship that is shared with the unknown passenger, about which we might say that the “in-” of intrusion is the only “in” that we share in common in our mutual exposure to the outside that in its infinite finitude as the force and field of intrusion remains inassimilable and incommensurable. Out of this is derived the sense that one is never alone with oneself but always only alone with others. This is the source of assurance that existence—as the infinite intrusion that lies between us—is an exigency that remains to be decided, each time. An infinitely finite � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  65

task. We are alone in this, all of us, apart from no one else and with no one name between us but “us.” Blanchot tells us that our task is to “utter the unexpected.”³⁴ This might mean to name the unexpected, perhaps by giving it the name of the intruder, but only in such a way that such a name would preserve the infinite reserve of intrusion, including the intrusion of any act of nomination. Once again, it is a matter of naming the anonymous without reducing (or elevating) it to that of the “unnameable.” This would be the name that is not a name or any one name (designation, identification, signification). So not only to name no one man, but also to name no one name: neither singularity nor the one name for the plurality of subjects—that is, if we wish to preserve the singular intimacy of the intruder in the persistence of its strangeness, and the singular strangeness of the intruder in the persistence of its intimacy. The one who is standing apart from me, as the clandestine companion that is not accompanying me, the intruder as passerby that, in the step/not (pas), aporetically stages the impasse as path and passage between us. Intrusion is the force field of our being-together, and is the affirmation that any sense of an ontological ground for our coexistence takes place as the decision between us, in which what remains is not a thing or even a name, but a scene—the very intimacy of intrusion. Intrusion as the spacing of shared existence means that I partake in the parting (dividing) of the one apart from me, the part that remains, yet a part only in the other one’s departure. Writing, signing, and countersigning a mutual consent to the intrusion and betrayal of the intruder inevitably raises ethical questions as to how this might be undertaken. First question: how to remain true to intrusion and betrayal and not intrude upon (appropriate) or betray it. For to take on or enact intrusion and betrayal and thereby remain true to it inevitably means that, in doing so, an act of intrusion and betrayal is perpetrated, against the very thing that you had wished to remain true to, by not intruding upon or betraying it. Taking a few steps back, we recognize the performative dimension of the signatory (“I, behold the undersigned, hereby attest to my presence . . .”) and always the fact that betrayal and intrusion are two of the many things that the signature performs (in addition to, say, authenti­ � � �   �  66

fication). In fact, we might say that the signature is the trace of in­ trusion of space and the betrayal of the subject, and that this is staged in and as the scene of writing. As Derrida demonstrates in a late essay on Genet,³⁵ the countersignature is a doubling of this, either in opposition to, or alongside of and in concert with, the prevailing signature (or both opposition and coincidence at once). We must also recognize that for the force of the performative to survive, it must not succumb to the status of the event, including the event of decision, for as Derrida has argued, the event is the limit of the performative. Instead, it must remain as the spacing of the peri-performative scene/stage, which is also to say as the scene of intrusion and of decision. Actor, act, and event all need to be undone, and we give the names intruder, intrusion, and perispaced scene to their undoing, respectively. So to remain true to the intruder’s betrayal and traitorous intrusion is to collaborate with that betrayal, if not by betraying it in turn, as we outlined in the previous chapter, then by mutually sharing in its exposing intrusion. Which is what it means to remain in the space of decision, and to decide not to name one man or to name many men, but to name the name that is not a name—the signature or countersignature signed “without-name.” Not as the absolute annihilation of names but as a name or names that remain to be decided and that can only be spoken or written through a peri-performative signatory act. Not the name “Robert Rauschenberg” or “Willem de Kooning,” my name or your name. So, echoing Genet, about whose work Derrida said that it begins with a question of remainder, we ask “what remains” yet remains in such a way that it “escapes all ontology, all philosophy that sees in the remainder ‘what remains,’ that is, substance, persistence, or even a state. The remaining of the remainder is not a substance that subsists or stays, it isn’t being that resists time.”³⁶ Far from substance, persis­ tence, and a state of being, the remaining of what remains is not a remainder at all. It is less than a thing and perhaps even less than a vestige. For what remains in remaining, including what Derrida calls the “undecidable syntax of the remainder,”³⁷ is nothing other than intruding. Intrusion remains. Intrusion is that which interrupts every consignation and betrays every designation, including in the forms of the substantive remnant � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  67

and the decisive event. This is the scene of encounter between decision and remains, in which they mutually serve as countersignatories for each other, affirming that decision remains, and that the question of remains is yet to be decided. The undecidable, the inassimilable: it is this that bears the signature—unverifiable and unjustifiable—of the unbecoming community, the ones who sign their refusal “not in our name.” And so, as Foucault said in an interview from 1977, the question is not (or at least no longer) “what remains” but what is happening. When it comes to the happening of ethical decision, what remains is intrusion, and when it comes to decision, which is always the question of existence, we are all intruders. Not an image, a thing, a remainder, a fragment, or even a sign, what remains between us—we, the intruders that we are—is exposure to the incommensurable, which in its ethical demand calls for us to withdraw from relations to things and the values and prices that we apply to them, and the desires and meanings that we project and impose upon them. To the equality in the sharing of the incommensurable, Nancy at one point gave the name “fraternity,” yet fraternity as exactly opposite of some universal brotherhood or fraternal order. Rather, fraternity here is meant to name the sharing out or partaking of inassimilable remainders, as that which interrupts and exceeds any substantive measure. As Nancy goes on to argue, “What measures itself against this incommensurable is freedom.” Following our reading of Nancy on the political, one name that we can give to this experience of intrusion as the opening up of shared inequality and incommensurability is democracy. In the infinity and excess of its finite existence, it is irreducible to any substance or remainder, and inassimilable to any archi-enclosure. Art’s work is the praxis of sharing-out this incommensurability, through its finite presentation and sustained spacing of this withdrawal and retreat. Beyond any work of art, poietic production, and archivization, this is no longer a question of what remains, but of what is happening—it is a question of praxis. Of praxis operating without a common term of general equivalence, but rather the praxis of nonequivalence and incommensurable measure. Such is the ethical decision, each time, just this once. The task, then, is, as Nancy argues, “a matter of keeping open (dare we say wide open?) the exigency of not accomplishing � � �   �  68

an essence or an end of the incommensurable, and yet, and precisely, of sustaining its (im)possibility: the exigency to regulate power—the force that must sustain this nonorganic nonunity—according to any incommensurable ‘justice.’ ”³⁸ Only in this way will we stand the chance of being able, “to bring into view that which we cannot ‘see’—that which conceals itself as the origin of the other, in the other—and to bring ‘into view’ the fact that we cannot ‘see’ it: that is what today makes an ‘ethical’ demand, without which any moral standpoint, any normative or prescriptive, assurance, is only the application of a recipe, with eyes closed, sleepwalking,”³⁹ as though on a train of moral values, and without a sense of intrusion. This calls for the inoperative presentation of the incommensurable, for instance, as the spacing between two columns of  text: one on Rembrandt and the other on an encounter with a stranger on a train. Art or thought—the decision of each and in their inextricable bond—this is what remains between them, in their shared incommensuration. So what is called for is not the fetish-image as measure of the incommensurable, but the naked image of incomparable compearance, and rather than find ourselves continuously tied to alienating exchange, we need to seek out nakedly equal sharing of the incommensurable. “Naked” meaning across both registers, that which is without comparative term, but is instead starkly presented and exposed. Such that the naked image of naked sharing might be construed in terms of an incommensurable staging of shared incommensurability. The next four chapters are devoted to theorizing this scene of mutual exposure.

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�: Naked Sharing The between-us, whenever it takes place, is always the between of nakedness. ����-��� �����, “Concealed Thinking” in A Finite Thinking (40)

Along with the next two chapters, this one is written around bed scenes: empty and unmade beds, and bedrooms both occupied and not. That is, from the body of Psyche lying outstretched and extended in this chapter to the similarly comported naked female body in Marguerite Duras’s story The Malady of Death and its filmic redaction as Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell, and the unmade bed of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s urban billboard photograph, in chapter 4, to the made and unmade beds in photographs by Bernard Faucon and Daniel Boudinet that bracket our reading of Roland Barthes in chapter 5. And so we will move from the psyche’s corporeality to bodies on beds, and from those occupied bedrooms to images of beds, now empty, unmade and yet bearing the impressions of bodies. The unmade bed is taken here to be neither the property of the stage (as in theater), nor the place of a conjugal coupling, nor of a final destination and resting place, but rather the image of an exposure to a sense of freedom that remains open and no place other than in the finitude and concealment that is nakedly presented as the shared space around and between bodies. Naked image is the name that I have given to the presentation of these scenes of bodies together and exposed—scenes of shareddivided sociality that I theorize as naked sharing. Like the sheets of paper discussed in the previous two chapters and other pieces and stacks of paper that we will turn to in the final chapter of the book— and like the beds that furnish them—these are scenes that present readymade places, including the “between” of shared sociality, as already-unmade. This is the scene/stage of what I have been calling the unbecoming community.

We begin our discussion with a posthumous note, written around the body of Psyche. In his book-length essay Corpus, Jean-Luc Nancy has written that “Freud’s most fascinating and perhaps (I say this without exaggerating) most decisive statement is in this posthumous note: Psyche ist ausgedehnt: weiss nichts davon. ‘The psyche’s extended: knows nothing about it.’ ”¹ In its entirety, Freud’s posthumous note reads as follows: “Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing of it.”² Freud wrote this note—which was to be his second to last—while in exile, in August 1938, soon after he had emigrated from Vienna to London, and just a year before he died. Alongside Nancy’s estimation of the importance of this posthumous note as absolutely decisive for Freud and any understanding of his work right up to and beyond his death, the importance of this note within Nancy’s own thinking over the past thirty years on the philosophical, conceptual, and material relations between body, soul, and psyche cannot be overestimated either. For not only has he recently said that his essay Corpus finds its sole theme in Freud’s statement, Freud’s text has held his attention since at least as early as 1977, when, in a short text simply titled “Psyche,” he wrote three times around the body of Psyche in the form of three short paragraphs, in which he respectively imagines the body of Psyche first as dispersed, then as asleep, and a third time as (perhaps) dead.³ In his book On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, and its opening discussion of this 1977 text by Nancy on Psyche, Jacques Derrida expressed his own estimation of Nancy’s essay Corpus, within the Western philosophical tradition and its thinking of the body, the senses, and in particular touch, by nominating it as the modern and current-day equivalent of Aristotle’s De Anima (On the soul), which in the original Greek bears the title Peri Psuches (or, Around Psyche).⁴ In turn, both Derrida and Nancy have pointed out that Aristotle’s treatise, although seemingly dedicated to the theme of the human soul, is, in fact, a discussion of the body. As we can now perceive and appreciate, this is just one of the earliest of such deviations between

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theme/topic and discourse when it comes to the philosophical excursion into questions of body, soul, and psyche—marking their very chiasmus in philosophical discourse from Aristotle through Descartes, to Freud and Nancy. For we can also note the equally interesting and significant discrepancy between the title of Nancy’s text Corpus and its self-proclaimed and “sole” theme—namely, psyche (and specifically Freud’s posthumous note)—a deviation that, in turn, can be understood as an inversion or reversal of the discrepancy that structures Aristotle’s own thinking on body and soul. We might summarize this series of inversions as follows: Nancy writes a text titled Corpus that is about psyche, and Aristotle writes a treatise on the soul that is about the body (from psuches/psyche to soma/ body). In their chiasmic crossing lies Freud’s Psyche, figured as a body, outstretched and extended. Based upon this philosophical genealogy, it seems that Psyche has always been a question and matter (and figure, even) of space, the transitive, extension, and in particular as a being-in-act: the constative and performative exposition and the animating force (de anima) of a “here lies.” In what follows, I argue that this extended exposure performed as “she” just lies there (dispersed, asleep, dead?) is the opening and staging of an ethical spacing. A pose, position, disposition, and exposition that raises the question as to how she lies there, and of the decision to allow her to just lie there, outstretched and extended, and for her, and perhaps even “for us,” to know nothing of it. Here Lies a Body: Ex-corpore Taking a decisive step away from Heidegger’s formulation that the essence of existence is ek-sistence (thrown, standing-out) and Sartre’s reformulation—that existence precedes essence—Nancy consistently posits that existence is its own essence, and in doing so, he effectively divorces essence from any thinking of the ontological. In practically the same breath, he “locates” a body (always of the indefinite article since, as he reminds us, there is no such thing as “the body” even though we—as does he—will find ourselves writing it both ways) not only “at” or “on,” but as the ontological register of

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existence. This means that when it comes to the question of the ontology of the body and existence, a body cannot be said to be simply in or at a place, but instead a body is the (always local) place of existence, such that, as Nancy writes, “The ontology of the body is ontol­ ogy itself . . . the body is the being of existence.”⁵ In other words, the body is where ontology takes place. By further distinguishing the place of this body-ontology as being more spacious than spatial, Nancy thinks against all phenomenopsycho-theological conceptions (read: reductions) that, in their various relational logics, conceive of the body as the corporeal incarnation of ontological presence and in turn construes the place of that presence as “embodied.” These conceptions presuppose the existence of a place (“here”) in or at which a body (also presupposed) can be put (“there”). But as Nancy argues, there are no such presuppositions when it comes to places and bodies, and it is this absence of foundation or ground—one that would function as a bridge appro­ priating the distance between here and there—that constitutes the spaciousness of bodies and, as he will also argue, an experience of their singularly shared freedom.⁶ Here, as the place of existence, is the place of exposure, the ontological opening of (toward, onto) “the-there.”⁷ And yet, the there of this here must not be mistaken as being “over there” nor even “elsewhere.” Instead, the there lies in the there of here, the here that is right there, and as Nancy points out, “This is what Heidegger tries to make the word Dasein (‘existence’) say: Dasein is being the there (da).”⁸ Working from sections 22–24 of Being and Time, gathered as they are under the rubric of “the aroundness of the surrounding world and the spatiality of Da-sein,” Nancy enables us to understand that the entrance of the body (here) lies in its exposure, its “being-the-there.” For instance, in section 23 of Being and Time, on “the spatiality of being-in-the-world,” Heidegger states that Dasein understands its being here in terms of the over there of the surrounding world. The here does not mean the where of something objectively present, but the where of de-distancing being with . . . together with this de-distancing. In accordance with its spatiality, Dasein is initially never here, but over there.⁹

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To Nancy’s observation, made on a number of occasions as to the difficulty of Heidegger’s formulation of Da-sein,¹⁰ we can add Heidegger’s admission as to the difficulty he had in thinking the bodily. Heidegger is famous for having devoted very little of his writing to the body, although the recent publication and translation of his Zollikon Seminars will rectify many of the prevailing overstated per­ ceptions as to the philosopher’s reticence on the topic.¹¹ Nonethe­ less, it is undeniable that in Being and Time, his most important and widely read work, Heidegger will write of “the spatialization of Dasein in its ‘corporeality,’ which contains a problematic of its own not to be discussed here.”¹² It is clear that in his post-Cartesian thinking of Da-sein, Heidegger refused its bio-empirical reduction to a thing, object, or substance, such as a body (res extensa) or the psychological investment in an “Ithing,” as he calls it (res cogitans). Instead, Da-sein is located in handiness, care, use, and techniques of dedistancing and directionality that affirm the essence of existence to be ek-static, out-standing, extended and exposed.¹³ Indeed, Nancy’s thinking on existence as extending and exposing “there” finds its strongest philosophical resonance in the Da- (“there”) of Da-sein (“being-the-there”), Heidegger’s name for the event (Ereignis) of Being. Even further, the step that Nancy takes in arguing for the equiprimordial relation of body and existence is echoed in Heidegger’s discussion, in the Zollikon Seminars, of the openness of being as a “bodying forth” (Leiben): “Bodying forth always belongs to being-in-the-world. It always co-determines beingin-the-world, openness, and the having of a world.”¹⁴ Presumably it is for these reasons that Sarah Sorial is able to argue that “while the body is suspended in this [Heidegger’s existential] analysis, it remains the condition for the possibility of Heidegger’s existential analytic; that is, the body, while apparently absent, is always presupposed.”¹⁵ Yet at the same time and further to the purposes of our discussion, in his theorization of dedistancing, Heidegger makes it clear that this active and transitive existential “bringing near” is not to be confused with the remoteness or nearness of measurable distance, nor is it “oriented toward the I-thing encumbered [!] with a body.”¹⁶ As Richard Askay explains in his reading of Heidegger, “While our bodily being is essential to our being-in-world, it

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is our being-in-the-world (our openness to that which addresses us in the clearing, our dwelling in ecstatic being, our understanding of being, etc.) which is primordial from an ontological perspective.”¹⁷ One way of understanding this is to read it as saying that where there is extension and exposure, there is a body (and not the other way around). In other words, a body is the creation of its own place, and the scene of the body is no place other than, and nothing but, the body in its ontological extension and exposure, as being-there. We can think this in terms of Nancy’s description of birth, as when he writes: When a baby is born, there’s a new “there.” . . . The baby is nowhere else but there. It isn’t in a sky, out of which it has descended to be incarnated. It’s spacing; this body is the spacing of the there. . . . The “there” itself is made only of opening and exposition.¹⁸

Bodies are—they exist—to the extent that there is extension and exposure. Extended and exposed name the ontological existential spacing of the body—the opening and self-separating of its spacious spacing. As Nancy argues, “In order to speak about the body, or, to put it in the Latin and professorial mode, to speak de corpore (‘on the subject of the body’), we always have to speak about the body ex cor­ pore . . . as in ex cathedra.”¹⁹ Bodies are born out of this exteriority, and the expression “here lies” enunciates this place of ontology. It constatively and performatively enunciates the body’s entrance onto the ontological scene of existence, there where the body lies, extended and exposed, as the ex corpore (body-from-out) and exteriority that the body most properly is. It is inarguable—even based upon my necessarily brief excursus— that Jean-Luc Nancy has relied upon the work of Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud and their respective thinking on Da-sein (“beingthe-there” of existence) and what we might for the moment refer to as “psychic space,” as two principal conceptual axes along which to think and write on the extension, exhibition, exposure, weighing, touching, and sense of body, soul, psyche, corpus. Yet it must be noted that Nancy finds in Heidegger’s “being-the-there,” and Freud’s statement on Psyche, mutually supporting ways in which to think and write on the ontologically spacious disposition of a body that are not aligned with the kind of phenomeno-psychological interpreta� � � � �   �  78

tion that might otherwise be suggested by, or attributable to, these authorial references.²⁰ Here Lies a Body: Co-corpore and the Elliptical Spacing of  “With” As is increasingly known and understood in contemporary scholarship on his work, for Nancy, the ontological register of existence not only is a body, but this body-ontology is always a matter of coexistence. In a move that at once draws upon and distinguishes itself from Heidegger’s existential analytic, Nancy gives ontological priority to Being-with, such that all discussion of ontology must always be thought in terms of co-ontology. In his recent discussion of Heidegger’s notions of Mitsein (“Being-with”) and Mitdasein (“Beingthere-with”), Nancy credits Heidegger with being the first “to have elucidated . . . the essential character of the existential with (that is, of the with as condition of possibility of human existence)—if not even of the existence of all beings.”²¹ So if, as we have just discussed, existence as being-there is always bodily existence, and bodily existence is extended and exposed (excorpore), and existence is also and at the same time always coexistence, then it can be said that each and every body, in its singularity, is at once ex-corpore and co-corpore: a body exposed in its ontological being-with other bodies, and a body that is with other bodies in being ontologically exposed. So not only do bodies not preexist their extension and exposure, they also do not preexist their coexistence with other bodies. Just as much as there is no such thing as a non-exposed and non-extended body, there is also no such thing as a body that exists completely separate and detached from each and every other body. In our bodily dispositions, we are exposed to an ontological exteriority: a spacing between, around, and among that exists only as a shared-out spacing. As spacious bodies, we are co-ex-posed corpuses. This is what Nancy’s Corpus tells us and even gives us a sense of, written as it is around Freud’s note on Psyche. It is also what Derrida calls to our attention in his essay “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” and its reading of Francis Ponge’s poem “Fable,” the first line of which is: “With the word with begins then this text.”²² The word with is the word/name for the origin or the � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  79

beginning, and not just of Ponge’s poem but perhaps of every such invocation of an origin or beginning. Or even more properly, “with” is the shibboleth that gives us access to the origin as with, which is to say, always at once separated from itself and always with something other than itself. “With” is the invention of the origin and the other, and of the other at the origin that makes the origin always already other than itself. It is as though with is the word that impossibly names that which is prior to every proper word and name, as if with is the first word prior to all words, including first and word, but also with. Ponge’s inaugurating “with” makes us recall and want to rewrite the first words of John’s gospel so that they would read: “In the beginning was the with (cum/come) as the first word (logos), and the ‘with’ was made body (flesh),” as though logos, body . . . world, come or are created out of the “with.” No thinker other than Nancy has better equipped us with the sense that the “world” means beingwith everything here.²³ “With” is the place-name for the ontological space of existence as coexistence; of being as always being-with (Mitsein), and following Ponge, of “with the word with” being the with by which being is being-there-with (the way or technē of being-there, as when we say “to write with a pen”). Neither an exteriority nor interiority, but spaced as “under the one and other” (the third line of Ponge’s poem), a spacing that might be understood as under exteriority and interiority, as well as under the one (subjective ego) and the other (object). With is the “ground” between, around, and among us. It is a means (way) without end, and therefore corresponds to Derrida’s definition of the allure in his discussion of the ellipsis: “the action of something that comes without coming, the thing that concerns us in this strange event.”²⁴ “With,” then, is elliptical: it marks the impossibility of originary singular presence—as affirmed in the first line of Ponge’s poem—and of a definitive end—as inscribed in the last line of the main body of the poem, the line that begins with the word there and that ends with an ellipsis: “There as to our difficulties . . .” With is the word for the elliptical being-there of our being-together. But what about Ponge’s reference here to “our difficulties”? Well, that sort of tension probably needs to be acknowledged, spoken, and

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not in the least bit denied. But our sense and pleasure need to be acknowledged as well, including, as we shall see, the pleasure of partaking in the frayed outline or path of the shared-division of our coex-posed bodies, a de-parting that is shared between us, and traced along its extended exposure as though with the with of an ellipsis. It is in his essay “Elliptical Sense,” on Derrida’s essay (cited above) on that graphic mark of lexical omission in the work of poet Edmund Jabes, that Nancy locates and speaks of à corps perdu (of which there are multiple meanings and possible translations: desperately headstrong; a lost, undone matter, body, or garment; a corpse; a commonalty; the phrase is also related to the English word corps, as in Marine Corps). Nancy derived this term from one of the three quotes from Hegel that serve as the epigraphs to Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy (1972). Hegel had written of the “body” of philosophy being without ground and therefore as needing to proceed à corps perdu (“in a headstrong manner”). For Nancy, this is also to be understood as a losing or undoing that is the very non-negative sense of matter, body, garment, corpse, and community. Psyche’s body, outstretched, with its garments undone and lying there as though a corpse, draws the outline of à corps perdu, written and read as an ellipsis.²⁵ The ellipsis is the refusal of the punctual point and period, including in the form of the dotted line (the latter constituted as a mul­ tiple succession of points). In his discussion of the dotted line in his book The Flesh of Words, Jacques Rancière elides it with the ellipsis, and treats them as synonymous in their operation.²⁶ Now, as he quite astutely points out, the dotted line represents an absence that needs to be filled in with a word, it graphically signifies a question awaiting its correct answer. To this we might add that the dotted line is also, familiarly, the empty placeholder for the signature, the name that is to be inscribed right on or just above it, as when one is asked to “sign on the dotted line.”²⁷ In contrast, Rancière finds in the empty parentheses—“( )”—what he describes as the denial of the dotted line and the appropriation of the latter’s absence that paradoxically makes absence and the invisible present and visible. He goes on to say that the empty parentheses represent the answer awaiting a question that has not yet been found. Think of it as a pregnant pause and space of expectancy, imbued with the promise of future

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redemption and the continuity of that which has been temporarily interrupted. Now while, for Rancière, the empty parentheses are one step removed from the teacherly demand for the (re)production of knowledge represented by the dotted line, for us, the ellipsis is a full two steps removed from it. Along this imagined spectrum, we might envision the dotted line on one end and the ellipsis on the other, with the empty parentheses plotted halfway between. In this way, we can envision the ellipsis as effectively dis-enclosing the prayer-like hands of a parenthetical emptiness, and functioning as the lexicalgraphic measure of the extent to which the invisible remains invisible in the visible, the unsayable unsayable, and so forth—incapable of being appropriated and put to work—not the empty void, but an extended exposure unto the outside. The ellipsis, then, is neither a matter of absence or presence nor even of the not presentable, but in a sense is the lexicographic presentation of presentation. It is the stage/scene that summons nei­ ther a word (as in the dotted line) nor a concept (as in the empty parentheses) but simply a prefix (such as ex- or co-). The ellipsis is at once an iterated and suspended periodicity that traces a path and logic of the allure (or simply of the lure as I discussed in previous work)²⁸ through a zone of non-knowledge and worklessness that, unlike the symptomal and paranoid reading strategies that have been critically examined by Rancière and by Sedgwick, does not presuppose iden­ tity and produce community, but rather perhaps what I am calling the “naked sharing” of the unbecoming community.²⁹ Along the edges of bodies, rubbing and pressing against bodies, an ellipsis is outlined that we might call skin, but only in agreement with Nancy when he states that “there is no skin as such. It is missing, and always being undone, and this is how it covers up, unveils, and offers.”³⁰ Such a seemingly paradoxical nakedly exposed concealment is the reason why skins are also referred to as “hides.” It is this exposed concealment that is nakedly shared between us as co-exposed bodies, a stripping or undressing of all revelations of a common and transparent communication (“adamitic nudity”). Along the ellipsis that is the shared exposition of our common concealment, there is no definitive answer or point of completion. The only question is, without question, the question of decision, including the decision to keep � � � � �   �  82

open that question and that decision. It is, once again, the question of community but only as the community of the question (as Derrida, Jabes, and others have said), without a question held in common or a common question around which the community of bodies would organize as some sort of concentrated collective organism. As we come to think of the co- as index of the ontological register of bodily existence, and the ex- as the direction or orientation from out of, and into which our bodies come and go, might there then also be a way to indicate the space or spacing of this shared extension and exposure, besides the terms that we have been using—namely, here and there? In my own bit of professorial Latin, I propose that it might be barely a word, and certainly not a concept, but actually yet another prefix, the one that extends as far back as Aristotle’s treatise on the soul, body, and psyche: peri- (“around”). We might say that as coexposed, our bodies are extended and share-out a peri- or “around space” that, ontologically and ethically speaking, lies just between us. Around—as vicinity, orbit, ease, leeway (but not surround, envelope, or enclosure)—is the shared-out (co-ex-) space that makes bodies spacious. It is the partition and distribution, the sharing and dividing (partager) of being-here and being-there, which is to say, of place as taking-place, that is neither properly here or there, but the “or” that shares-divides “here or there,” “an ellipsis of places,” as Nancy has described it.³¹ Peri- is, then, the spacing of à corps perdu. It is the around that lies— elliptically—just between us, sensing ourselves as “us,” and what renders each and every body a peri-corpus, as much as a co-corpus and excorpus. Hands holding (mains tenant) is, as we recall from chapter 2, Nancy’s description for the “now” (maintenant) of this space, a now that is not punctual but extended, like an ellipsis rather than the single pair of prayerful hands of the empty parentheses seeking ultimate union with the beyond or even in the immanence of community. And so he writes, “These are ‘our hands’: it is no longer an I that is being uttered, but the uttering and articulation of a we.”³² Beyond the phenomenological, this juncture is also, it would seem, the outside or just alongside of philosophy, and in particular marks the various attempts to think the potentiality, actuality, and limits of soul, psyche, life, and its animating force. In doing so, the discourse � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  83

of Western philosophy found and invented peri-spatiality, and did so precisely as à corps perdu. Nonetheless, in (re)tracing this line, we will want to avoid Hegel’s imperative, when, in resorting to this French phrase, he spoke of the essence of philosophy as a body that in expressing “the sum of its peculiarities,” “in order to attain philosophy,” must “cast itself into the abyss à corps perdu.” Peri-spatiality not only marks philosophical thought’s disavowed encounter with the body that it invents there around its principal object of knowledge, but it also marks the place of non-knowledge, such that, as has been said of Psyche, so too can we say of  Aristotle, Heidegger, and Freud, and us: that when it comes to peri-corpus, they (we) “know nothing of it.” In a certain sense, peri-spatiality is a way of mapping the deferral and difference that bodies cause when they are disseminated across philosophy, language, and thought. This explains why Nancy has called for the need not of a discourse, but a catalog and corpus of the body, including the ways its retreat has been the very means of its entrance into language and thought.³³ The “around” is one of the spatial registers along which the body makes its entrance, and where I locate the event of decision that lies and is shared between bodies, and from out of which something like an ethical relation can be thought and perhaps enacted. Around Psyche’s Body . . . This Is What Escapes It In his short essay from 1977 titled “Psyche,” Nancy writes three times around the spatial disposition of the body of Psyche. In each scenario, Psyche bears a female gender, just as in the ancient myth, and is described at the outset of each scene as “outstretched.” In Nancy’s three refrains of Freud’s “brief melody” (as he describes it), Psyche is first dispersed, then sleeping, and then close to, but perhaps not exactly, dead. It is as though there is a progression from dissemination and radical exteriority (in the first scene: “everything is outside another outside”), to an eroticized deep sleep that “has taken from her even the abandon of her pose” (in the second scenario), to a fixing of her body “with such exact and cruel knowledge” as though lying in a coffin that is about to be closed (in the third scenario). About each of these scenarios it is said—originally by Freud and then three more times here, by Nancy, that “Psyche . . . knows nothing of this.” It is as � � � � �   �  84

though this sequence of scenarios represents Psyche as increasingly threatened with being transformed from a body to a thing and, even more precisely, from that which is spread out and exposed, to that which is suspended or abandoned of its pose and position, right up to and including its exposition, deprived even of “its own” death. In two separate discussions, one of bodies and the other of things, it is in terms of the question of weight that Nancy takes the measure of the difference and distinction between a body and a thing. As he explains, the immanence without immediacy of the thing is a pause in weight, not the effect of gravity but gravity itself, without positing or position, and this is the thing’s ex-position (here lies the thing). Like a thing, a body is extended. However, in being a thing that presses up against other bodies, a body is weighed and is a thing that weighs; not a matter of gravity but of a rising of mass to the surface— an exposed extension. This raising of the body, resonating with its being laid out (stretched out) as at a funeral, is not a vertical elevation, standing erect, or resurrection, but the retreat/withdrawal and excessive coming (and coming up against) of the body that happens no place other than on its very frayed outline and limit, an exposition that is an ex-peausition, an ex-foliation, and a lubricating and delaminating (Berlant). It is a waxing and waning of the body’s surface or, more precisely, its hide (its naked concealment), the shine or finish of its in-finishing (infinitely finite exposition). Here lies a body. Compare these two definitions, both from 1990, the first of the “thing,” the second of the “body.” The former is taken from Nancy’s essay “The Heart of Things,” while the latter is from an early version of his essay “Corpus.” To speak of the thing’s immanence without immediacy would be to try to say that the thing remains in itself (in-manere) but that in this manner of remaining, in this manner of lying, there is nothing that weighs or that posits, but there is a pause in weight: not the effect of gravity, but gravity itself—and position is suspended there, bringing out its ex-position. The beating heart of an immobility, the unbeating heart of co-incidence.³⁴ A body always weighs; it lets itself weigh, be weighed. A body does not have a weight, it is a weight. It weighs, it presses against other � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  85

bodies, onto other bodies. All bodies weigh against one another. . . . This is not a matter of mechanics or gravity. Bodies weigh lightly. Their weight is the rising of their mass to their surface. . . . Here the “self ” is the surface whereby mass is exposed. Massive substance is supported only by a spreading, not by interiority or by a foundation. So, as Freud remarks, “Psyche is spread out”—adding “she knows nothing of it.”³⁵

In one of his other discussions of the Cartesian categories of res extensa and res cogitans, Nancy calls for us to stop talking in terms of “things,” and instead to adopt the vocabulary of “relational/exposed.” The logic underlying this shift is that there is relation and exposure, and every relation presupposes exposure, while exposure need not be folded back into a relation. In turn, extension is not relational but instead all extended things are exposed. In fact, as Nancy writes, “The whole point about extension is that it is only ever exposed, put forth, turned outward without there being an inside, nowhere turned back in upon itself and hence devoid of ‘self.’ ”³⁶ So it can be said that a body is an extended and exposed, but not a relational, thing (i.e., not a thing that returns to, and as, a self). This should stand as a corrective to all of those readings of Nancy’s singular plural ontology of coexistence as a psychoanalytic, phenomenological, or existential philosophy of relationality. For as I will try to further clarify, Nancy’s philosophy is wholly dedicated to a deontologizing or unbecoming ontology of exposition and exposure. We can say, then, that there is some one before becoming someone; and prior to there being some one, there is some body; and before there being some body, there is some thing. However, the ways in which a body is an extended thing and the ways in which some other thing—say, a stone—is an extended and exposed thing differ from each other in additional ways to those that we have already discussed. Nonetheless, we must not ignore that the entity designated as “someone” never relinquishes the multiple ties to this chain, and retains within it “the beating heart of an immobility, the unbeating heart of co-incidence” of the thing. For someone and something, the “some” or “a lot of ” precedes the one or the thing, and it is from out of the some that the one or the thing exists as partes extra partes—that is, a part without reference to � � � � �   �  86

a totalizing and immanent whole or One. In the chapter titled “Someone” in his book  The Sense of  the World, Nancy states that “ ‘One’ means: some ones and some other ones, or some ones with other ones” and, further, that “every one is just as singular as every other one.”³⁷ Ethical sociality lies in sustaining the mutuality of this “and” and this “with.” And yet it is precisely due to the finitude of the “and” and the “with” that we are not only singular plural beings, but also that the incommensurable is what is shared between us, including as the separated-spacing of each and every decision. Which is to say, the sharing in that which cannot be shared (exposure to the aporia) and that which is absolutely non-substitutable—namely, the death of each and every other some one. The “some” of some one is the plural of each singularity. Without presupposition and incapable of being subsumed in the form of the subject, the non-totalizable some of some one is the “cum” or “with” of ontological exposure of coexistence. Ego cum (as Nancy rewrites it), which we might translate as “I come, I-with(-out).” In its enunciation, “ego cum” is a peri-performative, elliptical, and non-constative act of speech that does not announce a return to a metaphysical, anthropological, or psychological subject—I. In other words, while Nancy maintains that a body is an extended thing (res extensa), unlike Descartes’s conception of this category, a body for Nancy—as an extended thing that senses and feels— need not, and does not, always lead back to the mind of the thinking subject and its self-conscious production of knowledge (the res cogitans that states “cogito, ergo sum”). For, as we have discussed, for Nancy a body is not only an extended thing, it is also a thing that only exists in its coexposure. To this conception I add that a body is a shared-spaced exposure to the “around” that lies—elliptically—just be­­tween us. So in drawing from Nancy’s critical reading of the modern Western philosophical tradition, and his assessment that “the time of modernity is followed by the time of things,”³⁸ we might go on to say that our time, the time of us—that which is, at once, our historicity and also the temporality of co-ontology—is the time of scenes, with the difference between these scenes being relational or scenes of exposure. Such a move from things to scenes would effectively shift the emphasis from parts to spacing, in which the latter is understood to be � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  87

the extended and exposed exteriority marked by the “extra” of partes extra partes. In fact, at the very end of the Corpus book, Nancy states that extension (and, by extension, exposure) is the res (thing), and this res/extension is the only thing between bodies, between us.³⁹ Neither as transcendent resurrection, nor as concentrated substance or thing (narcissistic and self-centered), this raising of the body is the weighing on and against itself and other bodies, in any one of the innumerable ways in which bodies partake of the catalog or corpus of sense and touch—taking place in and as the “extra” zone between partes extra partes (ex-co-pore).⁴⁰ When it comes to bodies and the coming that bodies are, think of “knowing” being replaced with “weighing-extending.” To quote Nancy, “Psyche, here, is the name of the body, as presupposed neither according to a substratum sunk into matter nor according to an already-given superstratum of self-knowledge.”⁴¹ A body, then, is neither presupposed nor the presupposition of anything. For, as Nancy states, the only supposition is existence, and existence is the suspension of any presupposition. It is “the supposition of supposition, the simple and absolute position that cuts short all supposition, all sub- or pre-.”⁴² Existence is always coming, yet in such a way that even this coming (not to mention what it might become) cannot be presupposed. To this precise extent, existence is unbecoming—otherwise, it cannot be said to exist. From this we can infer that the scene—in and as its spacing—is the only thing between us; it is the around that our bodies open up, stage, and elliptically space. Not as that which is simply “around,” as in the sense of an enveloping spatial surround, but as the around that a body is in its performative passivity as being-a-thing-there, just lying here, around. So the scene is not simply the place where the body lies, but the way that it lies. It is the taking-place of the body, in its extended and exposed being. The body is never simply “in” or “at” a scene, but is the scene, the scene that it makes in its ontological extension and exposure. Which is to say that the body-scene does not partake of the punctual, the relational, or perhaps even the event— performative or otherwise. So to say that Psyche is outstretched (or extended) is (ontologically speaking) to say that she is the scene of exposure. Psyche means: ex-

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posed to “the extension [that] has exceeded the ‘self ’ in advance” and that in what follows we will come to define in spatial terms as the fore-scene of a directional to- and toward-, that in its extended exposure (and exposed extension), right up to and including death, is argued to be the primal scene of never-ending fore-pleasure. In turn, by being described as knowing nothing of this, Psyche is distinguished from the thinking thing (res cogitans) that appropriates the thing in a relation of apprehension, perception, or intention and that would have the effect of constituting Psyche as a subjective self— as someone. Yet the one thing that the res cogitans cannot appropriate is its own death, and it is death that is the condition for exposure, and it is death that is staged in and as the “here lies” of extension or being outstretched, like Psyche. The only relation that one can have to death is a non-relational relation, and its locus is neither within nor without but in a space that is aporetic: “so intimate and yet so improper.”⁴³ The scene of infinitely finite exposure is the shared-out and divided space of decision and offering that does not belong to any economies of exchange—of giving and taking. Coexistence to be understood as toward or to the “ex” and the “co” from out of  which we come. Coexistence, and for that matter life itself (if we wish to speak in such terms), is not a gift, but an offering from out of nothing, nothing but the world, infinitely finite and always in advance of each of us in our singular plurality as some one of the always more than one, and not as a self or an other. At this point it is worth quoting at length a passage from Nancy’s chapter on “someone,” since it weaves together many of the threads of our discussion up to now: What is commensurable in them [singularities] is their incommensurability. Thus, the death of the other is not only that to which I cannot have access, that which I cannot take on myself or appropriate—as little as I can appropriate my “own” death. The death of the others represents also being-with-the-others as being-with-no-body. It is not an empty relation or a relation with emptiness: it is the relation with the singularity of the singular as such. The grave is not a commemorative superstructure posited in an empty place: the grave is itself a place, a space that is valid as such, through its spacing.

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Before being a sign, it is a passage and a partitioning of sense. We die into the world as we are born into it: singular, whatever, substitutable—always capable of coming in the place of the other—nonsubstitutable—the place of the other being nothing but the spacing out of the place of the one.⁴⁴

The withdrawal, retreat, and departure that is the entrance of a body-as-scene is no longer the relational scene of sameness versus difference (binary, dual, oppositional), but the scene of a shared exposure to the withdrawal of the proper, and of property, and propriety. This is an aporetic sharing-out of what cannot be shared: namely, the improper and inappropriable. Indeed, this scene is a no-man’sland, the place that literally belongs to no one, and hence that which cannot be either given or taken.

Cruel and Exact Knowledge In Nancy’s reading of it, Freud’s posthumous note gives us an image of Psyche that, in the peri-performative extension and outstretching of her body, is also the exposure to what we might refer to as the scene of non-knowledge. In a section of Corpus titled “Weighing,” Nancy describes Psyche’s body as the very body of non-knowledge, when he writes: Psyche’s nonknowledge of her proper extent—of the extensionweighing that being is, once the psychic exists (and what, finally, does “psychic” mean? if not the “existant” = “the form of a body in action”—and there’s neither a potential body nor an essential existence, it’s this, even, “the body,” “existence,” it’s nothing else, nothing more, nothing less than this—which is why, in this one note by Freud, all of “psychoanalysis” really has its true program always yet to come)—this nonknowledge, then, is Psyche’s very body, or rath­er, it is this body that Psyche herself is. This nonknowledge is not a negative knowledge or the negative of knowledge, it’s only an absence of knowledge, an absence of this bond called “knowing.” (97)

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what we might call the fore-scene of psychoanalysis, in and as its own exposure to non-knowledge. Here Freud seems to at once touch upon the limits of psychoanalytic discourse, and at the same time retreat back into the psychical apparatus—namely, the ego of the individual subject. For while in the Postscript to an Autobiographical Study (1935), a text closely contemporary with these last unpublished notes, Freud spoke of a “wider stage” (namely, culture) across which psychoanalysis might operate, right up until the final months of his life he remained committed to an egological interiority as the only epistemo-psychological foundation, and as the origin from which any sense of social relationality might be derived. We recall here that the entire note on Psyche reads: “Psyche is extended; knows nothing of it. Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is possible. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus.” Our understanding here is greatly aided by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s coauthored notes, “La panique politique” (Political panic), on the issue of  psycho­ analysis and politics, in which they argue that “the psychoanalysis of identification necessarily led to the analysis of the ‘wider stage,’ of the no man’s land, but also that the overflowing of this scene was not, immediately at least, sustainable through a psychoanalysis which has remained dependent, whether it likes it or not, upon the paradigm of the subject.”⁴⁵ Psyche is body: this is what escapes it, and this escape (or retreat) is what constitutes psyche, in and as “a dimension of not (being able/ wanting)-to-know-itself.”⁴⁶ In a word, as “non-knowledge.” In its spacing, non-knowledge is the not entirely measurable dimension “around,” which comes to constitute co-ex-posed bodies in a non-totalizing, non-unifying erotogenic zone of peri-corporeality. In this peri-spacing of bodies, “the body of sense” is born on and as the scene for the sense of life, soul, animation, and sensation. Self-separated, outside, suspended, in advance of itself and never returning to, or having re-course back to, itself (as subject) but always to-come (e­venire) in its infinitely finite coexistence—this is sense, this is body. And this is the scene that the body of Psyche performs in being extended and exposed to non-knowledge (following Nancy, and in a psychoanalytic idiom, let’s call it “the unconscious”). � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  91

It cannot be said that Psyche is either knowledgeable or ignorant of the non-knowledge that she is, since non-knowledge (according to Bataille, from whom Nancy derives the concept) is the absence of the relational logic that structures knowledge, including in its negative form, as ignorance. In other words, non-knowledge is not a lack of knowing, since that would still leave intact an object of knowing and knowledge, only negatively and perhaps, we might say, temporarily, about which it is imagined that one day, in some Hegelian future, this lack of knowing will in turn be negated so as to achieve a more complete and total knowledge. As Nancy states, for Bataille, “ ‘Notknowing’ designates, on the contrary, knowing that there is no knowing beyond our knowing, that ‘knowing’ designates merely the knowledge of an object (essentially, then, we are still swimming in Kant’s vast wake), and that the totality of being cannot be addressed by a knowing.”⁴⁷ Psyche, then, is said to be the body of non-knowledge based upon an absence or lack of relation tout court, including the relational structure that goes by the name of knowledge and that is bracketed by the absence of knowledge or presence of ignorance, as the two poles of epistemological lack. Being-exposed means never to stand (or lie) in an essential relation to any one or any thing, and it is because she is “the form of a body in action” and “extension-weighing” that Psyche is not bound by the relational bonds of knowledge. The first of Nancy’s three meditations written around the body of Psyche reads, in its entirety: Psyche is outstretched, partes extra partes; she is but a dispersion of infinitely parceled out places in locations that divide themselves and never penetrate each other. No encasement, no overlap; everything is outside another outside—anyone can calculate their order and demonstrate their relationships. Psyche alone knows nothing of this; for her, there is no relationship between these places, these locations, these bits of a plane.⁴⁸

As we have already discussed, Nancy’s social ontology is not relational but instead thinks coexistence in terms of an infinitely finite exposure to finitude that is shared, and therefore, if his work calls upon us to do something, it would be to partake in an equally finite

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and concealed thinking (as he has called it), one that ceaselessly exposes itself to non-knowledge. As Nancy has put it, “The task is to defer/differ Parousia. Not to cast it ever further but, on the contrary, to approach it in the most intimate manner: to defer the para (the near, proximity, presence) of the ousia (or essentia).”⁴⁹ As a means of engaging with a longstanding deconstruction of metaphysics and presence by affirming the aporetic relation of “here” and “there,” a thinking of the “peri-” differs from the ousia (essence) but also differs, in its sense of ex­ posure, from the protective cover of each and every para (the paratrooper’s parachute or even his parasol).⁵⁰ For unlike such paratactic devices or apparatuses, the peri-spacing of Psyche, of being-exposed, is not a relation of interiority and exteriority (i.e., the latter being the projection of the other), but is, as Nancy defines it, “organized around nothing other than its own opening.”⁵¹ It is in this context that he makes reference to “the unconscious,” about which he goes on to say that as this opening onto the space that lies around it, the unconscious is an opening onto nothing—nothing but the zone of nonknowledge, the place of the unbecoming community. Given that Freud himself figured the unconscious as the beingextended of Psyche, the question becomes more a matter of whether one decides to sustain this exposure to non-knowledge or somehow to work through and beyond it, to transcend it—for instance, by means of what Nancy refers to as “such exact and cruel knowledge.” These are the very last words of his third meditation on Psyche, in a scene in which others, by standing around her outstretched body, immediately occupy the peri-spatiality of coexistence. It reads: Psyche is outstretched in her coffin. Soon it will be closed. Among those present, some hide their faces, others keep their eyes desperately fixed on Psyche’s body. She knows nothing of this—and that is what everyone around her knows, with such exact and cruel knowledge.

This calls for a thinking of the immediacy of peri-spatiality in order to “approach it in the most intimate manner,” and perhaps even as the space that comes to be designated by the word intimacy. Not

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the place of encounter of the “paramour” even (etymology: “by love”), but of the peri-amour. By writing it as “im-mediate,” Nancy marks the interruption and suspension that every sense of immediacy at once attempts to overcome and from which it derives its very reason to exist. It is the nonmediating and incommensurable distance and proximity between here and there, as in the spacing that lies just between us. Struc­ tured in neither an immediate nor a mediated relation to each other, here and there instead can be said to be im-mediately around each other. As theorized by Nancy, the im-mediate is neither of immediacy, since, obviously, this would eliminate the sense of difference between “here” and “there,” thereby canceling out both, nor is it a matter of mediation, since this would preserve each and every subject/object duality and would come to constitute an all too stable liminal threshold, where one would be met halfway between here and there, as is often said in the name of reciprocity or some other such liberal notion of equitable exchange. Rather, Nancy argues that the im-mediate is interval or passage, where the immanence or hereness of any thing lies. This is the place that is not simply around and between here, but the around and between that here is—the spacing that is most proper to it. In other words, the around and between is where here lies. Like a body that, in being outstretched and extended, makes room for, stages, and opens the around or peri-spacing that immediately lies at (and as) its exposed and expropriated heart. Peri-spacing is the place-name for this partaking of space and imparting of place that is the coincident partition of here and there (partager: spatially distributed sharing and dividing). The periphery, then, is not peripheral to, but at the heart of, things, bodies, the social, us—a space that is immanent yet without immediacy. As Nancy states, “A finite thinking is one that rests on this im-mediation.”⁵² Nancy’s finite and concealed thinking are dedicated to sustaining this naked concealment of non-knowledge, so as not to abandon the peri-spatiality of coexistence either to a form of ignorance or as an object/subject of knowledge. In reading Nancy when he writes that “concealed thinking is no more annihilated thinking (unconscious, asleep, dead thinking) than it is maintained, self-identical thinking,” we discern a reference to the three scenarios from his essay on Psyche. In doing so, he also implicitly provides us with examples � � � � �   �  94

of the attribution of non-knowledge to an “appropriable content” (an unconscious, asleep, or dead body), while at the same time he points to the effects, not only for Psyche then, but also for our thinking now, of a knowledge that in that text he described as “exact and cruel.”⁵³ To avoid such cruelty, we need to think in terms of the finitude of knowing—of knowing that there is no knowing beyond knowing—which would mean remaining nakedly exposed in and as nonknowledge—a non-knowledge that will forever remain concealed in and as our thinking. Finitude, in its infinity, renders “the nothing” an ontological impossibility, in that the nothing is a totalized “no,” and finitude is the interruption of any and all such totalizations. Therefore, when we say that “nothing stands between us,” we mean “no-thing” (including that “thing” designated as “everything”), and thereby express the infinite finitude of naked sharing. Finitude is the interruption that renders nothing as no-thing, and in turn, no-thing is in-appropriable, precisely as the thing that is nothing and that, as nothing, is that thing that most properly belongs to no one (proper self), but instead can only be shared and sharedout. To share, then, means to sustain this very in-appropriable (and therefore non-exchangeable) spacing—the nothing—that lies just between us, as the exposure to the separating/interrupting force of finitude. This is, as I have argued, literally the (spacing of) decision that, in our ontological existence in and as this shared exposure, is what we mean by the ethical. It is the decision of shared de-cision, not once and for all, but for each ones (partes extra partes) as the singular plural beings (some ones) that we incommensurably are in being-together. It is the persistent exposure to exteriority that constitutes each and every singularity as an infinite affirmation of non-redemptive finitude. Which is also to think of ethical decision in terms of an alwaysinitiating move (birth) that is without any prescribed end (death). For Nancy has recently argued that if “it is exactly at the place of the with that both the chance and the risk of existence manifest themselves, then one must also remember, in conformity with the Heideggerean paradox, that this place is that of death . . . [which then raises the question, asked by Nancy] how can death between us, or even death as the co-opening as such of the there, be thought?”⁵⁴ � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  95

In terms of our discussion, we can say that the peri-spatiality of coexistence lies around and im-mediately between us. So to the list of things that Psyche performs as the body of non-knowledge—that she exists to the extent that she is extended; that anyone can calculate and report on her dispersion; that eros contemplates her; that she is not exactly dead; that others know her, cruelly and exactly— we might add: that around her body lies the im-mediate zone that is the space of coexistence. The around: here is where the body lies, extended and exposed there. So: here is exposed and there is exposed, and the body’s singular freedom lies in the mutual abandonment to the around (the outside, the infinite finitude of existence) that lies—nakedly concealed and shared—just between here and there, you and me—us. This sharing in the around or peri-space that is the ex-proper place of a body is a sustaining of the ethical space of decision, around (peri) and about (ex) the body. This would be something like the decision to allow her to just lie there extended and exposed onto nothing—and thereby to rest where the shared sense of freedom itself rests nakedly concealed, right there around the body of Psyche—peri psuches. This is the performative exposition of the ethical, of the sustaining of the space that lies im-mediately around our bodies, shared-out between us. Incapable of being appropriated by or as the subject/object of knowledge (i.e., phenomenological-existential consciousness or the ego/unconscious of psychology), this scene of non-knowledge is the performative opening and spacing of its own staging, in and as the “here lies.” It is the way in which a body, in lying there, outstretched and extended, can be the exposition and an exhibition that “lays bare” or exposes a “singular freedom.”⁵⁵ This does not play itself out on the register of the performative utterance; this scene does not unfold through the “hereby” of an illocutionary utterance or speech-act (e.g., “I hereby declare you husband and wife”) but a quasi-epitaphic “here lies” that approaches the limits of vision and the imperative to “see here!” (whether moral, theoretical, pedagogical, legal-juridical, and categorical: all various forms of “paranoid reading”). So neither the voice of abandonment that declares “hoc est enim corpus meum” (“here is my body”) nor habeas corpus as figure of the legal-juridical subject of modern democracy, for in both cases an insistence on the � � � � �   �  96

coincidence of body and “here” effectively abandons being, body, and place through the forsaking and appropriating of the open space that lies nakedly concealed and gives nothing to see, and that lies right here between us, as the extended and exposed bodies that we are. Behold (or “see here,” voici) is an imperative. If it is true that it orders (but up to what point is it true? up to the boundary, so fragile, of the ellipsis or suspension of a you; what is needed for this ellipsis, the tone of voice it engages, its fragility—all of this remains to be thought), then what it orders cannot be described, for the here, of “see here” is not shown. . . . Ecce homo orders what we once called the ecceity of man: its presence, for itself, in this or that “here,” independent of its attributes, of its very essence. Ecceity is being that is stripped of everything that is not its being-here—or its beingthere.⁵⁶

As opposed to the performative utterance that demands and orders to “see here” a physical presence (physiological, made flesh, incarnated, embodied, corporeal, etc.), the “here lies” partakes of the logic of the peri-performative (as literally “around-the-performative”). An elliptical performance, the peri-performative is the staging and scene, presentation and exposition of “here lies” that gives nothing to see, nothing but the peri-spatial ellipsis of “here” as its scene. It is not that there is first the performative and then, wholly distinct from that, the peri-performative. No, it is the latter that enunciates the around that lies at the heart of the performative, as its open-ended and reiterated staging. So not “around the stage or scene,” but the “around” that the scene is, and more specifically—given our sense of the perispatiality of our bodily coexistence—as the performative spacing of the around that lies just between us and is shared, as the common concealment of our nakedly coexposed bodies. Neither measurable nor immeasurable, this is not common sense or a sense held in common, but the shared sense of our common incommensurability. Is there an art to this? Which would mean to begin to think an aesthetic praxis that presents this extra spacing that is the substance out of which bodies come, and come together to share out, around, and between. In what follows, I propose naked image as one name for the image or scene of partaking in this exposure to the infinitely finite sense of existence that we have come to call naked sharing. � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  97

�: Naked Image “Don’t   you want to stretch out now?”   “Yes,   I think I’m going to stretch out,   it’s a large bed, unmade and disorderly. Do you want me to describe things to you as I see them?” ��������, The One Who Was Standing apart from Me (61)

Exposure, in its finitude, is never bare, and this is what makes it in­ finitely concealed in its very nakedness. This is also the source of the sense of pleasure (rather than, say, frustrated desire) and of sharing in  a never-ending stripping or exposing, not of concealment (and hence not as revelation or exposé), but as a sharing out of nakedness. Naked­ ness is the spacing of the with, the between-us of our being-together. This is how we understand Nancy when he writes, “The between-us, whenever it takes place, is always the between of nakedness. This doesn’t mean that only nakedness allows us to be between us; rather, it means that when we are between us—when this happens—we are naked.”¹ For, as we discussed in the previous chapter, just as there is no solitary body (for such a thing would no longer be a body but rather some saturated and undifferentiated totality), there is also no solitary nakedness; and thus we might say that nakedness is the form of sharing in the with, as the spacing and decision between us. This naked sharing in and as the spacing of the with is a form of exposure not to be confused with the revelatory, asymmetrical, and transparency-driven representational logic of the exposé. As in the previous chapter, and as will be further discussed below, naked shar­ ing is a shared exposure (a coexposure) to that which remains in­ finitely concealed—the scene of our being-together as nothing but spacing, the (peri)-spacing that lies around and just between us. In other words, in the being-together of our coexposed bodies, we most properly share in the retreat and withdrawal of any relational ground and ground of relationality. Naked sharing is the exposure to the sep­ aration and concealment of our being-together, and offers us the sense that this separation and concealment (this incommensuration)

is what we most share in common. So it is that in his theorization of the between-us nakedness, Nancy goes on to write that “denuded, we are immediately concealed, since there is nothing that could render us visible, knowable, identifiable.”² Again, we express the intimacy of  this “nothing” when we say that “there is nothing between us.” To attempt to seize, capture, and appropriate the concealment that just lies there outstretched, extended, and nakedly shared and exposed, around and between us, is to pursue the kind of knowledge that Nancy, in his writing on the body of Psyche, called “cruel and ex­ act.” In this knowledge’s imperative form and performative utterance to “see here” a body, it is also what philosopher Sarah Kofman theo­ rized as the anatomy lesson, in her essay on Rembrandt’s eponymous painting,³ and in the extremity of its appropriating violence it is what filmmaker Catherine Breillat has named—as the title of her 2004 film—“the anatomy of hell.”⁴ In the medical theater represented in Rembrandt’s painting, a naked male body lies outstretched and ex­ tended on an examination table, around which is assembled a group of male doctors. In the bedroom scenes—which constitute nearly the only scenes of Breillat’s film—the naked body of a young woman lies outstretched and extended on her bed, willfully exposing her body to a male stranger whom she has hired to look at her. In each scenario, whether in the transport of the male body from corpus to corpse and then rendered as an object of scientific study and pedagogical example, or in the scrutiny of the female body for its secreted gender and sexual essence, as it lies there awake or asleep and erotically available and vulnerable, the scene of non-knowledge that the body is becomes a scene of cruel and exact knowledge when the finitude of the body’s infinitely exposed and self-separated spac­ ing is no longer shared, but is laid claim to and appropriated (scien­ tifically or sexually), such that the body becomes a lesson in anatomy and the body, now equated with anatomy as its destiny, becomes its own form of hell. A body does not cease to stage. This phrasing is my variation on Gayatri Spivak’s translation of Nancy’s “un corps ne cesse pas de se,” which she translates as “a body does not cease to transit.” “De se,” also meaning “to exhibit,” “to expose,” and “to present itself,” as in the non-metaphorical staging of the body’s spacing. This is exactly � � � � � � � � � �  �  99

what Nancy meant when, in his exchange with Lacoue-Labarthe on the question of the “scene,” he wrote, “Body, meaning already a stage.”⁵ In the infinite finitude of the body, the non-ceasing of its scene ex­ tends right up to the end—that is, an end that never ceases ending. In other words, “death” as the body’s de-ceasing transit. By the end of this chapter we hope to arrive at understanding this as what it means to “suffer” existence, and how this might constitute a non-traumatic relation and non-securitized response to the body’s incessant retreat and withdrawal, including when that body lies outstretched and ex­ tended in death, as a corpse. Opposite this would be to suffer from what I take Marguerite Duras to mean when she writes of “the malady of death.” This is the diagnosis that the single female figure bestows upon the single male figure as suffering from in Duras’s récit The Malady of Death.⁶ In its seemingly rhetorical redundancy, the malady of death is not simply to suffer death (to die) or existence. Nor is it to be afflicted with what we might call the sickness of (or unto) death, or the radical sickness beyond sickness that is death, and in either case as something like the death of death, in the sense of the onset and intensification of death’s very own proper force (e.g., “You’ve come down with a bad case of death”). Rather, I think that what it means to suffer the malady of death, as the man in the Duras story is said to, is to seize and appropriate our shared exposure to death, which, as we have argued, is the spacing of the with, and a sharing in that which cannot be shared—namely, death—a separated spacing that makes us the finite singularities that we are, yet only in the sense that it is this very incommensurability that is shared between us. The malady of death, then, is the making of death into a general equivalence— that is, of making the incommensurability of our coexistence com­ mensurable. To suffer the malady of death is to put death to work. In The Malady of Death, it is a young man who hires a young woman to come to his home and to lie naked on his bed, over the course of three consecutive nights. It is no coincidence that this scenario re­ sembles the one in The Anatomy of Hell since the latter is Breillat’s filmic redaction of Duras’s story, with one important difference: it is the young woman who hires the young man to watch her lying naked in bed over the course of four nights. Nonetheless, in both works, so­ cial and sexual relations around bodies are structured in the binary � � � �  �  100

terms of gender (male/female) and sexual identity (homo/hetero). We take these to be final lessons in anatomy or finalizing the lessons of anatomy—the complete charting of its destiny and the appropria­ tion of its end, which is also to say, as its own form of hell. Against this we will continue our theorization of naked sharing as the scene of non-knowledge in which we remain on the threshold, infinitely exposed to the force of finitude. This, in contrast, is not an anatomy lesson or anatomy of hell, but what Breillat has named, in the short novel version of her film, “pornocracy.”⁷ The pornocratic would then be one name for the non-appropriative, non-humiliating, and non-redemptive naked exposure to this shared-separation, and that calls for what I have begun to theorize as pornographic faith. The retreat, withdrawal, and departure of bodies stages the scene of na­ ked sharing as naked image, in which the non-redemptive emptying out (kenosis) and raising of the body (fore- and ground) does not yield a resurrection but presents the scene as empty tomb or, better, an  already-unmade bed, as in the quotation from Blanchot’s The One Who Was Standing apart from Me that serves as the epigraph to this chapter. As already-unmade, we will come to think it as the forescene of fore-pleasure. Naked Sharing of Finitude, or The Malady of Death According to Duras’s notes that are appended to her story and out­ line the minimal aspects of its potential staging, the female actress would be the only performer onstage; she would speak her lines from memory; the male figure would be physically absent, only to be re­ ferred to in the second-person “you” by a male narrator who, also in­ visible to the audience, would read the entire story—including the lines of the unseen male character—from the wings of the theater.⁸ Further, while The Malady of Death “could be staged in the theatre,” as Duras noted, it is less a script to be theatricalized and more of a text to be performatively read. Specifically, read around the body of “the young woman of the paid nights” who “should be lying on some white sheets in the middle of the stage.” Duras then adds, “She might be naked.” As a number of commentators have pointed out, in several of her works of the 1980s, Duras was interested not only in blurring  � � � � � � � � � �  �  101

literary and dramatic genres and modes of presentation, but also in exploring the limits of performance, right up to its near impossi­ bility. In The Malady of Death, Duras explores the relations between the récit and theatrical drama, and reading and acting (the latter un­ derstood as the recitation from memory), as im-mediate and persis­ tently intransitive spaces.⁹ One could go further and say that what is remarkable and of utmost interest for us here is the way in which Malady is the very staging of this im-mediate spatial milieu, and that it is this space around both reading and acting that it seeks to open up and indefinitely sustain. I wish to argue that the work is dedicated to this peri-performative spacing, and that it is from this that it derives its ethical import. Simply put: The Malady of Death is about this perispacing, which is here performed by the exposed presentation of a fe­ male body just lying there “on some white sheets in the middle of the stage,” as if to suggest that the entire stage is one “large bed, unmade and disorderly,” and from which the young woman asks, “Do you want me to describe things to you as I see them?” As Martin Crowley has aptly described it, “The phenomenon of staging in Duras’s work: far from providing insulation for the object staged . . . exposes this object to an uncertain encounter with its outside.”¹⁰ As you will recall from the previous chapter’s discussion, this per­ formative exposure to the outside is what I theorized in terms of the peri-performative. Peri-performative is the term that at once names a performative exposure to the outside and is the non–geometrically measurable spacing “around” but also beside, alongside, and in the neighborhood or vicinity of the performative. With this in mind, we come to understand that the performative is the staging, presenta­ tion, and exhibition of its scene, yet only in the precise sense of Nan­ cy’s “de se,” meaning, as the performative’s disappropriation of itself. Which is to say that its existence lies solely in the spaced-out expo­ sure to a zone “around” that is uninhabitable and inappropriable. The peri-performative, then, might be the name for this transitivity that is not a substantiality, and of the way in which, by staging a shared ex­ posure to a common concealment, it is the scene of sex and ethics. This concept of the peri-performative is derived from Eve Sedg­ wick, who, in her book Touching Feeling, devotes a chapter to utter­ ances that allude to, and are about, explicit performative utterances, without actually functioning as actual instances of the latter.¹¹ Sedg­ � � � �  �  102

wick finds examples in nineteenth-century narratives of slavery and marriage, and argues that these stories involve a shift in focus from the bodies (i.e., black and female) that are forcibly put on display in the slave market and the domestic bedroom, respectively, to the very spaces of exhibitionism and display themselves. In other words: the peri-performative space around the explicit performance and appro­ priation of the bodies of others. Unlike the explicit performative ut­ terance theorized by Austin, which, as Derrida has pointed out, is always predicated upon a (typically unacknowledged) sense of deter­ minable context, the peri-performative would be distinct from such a conceptual presumption, and, in fact, could be considered one means for undertaking its deconstruction. As Sedgwick has come to describe it, the peri-performative has an “affinity . . . for the mobile prosce­ nium, the itinerant stage, the displaceable threshold” and therefore is never reducible to “context.”¹² In this regard, the peri-performative can be conceived as the staging of the scene of non-knowledge, as in the spacing around the body and its scene, as in the body of Psyche (peri psuches). In her postscript notes to The Malady of Death, regarding the re­ lation between reading and acting,¹³ Duras writes, “Je crois toujours que rien ne remplace la lecture d’une texte, que rien ne remplace le manqué de mémoire du text, rien, aucun jeu.” Barbara Bray has trans­ lated this as: “I still think that nothing can replace the reading of a text, that no acting can ever equal the effect of a text not memorized.” Yet in her essay on reading and recitation in Duras, Sharon Willis has suggested a slightly different translation, one intended to emphasize the priority of reading over acting: “I still think that nothing replaces the reading of a text, nothing replaces the text’s lack of memory, nothing, no acting.”¹⁴ Yet I would suggest that the statement, in its refusal, can be taken even further, with the emphasis neither on act­ ing nor on reading but on “nothing,” such that we might understand Duras to be saying that nothing (as a non-substantive noun in excess of sense) would actively replace reading just as much as it is said that reading replaces acting/reciting. For in her staging of reading around the scene and body of performance, Duras is also staging the nothing that lies around this scene and performance, and that can only ever be an exposure—beyond these dualities—to non-knowledge. It is in this regard that critics such as Willis, Cody, and Crowley (to name a � � � � � � � � � �  �  103

few) have rightly described Duras’s work as engaged in an exposure to its own limits and potential failure. It is here in this aporetic space that I will locate (in critical alliance with Crowley) the work’s ethical and political import. To quickly recap the plot of the story: a woman has been hired by a man to come to his home and to lie naked in his bed, and to cure him of his inability to relate and connect with others, in particular with women, and in ways that are specifically sexual. Like Psyche in Freud’s posthumous note, the woman’s body is repeatedly described as outstretched, exposed, dispersed, asleep, and in all of these ways, runs the risk of disappearing. And so we read: You realize she’s so made that it’s as if at any moment, at her own whim, her body could cease to live, could just thin out around her and disappear from sight, and that it’s in this threat that she sleeps, exposes herself to your view. That it’s in the risk she runs, with the sea so close and empty and black still, that she sleeps.¹⁵

She is not only the object of mystery for the man (“You don’t know what’s in the sleep of the girl on the bed”), but also, and again like Psyche, she is the very body and scene of non-knowledge. So that ear­ lier on in the story we read: [Of her readiness] That’s just what you will never know. She’s more mysterious than any other external thing you’ve ever known . . . of the malady she says you suffer from. She doesn’t know, herself. She couldn’t tell you. You couldn’t find out anything about it from her. You’d never know anything, neither you nor anyone else; about what she thinks of you or of this affair. . . . She is incapable of knowing.¹⁶

To want to claim and appropriate as a form of knowledge the scene of non-knowledge that the woman stages in lying outstretched and extended on the bed is to suffer the malady of death. It is the appro­ priating force of this malady that represents the refusal to remain ex­ posed to the fact that, as Nancy has argued, “ ‘Life’ and ‘death’ rep­ resent, respectively, the absolute antecedence of self-appropriation [i.e., “life”] and this appropriation’s absolute failure to pass itself on [i.e., “death”].”¹⁷ So the “malady of death” is not the death-drive, but an attempt to live without it. As we have already encountered a number of times, the concepts � � � �  �  104

of infinite finitude and of the infinitely finite are central to Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of being and the sense of existence. According  to Nancy, we are, each one of us, singularly finite entities. Which is to say that we bear an inextricable relation to the limits of existence, to loss and to death. Yet only to the extent that our finitude, as ending, is understood to be never-ending, such that it needs to be thought in terms of an ongoing exposure to an absolute exteriority. We sense this no place other than right at the limits of our bod­ ies, in that peri-space that is neither finite nor infinite but infinitely finite—in other words, never-ending ending. This space is not dialec­ tical but aporetic, being not the oscillation or bridge mediating be­ tween the finite and the infinite, but their syncopated conjuncture/ disjuncture. Nor is it to be confused with and located in some mysti­ cal, metaphysical, spiritual, or abstract realm beyond corporeal exis­ tence, or in some secret interiority hidden deep within the body, but in fact resides no place other than in the peri-space around bodies, an exposure that renders all bodies in their existence—whether clothed or not—naked. As the suspension or disruption of the dialectic, this is also the sustaining of a paradox and the tension of the double bind, in the passage of sense and sense of passage that interrupts or sus­ pends the immanence of the end. In turn, we must not overlook that it is this infinite keeping open of finitude, this peri-spatial exposure, that is precisely what can never be kept—that is, appropriated and possessed, completely preserved, or made the object of any form of exchange: communicative, eco­ nomical, even sexual. Instead, this infinite keeping open is what is kept from us, and yet, in its infinite withdrawal and concealment, is what constitutes us as the finite beings that we most properly are. So we can say that when we are with each other, we share in an exposure to that which remains concealed. Naked sharing. The ontological priority that Nancy allots to the relation to death rather than to death per se is evidenced in the following discussion of Heidegger’s notion of zum Tode sein (“being-toward death”), in which Nancy underlines the directional sense of this and, perhaps and per­ force, all relations now defined as infinitely finite. What carries the whole weight of thinking, in an expression like zum Tode sein, being-toward- (or to-) death, isn’t death but the toward or � � � � � � � � � �  �  105

the to, “death” merely indicating that this toward or this to is main­ tained, as a structure of being, “up to the end”—which is always the absence of any “end,” of any extremity at which the infinite circle of an insane appropriation might be completed. . . . It is appropriated death that is senseless.¹⁸

Here we once again encounter the affirmation that the infinite fin­ itude of existence is an infinite erasure right up to the end, including the definitive erasure (appropriation) of any “end.” But Nancy also explains that any sense of our existence as mortal beings not only de­ rives its sense and direction from death, but that death directs us to or toward no destination, no end. This is critical for thinking our shared exposure to finitude, given that this nowhere to which the sense of existence is directed lies nowhere other than just around us, and as no-thing is the nothing that, as we have said and continue to say, lies just between us. Just as he emphasizes that the sense of being-toward-death lies not in death but in the inappropriable and non-destinal to- or toward-, so too does Nancy, in a separate essay, explain that the sense and spac­ ing of being-together is also without directional markers that would signify toward-what or toward-whom and therefore to what end. So we read in The Sense of the World: This sort of configuration of space would not be the equivalent of a political figuration (fiction, myth). It would trace the form of  being-toward in being-together without identifying the traits of the toward-what or toward-whom, without identifying or verifying the “to what end” of the sense of being-in-common—or else, by identify­ ing these traits as those of each one; a different “totality,” a different unicity of truth. Of being-in-common, it would operate a transitivity, not a substantiality.¹⁹

Returning to our discussion of The Malady of Death, I want to argue that what Duras confronts us with is not the problem of death per se (but as we have seen, one cannot even speak of death in such terms), but a striving to appropriate the infinite finite exposure to finitude that is our (non)-relation to death, in order to arrest it, once and for all. So instead of reading Duras’s malady as an adjective that would

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qualify death as if to speak of its deadliness, we might read it more in the sense of an adverbial nominalization: as the name for a certain, one might say, allergic relation to death that would set off an attempt to rid oneself of the allergy by claiming as one’s own neither the oth­ er’s death nor one’s own death (murder or suicide) but the infinite re­ lation toward- or to-death that remains concealed between the two finite lives. In suffering the malady of death, the male character suffers an af­ fliction that is caused not by his knowledge or ignorance of death, but rather by his refusal to not not-know—that is, to be exposed to the peri-spatiality that remains infinitely concealed in its very naked­ ness, around the body of the woman. Instead, he insists on attaining knowledge of this very place and thinking that it lies in the body of the woman lying outstretched on the bed. At one point in the story, it seems as though he might be approaching this non-knowledge, only for it to be immediately repudiated in a retreat into subjective and rather narcissistically egoistic reflection: “You think you know you know not what, you can’t go through with that knowledge, you think you alone are the image of the world’s woe, of a special fate. You think you’re the master of the event now taking place, you think it exists.”²⁰ In turn, on a couple of occasions this subjective and visual-based epistemological position locates the object of its knowledge— namely, the malady of death—in the very body of the woman: “You look at the malady of your life, the malady of death. It’s on her, on her sleeping body, that you look at it,”²¹ and then again: “You realize it’s here, in her, that the malady of death is fomenting, that it’s this shape stretched out before you that decrees the malady of death.”²² As Blan­ chot has noted, the woman’s white body is “indistinguishable from that of the huge bed [and, we add, its white sheets] which is the un­ limited space of her life.”²³ Her body, in being outstretched and ex­ posed on the bed, stages the scene that is the malady of death as the inappropriable zone of non-knowledge. This is not only what escapes her (and him) but is also, as Blanchot puts it, what “she escapes [that] would turn her into a graspable whole, a sum that would integrate the infinite and thus reduce it to an integratable finite.”²⁴ One possible cognate for “the malady of death” is “death-sick,” one 

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of several possible interpretations/translations of Duras’s title of­ fered by Mary Lydon, who nonetheless regards it as “virtually un­trans­ latable.”²⁵ Guided by Lydon’s insights, “death-sick” is conceptually operative here to the precise extent that it resonates with “lovesick” and thereby suggests the tracing of a circle that would infinitely wed the two to each other in a doubly fatal embrace. To be “death-sick,” then, would mean being so enamored with, or in love with, death (i.e., fetishizing it) that it would make one sick to death, a lovesickness so extreme that it would, in turn, seduce one into completing the circle in an “insane appropriation” (Nancy, as quoted above) of death and of love, which would render both death and love senseless. The malady of death is at once the impossibility of knowing and experiencing one’s relation to one’s own death or that of another, and the attempt to eradicate this impossibility and seize and appropriate death as one’s own (whether as the death of the self or the other or the infinite relation between the two finitudes). This transformation of non-knowledge into an object of knowledge is what I take Nancy to mean when, in describing those who surround the outstretched body of Psyche lying in a coffin that is about to be closed, he says that “with such exact and cruel knowledge” they know that Psyche, as non-knowledge, knows nothing of this. This is exactly the kind of knowledge from which the woman in the story is said to express a de­ sire to distance herself: “She says she hopes she’ll never know any­ thing, anything in the world, the way you do. She says: I don’t want to know anything the way you do, with that death-derived certainty, that hopeless monotony.”²⁶ At the end of the story, with the woman having disappeared from the bedroom during the night, the man has still not succeeded in his ego-driven search for love and, now crying, remains clueless as to the basis for his suffering from the malady of death. “When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibil­ ity of reaching her through the difference that separates you.”²⁷ This weeping will not be relieved of its solipsism simply by being redi­ rected so as to cry over the difference and separation between him and her; nor will the malady of death find its cure by bridging this gap. Instead, we must recognize that the malady of death lies in the refusal to recognize that the “impossibility of reaching her through

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the difference that separates you” describes the very space of social ontology, including intimacy and love as separated spacing that is, and remains, incommensurable.²⁸ As a funereal laying out that is also a raising of the body, the woman lying naked, outstretched on the bed, is the infinite retreat, withdrawal, and disappearance of the body in its peri-performative extension and exposure, and this scene is therefore something other than the event of a religious resurrection and redemptive return of/ to the body. Which is also why Blanchot is correct in saying that we should not be surprised by her sudden disappearance, since that has been the very way or performative mode of her being-there through­ out the récit: “a disappearance that cannot surprise, as it is but the exhaustion of an appearance that gave itself only in sleep.”²⁹ Or as Breillat has put it, “Life is always about sleeping with death”³⁰—life and death’s unconsummated copulation. This is the risk (of life) that the woman runs, as she lies there on the bed and knows nothing of it. Along with Blanchot, we speak of disappearance and death as unsur­ prising, because death is not the surprise risk or intrusion of life—life itself is. Anatomy, a Lesson To conjure death is to make it appear unexpectedly, yet for the ex­ press purpose of trying to turn it into the surprise that it isn’t. Which also means to plot against death in an attempt to exorcise it. Based upon its Latin roots, conjuring also entails a banding together by oath so as to conspire against something. This is exactly what the doctorprofessor and his seven confreres or band of (medical) brothers are doing in Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632), according to Sarah Kofman, in her essay on the painting, titled “Conjuring Death.”³¹ This essay, published posthumously, was also the last text written by Kofman. It is its own posthumous note on the body, specifically a cadaver, yet one that has been stripped of the singularity of its finitude, and thus has become not even the body of death, let alone a body of this death (the death that it was born with and that it bore in its life), but the figure and instrument, spec­ imen and example, by which death is being conjured in this scene,

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as though death itself were being made to unexpectedly appear and hence not be the unsurprising disappearance that it is. This is a scene in which the body is stretched out horizontally under the surveil­ lance of the scientific gaze and its analytic dissection—their very own forms of cruel and exact knowledge. As Kofman describes it, “With this dissimulation of the body, its fragility, its mortality, comes to be forgotten, even though it is exhibited in full light by the pale cadaver that is right there, purely and simply lying there, naked (only the sex is modestly veiled), in the most absolute anonymity.”³² Resembling Freud’s and Nancy’s Psyche, by being a body that lies outstretched and extended around which a group of onlookers has gathered and knows nothing of it, Rembrandt’s/Kofman’s anony­ mous corpse is the object of a different analytical scrutiny, one that is obviously anatomical rather than psychological (more body than psyche/soul). And yet such distinctions are ones that we continue to seek to trouble. For instance, in citing Claude Frontisi’s recent book on Paul Klee and the anatomy of Aphrodite, Kofman reminds us that the word anatomy means dissection, nudity, sex, and analytical dis­ course, such that as the object of a lesson in anatomy, we can under­ stand the cadaver—like the body of Psyche—to be the site of conjur­ ing death so as to exorcise it, here in the theater of medicine/surgery, by appropriating, through such cruel and exact knowledge, the sense of being-together as singular finite bodies that is nakedly concealed around and between us, and know nothing of it. This is exactly what is represented in Rembrandt’s painting. Banded together around the cadaver that lies outstretched on the dissection table, the corporatized pyramidal unity of the eight doc­ tors is preoccupied and seemingly fascinated by the large bound book that sits open at the end of the table, and that distracts their atten­ tion from the body right there in front of them. Here in the anatomy theater, it is a matter of gaining access to a secret that the doctors of anatomy clearly believe to be lodged in the depths of its interior­ ity, and thus to need to exteriorize it, by inscribing it in a book. From the spacing of the body as corpus to body as corpse, and then from  the body as medical cadaver to the space around it now focused on the  book or corpus or more specifically as anatomical catalog, it is as though we can chart the transiting of the body—from one corpus to another—and attempts to cease and enclose the exposure to the out­ � � � �  �  110

side, rather than remain exposed to the peri-spacing of concealment and not-knowing that is nakedly shared between bodies, and that, as we have argued, the body never ceases to stage, right up to the end. By posing the question of “what stance to take, when there is nothing left to say, in the face of the deposited body”—that is, in our shared exposure to the forces of finitude, for instance, in the forms of pain, suffering, and death—Nancy raises the ethical question of the decision “not to resort to anatomy lessons, another way of establish­ ing significations,” and of conjuring death so as to exorcise it once and for all. In directing their attention toward the book and hence away from the body, the doctors are following the path of anatomy and learn­ ing its lesson, the one that tries to provide a sense of the “what” to­ ward which bodily existence is directed. As such, the doctors’ gazes not only prevent them from seeing the body, they also do not allow them to reflect back on themselves and to perceive the image and scene of their own mortality, presented right there in the anatomy theater. As Kofman writes, “They do not seem to identify with the ca­ daver stretched out there. They do not see in it the image of what they themselves will one day be, of what, unbeknownst to themselves, they are in the process of becoming. . . . The lesson of this Anatomy Lesson is thus . . . not that of a triumph of death but of a triumph over death.”³³ The doctors do not know that they too suffer the happenstance of existence—its accidental intrusion and surprise, such that we might say that they do not know that they suffer the malady of death. But it is also to say that for all of their corporatized unity in learning the lesson of the anatomy lesson, they have not, however, learned the les­ son of this Lesson, a lesson that is not so much conveyed by the paint­ ing in being an image and representation, but in its representation of a scene of presentation, and specifically as a scene of shared ex­ posure. For while we might agree with Kofman when she suggests that, in learning the lesson of anatomy that we have been describing, the doctors have also learned the lesson about the protective mask­ ing and prophylactic guarding of representation, or what she refers to as its “pharmaceutical function,” I want to argue that without art’s work (as scene of exposure rather than as object and work), we would be without a principal means to measure the distance between the � � � � � � � � � �  �  111

lessons of representation and the lessons of presentation, as the dif­ ference between the making visible of the invisible, and the demon­ stration or exposition of the extent to which the invisible as a force of retreat, withdrawal, and disappearance remains invisible in the vis­ ible—nakedly exposed in the finitude of its infinite concealment. So  whereas Kofman writes that “what is astonishing about this Lesson is that with the help of a cadaver that is fully exposed but that no  gaze sees as such, the cadaveresque that each living being, already from the origin, carries within itself comes to be hidden,”³⁴ I want to argue that the painting is the presentation or exposition of this concealment, but now to be understood as that which is not only  common, but nakedly shared, as the separated-spacing and thus the very incommensurability of our being-together. This is the lesson that the doctors do not learn due to their conspiratorial conjuration of death and other anatomy lessons. Anatomy of Hell and (as) Sexual Difference In her film The Anatomy of Hell, in which (as we have noted) a young woman hires a young man to watch her as she lies in bed, naked, and sleeps, and specifically to watch her there where she is “unwatchable,” Catherine Breillat stages the scene of shared-separation, only to anat­ omize it, by locating this aporetic sociality and impasse of visuality in the female body per se, and in particular her genitalia. The film is an adaptation of her novel Pornocracy, itself written in order to circum­ vent the legal obstacle of her not being able to secure the rights to pro­ duce a filmic adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s The Malady of Death. In the novel, the female sex is figured as this very spatial “gaping,” and the female body is described as this “abyss” and “living gulf,” such that not only does this obscene abyss “take up all the space in her young fluid body,” but thereby we are to understand that her body, in turn, is this very evacuation of space itself. So at various points in the narrative, the woman’s genitalia are decorated with makeup; fingered and fucked; penetrated with the wooden handle of a pitch­ fork; made to conceal and then hatch a black, penile-shaped volcanic stone; and to become the site for playing with a blood-soaked tampon that has been pulled from it, and then dunked in a glass of water like 

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a tea bag. All forms of humiliation, even though—or perhaps pre­ cisely because—as the narrator will ultimately explain, “the vision, touching or investing of the woman’s genital flesh is nothing.”³⁵ In her rewriting of the Duras story, Breillat not only switches the gendering of the roles of the two characters, so that now it is the young woman who hires a young man to come over to her place and watch her, Breillat also portrays the sexual identity of the male character more explicitly than Duras had. For whereas in Malady the sexual identity of the man is kept ambiguous while hinting that he might be gay, in Anatomy, the male character is a gay man or, more precisely according to Breillat’s intentions, is a man who frequents the kinds of bars and clubs where men who like being with other men find each other. No doubt this more explicit homosexual identity is meant to further underline the differential gap between the two char­ acters, but Breillat takes this one step further and puts an extra spin or twist on it, by audaciously casting the well-known and recognized star of straight porn Rocco Seffredi in the male role. On the evening of his first visit to her home, the man is led “di­ rectly to the bedroom,” which is described in the following way: A big bed stands in the middle, with disheveled sheets tumbling, yet immaculate, simple sheets of white cotton, in fact the cheapest, what the laundry takes in for five francs less than coloreds. And yet they symbolize purity and luxury.³⁶

“Life is always about sleeping with death”: this phrase of Breillat’s, which I quoted earlier, appears here on the previous page of the novel, such that we might take the description of the bedroom and its un­ made bed to be the scene not only where life and death are imagined as sleeping together, but that this phrase is also a way of saying that  in the nakedness of our shared exposure to life and death, being-  together is always a form of sleeping-together, and both consist in our consenting to existence, consenting to death. Yet once again, Breillat casts this in the stark binary terms of gender identity, as the scene of a persistent male desire to kill the female and the equally persistent ignorance of this very desire by men, as when it is explained, “That is why they [men] join us on our beds, and those veils they want to dress us with, ritually, foreshadow our shrouds.”³⁷

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While queer theory has been a critical and theoretical discourse ded­ icated to questioning, resisting, and refusing the binary logics and structures in which dominant understandings of gender and sexual­ ity have been shaped, nonetheless, the vast majority of this discourse continues to be articulated in terms of sameness and difference—a dominant binary structural logic that is particularly potent in its abil­ ity to exclude, hierarchize, and totalize. As this study has proposed in terms of sociality, aesthetics, and ethics, what if, when it comes to thinking about sex and sexuality, we were to replace the ontologi­ cal dyad of sameness/difference with the aporetic shared-separation, in order to name the ethical spacing between any two or more bod­ ies, in their retreat and withdrawal? Which is once again to repeat the question provided by Nancy and that continues to serve as our principal theoretical guide: “whether being-together can do without a figure and, as a result, without an identification, if the whole of its ‘substance’ consists only in its spacing.”³⁸ This would entail a series of shifts in discourse, from bodies inscribed with identity to the per­ formative exposition and scene of their shared-separated spacing, a with that is here, just between us, and a here that is nothing but there, right there in the nakedness of our being-together. This is the scene of naked sharing as the sharing in that which cannot be appropriated. My contention is that this is not reducible, nor should it be made re­ ducible, to gender and sexual identities, especially when structured as binaries. It is only in this way that we begin to be done with sub­ stance, free from those lessons that destine bodies to that infinitely eternal place of damnation, the hell of anatomy. Something like this seems to be presented in the récit Blue Eyes, Black Hair (1987),³⁹ Marguerite Duras’s own rewriting of  The Malady of Death  (1982). The male character, now explicitly identified as homosexual, pursues his desire for an anonymous male stranger through an inti­ mate relation with a woman who regularly visits his home and, lying outstretched on the floor, exposes herself to his irresolvable longing. Even more so than in Malady, this story consistently draws our atten­ tion to the spatial disposition and proximity between the man’s and the woman’s bodies: they are constantly lying next to each other, and described in a vocabulary as being “near,” “beside,” “stretched out,” and “sleeping,” and yet always without touching. It is as if their very � � � �  �  114

relation to each other lies in maintaining the unbridgeable gap be­ tween them, yet as a spacing that is not predicated upon the posses­ sion of one’s proper place or its substitution by another, but quite the opposite: as the very exposure to the peri-spacing of non-knowledge. This is what seems to be affirmed by the woman to be the basis for her love of the man, as when she says, “I don’t know you. No one can know you or put themselves in your place—you haven’t got a place, and you don’t know where to find one. And it’s for that that I love you and that you are lost.”⁴⁰ The man is lost (in every sense of the word) not because he doesn’t have, or doesn’t know where to find, a place that he can call his own, but because he cannot affirm what the woman lying there beside him, outstretched on the floor, evidently knows: that a sense of place, its taking place, is always a shared sense of the inappropriable and improper spacing that lies around and yet no place other than just between us, and that this is not just something that we should try to love, but is the place of love, and so it is this place (and not the Other) that one falls in love with. To the extent that this nameless woman knows (and loves) this, and even further might be said to be this nonknowledge, we might give her the name Psyche. In Blue Eyes, Black Hair, the act of love is presented as wanting nothing and loving that not-wanting in the other: (Male): “Perhaps. But I was wrong, I didn’t want anything.” . . . She says, “Perhaps you’ve never wanted anything.” . . . It’s in the silence that follows that suddenly she says it. Says he’s her love: “You’re my lover because of what you just said—that there’s nothing you want. You don’t want anything.”⁴¹

And yet, although the place of non-knowledge as this seductive scene of not-wanting is said to be “without words, without ink to write it down or a book to read it in,” and thereby would seem to defy every form of inscription, preservation, and reiteration, “it will have a date, a place in time.” In other words, it will still have the specific­ ity of a certain historicity and finitude, and that is no time and place other than right there in the room. “She says: ‘And so everything there is here, in this room,’ and with the palm of her hand she indi­ cates the tile floor, the sheets, the light, the bodies.”⁴² This is the space  of the peri-performative; not the scene of seduction, but the exposure � � � � � � � � � �  �  115

of (and to) the seduction of the scene of seduction. Not the body or bodies lying outstretched, but the bed/room that is the stage/scene of shared exposure, along with the white sheets across which they lie outstretched and extended, nakedly concealed together. Just as much as Heidegger rarely spoke of bodies, he also, not surpris­ ingly, then, rarely spoke of sex. However, in his lecture course at the University of Marburg/Lahn in 1928, and as part of a discussion on the neutrality of Dasein, Heidegger did further qualify and define this neutrality in terms of the sexless. In his essay “Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,”⁴³ Derrida argues that the neu­ trality of Heidegger’s Dasein, while to be thought of as sexless, none­ theless does not desexualize the ontological. Rather, Derrida explains that the ontological negativity of this neutrality is deployed against the marks of difference, and specifically the binary or dual division of the sexual. For Derrida, Heidegger thus provides us with a way to “think a pre-differential, or rather a pre-dual, sexuality—which . . .  does not necessarily mean unitary, homogenous, and undifferen­ tiated.”⁴⁴ Given our discussion of shared-separation as the spacing and de­ cision between and around bodies, we might then want to ask: what  is the ontological force (perhaps the one that in the 1928 lecture Hei­ degger described as “potent”) that is the source of this sense of beingwith as naked sharing? As we have seen in the first two chapters of this book, and as we will continue to explore in the chapters to follow,  this force is none other than the force of erasure, including in its “positivity” or, better, its exposition. Derrida suggests as much. For even though he continues to deploy the binary logic of sameness-  difference in this essay on Heidegger and sexual difference, Derrida at one point writes, “Sexual division itself leads us to negativity; and  neutralization is at once the effect of such negativity and the era­ sure to which thinking must submit this negativity so that an origi­ nary positivity can appear.”⁴⁵ In other words, due to the intrusion and  force of erasure—that is, of the withdrawal and retreat of bodies, in­ cluding the traces and traits of identity—we encounter the exigency that states: name no one man and no one woman. This is what it would mean to free sex and sexuality, and per­

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haps even “sexual difference,” from binary logic, and thus to with­ draw from the negativity that it destines and determines, precisely through its either/or (or even neither/nor) binary logic: this/that, man/woman, same/different, here/there, and so forth. Instead of the asexuality and neutrality that is generated and reproduced by binary sexual difference, we might think in terms of the pleasure of sharing in the sense of separation—the very spacing of sense—as bodies ex­ posed to the incommensurability of existence, the latter of which ex­ ists outside the measure of any binary set of terms. But it is also what it would mean to think exposure as prior to ex­ tension, or to understand extension as always exposure. Or, as Der­ rida writes, this spacing is that “ ‘prior to’ the determination of space as extension, [that] comes to extend and stretch out being-there, the there of being, between birth and death.”⁴⁶ It is based upon this understanding that I wish to theorize the ex­ posure of naked sharing as the pleasure of the fore-scene: the scene that bodies stage “prior” to their binary sexual division and reduc­ tion, and in turn to theorize the fore-scene as the very scene of plea­ sure, as the pleasure of the fore-, as opposed to the destiny of orgas­ mic end-pleasure. The image of this is, in turn, a naked one. Unmade Bed: Naked Image of the Fore-scene Toward the end of his lecture “To Do Justice to Freud,”⁴⁷ delivered at a  colloquium in 1991 commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la folie (History of mad­ ness), Jacques Derrida poses a question that might enable us to reg­ ister the resonance between principle and scene, and perhaps even of scene of exposure as prime or primal scene, yet operating without principle, and in which the scene of exposure operates according to what we might call the fore-pleasure principle. The question that Derrida poses concerns whether Foucault’s wellknown notion of problematization operates without gathering—for example, as concept, paradigm, episteme, and principle. Confronted with the obvious inability to ask this question directly to Foucault, given that the latter had died seven years earlier, Derrida instead imagines the kind of reply he expects Foucault might have provided.

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Here’s what Derrida imagines Foucault would have said: “What one must stop believing in is principality or principleness, in the  problematic of the principle, in the principled unity of pleasure and power, or of some drive that is thought to be more originary than the other.”⁴⁸ While Derrida immediately goes on to say that “the [wellknown Foucauldian figure] theme of the spiral would be that of a drive duality (power/pleasure) that is without principle,”⁴⁹ here I want to suggest that the image of the unmade bed is that scene that is without principle, its own spiraled spacing of retreating and retrac­ ing—the scene of the principle before principle—the fore-scene. As Derrida suggests, that which is before the principle of pleasure and “would remain forever heterogeneous to the principle of prin­ ciple” is, according to Freud, the death drive, that force of life that stages the fore-scene as the exposure of “living on” (survivance) of life. Yet as both Tim Dean and Jean-Luc Nancy have more recently explained, one should simply speak in terms of “drive,” as that which is at once beyond and before principle, including any principle of pleasure. According to Nancy, we are to understand Freud’s Trieb, or drive, as that thrust which, as the force of intrusion, for instance, is “the sense of the infinite lying before, behind and among us, the de­ sire to respond to it and to expose ourselves to it.”⁵⁰ The Freud bibliography on such scenes includes his short paper “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” in which he theorizes child’s play as the ground, origin, and source of poetic production, a stag­ ing or mise-en-scène, based upon the double meaning of the German Spiel (“play”): child’s play and theatrical stage production. The latter has been classically divided between comedy, or Lustspiel, and trag­ edy, or Trauerspiel. If play is a source of pleasure (and who will deny that it is?!), then Lustspiel can also mean “pleasure-play.” In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud points to the semantic divi­ sion between Lust as tension/preliminary (Vorlust) and Lust as satis­ faction/release/end (Endlust), and thereby and in a way that we will argue is unavoidable, accentuates the ways in which fore-pleasure can, in itself, be the source of its own “satisfying” pleasure and not simply a “preliminary” pleasure. However, Freud does not think in such terms, but instead relegates Vorlust to the status of always being little more than a preliminary, free, and gratuitous pleasure.

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For Freud, adult sexuality has two functions: first, as reproduction (social and communicative—altruistic in its forms, even); and sec­ ond, of being oriented toward climax, discharge, and release—Endlust—and in which, it is argued, pleasure finds its source, in a way  that is similar to and yet distinct from the pleasure that is said to be derived from the first function: reproduction.⁵¹ According to Freud, to achieve end-pleasure (Endlust), one must pass through fore-pleasure in order to resolve a tension inherent in fore-pleasure, and thereby complete and satisfy the otherwise incomplete and unsatisfied sat­ isfaction that is fore-pleasure. It is, according to Freud, to pass from erotogenic zones (fore-scene of fore-pleasure, as preparatory staging for sexual satisfaction—namely, foreplay) to sexual (namely, genital) discharge as the removal of all sexual tension and the achievement of satisfied fulfillment as end-pleasure. For Freud, the danger would be to “linger over” the preparatory acts, and to derive more pleasure from the fore- than from the end. Forms of such sexual satisfaction are duly pathologized, and classi­ fied as perversions. And yet based upon his fear of a perverse linger­ ing over the erotogenic zones of fore-pleasure, Freud formulated a conundrum that he could never resolve. Namely, how is it that the sexual tension that structures the (non-genital) erotogenic zones is connected to pleasure? For given that clearly it is pleasurable, this would seem to suggest that fore-pleasure is not predicated upon a sense of lack and the accompanying genital-centric drive to reach end-pleasure, and even further, that a certain satisfying pleasure can be derived from its incompletion rather than its end. At one point Freud states, “We remain in complete ignorance both of the origin and of the nature of the sexual tension which arises si­ multaneously with the pleasure when erotogenic zones are satisfied,” and which leads him to conclude that “pleasure and sexual tension can only be connected in an indirect manner.”⁵² Such an aporetic sat­ isfaction (pleasure) in unsatisfied incompletion (sexual tension) re­ mained a conundrum for Freud because he could not conceive of the erotogenic zones, in their form as fore-scenes, to be the very ground of pleasure rather than as spaces of sexual tension that needed to be overcome and resolved. In other words, of what I theorized in chapter 3 as the co-ex-corporeal, now to be understood in the context of this 

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discourse as the zone of the erogenous, and not limited to the body or any form of its sexual division into parts of an organism (genitals) with the sexual goal of orgasm as their end. (Here we note that Freud had suggested that the entire body and not just the genitals could exist as such a zone, and yet, in doing so, he at the same time lim­ ited this zone to the corporeal body.) Rather, an erogenous zone, as the spacing/scene of pleasure that is staged by co-ex-corporeality, is what we now take it to mean when we speak of the body’s non-  anatomical spaciousness. And so we might find it “highly instructive,” as Freud himself did, that the German word Lust means both “the sensation of sexual ten­ sion” and “the feeling of satisfaction,” which of course implies that Vorlust is, as Nancy has noted, “necessarily, already, an aspect or type of instinctive Lust; it is the latter’s substance and ‘selfsame’ figure.’ ” And at the same time, that “Lust—pleasure [as feeling of satisfac­ tion]—presents itself only as formed in Vorlust. It occurs, in short, only as Formlust.”⁵³ Needless to say, Freud regarded this ambiguity as “unfortunate.”⁵⁴ This estimation will persist right up until the very last year of his life, as evidenced in a (posthumous) note from Au­ gust 3, 1938 (the one that immediately precedes the note on Psyche, dated just nineteen days apart from each other), on the inhibition of masturbation as “ultimate ground of all intellectual inhibitions and all inhibitions of work” (I cannot take up this weighty and sweeping assessment here) as located in its own unsatisfying nature, in which, Freud writes, “there is always something lacking for complete dis­ charge and satisfaction—en attendant toujours quelquechose qui ne venait point [“always waiting for something which never came,” French in the original—but why?]—and this missing part, the reaction of or­ gasm, manifests itself in equivalents in other spheres, in absences, outbreaks of laughing, weeping, and perhaps other ways.”⁵⁵ What Freud considered unfortunate is exactly what enables us to speak always in terms of form-of-pleasure and never simply of (pure) pleasure, and of the fore-pleasure of the fore-scene as the fundament/ ground and sense/pleasure of this (any) form-of-pleasure. Which, in turn, amounts to saying that Lust, as “the feeling of satisfaction,” only comes to constitute itself as, and derives a sense of pleasure from, an incomplete and unsatisfied satisfaction. This effectively suspends the drive for end-pleasure, interrupts the pleasure principle, and dis­ � � � �  �  120

engages from genital-centric pleasure and its circumscribed base in sexual identity and difference. Rather, it remains and finds pleasure in the necessarily incomplete (inoperative) and unsatisfied satisfac­ tion that is the unformed formation of the fore-scene. In other words, it is what it means to think in terms of unbecom­ ing pleasure in its very coming: not the lack or missing of pleasure, but the lack of an origin and an end, and of the formation of the fore-scene as the groundless ground/fundament of pleasure—pri­ mal and premium scene, and of being seduced by both. A seduction of the scene of seduction as Nancy writes it, yet without it being, as he warns, a Verfuhrung (deceptive and misleading sexual ad-vance to an end), but instead the pleasure of the ad-vent of form and funda­ ment: the fore-scene that is born in the mixing of the aisthetic and aesthetic. As discussed in the previous chapter, this is the scene that Psyche gives birth to, according to what, in earlier work, I theorized as the logic of the lure (Verlockung).⁵⁶ As Nancy goes on to argue, “The  premium is what forms the fundament, dissolving it in statu nascendi: by this dissolution, by this birth, the identity of the fundament (or of the fund), all identity, simultaneously disintegrates and is precip­ itated. . . . Identity is jouissance; jouissance is aesthetic.”⁵⁷ Pleasure, then, neither in form of completion (e.g., discharge) nor in the fun­ dament/ground, but in the formation (birth/nascendi) of the funda­ ment in its dissolution as unbecoming fore-scene: aporetic aesthetics of aesthetic pleasure. To summarize Nancy’s theoretical formulation: sexual fore-  pleasure is explained in terms of aesthetic fore-pleasure—namely, the ad-vent of form and fundament that is a seduction of the one by the other and vice versa, and that finds its principle in aesthetics (same sense, shared sense, cofeeling, coenaesthetic). Meaning: forepleasure (aisthesis) in and as the (aesthetic) fore-mation of the forescene—the inextricable mixing of the aesthetic and the aisthetic. This is an aesthetics, an ethics, and perhaps a politics of pleasure as periperformative: not as the taking (of) place (including the taking place of pleasure), but the exposure to that place that cannot be taken, ap­ propriated: a directional (sens) to or toward sense (sens). This space is shared as the coappearance/coexposure of bodies, nakedly con­ cealed. Not the performer or the event but a naked exposure to the coming in all of its unbecoming concealment. We might say, then, � � � � � � � � � �  �  121

that what turns us on (the exposition of naked sharing) is what turns us out, by being exposed not to each other, or by each other, or even for each other, but simply with each other, in the separated spac­ ing that we incommensurably share—the “substance” of which our  being-together consists. Now, what if, instead of Freud’s understanding of fore-pleasure in the work of art consisting of “a formal seduction thanks to which the artwork . . . gives access to the pleasure of a content whose nature is completely different from the artistic form,”⁵⁸ we began to imag­ ine the pleasure of being seduced by the scene of seduction itself ? Accord­ ing to Nancy, it would mean taking this to be the primal scene of art, which consists, as he explains, of “an uncannily intimate rapport, a copulation of form and fundament. A scene of seduction, but with­ out the possibility of deciding which one seduces the other—since the two are indistinct. Unless, instead, art itself is the primal scene, both primary and already given as a premium (in the surplus of the ‘form’).”⁵⁹ What Nancy is suggesting is that the pleasure of art is always a fore-pleasure that involves the seduction of the very scene of seduc­ tion (Verfuhrung), of being seduced by the form of the fundament— that is, the ground or stage of performance that lies neither in the subject-performer nor in the event exactly, but in the space around, beside, and alongside. In other words, it is no longer a question of fig­ ure/ground, or even of form/content, but of the content of pleasure in the “copulation” of form/ground—the ways in which the ground may be the form that seduces.⁶⁰ Yet by pairing Freud’s comments on children’s play and pleasure in his “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” with our earlier discus­ sion of Freud’s short note on the Mystic Writing Pad (which, as Der­ rida pointed out, is nothing more than a child’s toy), we are able to further our understanding of the ways in which withdrawal and re­ treat, including in the form, praxis, or technique of erasure, is its own source of pleasure, and presents the fore-scene of fore-pleasure not as empty but as already-unmade.⁶¹ Something like the photograph of  an unmade bed, as the naked image of naked sharing, or, as Gerard Granel might put it, “the a priori formal constitution of living in its nakedness.”⁶²

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Figure 2. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled,” 1991; billboard; dimensions vary with installation. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

This is exactly the image that Felix Gonzalez-Torres publicly pre­ sented for the work “Untitled,” 1991, as a number of advertising bill­ boards in New York City in 1992. A photograph of an unmade bed (his own, as it were), with white rumpled sheets and both of the pil­ lows bearing the indented impressions of what we presume to be the heads of two people who had been lying in the bed not long before the photograph was taken (fig. 2). Like the Erased de Kooning, Felix’s unmade bed is another naked image, at once the scene of retreat and withdrawal of bodies and “the empty place of the absent as a place that is not empty” (as we recall Nancy’s definition of the image and its distinction). The “work” that is being done by the naked image consists of the stripping, disrobing,  and denuding of the space, surface, or screen of representation, pro­ jection, or figuration of identity and community. Felix’s unmade bed presents the unmaking or retreating of any figure upon or toward

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which our being-together would be rendered “visible, knowable, [and] identifiable,” as in the common ground, origin, or destiny of community. Just as much as it should not become the site for imagining com­ munity by projecting any number of possible figures onto it, Felix’s bed should not be seen as empty but as unmade.⁶³ Perhaps deriving their cues from Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari famously stated that not only is the canvas never empty, it is riddled with conventions and clichés, and that it is the artist’s task to rid the surface of these blockages of sense through var­ ious techniques of subtraction. Yet within the context of my theori­ zation of an aesthetics of retreat and withdrawal, we note that when it comes to the uses of pleasure to which the never-empty bed might be put (aesthetic, sexual, or otherwise), it is a matter of unmaking it, meaning to retrace in order to sustain the spacing of coexposed bod­ ies in their nakedly shared common concealment, by retreating and withdrawing the figure and figuration from the stage/scene. If there would not remain something of the figure, perhaps there would still remain something of the outline (the retracing) of its retreat. Finally, against most interpretations of the work, in which it is taken to be a representation of a private space put on display in a public space, as though the boundaries and limits of these spaces and zones are clearly delineated and uncontested, I would argue that Fe­ lix’s bed is the very scene of what Sedgwick described as “a vast over­ arching peri-performative struggle over the spatial delineation of performative privacy and witness.”⁶⁴ Which is to say that Felix’s bed is not the representational visual form added to a preexisting content (e.g., privacy, domesticity, coupledom), but is the very scene of the ethical-political contest over these various terms, and the performa­ tive spatial praxes to which they are conventionally assigned.

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�: Neutral Mourning

Camera Lucida (1980), the last book that would be published by Roland Barthes, just a few months before his untimely death in March 1980, consists of forty-eight short numbered sections written over the course of forty-eight days, from April 15 to June 3, 1979. While the original French edition carries the subtitle Note on Photography, and would seem to suggest that the entire series of notations constitutes one single “note,” the subtitle of the English edition, translated by Richard Howard, reads Reflections on Photography, and thereby loses the sense of notation that, as we shall see, was so central to Barthes’s “deliberation” over the form that his writing might take at this time. Indeed, Camera Lucida is only one instance and example of both the notational form and the methodical quality of the work of writing that Barthes undertook during what were to be the last years of his life, as they are indicative of the remarkably precise and clearly delineated schedule that he kept—often ending one project, lecture course, or essay before beginning the next—right up until the day he was struck by a laundry truck while stepping off the curb and into the street in front of the Collège de France, on February 25, 1980— just two days after delivering the final lecture of the second part of his course on The Preparation of the Novel. That he would succumb to death just one month later, on March 26, 1980, seems to hauntingly extend—right up to the moment of his death itself—a methodical rhythm of work, teaching, and writing that marked the pace and pathos of what I will theorize here as Barthes’s neutral mourning. Anyone who has read Camera Lucida (hereafter abbreviated in the text as CL)—which is anyone over the past thirty years interested in theories of photography—knows that it was the death of his mother,

whom he lived with and was incredibly close to, that is the wounding event that most deeply affected Barthes, and that he may never have overcome, and that lies at the heart of his thinking on photography. In what follows, I discuss CL as an album of notations and photographic images that enacts a performative—or more precisely peri-performative—spacing/staging, in three interrelated ways: (1) by theorizing photography as the performative presentation of withdrawal, loss, and the scene of exposure to finitude and death; (2) through Barthes’s own writing as perigraphic;¹ (3) and through a performative reading and understanding that the book calls for, through the very textual exposition of its rhetorical presentation. Our first step in this direction takes us back to 1970, nearly a decade prior to CL, when Barthes published a short essay in Le Figaro littéraire, on the performative writing of a performative reading.² Not, mind you, performative writing about performative reading (as though the former were an analysis of the latter), or even, performative writing and performative reading (as though the two were to be kept analytically separate from each other). No, instead, what Barthes posed in that essay is the notion of a double performative, from the point of view of the writer on reading, in which what is performed in reading is enacted in the writing on and around this very same reading practice. The first clue that this is Barthes’s mission is to be found in the article’s title: “Writing Reading”—no comma between the two words. For such punctuation would have not only separated them, ever so slightly, but would have further suggested a sequencing, at once temporal and spatial (of reading following writing), there where Barthes had sought to locate their co-presence or, shall we say, shared spacing of separation.³ The implicit question here is how to write reading, such that this performative writing would be the textual enactment of reading. For while, early on in the article, Barthes states that devising a theory of reading is said to entail trying “to grasp the form of all readings,” including his own reading practice, and would thereby approach the level of science, since, as he puts it parenthetically, “(form: sole site of science),” by the end of the article the discussion is much more concerned with performative spacing than it is with any formal analysis. Meaning here: the environs of the text that are opened by the interruptions that are actually constitutive of the most intense � � � �   �  128

reading practice, a proposition that doesn’t seem so counterintuitive once the question is put to us: “Haven’t you ever happened to read while looking up from your book?”—as Barthes does at the very beginning of “Writing Reading.” By advancing the technological metaphors drawn from science that Barthes uses in order to distinguish and define and render distinctive—albeit negatively—this kind of critical looking up and around while reading, we might say that it is peri-scopic, rather than either microscopic or telescopic (Barthes’s terms). Barthes makes it clear that in order to critically approach this space that is “a supplement of meaning for which neither dictionary nor grammar can account,” what I wish to call peri-scopic reading must not be reduced to either the individual subject (a reader) or the work with which he/she is engaged. Here we recognize the shift that Barthes will famously theorize one year later, in his essay “From Work to Text” (1971).⁴ In “Writing Reading,” Barthes states, “To open the text, to posit the system of its reading, is therefore not only to ask and to show that it can be interpreted freely; it is especially, and much more radically, to gain acknowledgment that there is no objective or subjective truth of reading.”⁵ Rather, Barthes goes on to explain, it is a matter of topological disposition, namely, that of our bodies, and of the ways in which reading stages the body as itself a transassociative scene of exposure as it “finds” itself—in reading—looking up and around. A peri-scopic reading that retraces the text’s retreat from the domain of analysis and the image-repertoire (viz. work, signifying system), and through this exemption from meaning, outlines the frayed edge where the reader and writer coexist: the shared contour that is the space of freedom.⁶ In what follows, I will attempt to demonstrate that Camera Lucida is just such a shared space between writer and reader, not as the result of interpretive analysis or an imagined community of images, but through a peri-scopic reading of a perigraphic writing around photography, in which the sense of existence lies in a mutual exposure to retreat, withdrawal, loss, and death that, as shared separation, is the spacing of sense itself. Naked image is the scene of this sharedseparation, which is to say, its spacing, substance, and sense. Camera Lucida offers us this shared sense, not through any form of representation (e.g., figuration, identification), but through its presentation � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  129

of two naked images as scenes of separation (at once separated from themselves, and separated from each other), which opens up and sustains a space that is the “shared contour” of perigraphic writing and perigraphic reading. Following Nancy, and the statement that has come to serve as a refrain for my study, the “substance” of beingtogether—its sense—“consists only in its spacing,” which is to say, the separation of all sharing and decision. For if no separating or dividing exists—no matter how great or small—sharing would be necessarily impossible. An analogy would be to the piece of cake that cannot be shared unless it is divided, and to the fact that the only reason it can be divided is because its substance already consists of its spacing, meaning: the separation of itself from itself. This self-separation applies to anything that, as we say, matters or makes sense. Sense is self-separated, it “coheres” through this separation, it can be divided due to this separation, and therefore is capable of being shared. It is in this way that the only sense is shared sense (there is no sense that cannot be shared), and therefore, there is sense to be shared because sense is, always already, separated from itself (and from absolute sense). There is no such thing as absolutely whole and intact sense. This is exactly the way in which Jean-Luc Nancy, perhaps one of our finest contemporary sources for a philosophy of sense, has enabled us to come to understand the shared sense of things. While so much of his published work is dedicated to this topic, and most obviously in his book The Sense of the World,⁷ I know of no other place where he provides a more succinct formulation than at the very outset of his essay on Barthes, titled “The Exempting of Sense.”⁸ There is no sense that is not shared [partagé]. But what is sharing, and what sense is revealed in it? Perhaps the two questions overlap: that is, one shares only that which is divided in this sharing, that which separates from itself, and a shareable sense is a sense separated from itself, freed of its completion in a final or central signification.⁹

Nancy is positing something of great importance—philosophically no doubt, but in terms of the political, ethical, and aesthetic as well. He is not simply saying that separation is the space that is opened up and sustained by sharing, and that this is the source of � � � �   �  130

sharing’s sense. Further, and on a register that is even more ontological, if you will, he is saying that sense “itself ” is separated from itself, such that we can no longer even speak of sense “itself,” except as that which is self-separated, and thereby as consisting only in its spacing, which is also to say, in its being-shared. Nancy’s coontology of shared existence, then, is not simply a matter of the sharing-separating of sense, it is also and at the same time the sharing-separating of the self-separation of sense—a doubling of separation that is shared, if you will. Therefore, we can say that as coexposed bodies, the substance or sense of being-together consists only in the spacing that is shared-separated, not simply “between us” but with the spaced-separation that is sense. Nancy finds a corollary for his notion of the separation of sense and derives one form of its expression, in Barthes’s phrase “exemption from sense.” One of Barthes’s most pronounced reflections on his own long-standing commitment to “the exemption of meaning” is found in the eponymous section of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. The first paragraph reads as follows: Evidently he [Barthes] dreams of a world which would be exempt from meaning (as one is from military service). This began with Writing Degree Zero, in which is imagined “the absence of sign”; subsequently, a thousand affirmations incidental to this dream (apropos of the avant-garde text, of Japan, of music, of the alexandrine, etc.).¹⁰

The fact that the exemption from sense can be traced from the very beginning of Barthes’s career right up through his courses at the Collège de France does not necessarily contradict Nancy’s description and estimation of the import of this notion.¹¹ As Nancy writes in his essay on Barthes, “That [exemption from sense] is the expression Barthes gives us, and it must hold our attention all the more due to the circumstance that he himself did not furnish us with a real analysis of it but left its sense in limbo, attached only to a few occurrences, elusive at best.”¹² We will continue to chart some of the possible reasons for the lack of analysis on Barthes’s part when it came to this notion, as we also look more closely at the ways in which, by leaving “its sense in limbo,” and providing examples that are “elusive at best,” Barthes was not avoiding but in fact enacting the task at hand, by performing in his writing an exemption from sense. It is in this very � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  131

exempting or retreating that Barthes’s writing—increasingly from 1977 onward—opens up and sustains a space of sense that can be shared. Occurrences of this include his course on The Neutral, the haiku poetry that was the focus of the first part of his two-part course The Preparation of the Novel, and in photography, as presented in Camera Lucida—all of which mark a commitment to approaching a zero-degree writing that had inaugurated his writing career and would persist right up to his very last written notes. It is to the question of Barthes’s notation that we now turn. According to François Wahl, Barthes’s interest in the notational form of the “incident” dates back as early as 1964, when he wrote, “non des fragments, mais des incidents, choses qui tombent” (not fragments, but incidents, things that fall).¹³ While we will go on to further discuss the conceptual homologies between, and formal conflations of, incident and notation, we also need to note the important distinction that Barthes will continue to make throughout his career between the textual form of the incident and that of the fragment, as well as the distinction between the occurrences, moments, or instances that are differently referred to by the words incident and event (in which the former is understood as being less than, slighter, or more modest than the latter, yet, as he stresses, is nonetheless “just enough”). Short form, mini-text, one-liner (pli), haiku, minor, and zero-degree notation are some of the other terms that Barthes regarded as synonymous (or nearly so) with the incident as notational form. And futile, insignificant, infinitesimal, ad-venture, and drague (cruising) are some of Barthes’s synonyms for the incident as experiential occurrence (yet always distinct from what would commonly be referred to as a “subjective experience”). While Johnnie Gratton, in his focus on the “incident” in A Lover’s Discourse, argues for a significant distinction between Barthes’s use of the term there and in his prior and subsequent uses (as partially outlined above), I would argue that the negative affect that inflects the sense of the term in Lover’s—as a certain kind of melancholic sadness and devitalization of the wounded lover—is actually commensurate with Barthes’s thinking and writing on both mourning and gay cruising. What Barthes offers in A Lover’s Discourse, Camera Lu-

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cida, and the collection of personal diary/journal writings posthumously published under the title Incidents are lessons in the ways in which love, mourning, and cruising—as three names for our existential comportments to love, death, and sexual attraction—are futile in the precise sense that the force of finitude that infinitely and incessantly runs through the latter is the force by which they resist representational capture, whether in the form of discursive, photographic, or narrative exposition. It is during the first session of his course on The Neutral that Barthes speaks of “The Wirelike Sharpness of Mourning,”¹⁴ a phrase that we should understand as describing the infinitesimal spacing that divides devitalization from total resignation, and a will-to-live from a life that has lost all sense of a future. As part of his preliminary comments on the course, Barthes explains how it is that he is now a different person from the one who had originally conceived the course on The Neutral, and that his current interest in the topic has necessarily changed in the months between his choice of topic (May 1977) and this first lecture (February 18, 1978). As he stated, “Between the moment I chose the subject of this course (last May) and the moment I had to prepare it, there entered my life, some of you know it, a serious event, a mourning: the subject who will speak of the Neutral is no longer the same as the one who had decided to speak of it.”¹⁵ He goes on to say that, originally, the choice of topic was motivated by his long-standing resistance to, and refusal of, conflict and of a distinction between will-to-live and will-to-possess, but that following his mother’s death and in the midst of his bereavement, his interest in the Neutral is now motivated by “the difference that separates this already decanted will-to-live from vitality,” a vitality that in citing Pasolini he qualifies as “a desperate vitality,” and goes on to gloss as “the hatred of death.”¹⁶ Of course, the intervening event that Barthes alludes to during this first lecture on the Neutral, was the death of his mother on Octo­ ber 25, 1977, which not only, evidently, precipitated an existential/ intellectual change, but also prompted him to keep an almost daily diary of his bereavement, beginning no later than the day immedi­ ately following his mother’s passing and continuing—methodically—right up until exactly one year later, on October 25, 1978.

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We might say that, for Barthes, there are two (related) forms of the neutral, just as there are, in CL, two (related) forms of the punctum. The parallels being that the first set consists of an affective force (will-to-live/pricking) separate from appropriative knowledge (willto-possess/studium), whereas the second set consists of an affective temporality predicated upon an exposure to death, and a sense of the anteriority of finitude that comes to recast the neutral as will-tolive without “a desperate vitality.” Therefore, Barthes comes to understand the neutral—including what I am calling a “neutral mourning”—as the only means by which to remain vigilant “in front of the hardenings of both faith and certitude and incorruptible by either one,”¹⁷ in a world in which love and death are inextricably bound together. Indeed, it would be a great injustice to regard this stance as either futile or incidental, in any ordinary or common sense of these words. At the end of June 1977, just one month after he chose the topic of The Neutral for his second lecture course at the Collège de France, Barthes presented a paper at Pretexte: Roland Barthes, the colloquium held in his honor at Cerisy-la-Salle, simply titled “The Image.” The lecture was at once a reprise of themes he had taken up two years earlier in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (hereafter abbreviated RB by RB), under the rubric of “the image-system.” At the same time, both the lecture of 1977 and the notation from 1975 must also be understood as initial steps toward what he will eventually write, two years later, on the specificity of the photographic image, given that the intertitle in RB by RB is “L’Imaginaire,” remarkable due to the fact that this is not only the title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s book from 1940 on the phenomenology of human imagination, but is also the book that Barthes pays homage to, by dedicating Camera Lucida to it—one book in homage to another.¹⁸ In the Cerisy lecture, as in his course on The Neutral, and encompassing nearly all of his other writing and teaching dating back as early as The Empire of Signs, including Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and extending right up until the notes for his prospective “novel” “Vita Nova,” Barthes is expressing a resistance to any form of combat, conflict, contest, or confrontation, including what he often referred to as “the (domestic) scene,” meaning any kind of melodramatic violence that can be construed as all the more unpleasant, � � � �   �  134

tedious, and painfully hurtful, precisely because of the domestication of violent words and images that are thrown about.¹⁹ At Cerisy, Barthes’s comments are obviously targeted more so at images than at language, but his “desire for neutral” (as he would say) is as strongly felt here as anywhere else. In fact, while he does not employ such a descriptor, we might say that Barthes is clearly thinking toward a notion of the neutral image. This would be the type of image—or, more precisely, relation to image—that he will come to associate with the photographic image, and that would accompany a bereavement and mourning that, while unquestionably painful and infinitely prolonged for him, might nonetheless be described as its own desire for neutral. While our reading will primarily focus on what Barthes refers to as the “combat of image,” it is nonetheless worthwhile to briefly outline his argument on “combat in language,” which he addresses in the lecture prior to his discussion of image. As concerns the combat in language, Barthes identifies two dichotomous forms: stupidity and the unreadable. These terms are translations of Doxa and Mystique, respectively, terms that themselves had been mainstays in Barthes’s critical vocabulary for some time. In a schematic yet hopefully accurate way, we can understand Barthes’s use of the term stupidity here as defining the way in which language is conceived of as stable, fixed, and closed in its meaning, and as such is used in ways that are obvious, arrogant, and dogmatic. For Barthes, this amounts to systematization, in which a collection of stupid ideas comes to constitute a Doxa, itself to be understood as a stiffening, obdurate hardening, and effective hatred of language—hence the reason for Barthes resorting to the representation of the corpse as a figuration of this hatred of death. On the other end of the language-system is the unreadable, here discussed in terms of the ephemeral and obtuse, and thereby as bearing a certain semantic valence onto the ineffable and mysterious. Whereas stupidity was represented by the figure of the corpse, the unreadable might find its representational figure in the saint, and therefore effectively stand for a hatred not of death but of life (which, of course, might amount to the same thing). Curiously, the combat of image seems to take one general form— namely, the stereotype: that which wounds by the way in which it turns any subject’s singular plurality into little more than an � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  135

iconic-emblem, through a reduction to name and identity. The generality of this critique is commensurate with Barthes’s indictment and plea: “I long for Abstinence from Images, for every Image is bad.”²⁰ In making his argument, Barthes draws upon two analogies: French fries and military conscription. The former is a deliberate pun that is meant to conjure up an image of the author himself as a raw slice of potato being dropped into a vat of hot oil and fried to a (French) crisp, in a manner that, for us, might mark the distinction of being as either a frying or a fraying. It is from the metaphor of obligatory military conscription that Barthes derives his language of “exemption,” as when he writes, “I must pass through the Image; the image is a kind of social military service: I cannot get myself exempted from it; I cannot get myself discharged, cannot desert, etc. I see man sick of Images, man sick of his Image.” While Barthes recognized that this sickness is ultimately incurable (i.e., two years later in his essay “Deliberation,” written at the very same time as CL, he writes, “We are never done with the image-repertoire”²¹), he does nonetheless propose two means of possible liberation from this malady of image—namely, Epoche (suspension) and Acolouthia (transcendence of contradiction). In their disruption of the image-system, neither of these should be confused with iconoclasm, since the task, as Barthes frames it, is one of “distancing” or withdrawal or exemption from image rather than an attempt at the latter’s (ultimately impossible) destruction. Therefore, Barthes translates Epoche (suspension of judgment) and writes, “I say: suspension of Images. Suspension is not negation.” Rather, he goes on to say, “Epoche, suspension, remains a pathos: I would continue to be moved (by Images) but no longer tormented.” As a scene not of confinement and torment, but of movement and transiting, this image of suspension that is also the suspension of image is at once pathos and path. Acolouthia, in turn, as the antonym for Mache (meaning, at once, combat and contradiction in terms, logical trap), is, as Barthes writes, “the opening of the trap . . . [and] the retinue of friends who accompany me, guide me, to whom I entrust myself. I should like to designate by this word that rare field where ideas are steeped in affectivity, in which friends, by that retinue which accompanies your life, permit you to think, to write, to speak.” For Barthes, then, acolouthia is the name for that retinue or entourage of

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friends who guide you, and to whom you entrust yourself and who enable you to read, write, and speak. Barthes argues that this relation is as steeped in erotic affect and what he refers to as “amorous distance” as it is the transcendence of contradiction, of the opening of the trap. In the final paragraph of his essay, Barthes introduces the figure of Socrates from Plato’s Symposium, and argues that the philosopher too was aware of this. Indeed, it was one of the principal features of the pedagogical/philosophical method that carries his name to this day. It is, for instance, the spacing of amorous distance and sexual non-rapport that Socrates shares with the young Alcibiades during the banquet, and yet, as Barthes argues, Socrates reduced this to the logic (trap, snare) of contradiction and the arrogance of obtaining the truth via critical distance of intellectual mastery. The final sentence of “The Image” reads, “Socrates knew Acolouthia: but (and this I resist) he maintained in it the snare of contradictions, the arrogance of truth (so we are not surprised that he ultimately ‘sublimated’—rejected Alcibiades).” We might then read these two modes of liberation from image together, such that the pathos of image as aporetic spacing—as suspended path and path of suspension—is opened up by the retinue of friends and companions, and that this affective field of shared sociality makes the scene of suspension of image into a passage, to the extent that it sustains the suspension of image “into which or onto which a figure of community could be projected” (Nancy). By translating acolouthia (“retinue”) as “entourage,” the connection is made to entours, the French word for “surrounds” (from the verb entourer: “to surround”), and with this we can begin to grasp the sociality of this shared exposure to what lies around and elsewhere. That is to say: the peri-spacing where one finds one’s acolouthia or retinue of friends/companions/readers—one’s entourage. Reading Barthes in this way provides us with nothing less than a condensed definition of the neutral and naked image. Camera Lucida is the presentation of such a scene of neutral image, in which we as (peri-scopic) readers of the text become part of the retinue of Barthes’s (perigraphic) writing, and together mutually sustain the space of suspension and separation that is opened up by the ontological force of loss, withdrawal, and retreat.

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Naked Image of  Neutral Mourning Just as it can be said that Barthes found in haiku an example of an exemption from the combat of language, with photography he ultimately found his exemption from image. That he would make the connection between the two, as when, during the February 17, 1979, session of his Novel course, he said, “The art form that enables us to conceive of the haiku = Photography,” is all the more remarkable. Taking the relation between them to be mutually transitive, we might go on to posit that the art form that enables us to conceive of photography is haiku. Barthes’s interest in the language that underpins the tenets of Japanese Zen Buddhism was long-standing, dating back to his book The Empire of Signs (1970) and extending up to his course on The Novel, the first part of which is almost entirely devoted to the topic of haiku. While an extended analysis of the connection between Barthes’s writing on haiku and photography is beyond the scope of the current study, in the following theoretical analysis of CL, I do draw upon four of the Zen terms deployed by Barthes, as one way to understand some of the aesthetic dimensions and possible ethical ramifications of the book on photography. Again, this seems justified given the fact that the lectures on haiku share the same time frame with Barthes’s writing of CL. In fact, that session of the course in February contains many of the themes, references, rhetorical figures, and theoretical propositions that will be further taken up and developed, either by Barthes, in CL, or by me, here in my reading of it. These include a reference to the work of Bernard Faucon; “essential sting” as theoretical premonition of the punctum; the notion of syntactical co-presence of asyndeton and parataxis. Finally, “that-has-been” as formulation for the temporal grammar of haiku and photography, not as “the aorist past (it happened) but to the perfect, the tense of evocation, of the affective link between what has taken place and who I am as I remember it.” As regards the latter, Barthes writes, “My hypothesis (long held but never explored in depth: something I propose to do—soon—in a future work) = the noeme of photography has to be sought on the side of ‘that has been.’ ”²² When Barthes writes that “the proximity between photography and haiku remains very great,” one way in which he measures this is � � � �   �  138

based upon the ideas that “in both, everything is given straight away” and nothing can be added to either of them in order to develop them further. In arguing this way, Barthes is implicitly drawing upon the Zen notion of Wu-shi, which he will go on to explore, at length, during the rest of the course. Wu-shi means “nothing special,” the thing “as such,” and “just as it is.” For Barthes, this represents a certain seconddegree literality, in that the first degree consists of stupid recognition (i.e., a spade is a spade), which is then followed by interpretation (will-to-know, to achieve meaning and significance), which is then only eclipsed by a second-degree literality (Wu-shi), as exemption or withdrawal from meaning, into a plain, simple, or neutral sense. The example that Barthes gives is a personal one, entirely concerned with death: “It was some months after the death of a loved one before I could say, simply, nakedly, ‘absolutely’: ‘I’m suffering because that person died.’ ”²³ No doubt the loved one referred to here is his mother, and it is precisely in the newly found ability to “nakedly” express the suffering that he feels from her death that Barthes is approaching the sense of Wu-shi as neutral mourning. The non-passive exposure to the “as is,” is also, then, an exposure to its passing. The latter is partially what is meant by the Japanese word Ma, meaning “interval” or “spacing,” distinct from the Kantian a priori category of Space. In the fall of 1978, Barthes will contribute an essay for an exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts, in Paris, entitled “Ma. Espace/ Temps du Japon.” This will coincide with an essay entitled “L’Intervale,” on the same exhibition, that he will publish in Le Nouvel Observateur, on the theme of “Between Agony and Love.” At one point in that article, Barthes defines Ma as “toute relation, toute separation entre deux instants, deux lieux, deux états” (all relation, all separation between two instants, two places, two states).²⁴ Also in “L’Intervale,” Barthes defines Utsuroi as “the moment when the flower will wilt, when the soul of something is suspended in the void, between one state and another.”²⁵ We might say that Utsuroi bears the precision of the instant of the eve of finitude: of neither dead nor dying, but of the “about-to-die” that exists just this side of death. Finally, the Zen word satori is the name for the revelatory or epiphanic moment that is beyond words (and perhaps also beyond image). From this we ask, What is the satori offered by Camera Lucida—not Barthes’s, nor even ours, but the one that is shared between � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  139

us? Not the noeme or essence of Photography, but rather the scene of its satori. Perigraphic Palinode Nearly all prevailing interpretations of Roland Barthes’s theory of the punctum in photography understand it to be, first, the affective perceptual force of some thing or some detail that virtually leaps out from the visual field of the image and pricks and perhaps even (metaphorically) wounds the viewer of the photograph, and second, as the affective temporal force that has the power to create a sense of a future loss or death in the photograph’s very registration of the living present—the decidedly aporetic future anteriority of loss or death. Without doubt, these interpretations are not only accurate, they completely correspond to the two principal definitions of the punctum, put forth by Barthes in each of the two sections (respectively) of Camera Lucida. Therefore, it is not my intention to take issue with either of these readings and definitions. Rather, I wish to think the two together, as mutually bearing upon each other, and in ways that, I will argue, are inextricable. Further, I wish to suggest that through somewhat complicated chiasmic crossings of these affective forces—at once perceptual and spatialized, temporal and exposed to finitude— is generated not so much a subjective and wholly privatized nor a collectivized sense of loss in the face of death, that through photography would put death to work (represent it), in order to make sense of it and produce its (death’s) meaning. No, instead, I will argue that Camera Lucida presents us with a wholly original and, I believe, either ignored or mistaken (misconstrued) notion of loss’s future anteriority as an exempting, withdrawing, emptying, and retreating of sense, and that in that very exemption lies the chance of a sharing in that loss, precisely to the extent that it is neither forcibly concretized nor chalked up as ephemeral, but instead is staged in and as the full force of its retreat. In a number of important respects, this amounts to sustaining a shared sense of the punctum’s force, and thereby a resistance to its being reduced to any number of codes, significations, or other such mechanisms by which meaning is systematically produced, as yet another doxology or ideology.

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In section 23—the penultimate section of part 1 of Camera Lucida, Barthes states one “last thing about the punctum,” an aspect that initially may seem difficult to reconcile, and that, regardless of its apparent last-minute introduction into the discussion, will prove to be of principal importance. What Barthes writes is this: “Whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.”²⁶ Barthes is saying that the ontological priority of the punctum lies in its latency and supplementarity, and specifically exists as a supplement that is added to the photographic image by the viewer, even though it is “nonetheless already there.” How do we understand this convoluted temporality and spatiality, this spectatorial agency and lack thereof (corresponding, or so it would seem, to the Derridean notion of the “originary supplement”)? Barthes’s formula is not convoluted for the sheer sake of complexity, nor, certainly, is it the result of a lack of conceptual clarity. Rather, it is necessarily and deliberately convoluted, since it is outlining the temporal and spatial folds of the punctum’s affective force. More so than even latent, the exteriorizing force of the photographic punctum is ontological, meaning that it can be said to exist “whether or not it is triggered” (as Barthes says). As such, the punctum is the opening up of a space around the image, which neither lies entirely outside of the image-field nor is wholly the domain of the viewing subject, but more precisely is the mise-en-scène of their coexistence—affective spacing and animating force between them. As he will go on to write, just a bit further in the text, in his discussion of the erotic photograph’s punctum affect, “It takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.”²⁷ It is for this reason that we must read Barthes as saying neither that the punctum is inherent in the photograph nor that it is that which is projected by the viewing subject onto the image. Instead, the punctum is an opening and spacing that stages the scene upon which a partaking of affect takes place as already there. Which is what would it would mean (or feel like) to sense the future anteriority of the punctum’s affective force (and, perhaps, of affect per se). In other words, Barthes draws our attention to the spacing and the future anteriority of affect.

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The term—derived from the film theorist Andre Bazin—that Barthes uses to name this space is blind field. Distinct from the visible field of the framed image (as in photography), the screened image of cinema includes a blind field as the space that exists beyond the frame, and that functions as a space of transit where, for instance, characters in a movie can be said to go when they are not visibly present in the projected film image. It is for this reason that Barthes refers to this space that exists beyond the cinematic screen as a “hideout.” It is a space for the emergence and withdrawal of figures, of the staging and transiting of bodies that I am theorizing as peri-performative movement and exposure. In RB by RB, Barthes had spoken to the importance of such “offspaces” when, as part of his self-estimation of his work, he acknowledged that “whatever pertinence there happens to be comes only in the margins, the interpolations, the parentheses, aslant: it is the subject’s voice off, as we say, off-camera, off-microphone, offstage.”²⁸ Now, while photographs are defined in distinction from those images traditionally referred to as motion pictures, we might still want to think about the ways in which photographs, including those involving bodies, can operate peri-performatively. For Barthes, this means freeing the photograph from the restricted space of the studium as a space of enclosure and confinement, and thereby of exempting the photograph of sense (meaning, code, signification). For, as Barthes writes, “When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave; they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”²⁹ What is it that would serve to liberate the photograph from its studium through an emptying of signification (but not sense), and its figures from a forced immobilization that is as much existential as it is photographic? Barthes provides an answer to this question, in a way that is as remarkable for having been ignored by most commentators as it is for its unequivocal succinctness: “Yet once there is a punctum, a blind field is created (is divined).”³⁰ That the stakes involved in this freeing up were as much erotic and pleasure-based as they were existential (or perhaps we should say that the latter is predicated upon the former for it to even make sense) lies, funny enough, in Barthes’s allusion to butterflies, quoted � � � �   �  142

above. For while forcibly confined figures in photography recall for Barthes butterflies pinned down as biological specimens for exhibition and study, in contrast and with the image of the flying butterfly, he draws an analogy to cruising. “Cruising relates to that passion which Fourier called the Variant, the Alternant, the Butterfly—in the feminine: ‘La Papillonne.’ ”³¹ Returning to Barthes’s statement against the photograph as motionless image, we can now point out a number of important things. First, that through the affective force of the punctum and its staging of a blind field in photography, a photograph is not simply a representation but a presentation, and more specifically a scene of movement and emergence that blurs the certainty of limits and barriers. As Barthes in the “L’Imaginaire” section of RB by RB writes, “ ‘To stage’ means: to arrange the flats one in front of the other, to distribute the roles, to establish levels, and, at the limit: to make the footlights a kind of uncertain barrier.”³² Second, that this exteriorizing is the antithesis of representation—that is, what representation sets out to seize and arrest—given that, in The Pleasure of the Text, he wrote, “That is what representation is: when nothing emerges, when nothing leaps out of the frame: of the picture, the book, the screen.”³³ Third, that to fly (move) like a butterfly, from surface to surface, is as though to cruise from one place to another; and fourth, that there is an aesthesis (if not an aesthetics) to such erotic movement, specifically the motion of leaving and departure (I will return to this). With the photographic self-portrait of the young and shirtless (naked?) Robert Mapplethorpe with arm extended (the last image reproduced in part 1 of the book, section 23), Barthes finds not only one of his favorite subjects (the young boy) but also his butterfly (fig. 3). This image is not only yet another occasion for Barthes to be able to distinguish between the erotic and the pornographic, but it is also an image of the photographed body performing the blind field of the punctum by literally gesturing, if not exactly pointing, to the space just beyond the frame, the space off-camera as though offstage. With only a bit of his head and naked torso in the frame, and with his right arm extended up and out to his side, Mapplethorpe presents his body as the exposure to a shared eroticization that is neither of the fetish nor the tableau, but of the peri-performative stage that, as I wish to argue, is not the space of the body per se, nor even � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  143

Figure 3. Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, 1975 © The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Courtesy Art & Commerce.

the stripped-off clothes of its nakedness, but the scene that lies simply around (the floor, the bed, the wall). This is what I find captured by Barthes, within his discussion of the Mapplethorpe self-portrait, when, in a tone that is almost conclusive, he writes, “The punctum then, is a kind of subtle beyond—as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward ‘the rest’ of the nakedness [as if to visually “complete” the boy’s torso], not only toward the fantasy of a praxis,” at least right up until the point where he then goes on to write, “but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together.”³⁴ What Barthes is outlining in this statement and its definition of the affective erotic force of the punctum is nothing less than a theory of photography as performative spacing, as the opening up—precisely through the retreat of what can be seen—of a blind field as “subtle � � � �   �  144

Figure 4. Robert Mapplethorpe, Untitled, 1973 © The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Courtesy Art & Commerce.

beyond.” So the punctum is not simply to be understood in this case as that photographic detail that leaps out of the frame, just as much as it is not the posed body. Instead, it is enacted in the gesture of the “young man with arm extended” in the Mapplethorpe self-portrait, as though it is pointing to the around space that is the blind field of photography’s affective and erotic spacing. We note that earlier in the book (section 17), Barthes had cast the pornographic photograph as unary, as opposed to the erotic, which, according to him, involves partial concealment, delay, and distraction. As an example of the latter, he cites (without reproducing) Mapplethorpe’s photograph of “the fabric of underwear at very close range” (fig. 4), a shift from a pornographic emphasis on genitalia, which, as we know, even Mapplethorpe attempted to aestheticize.³⁵ This shift from sexual organ to material texture in a sense can be understood to parallel the difference between “work” and “text” as conceived by Barthes, in addition to the distance between studium and punctum. This shift and gesture—both Barthes’s and the young Mapple­ thorpe’s in the self-portrait—harmonize with another observation of � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  145

Barthes’s that occurs at the conjuncture of the erotic, a young boy, gesture, and the question of essence. It appears in the form of a question, in one of his two essays on the American artist Cy Twombly. Both of the essays Barthes wrote under commission, one “Sagesse de l’art” (English translation: “The wisdom of art”) for the catalog that accompanied an exhibition of Twombly’s paintings and drawings from 1954 to 1977 at the Whitney Museum in New York, the dates of which, April 10–June 10, almost completely coincide with the same month-and-a-half period during which Barthes was writing CL.³⁶ The other essay, and the one that I will draw from here, was included in a volume of the catalogue raisonné of Twombly’s works on paper, and commissioned by Yvon Lambert.³⁷ In this second essay, originally titled “Cy Twombly ou ‘Non multa sed multum’ ” (“Cy Twombly or ‘not many but much’ ”), in a section titled “Writing,” Barthes argues that Twombly (abbreviated throughout the text as “TW,” as was Barthes’s custom) articulated the essence of writing in terms of neither form nor usage, but only as gesture, and in particular, as a gesture of negligence. In order to further illustrate his point, he makes a comparison, and asks, “Qu’est-ce que l’essence d’un pantalon (s’il en a une)?” (What is the essence of a pair of pants [if it has such a thing])?). He goes on to answer in the following way: Certainly not that crisp and well-pressed object to be found on department-store racks; rather, that clump of fabric on the floor, negligently dropped there when the boy stepped out of them, careless, lazy, indifferent.³⁸

I want to suggest that for the Barthes of CL, Mapplethorpe is just such a boy—his Alcibiades—who performs the pleasure of the text (or texture, as the case may be when it comes to skin and underwear), in which the sense of “the absolute excellence of being” lies neither in the existent’s body per se, nor in its extraneous clothing (Perniola), but in the scene that is staged in their stripping and withdrawal. Which should also not be categorized as the striptease, given the ways in which the pleasure of nudity is here being rethought in its relation to negligence and loss. At least this is how Barthes had sought to reconceptualize nudity, in his essay from 1972, “Outcomes of the Text.” There, in a section on the relation between the erotic and clothing, titled “Habillé/Dressed,” he writes the following: � � � �   �  146

As it happens, for us the nude is a plastic value, or even eroticoplastic; in other words, the nude is always in a position of figuration (this is the very example of striptease); closely linked to the ideology of representation, the nude is the figure par excellence, the figure of the figure. To rethink the nude would therefore mean, on the one hand, to conceive of nudity as a historical, cultural, Occidental (Greek?) concept, and on the other, to transfer it from the Tableau of bodies to an order of erotic practices. . . . The nude is a cultural object (linked perhaps to an order of pleasure, but not to that of loss, of delight), and consequently, in conclusion, a moral object: the nude is not perverse.³⁹

The fact that the entirety of this essay is an extended meditation on Georges Bataille’s short essay on “The Big Toe” makes Barthes’s critical indictment of the striptease even more remarkable, given that Bataille is the philosopher who famously pronounced about himself, “I think the way a girl removes her dress. At the extremity of her movement, thought is shameless, even obscene.”⁴⁰ For a long time, I have considered these two scenes of disrobing to be in tension and perhaps even stark contrast with each other. At this point, I am less certain. For while the homo/hetero divide that marks the difference in the respective authors’ choice of nude subject is not to be ignored or trivialized (Bataille will always seem severely allergic to the gay male sense and sensibility of a thinker such as Barthes), to the extent that Barthes and Bataille both highlight the outer limits of the body’s movement and gesture in its disrobing, they share an abiding mistrust of that same body’s figural representation. Nonetheless, Barthes’s anecdote seems much more attuned to what we might call the architecture of the scene, and less invested in either the garment or the body that dropped it. Unless, that is, the discarded clothing was characterized as a “heap,” in the way in which Barthes did in a few of the outlines for his “Vita Nova,” as well as in interviews and essays written in 1979 around the same time that he was writing CL. In each instance, the heap (le tas) is associated with a Rousseauean “pure idleness” (far niente) and “philosophical doing nothing,” which Barthes aligns with the Neutral, Tao, and, in the last outline of “VN,” “the Moroccan child.” As Diana Knight has recently noted, the heap appears in the � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  147

interview that Barthes did for Le Monde Dimanche, published on September 16, 1979, titled “Osons être paresseux” (We dare to be lazy). There he speaks of the heap as being a matter of neither participation nor exclusion, but rather its only point is to simply be there, and nothing more (or less).⁴¹ Strikingly, the photographs by Bernard Faucon that are reproduced on the covers of the double-volume American edition of Barthes’s posthumously published book Incidents would seem to be rather close approximations of the very sorts of scenes of abandonment and negligence being discussed here.⁴² Barthes did write a short article on some of Faucon’s photographs for the magazine Zoom (October 1978);⁴³ however, the images that he discussed there (and that he also briefly mentioned in that key session of  The Novel course discussed above) are not those that appear on the University of California Press books. Rather, these two latter images are from a series by Faucon on the “rooms of love”; specifically, Thirteenth Room of Love (reproduced on the Barthes volume) and First Room of Love (reproduced on the D. A. Miller volume) (see plates 1 and 2, respectively). These two bedroom scenes, while quite similar, obviously differ in one important respect: the Thirteenth Room of Love is visibly devoid of any human body, in contrast to the other image, in which a single figure (possibly male?) is seen sleeping in bed. Providing a partial view of an unmade bed, the floor and corner of the room, and the sheer-curtained window, through which an intense bright white light shines, Thirteenth Room of Love might be taken to be a view of any number of bedrooms, including Felix GonzalezTorres’s. And based upon the very intense bright white light that shines through the curtained window, this photograph might even be ascribed a second title: La chambre claire—the original French title of Camera Lucida. As we will see, both of these images, Gonzalez-Torres’s and Faucon’s, are visual cognates of one of the two naked images that serve as the ground and principal structure of Barthes’s book. But before returning to our reading of it, we might note that when it comes to a photograph that provides an image of the scene that is staged when the adolescent boy steps out of his jeans, there is perhaps no other image that better captures this than the one taken by Richard Avedon

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Figure 5. Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory; left to right, Paul Morrissey, director; Joe Dallesandro, actor; Candy Darling, actor; Eric Emerson, actor; Jay Johnson, actor; Tom Hempertz, actor; Gerard Malanga, poet; Viva, actress; Paul Morrissey; Taylor Mead, actor; Brigid Polk, actress; Joe Dallesandro; Andy Warhol, artist. New York City, October 30, 1969. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

of Andy Warhol and members of  The Factory, on October 30, 1969, in New York City (fig. 5). In a triptych configuration that effectively presents a panoramic group photo, many of Warhol’s “superstars” are posed either clothed or naked (and both in the case of Joe Dallesandro’s double appearance). Of those who are naked, four identified as male (Joe Dallesandro, Eric Emerson, Jay Johnson, and Tom Hempertz), while the fifth is the transsexual actor Candy Darling. All five bodies stand there naked among the piles of their clothing, which lie there, negligently abandoned on the neutral white floor, in small heaps (tas). Barthes refers to this very photo in his short article on Avedon entitled “Tels,” written for Photo magazine on the occasion of the release of the book Avedon: Portraits, in 1977.⁴⁴ Barthes says that he reads in any Avedon photograph the offering of seven gifts: truth, character, type, the erotic, death, and the past, with finally the seventh sense (“le septième sens”): “C’est précisément celui qui résiste à tous les autres, c’est le supplement indicible, l’évidence que, dans l’image, il y a toujours autre chose: l’inépuisable, l’intraitable de la Photographie (le désir?).”⁴⁵ Which can be translated as: “The seventh sense (gift) is precisely that which resists all the others, it is the indescribable supplement [also: inexpressible, unspeakable], the evidence that, in the image, there is always another thing: the inexhaustible, the intractable of Photography (desire?).”

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Posing it as a question, Barthes’s uncertainty as to whether desire is the proper word for this intractable supplement is clearly warranted, given his description of it as equally indescribable: a nonevidentiary evidence that affirms the peri-spacing of the image in both its photographic and discursive exposition. This exposition, as the infinite opening of finitude, is an aporetic condition or paradox that Barthes attributes to all great art, a category that for him includes the work of Avedon. Indeed, this is exactly the way in which his article on the American photographer begins: “Regardez une photographie d’Avedon: vous y verrez en action le paradoxe de tout grand art, de tout art de grande race: l’extrême fini de l’image ouvre à l’extrême infini de la contemplation, de la sidération” (the latter part of this sentence might be translated as: “the extreme end of the image open to the infinite extremity of contemplation, dumbfounded”).⁴⁶ If, as Barthes theorizes, the photographic image enacts an opening up at its finite limit, an opening onto an indescribable supplement (what I am theorizing as the peri-spacing of infinitely finite exposure), then this extremity may be a matter of neither desire (desideration) nor consideration (“contemplation”—which I am taking to be Barthes’s cognate term). Even further, given what Jean-Luc Nancy can teach us about the ways in which the regulated desire for and observance of a sidereal order—there where only cosmological disaster exists— has, throughout the entire epoch of the occidental, shuttled between desideration as that “determination that consequently forbids itself access to finitude as being-in-act of existence,” and consideration as the containment of “the formless form of infinitude” through innumerable constellated configurations, then perhaps the problem lies, as Nancy argues, with “sideration in general.”⁴⁷ If not desire or consideration, or even sideration, then what? Perhaps what we have been discussing all along in our joint reading of Nancy and Barthes—namely, as exemption from sense, which here would entail an ethical-aesthetic attunement to the way in which an image can possess, as Barthes says of Avedon’s photographs, “the greatest intensity of sense and in the end the failure of this same sense” (my translation),⁴⁸ such that a sense of the world comes to be understood as lying neither in the myth of any cosmology or of creation and its deprivation, but simply in sense as praxis. Which is to

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say, in the waxing and waning of its (sense, world, praxis) infinite finitude. Such is the heap (tel est le tas) that is the world. To round out our discussion, we might turn to The Factory itself and the scene that was created there (here we might note that Warhol would almost single-handedly revive the very notion of “scene” in its heteroclite sociality). While predicated upon Warhol’s famous blankness, which almost seems to find its scenographic corollary in Avedon’s blank white studio set, the scene that was The Factory was created simply by people “hanging around.” But not necessarily around the superstar (now that is Warhol’s coinage) artist, but as Warhol himself admitted, contrary to prevailing perceptions both then and now, “A lot of people thought that it was me everyone at the Factory was hanging around, that I was some kind of big attraction that everyone came to see, but that’s absolutely backward: it was me who was hanging around everyone else. I just paid the rent, and the crowds came simply because the door was open. People weren’t particularly interested in seeing me, they were interested in seeing each other. They came to see who came.”⁴⁹ Turning back now once again to the Mapplethorpe self-portrait as young man with arm extended, we note that it is all the more remarkable within the context of CL, given that it stands in stark contrast to the majority of the photographs reproduced therein. In most of the images, subjects are disposed in frontal and centered portraitlike compositions. In other words, and to extend the butterfly analogy further, the latter can be taken as individual butterflies pinned down to the image, whereas Mapplethorpe appears to bear all of the potential to emerge and perhaps even to leave. The boy is literally on the verge, and for Barthes (as well as for Michel Foucault and any number of us other postromantic queers), the point of departure always carried with it the greatest erotic charge. We can say that for Barthes (and others), leaving and withdrawing always made the most sense.⁵⁰ In the final section (number 24) of part 1 of CL, titled “Palinode,” Barthes expresses his sense that up until now in the text, his own desire and pleasure have been the determining factors of his study and that he will now need to recant and write his palinode—that is, his

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retraction: the withdrawal of his prior statements. As he writes, “I had to grant that my pleasure was an imperfect mediator, and that a subjectivity reduced to its hedonist project could not recognize the universal,” meaning, here, “the nature (the eidos) of Photography.” And so he ends this one-paragraph section by writing, “I would have to make my recantation, my palinode.” This felt need to recant, no doubt prompted by the discussion of the Mapplethorpe self-portrait that immediately precedes it, is no less remarkable, given its implicit renunciation of the pleasures and desires of not just any subject’s everyday life, but specifically that of the older gay man who now finds the tiny folds and inflections of cruising and nonce sexuality to be little more than superfluous and futile distractions.⁵¹ All of this bears a rather uncanny resemblance to a diary entry that he wrote on April 25, 1979—just a few weeks prior, then, to writing section 24—and that he included in “Deliberation,” an essay on the topic of the “intimate journal” and the question as to whether he should write one with a view toward publishing it.⁵² The essay contains within it two numbered sections, the first consisting of entries from a diary that he kept in July 1977, at his country house in Urt, in southwest France, at the time of his mother’s illness, and the second written two years later; the latter is the one that we are particularly interested in here. The entry for “Paris, April 25, 1979,” opens with the words “Vaine Soirée” (“Futile evening”), which constitute the entirety of the first paragraph or, perhaps in its singular standing, that are meant to function as the journal entry’s title (or both). Certainly “futile evening” is the overarching theme of the entry, which is a chronicle of a rather dreary and rainy spring evening the day before, when Barthes ventured out to an exhibition opening of new work by the photographer Daniel Boudinet, whom Barthes had written about two years earlier, in an article for Créatis.⁵³ While the “chilly atmosphere of the opening” at the Galerie de l’Impasse made Barthes leave soon after he had arrived, among “D.B.’s photographs (of windows and blue curtains, taken with a Polaroid camera),” he would find the image that would serve as the frontispiece to Camera Lucida (plate 3). Later in the evening, after moving “from bus to bus and movie house to movie house,” Barthes ends up at Café Flore for some eggs � � � �   �  152

and a glass of Bordeaux, and to his great dismay and in a way that only confirms that “this was a very bad day,” he finds “no face to be interested in or about which to fantasize or at least to speculate” (no one to cruise).⁵⁴ And so he ends the entry in a way that echoes and resonates with the end of part 1 of CL: “The evening’s pathetic failure has impelled me to begin, at last, the reformation of my life that’s been in my mind for so long. Of which this first note is the trace.” In both cases, Barthes is expressing a need to reform his ways, his life—a need that we might assume dates back to around the time of his mother’s death, and most definitely to the period around April 15, 1978, which Barthes often made note of and referred to as the day of a decisive event in his life. While he never explicitly identified what that event might have been, it is generally understood to refer to his decision to begin his life anew, and to find in a renewed will-to-write a will-to-live in the face of loss and sense of futility. (I will return to this in the coda to this chapter.) Both the journal entry from “Deliberation” and the “Palinode” section 24 of CL are at once the chronicle and notation of a certain futility and failure for Barthes, and the means by which he will find a way out. Yet this very point needs to be made in a slightly different and even stronger way, given that he is not simply writing about his felt need to reform his life, but that through the very form of a written recantation or palinode—which is to say, through a writing of that which is withdrawn in and as what is written (in the writing of erasure; that is, the retreating of retracing)—Barthes will break open a path, and find a way in which the impasse proves to be not only a passage, but one of distinct pleasure as well. Such that, for instance, in a note that he parenthetically inserts immediately after this diary entry, Barthes describes the pleasure that he derived from rereading it, “so vividly did it revive the sensations of that evening.” Yet this was not because of what was, but rather “what was not written, the interstices of notation.” Which is to say, in what remains unwritten in writing, as though in the blank spaces between the lines of what is written. Not what is not written, but what resides in the intervallic (Ma) spacing of writing, as the unwritten within writing itself. It is the generativity and, dare we say, vitality of this aporetic and seemingly impassable space that seems to be what Barthes meant when, in a diary entry dated July 16, 1977, � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  153

he wrote, “This blank moment (no meaning) produces the plenitude of an evidence: that it is worthwhile being alive.”⁵⁵ At the end of the parenthetical note on rereading, Barthes suggests that resurrection might always occur alongside the thing expressed, being the role of the Phantom, of the Shadow. However, again, if we follow Nancy, in which he has come to transcribe “resurrection” as the raising of the body as that which entails the trace, outline, and impression of the body’s withdrawal, retreat, and departure, then perhaps phantom and shadow are nearly too figural to adequately name this perispacing that bodies never cease to stage, in the infinite singularity of their shared finitude (coexposure). Appearing as the very last photographic image in part 1, and with naked torso and arm extended, the self-portrait of the young Robert Mapplethorpe is made, so it seems, to point to part 2, providing at once the direction (sens) and sense (sens) that what is to follow in the second half of the book is not only Barthes’s recantation and palinode, but, as such, is, in toto, something of a blind field as well. Support for reading the photograph as such an indexical arrow is to be found in the fact that both in Barthes’s Oeuvres Completes and in the English edition of Camera Lucida, the orientation of the photograph has been reversed, such that the young male body points to the right (and thus to the second half of the book), rather than to the left, as in the original orientation of the image. As Barthes put it, “The body is always the future of what is said entre nous.”⁵⁶ Here we take this to mean that the body is the very exposure to a time-space to come—the extra that lies no place other than just between us (entre nous). So, like the boy stepping out of his jeans, the young Mapplethorpe here performs in his body and gesture the palinode that Barthes says he will go on to write, and that I take to be part 2 of Camera Lucida. Yet, as I wish to suggest and hope to further demonstrate, this is not only a withdrawing of previous statements and arguments but is also the inscribed announcement, by Barthes, of a form of writing that defines and underlines the entire book, including the first part, which is here being brought to an indefinite close. In this regard, I wholeheartedly concur with Eduardo Cadava and Paolo Cortés-Rocca when they write that “we might even say that this palinode—as a mode of assertion

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that countersigns a kind of withdrawal from what is being asserted— is one of the text’s signatures.”⁵⁷ It is in this way that Barthes’s Camera Lucida, as palinode, approaches without entirely engaging in a praxis of zero-degree writing, and that enables us to relate it back not only to his first book but also to that other inscriptive erasure of signatures—namely, Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, and its palindromic reversals of the representation (framing) of figures, bodies, and surfaces. Just as much as Rauschenberg and de Kooning can be claimed as cosignatories of a single work through the very withdrawal of erasure that they come to share in drawing, so too might we say that the Mapplethorpe and Roland Barthes, photograph(er) and writer, are cosignatories of Camera Lucida, and thereby come to constitute a certain kind of collaboration all their own. As we move toward the next stage of our discussion, it might be worthwhile to review the chronology of what Natalie Leger has referred to as the “panorama” of the late Barthes, and thereby concur with Antoine Compagnon that this period in Barthes’s life, from his inaugural address at the Collège de France to the eight pages of notes/ outlines for his final book/novel/roman project “Vita Nova,” concerns three things: the phantasmatic, the ethical, and the existential, all oriented toward finding a new will-to-live in a new will-to-write, in the midst of the experience of a devastating loss and its never-ending bereavement. When, in January 1977, Barthes gave his inaugural address on the relation between pedagogy and desire, his mother was sitting in the front row. By October of that year, she would be dead. We now know that in the intervening few months, he would choose The Neutral as the topic of his upcoming fall lecture course, and in June would present his paper on “The Image,” as part of the colloquium held in his honor at Cerisy-la-Salle. During much of July 1977 while at their country house in southwest France, he would keep a diary of notes on his mother’s illness (as discussed above, these notes would be published in 1979 as part of “Deliberation,” Barthes’s essay on the intimate journal), and the following September he would write “The Light of the South-West,” which will be posthumously published as part of the book Incidents. On October 26, 1977, the day immediately following his mother’s death, he began to keep what has recently been published in France

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(and translated by Richard Howard into English) as his Mourning Diary.⁵⁸ In doing so, Barthes enters what I will refer to as his palinodic phase, in which he will maintain in his writing a distinctive aporetic tension that incessantly interrupted and at the same time sustained his will-to-live. For as we have already touched upon and as we will see even further, in the personal privacy of the Mourning Diary, but also in published essays, lectures, courses, outlines, notes, and in what was to be his last published book, Camera Lucida, Barthes writes (and rewrites) his palinode: a writing that is at once the recantation (or retreat) of desire (to live, to write, to be read by others) and the evidence (the trace, retrait) of the persistence of a will-to-live, will-towrite, and will-to-be-read. For instance, in one of the six diary entries from October 29, 1977 (four days after his mother’s passing), he writes: The desires I had before her death (while she was sick) [so, in spring and summer 1977] can no longer be fulfilled, for that would mean it is her death that allows me to fulfill them—her death might be a liberation in some sense with regard to my desires. But her death has changed me, I no longer desire what I used to desire. I must wait— supposing that such a thing could happen—for a new desire to form, a desire following her death.⁵⁹

Once again we encounter what Barthes referred to as the “wirelike sharpness of mourning,” as that which cuts through desire, and in its cleaving, leaves open the question of what form of desire can follow the death of a loved one, and in particular would not implicitly justify that death by bestowing it with the power to liberate desire. Possessed now with the hope that writing (perhaps in some new form) will be the means by which this new vindicating desire will be realized, Barthes begins to envision two projects, one that will be realized as CL, and the other that will remain as a series of eight separate outlines for what he called his “Vita Nova.” To be clear: throughout this period Barthes is not finding in writing a means of overcoming this lack of desire, which, he believes, would be an impossibility, but rather, he finds in writing a means of persistently noting this very lack and the impossibility of its resolution. Writing for Barthes, from the fall of 1977 until his death in the spring of 1980, takes neither the

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Plate 1. Bernard Faucon, The Thirteenth Room of Love: The Stained Glass, 1985. © Bernard Faucon, courtesy Galerie VU’, Paris. Plate 2. Bernard Faucon, The First Room of Love, 1984. © Bernard Faucon, courtesy Galerie VU’, Paris.

Plate 3. Daniel Boudinet, The Bright Room, 1979. © Copyright Boudinet-RMN. Ministère de la culture–Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimone / Daniel Boudinet / Paris, France / dist. RMN / Art Resource, NY. Plate 4. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991; candies individually wrapped in multicolored cellophane, endless supply; overall dimen­ sions vary with installation; ideal weight: 175 lbs. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Plate 5. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Revenge), 1991; light blue candies individually wrapped in cellophane, endless supply; overall dimensions vary with installation; ideal weight: 325 lbs. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Plate 6. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Double Portrait), 1991; print on paper, endless copies; 26 cm at ideal height × 100 × 70 cm (original paper size) (10¼ in. at ideal height × 39 3 ⁄8 × 27½ in. [original paper size]). © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

form of an absolute refusal of life and the world nor the form of some redemptive liberation from his bereavement. Given that either of these options would represent an escape from, rather than a sustaining of, the double bind or aporetic impasse that structured the persistent notation of a never-ending abandonment of desire to write/live, Barthes’s only choice was to write and write again (retrace) this very retreat, which included the retreat or exemption from meaning and its forms of signification and representation, including the imaginary and its image. For as he stated in the May 13, 1978, session of his Neutral course, “In fact, refusing the world is the trap of the imaginary: to escape = supreme trap, but why not permit oneself this new trap; the subject is not relieved.”⁶⁰ We give the name naked image to the sustaining of this “new trap,” in which the imaginary (image-system/ repertoire) is neither refused nor positively embraced, but rather is staged as the scene of neutral mourning—“a retreat that protects without being a trap.”⁶¹ On June 5, 1978, just two days after he delivered his final lecture in The Neutral course and a year before he would complete the manuscript of CL—and so, again, with a methodicalness that we must continue to note and appreciate—Barthes’s Mourning Diary speaks of a book that he most strongly feels he must write, before he resumes his teaching. Not just any book, or even a book like any other that he had previously written, but a book that he would write around his maman (his mother) and that performatively would bring a different form of recognition. Here is the diary entry, in its entirety (it is one of the longest): June 5, 1978 Each subject (this appears ever more clearly) acts (struggles) to be “recognized.” For me, at this point in my life (when maman is dead) I was recognized (by books). But strangely—perhaps falsely?—I have the obscure feeling, now she’s no longer here, that I must gain recognition all over again. This cannot be by writing any book: the idea of continuing as in the past to proceed from book to book, course to course, immediately struck me as mortiferous (this I saw to my dying day). (Whence my present efforts of resignation).

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Before resuming sagely and stoically the course (quite unforeseen moreover) of the work, it is necessary for me (I feel this strongly) to write this book around maman. In a sense, therefore, it is as if I had to make maman recognized. This is the theme of the “monument”; but: For me, the Monument is not lasting, not eternal (my doctrine is too profoundly Everything passes: tombs die too), it is an act, an action, an activity that brings recognition.⁶²

In other words, what Barthes is putting forth here is a notion of a Monument that would not so much “stand” as it would be a performative act, action, and activity that offers (“brings” by staging) the doctrine of finitude (“Everything passes”). It is in this way that Barthes begins to conceive of the book he so strongly desires to write around his mother, as nothing other than an (monumentally) aporetic scene. I believe that this is exactly the scene connoted by the title of the course that followed The Neutral: The Preparation of the Novel. Here, the word preparation should be understood in terms of Barthes’s notion of “wanting-to-write,” which is also a matter of setting the scene or, more precisely, the fore-scene of writing; while Barthes uses the word novel to mean any new and inventive form of writing that bears within it the very will-to-write (e.g., Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Dante’s Vita Nuova—Barthes’s two principal points of reference, study, and inspiration, especially during this period as he thinks toward his own “Vita Nova”). As we recall from our earlier discussion, for Barthes, this is not a matter of writing the historical (“aorist”) past (“it happened”), but of wanting to write the sense of loss that is felt in the present, and is written as this persistence, now in the form of a new kind of book. In his Novel lecture of February 17, 1979, Barthes presents the perfect past tense as the “temporal category” of notation, in the form of either haiku or Photography. As he stated, it is not “the aorist past (it happened) but to the perfect, the tense of evocation, of the affective link between what has taken place and who I am as I remember it. . . . Haiku’s tense = the perfect.” He then goes on to ask, “What about photography? I don’t know; something to analyze later on. Of course: on the whole, in the perfect.”⁶³ � � � �   �  158

So in order to evoke the sense of loss that he is experiencing in the present—and specifically as the “that-has-been,” which, although still not fully articulated in the statement quoted above, we know he will come to identify as the noeme of Photography—Barthes’s writing must find its guide and ground in erasure. Which is to say that the force of retreat and withdrawal will be the means of sustaining an affective link or intervallic spacing that is the scene of exposure to finitude that is, at the same time, a path to beginning again. For just as John Cage (Zen Buddhist and a constant reference for Barthes in his course lectures) understood that “in order to begin again, he [Rauschenberg] erases the de Kooning,” Barthes too will find in the force of erasure a means to begin anew in writing, in such a way that the preparation of writing consists in withdrawing and retreating as the very staging of the fore-scene of writing (something like a Mystic Writing Pad). In this way we can imagine Barthes doing something similar to what he imagined Gustave Flaubert as having done: “When the depths of agony are plumbed, Flaubert throws himself on his sofa: this is his ‘marinade,’ an ambiguous situation, in fact the sign of failure is also the site of fantasy, whence the work will gradually resume, giving Flaubert a new substance which he can erase anew.”⁶⁴ When “the sign of failure is also the site of fantasy,” writing’s retreat is also the path of its renewal, precisely in the sense that this “new substance” of its writing—its spacing—remains exposed to erasure. So what Barthes is describing here is not simply the retreat of writing and the writing of retreat, but the retreat (retracing) of retreat (erasure), through which the infinite force of finitude can be sustained (however precariously) in writing. By writing erasure, Barthes stands the chance of beginning anew, while at the same honoring his mother’s death, by not denying, through his writing, her very inextinguishable death.⁶⁵ For Barthes as author of Camera Lucida, perhaps the place of his marinade was not a sofa but a bed. Or, even more specifically, the photographic image of a bed, conceivable in a way similar to his theorization of volume as “pure surface, formally structured, though not as yet by the content. Þ At first, then, it’s not a content or a theme that’s fantasized and ‘visualized’ . . . it’s a surface, an organized unfolding (volumen)—and it’s the organization of this space of writing � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  159

that constitutes my scenario, my pleasure.”⁶⁶ What I take Barthes to be describing here, as the pleasurable preparation of a scene of writing free of the fantasizing of content or visualization of a theme, is the fore-pleasure of writing as fore-scene. No doubt this immediately brings to mind our discussion of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s billboard photograph of an unmade bed, and the pleasure that I argued can be derived from the felt sense of the anteriority of loss and withdrawal, and that, in its photographic capture, renders the scene of photography not as readymade but as already-unmade, and that would call for a writing that would be equally unbecoming. Again, as Barthes tells us, it is “that-will-have-been,” as the temporal category of the photographic image: of neither the dead nor the living, but of always about to die, Utsuroi or will-wilt—the eve of finitude. Astonishingly, we need not look only to the Gonzalez-Torres pho­ tograph for an example of this naked image, since such a miseen-scène presented as the withdrawal of figure and body is to be found in Camera Lucida itself.⁶⁷ It is the one photographic image that is the most historically recent of all those reproduced in the book, and unlike any of the others, it appears in color. It is, remarkably, also the only image in the book that Barthes does not discuss, and it is one of the photographs—a Polaroid by Daniel Boudinet, to be exact—that Barthes saw at that private gallery opening on that futile evening of April 25, 1979, in Paris (as discussed above), just ten days after he began writing CL. Aquamarine blue-green in its coloration, and dark in its tonality, it appears to be an image of an empty bed in a bedroom, curtains drawn across the single visible window, the light barely enabling one to perceive the edge of the bed and the pillow that rests upon it. The image is simply captioned “Daniel Boudinet, Polaroid, 1979.” It is the book’s nakedly concealed naked image. Given its position and function as frontispiece, indeed it can be understood as the fore-scene of the book, the image that sets the stage for all that will follow in the text. The Photo-Maman Book In his mourning diary, on June 9, 1978, just six days after expressing his intention to write a book around his mother, Barthes makes explicit its connection to photography by referring to this project as � � � �   �  160

“the Photo-Maman book.” Four days later, now overwhelmed by the photograph around which the entire second part of CL will be dedicated, he has reached the deepest depths of his depression, so much so that he even lacks the desire to kill himself, he writes, “This morning, painfully returning to the photographs, overwhelmed by one in which maman, a gentle, discreet little girl beside Philippe Binger (the Winter Garden of Chennevières, 1898). I weep. Not even the desire to commit suicide.”⁶⁸ Based upon the following diary entry, dated December 29, 1978, it seems that Barthes had the photo from 1898 reproduced, perhaps for the purposes of being able to have the image on hand without running the risk of damaging the original. The entry reads: Having received yesterday the photo I’ve had reproduced of maman as a little girl in the Winter Garden of Chennevières, I try to keep it in front of me, on my work table. But it’s too much—intolerable—too painful. This image enters into conflict with all of the ignoble little combats of my life. The image is really a measure, a judge (I understand now how a photo can be sanctified, how it can guide Þ it’s not the identity that is recalled, it’s within that identity, a rare expression, a “virtue”).⁶⁹

Just as Mallarme had identified “Destruction” as his Beatrice and therefore as his guide, so might we read Barthes as saying here that he found the Beatrice for his writing of the exemption from meaning in photography, not in his mother per se, but in the Winter Garden photograph of her as a little girl. Of course, Mallarme’s reference to Beatrice would have caught Barthes’s attention given his interest in writing his own Dante-inspired “Vita Nova.” As we know, Dante’s La Vita Nuova is also about the loss of a loved one—namely, Beatrice—just three years prior to the book. So it too is a mourning diary, and one that concerns the writing and role of poetry in the mourning process. It ends up expressing its inability to adequately capture the meaning of these events. Dante’s Commedia, in turn, is the result of feeling as though he has emerged from the dark woods of a midlife depression (hence the beginning lines of the book), and while Vita Nuova is the result of the loss of Beatrice, the Commedia is more properly the result of the new life that he found in writing. Yet it was only through the loss of Beatrice due to her actual death that Dante � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  161

believed he was bestowed with the beatific gift of an allegorical guide in the Beatrice of the Commedia. As Robert Pogue Harrison writes in a recent review of a new translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova, the failure of the VN to account for the enigma of the deceased Beatrice “is one that keeps VN open-ended, projected into future possibilities. It contains within itself the evidence of things unseen and the substance of things hoped for—as in the hope Dante expresses at the end of the book ‘to say of [Beatrice] what has never been said of any woman.’ ”⁷⁰ While we know that Barthes wrote his first notes outlining his “Vita Nova” project on the very same day that he submitted the manuscript of Camera Lucida to his editor (methodicalness at work, once again!), within the context of Dante references, we might understand CL to be Barthes’s Vita Nuova, his Album, while the eight outlines that he began to draft for “Vita Nova” may well have led to writing the Book equivalent of Dante’s Commedia.⁷¹ For I think CL must be read as an open-ended book, and indeed that it clearly and without doubt contains “evidence of things unseen and [perhaps even] the substance of things hoped for,” just as Harrison has described Dante’s VN. Of that evidence of things unseen, perhaps none is more important, nor has gotten more critical attention, than the Winter Garden photograph, which might be said to lie at the heart of the book in general and certainly of part 2 in particular, and which Barthes discusses at great length and yet chooses not to reproduce. Not only does he famously not provide us, as readers of the book, with what might justifiably be considered its most important image, but in presenting his explanation to his readers apostrophically—that is, as though by addressing us directly across the proscenium arch and footlights of the stage from which he is writing—he does so by casting the explanation entirely between parentheses, in a paragraph that reads as follows: (I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the “ordinary”; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound).⁷² � � � �   �  162

The relation to the Winter Garden photograph is truly exemplary in every sense of the word: it is Barthes’s most important example; it serves to exemplify the noeme of photography; it is set apart from all the other examples of photography; it is exceptional in both its capacity to be remarked upon and its commensurate visual absence; and in its exceptional exemplarity, it is removed from the economy of visual reproduction and scientific objectification, and thereby is exempted from becoming “nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary. ’” Which is, then, finally, a way of saying that the Winter Garden photograph is, in its singularity, the exemplary example of the exemption of sense in photography in “Camera Lucida.” Through an ironic turn that every example cannot avoid, Barthes is captivated by photographic particularity exactly where he thought he had discovered photography’s universality. Drawing upon Nancy’s discussion of the “example,” we can say that “the example, here, does not refer us back to a generality or universality—to some ‘ideal existent’—it refers us back only to itself, to the world as a world of examples, as a world of the withdrawal of singularities in their very exposition.”⁷³ Through the staging of the “world” of photography in the way that he has, Barthes offers us a space in which we can come to share in the exposure to this exemplary withdrawal of the example itself. I completely concur with Meg Sheehan’s insightful observation, in which, as a reader of CL, she finds that the punctum-effect lies in the book’s “secretive punctuation”⁷⁴ (its parentheses, ellipses, blank alineas, etc.), and thereby I wish to advance the argument that these typographic marks of withdrawal and retreat open up, outline, and sustain a topographic space of shared-separation as the space of decision. As Barthes himself admitted during his lecture at Cerisy on “The Image,” “I often have put things I consider very important in subordinate clauses or in parentheses.”⁷⁵ And indeed, such use of the parenthetical is evidenced from early on in CL, when in writing about what we have been tracking as the sense of a certain transi­ tivity through exposure to the force of finitude, he writes the following remarkable sentence: “I am neither subject nor object but a subject that feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a microversion of death (of parenthesis).”⁷⁶ By casting the word parenthesis � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  163

between parentheses, Barthes effects a typographic doubling that textually enacts a suspending, bracketing, and doubling that occurs as death-in-life and that, as an exemption and retreat from meaning, is life and death in whatever sense they may have. It is in this kind of doubling by way of the parenthetical that, as we now know, finds its principal double in the explanation for not giving us readers the Winter Garden photo, that we find a means by which Barthes signed his text. This is what I understand him saying—and again, typographically performing—when in the “Image-system” (“L’Imaginaire”) section of RB by RB, he wrote, “This is what could be done here for some of the fragments (quotation marks, parentheses, dictation, scene, etc.): the subject, doubled (or imagining himself to be doubled), sometimes manages to sign his image-system.” We can take this parenthetical doubling in writing to be not only the signature of the writer’s “image-system,”⁷⁷ but also the suspension and exemption of—if not the escape from—this very same system. Drawing upon two terms that Barthes often made use of, both of which concern the notation of the blank space within writing, including as a space that attracts in its aerating force and that is therefore not to be confused with so-called empty spaces, we might say that Barthes’s writing on the Winter Garden photo is a form of asyndeton (a kind of ellipsis through the absence of linking words, conjunctions, or adverbs between prepositions, yet possessing a logical connection—i.e., in the form of the absent image of the mother). And further, that through this absence, he is able to construct a parataxis (a juxtaposition of propositions dependent on one another but where there is no explanation of what links them) between the writing around the absent photographic image, and the absence of writing around the present (yet purloined, we might say) photographic image of an empty (unmade?) bed that is the frontispiece of the book, its first opening, entry, and threshold. By marking the opening of his book with an image of an empty bed that he never remarks upon, as the frontispiece of the book (its entry and threshold), and by choosing not to reproduce the one photograph that means the most to him and to which the book is implicitly dedicated, Barthes stages this text through a double exemption, once of discourse/writing, and a second time of image/photographic notation. Through this chiasmic crossing of not-showing-yet� � � �   �  164

saying (Winter Garden) and showing-yet-not-saying (Polaroid), Barthes stages the scene of photography as an aporetic spacing of shared-separation, and it is through this shared-separation that the sense of photography is revealed. If, then, the Polaroid image is imagined to stand as one side of the parenthesis, then the Winter Garden can be imagined as the other, and yet in its absence as image, must be understood as effectively creating parenthesis that can never be completely closed and will therefore always remain open—as the very spacing that we are being asked to sustain through our own performative reading of the text. In fact, this is precisely what Barthes considered to be the ideal, again in that section on “L’Imaginaire,” when he writes: Hence the ideal would be: neither a text of vanity, nor a text of lucidity, but a text with uncertain quotation marks, with floating parentheses (never to close the parenthesis is very specifically: to drift). This also depends on the reader, who produces the spacing of the readings.⁷⁸

Camera Lucida: not ego diary, or lover’s diary, or mourning diary per se (all of which Barthes had already written as RB by RB, Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse, and Mourning Diary, respectively), and yet as a photographic album of forty-eight entries on the affective singularity of love and loss, this little book can be understood as all three of these at once. Barthes’s renunciation of hedonistic desire, written as palinode is, in CL, rendered infinite through his decision not to reproduce the Winter Garden photograph. Thereby withdrawal and retreat are sustained, as that which lies extended and exposed at the heart of desire and love of the other in the singularity of the other’s finitude: the “that-has-been” of each and every “there she is.”⁷⁹ And that thereby enables us to make sense of this scene of shared and divided exposure, as what Barthes teaches us is the noeme of photography: its self-exemption from any form of systematized closure. As Barthes had come to conceive it, the journal connotes at once rhythm and trap. It is a writing that tells the truth of the trap via its very formal rhythm. So it therefore needs to be a journal that is, as he said, labored “to death, to the end of an extreme exhaustion,”⁸⁰ and that takes the syncopated rhythm that is everyday life in its possibility and renders it, and the journal that is its notation, “virtually � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  165

impossible . . . [and] thus no longer resemb[ling] a Journal at all.”⁸¹ Here, then, the journal is being conceived as that which is consecrated to the infinite force of finitude—namely, death, which it chronicles through the exhausting extremity of its writing, which is to say, its technique. So not only a journal of the impossible, but the impossible writing that the journal has become, in which the aporetic impasse proves to be not a trap, yet not a path to ultimate resolution either, but rather becomes the ethical space of decision in all of its unbecoming deliberation and notation. Knowing that Barthes would begin to write CL on April 15, 1979, it is all the more devastating for us now, as readers, to discover that just two weeks prior, on March 29, 1979, this is what he wrote in his mourning diary: “I live without any concern for posterity, no desire to be read later on (except financially, for M.), complete acceptance of vanishing utterly, no desire for a ‘monument’ [not even, we take it, as a monument to “everything passes,” as Barthes had theorized].”⁸² I want to suggest that not only is the Mourning Diary a journal that approaches the impossibility of the possible (in the everyday) but so too is Camera Lucida. Yet, for me, one of the most important passages in the mourning diary is the one-sentence entry that Barthes wrote eleven days earlier, on March 18, 1979, which reads, “Each time I dream of her (and I dream only of her), it is in order to see her, believe her to be alive, but other, separate.”⁸³ So when it comes to the Winter Garden photograph, Barthes refuses to offer it to us as readers, not only because we cannot be affected by it since we are unable to feel the same bond that was shared between Barthes and his mother, but more precisely, and I think more profoundly, it is because we cannot feel the same separation that was shared between them and that constituted the sense and spacing of their loving bond.⁸⁴ By casting the most important aspects of his thinking of photography as a series of ellipses and parenthetical doublings, Barthes’s writing enacts the retreat and withdrawal of meaning that is, for him, the true sense of photography, and thereby, through Camera Lucida, he shares this sense with us. What is shared between us readers, and between us readers and Barthes, is the exemption of sense in photography, not toward an infinity of language, or an ineffable or mystical sense, but in a parenthetical spacing that is left open—for us by � � � �   �  166

underlining (retracing) the nullity (retreating) of sense. Therefore, it is up to us, as readers, to enact this staging of the text as a scene of mutual incompletion, neither with nor without quotation marks, nor with closed, but rather instead with open, parentheses. It is in this way that CL would approach Barthes’s utopian vision of performative reading and writing that, while never so naïve as to think it can ever be done with the image-repertoire, nonetheless might be the way a path of retreat from it stands the chance of being kept open: According to an initial vision, the image-repertoire is simple: it is the discourse of others insofar as I see it (I put it between quotation marks). Then I turn the scopia on myself: I see my language in so far as it is seen: I see it naked (without quotation marks); this is the disgraced, pained phase of the image-repertoire. A third vision then appears: that of infinitely spread-out languages, of parentheses never to be closed: a utopian vision in that it supposes a mobile, plural reader, who nimbly inserts and removes the quotation marks: who begins to write with me.⁸⁵

By writing CL as a book cast neither between quotation marks nor in the nakedly exposed absence of such marks, but as cast between parentheses never to be closed, Barthes stages photography as the shared image and scene that operates through a drifting, shedding, and exempting from sense. It is a performative writing that calls for a performative reading about photography as performative, in which each iteration is staged as the spacing around the performative. This calls for nothing less than a pronounced shift in the prevailing emphatic readings of the book, away from the punctum as pricking point and piercing punctuality (the wounding of punctum 1), to the extended line, outline, and scene that is traced in the withdrawal of figure, body, and subject (punctum 2). The latter is what I take Barthes to be referring to, when, in section 39 of CL, he writes of “a catastrophe which has already occurred” as the punctum that has been “more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of contemporary photographs.” If, as Michael Fried has called our attention to it, the word that Barthes uses here, gomme, translates less as “blurred” than as “erased” or “rubbed out,” then we can say that what has been erased in contemporary photographs (perhaps since around the time of the appearance of Barthes’s book) is the affective force of erasure � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  167

itself. It is in this way that we arrive at a sense of photography as an exemption from investments in identification and the projection of a figure around which community might be organized. Such that to speak of photography—its satori—would be to do so not once and for all or many times over, but in and as the temporality between the two, which “merely draws a line under the nullity of meaning.”⁸⁶ It is only through such an aporetic retreating retracing that our reading and writing can ever hope to enact the exemption from meaning and come to share in the fore-scene and anterior finitude that is the spacing and temporality of photography’s affective force and pathos and its most proper sense.⁸⁷ This chapter has been an attempt to keep the parentheses open, and sustain this shared-separation, given that spacing is the only substance of our being-together. For there is no photo finish when it comes to us others (nous autres) being-together in photography— nous photos.⁸⁸ Coda: The Decision from Camera Lucida to “Vita Nova” On April 15, 1978, the date that Barthes was to refer to again and again as the day when he made a significant decision and hence a date that came to signify a “decisive event” in his life, he was in Morocco, during a nearly monthlong break in the middle of teaching his course in Paris on The Neutral. Now, while Barthes never describes the nature of this decision and event, and while all commentators agree that we may never know what exactly occurred on that day, we might be able to do more than merely speculate on this decision that remains secretly buried with Barthes. In order to do so, we will rely upon the few pages of his notes outlining the proposed writing of what he called his “Vita Nova.” This project might have ultimately taken the form of a new kind of novel, while at the same time it might have served as some sort of account of his new life, perhaps the very one that he decided to embark on and to write, anew, on April 15, 1978. Or perhaps his “Vita Nova” would have been that much more Proustian, in that it would have been about the decision and desire for a new life and (as) the will-to-write a new novel—in other words, not a novel per se, but the preparation for one, as in the title of the two-part course that

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he was to teach in 1979–80, following his course on The Neutral. Regardless of what form this work of writing might have taken, in the eight pages of handwritten notes of eight different outlines for “Vita Nova,” written between August 21 and December 12, 1979, Barthes makes reference to a whole host of topics and themes (bereavement, cruising, literature, idleness, Maman, and the Moroccan child, to name only a few) that had come to concern him in what would be the last three years of his life and in particular since the death of his mother in October 1977.⁸⁹ Of these, there are two that I want to isolate from the rest and pair with each other—namely, Maman (his affectionate name for his mother) and the Moroccan child (a reference to a boy whom he saw while in Morocco, not in 1978 but much earlier, in 1969). It is my contention that these two figures represent not only the path of writing that Barthes had embarked on since his mother’s death and in particular the little book on photography that was in every respect dedicated to her and that he had completed just four months prior to the first outline of “Vita Nova,” but that they also mark the point of departure for the new life that he desired not only to live, but to write. My sense is that on April 15, 1978, while in Morocco, Barthes had an epiphany, one that enabled him to see, as though in the flash of an instant, how he might pursue a new life in writing, and to prepare to write his “Vita Nova.” Continuing to abide by our attention to Barthes’s clockwork methodicalness, we note that the date of the event of decision in Morocco (April 15, 1978) is exactly one year prior to his beginning to write Camera Lucida (April 15, 1979). Could it be that at least part of the event that Barthes was to regard as so decisive involved his decision to write a book about his mother and photography? We know that June 1978, in his Mourning Diary, Barthes begins to make explicit the connections he imagines between his mother, photography, the Winter Garden photo, and the idea of writing a book on photography. Yet the association between the two April 15 dates—1978 (Morocco, decisive event) and 1979 (the first day of work on Camera Lucida)— was, quite remarkably, even more deeply real for Barthes in a seemingly unconscious sense, when we realize that in the final iteration of notes for “Vita Nova,” he had first written “Decision of April 15, 79”

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before crossing out “79” and writing “78” in its place—indicating that he had confused the date when he began Camera Lucida with the date of the decisive event in Morocco. In various iterations of the “Vita Nova” outlines, the figure of “Maman” is described as “guide”—a title that within the context of Barthes’s project leads us as readers to recall the figure of Beatrice and her role as female guide in Dante’s La Vita Nuova. Yet further, just as Maman is the figural representative here of the guide (for Barthes), in a number of instances the Moroccan child is referred to as “absence of master.” This child, mentioned a number of times in the lecture courses at the Collège, is, for Barthes, a figure of the kind of idleness that he so much revered, and that he found in Rousseau’s famous notes of a Solitary Walker.⁹⁰ The inference (for Barthes and Rousseau) is that this is a form of idleness absent of mastery, and thereby is at once a retreat from the kind of philosophical sovereignty exemplified by Socrates (as we discussed above), and equally from an economy of productivity, including as auto-poeisis; in other words, masterless and workless. But for Barthes this idleness or far niente (“doing nothing”) is perhaps most strongly manifest in the Zen practice of sitting, and in particular as captured in the Zenrin poem that he quotes again and again in his writing, and which reads: “Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows of its own accord.” In the paragraph immediately following this quotation of the poem in his lecture notes on The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes states—partially parenthetically—that “(the anaco­ louthon enchants me; there’s no longer a subject, only a ‘Sitting’). I experienced this state absolutely, not for myself unfortunately—indeed, therein lies the problem—but by proxy upon seeing, on a day when I was in the car by myself, driving slowly toward Ben Slimane along with a minor road in Morocco, a child sitting on an old wall— and it was spring.”⁹¹ At the point at which his experience in Morocco, his interest in Zen Buddhism, and his thinking and writing on a neutral “non-will-to-possess” coincide, there sits the Moroccan child. Yet thanks to the posthumous publication of Incidents, the journal that Barthes kept during a stay in Morocco, we know that this encounter did not take place in the spring of 1978 (for instance, on or around the fifteenth of April), but much earlier, in 1969. In the personal privacy of the journal, the child is identified as a boy “sitting on a low wall, � � � �   �  170

at the side of the road, which he ignores—sitting there as for eternity, sitting there in order to be sitting, without equivocation: ‘Seated peaceably, doing nothing, Spring comes and the grass grows of its own accord.’ ”⁹² The boy is simply sitting there in order to (although even this phrase implies too much willful agency) do nothing other than to be sitting. Not facing anyone or anything, and not sitting for any purpose other than sitting. As though we might say that the child is sitting in sitting. Or, as Barthes says during his lectures and as he also makes note of in his outlines for “Vita Nova,” but also as we have seen in his mention of other boys in other scenes, the boy here might be described as sitting like a heap (tas). Might we speculate that although the unnamed decision that Barthes made on April 15, 1978, while in Morocco, and his encounter with the child/boy sitting on the side of the road, are separated in their respective occurrence by nine years, they are nonetheless related to each other in some other way? As we have noted, on August 21, 1979, having just recently finished writing Camera Lucida (June 3, 1979), Barthes begins to sketch out his ideas for a possible outline for his next major writing project, “Vita Nova.” In a couple of its iterations and especially the one dated August 26, 1979, it appears as though Maman as guide and the Moroccan child as without mastery bracket the entire scope of the “Vita Nova,” as though two figures marking both ends of its temporal-historical-anamnestic trajectory: where Barthes has just been and where he would like to end up. Which might be to suggest that on April 15, 1978, the decision that Barthes made while in Morocco, at the instant of his memory of seeing the Moroccan child, doing nothing, is that this is what he wanted to do, and what he wanted to become in the wake of his mother’s death: nothing more than a heap, simply sitting there, no longer for anyone or anything, and perhaps not even for the camera. For this is exactly what he discovered in the photograph of his mother as a little girl: a child “sitting” (as we say) for a photograph and for the photographer, in the Winter Garden, there where spring will not come of its own accord, because it is always already artificially there. I want to suggest that in the “Vita Nova,” Barthes wanted to get to a point at which the Moroccan child took the place of his mother as a little girl, and thereby come to allow his decisive memory of that encounter in 1969 to replace the Winter � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  171

Garden photograph taken in 1898. Or, if not to replace his mother (we recall that in Camera Lucida Barthes made the distinction based upon his sense that his mother might be indispensable [the Mother] but is not irreplaceable [his mother]),⁹³ then for him, Barthes, to experience again, not just absolutely but this time also personally, what he said he had only ever known by proxy: to be idle, without master, and yes, perhaps even to be without guide (mother), and finally to be able to just sit without equivocation, without profit or debt, sin, prostration, or will-to-possess. In other words, to do what he says in that final chapter of A Lover’s Discourse that he has decided to do in terms of the lover: “From now on, I will not make any attempt to possess the other.” Which would be, as he goes on to say, “to break with the system of the Image-repertoire, I must manage (by the determination of what obscure exhaustion?) to let myself drop somewhere outside of language, into the inert, and in a sense, quite simply, to sit down.”⁹⁴ As he cautions, this is not nothingness but rather an underlining (retracing) of the nullity (retreating and self-separating) of sense—an “obscure exhaustion”—something like the neutral sitting of a neutral mourning.

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6: Unbecoming Community

A heap of candy is piled up in a corner. Each piece is wrapped in its own monochromatic cellophane wrapper, and it is through the literal accumulation (from the Latin verb accumulare: “heaped up”) of these pieces that a polychromatic pyramid is presented in contrast to the smooth and stark white surfaces of the walls and floor (plate 4). Walls and floor so immaculate in their surface that by way of what we might describe as an architectonic of aesthetic intuition, we immediately recognize this heap of candy as a work of art, exhibited in a modern art gallery. Anyone familiar with the work of the American, Cuban-born artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres will recognize the above as a description of one of his candy pile installations, in this case, a work titled “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991. Obviously, this work does not convey the physical appearance of Ross through a representational and figural form of commemoration, but as Jean-Luc Nancy has pointed out, the portrait, or ritratto, is always the presentation of the subject in retreat.¹ With this work by Gonzalez-Torres, then, we are presented, if not with an image, then with a scene of this retreating portrait (ritratto). As a scene of retreat, the work sustains—rather than puts to rest via a memorializing image-form of final return and remembrance— this sense of loss through an inoperative praxis and technique in which an endless supply of readymade pieces of candy is presented and offered for the taking, such that those who encounter the work are invited, or at least offered the decision, to partake in its infinite withdrawal, and thereby come to share not in the completion of the

work, but rather in its incompletion. So too with Gonzalez-Torres’s installations of large sheets of paper, neatly stacked directly on the floor of the gallery, and forming a(n) (often monochromatic) rectangular form, in which anyone who finds the work “inviting” (in the sense of welcoming, enticing, and intimately accessible) may incomplete the work by taking a sheet of paper.² With Felix’s candy spills and carpets, and his paper stacks (plates 5 and 6), the work of art is extended toward and opens up a space of decision, a space that is sustained in its very incompletion. An incompletion that, as the infinite opening and sharing of the work’s multiplying finitude and division, might be described as in-finishing, a term we have inherited from Jean-Luc Nancy.³ In its hyphenated form, in-finishing is to be read, at once, as the sense that the infinite is finite (i.e., actually rather than virtually infinite), and as the infinite opening of finitude, right at its limit (and never-ending end). Depending upon the particular gallery installation, the invitation to take a piece of candy is either more or less pronounced. For instance: by a particularly hospitable museum guard or via a wall label simply printed with the words “Please take just one,” or in many instances without any sign or indication whatsoever. This varying and oscillating degree of explicitness and ambiguity is indicative of any invitation, and the invitation to partake in this work is as inoperative as is any invitation, given that, as Jacques Derrida notes, an invitation leaves one free, otherwise it becomes constraint. It should [devrait] never imply: you are obliged to come, you have to come, it is necessary. But the invitation must be pressing, not indifferent. It should never imply: you are free not to come and if you don’t come, never mind, it doesn’t matter.⁴

Which is to say that an invitation opens up a space of decision and leaves one free: free to decide, as in the case of the work by GonzalezTorres, to touch, to take one piece or more than one piece of candy, to eat it or to save it, or perhaps even to give it to someone else, and to let them decide what to do with it—accept it, eat it, keep it, or give it to someone else, in turn. I have a small collection of pieces of candy from various installations of these works, given to me by friends as souvenirs of their encounter with the work. Hence, these small, inadvertent gifts are symbols—in the full etymological sense of the word— � � �  �  174

of the separation that is shared between us, a shared-separation that is the very spacing of any relation, of which friendship is perhaps one of its most acutely felt forms. The invitation that is offered by Gonzalez-Torres to partake in the work—to take part in its presentation and spacing of decision—does not operate by way of an imperative, obligation, or necessity, yet at the same time its non-insistence is not indifferent, since it does not imply that if you don’t partake in the work by taking a piece of candy, it doesn’t matter. For I wish to contend that it does matter that pieces of candy are taken, and in ways that extend beyond simply transgressing a whole series of equally written and unwritten taboos concerning one’s relation to a work of art on display in a gallery. What we might call the decision of participation is in rapport with the decision of invitation. Yet as I have suggested and will develop further in what follows, this is a rapport between audience and artist that will forever remain incommensurable, given that the offering and the partaking are mutually inoperative. These works bear this tremendous aesthetic, ethical, and existential import, to the precise extent that they remain irreducible to the aesthetico-economic categories of the gift, communal substance, the artistic fragment, the souvenir or keepsake, and the readymade, as well as the commodity and the fetish-object/image.⁵ Which is to argue that these works bear the potential to actualize an ethics and politics predicated upon non-appropriative, non-obligatory, nonreciprocal, and non-redemptive modes of being-together in relation to others, to things, and the scenes that are staged between and around them—all the while undermining any number of prior critical estimations or attributions of the works’ utopian impulse, intention, or effect. In this way, Felix’s candy piles and paper stacks are scenes for partaking in a sense of existence, created through a shared exposure to the incommensurable relations between and around places, things, you, me, us. A sense of existence that, following Nancy, is not reducible to either the gift, desire, and their reciprocal relation structured in terms of fullness and lack. This is part of the reason why I have deliberately chosen to use the words offering and partaking rather than giving and taking, in order to name the aesthetic gestures that, in their inoperativity, present and sustain the work as already-unmade. For with Felix’s candy piles and paper stacks, the � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  175

artist is not the giver of a gift and the so-called viewer is not the taker (or recipient) of a desired object (or gift).⁶ Quoting Nancy in his discussion of gift and desire as part of his thinking of sense, we might say the partaking and offering of Felix’s work is “neither desire nor gift, but rather, the following: that the desire of the gift [e.g., through the figure of the “audience”] should desire essentially not to appropriate its ‘object,’ and that the gift of desire [e.g., through the figure of the artist] should give that which cannot be given and should give no ‘subject’ of an ‘object.’  ”⁷ While it is impossible to be entirely free from this economy of gift and desire, or what Nancy aptly names “ontotheoerotology,”⁸ Felix’s work is an invitation “to think sense as the in-appropriative encounter of desire and gift, as the excellence of the coming of the one toward the other.”⁹ Which is not only Nancy’s way of defining offering, but as such is the name for the specific form taken by Felix’s invitation. In his italicization of the words coming and toward in the quotation above, we might then find a correspondence between Nancy’s notion of an “in-appropriative encounter of desire and gift,” and the inoperative exigency of the invitation. However, there is a disparity between Nancy’s offering and Derrida’s invitation, one that lies in the difference between Derrida’s emphasis on the “to-come” of (a certain messianic) future-oriented temporal coming, and what I have been discussing as Nancy’s more spatial-oriented toward, which is doubly open-ended in its absence of indicating toward whom, or what, or what end the invitation or extension is being extended. Such that the kind of invitation as offering in Felix’s candy and paper works is “not presented [like a gift] but extended toward, left to the discretion of a chance and/or decision whose agent or actor [passing through the gallery] neither desires nor gives but merely exists.”¹⁰ In their in-appropriative offering and partaking—beyond the gift and desire—Gonzalez-Torres’s candy pile and paper stack installations are scenes of chance and incommensurable encounters and decisions around and between an incalculable number of some-ones and some-things—irreducible to subjects and objects. Through this inoperative praxis, not only is the traditional notion of the artist/author undermined—whether thought in terms of the au-

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thor as creator or the author as producer—two principal aesthetic paradigms inherited from Marcel Duchamp are reversed, at once and in relation with each other; namely, the readymade, and the notion that “the audience completes the work.” But before we venture further in that direction, we might remind ourselves of the principal means by which Duchamp, through his invention of the readymade, radically shifted and disrupted the discourses and practices of art, artist, artistic production, and the work of art. No doubt this will be utterly familiar to most readers, but its rehearsal is warranted and worthwhile here, since I want to argue that Gonzalez-Torres went several steps beyond Duchamp, and rendered his (Duchamp’s) workless work doubly inoperative. We note that by defining the readymade as an index of a rendezvous or encounter between himself and an industrially manufactured commodity about which he had no interest, aesthetic or otherwise, and as a trace of his act of choosing the anonymous object, Duchamp shifted artistic practice from making to selecting, and thus toward an act or praxis that is not the work or poietic production of the work of art (oeuvre), but rather the désoeuvrement (borrowing a term from Maurice Blanchot)—that is, a workless praxis that is nothing more (or less) than an art of the gesture. Given that any form of praxis effects a transformation or reconfiguration of the doer, the doing, and what is done, Duchamp’s readymades rendered workless the notions of artist, art making, and the work of art, and if not by putting them completely out of work, certainly by putting them radically into question, and as questions. Duchamp’s gesture dissolved the notion of work, yet as Octavio Paz pointed out in an essay on Duchamp’s readymades, from around 1970, this “an-artistic” gesture remained an artist’s gesture, and not just any artist’s gesture, but specifically that of Marcel Duchamp. As Paz writes, If the object is anonymous, the man who chose it is not. And one could even add that the “readymade” is not a work but a gesture and a gesture which only an artist could realize and not just any artist but inevitably Marcel Duchamp.¹¹

This persistence of the signatory is no doubt ironic, given that, as Paz goes on to explain, “The act of Duchamp uproots the object

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from its significance and makes an empty skin of the name: a bottlerack without bottles.”¹² So while it can be said that Duchamp’s workless gesture renders the readymade object anonymous and useless, it must also be noted that the very same gesture runs the risk of being perceived as being invested in the author, deposited in the object, or retained as though a medium or technique—all of which would draw the readymade back into the discourse of artist, work of art, and poietic production. So we might take Paz’s words as cautionary when he writes, “The transition from worshipping the object to worshipping the gesture is imperceptible and instantaneous: the circle is closed.”¹³ Indeed, in our thinking of an art and aesthetics of gesture— including the gestures of offering and partaking—we will want to keep the circle open, and as this study has argued, the way to do this is by maintaining a sense of the worklessness and inoperativity of artistic and aesthetic praxis, which, in the history of art, might be said to have been inaugurated by Duchamp and the invention of the ready­ made. Yet in order to do so, one must also put into question and perhaps resist the other Duchampian aesthetic paradigm mentioned earlier—namely, that “the audience completes the work.” There is no other artist I can think of whose work is more consecrated to the putting into question and undoing of this notion of completion than Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In the installations of candy piles and paper stacks, Felix’s work retains Duchamp’s notion of the readymade as index of encounter and trace of selection, but extends this encounter, decision, and selection so that it now includes the socalled audience, and therefore is no longer limited to the artist’s gesture of choosing. In turn, the decision to accept the offer and to partake in the work by withdrawing a part of it not only opens up the space and event of decision beyond that of artistic intention, the index of the moment of encounter lies not (or not only) in the presentation of the object as readymade, but also, and perhaps more subversively, in the readymade’s withdrawal and erasure. Hence, two primary Duchampian principles are reversed, and Duchamp’s own workless work is rendered doubly inoperative. For by partaking in the incessant withdrawal and disappearance of the work—by taking a piece of candy or sheet of paper—the audience can be said to incomplete the work, a partaking that, due to the work’s always already

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yet never complete withdrawal and disappearance, is a partaking in the work as already-unmade. The work can be understood as already-unmade in an even more simple, intense, or perhaps a priori sense, if we consider that due to the way in which its presentation relies upon multiple acts of withdrawing and disappearing, such that one can go so far as to say that its very existence and survival depends upon this retreating aesthetics, notions of original plenitude prior to withdrawal, and ultimate emptiness in the wake of the final piece having been taken, are two notions that are conceptually, but as we shall see, materially, impossible. The work exists at no moment prior to its withdrawal, and you can never be in any way confident that you are the first one to take a piece from the pile, or a sheet from the stack. We might say that withdrawal is a priori or originary, and that it is this that makes the work (perhaps any work in terms of its origin) inoperative, which is also to say already-unmade. In other words, the work only exists in its never-ending loss, a finitude that is infinite to the precise extent that Gonzalez-Torres indicated that the quantity of candy shall be an “endless supply” and to the precise extent that any number of those who encounter the work partake in its withdrawal, by taking candy or paper, each piece or sheet singular in its finitude and in relation to the incessant disappearance of the work. The praxis and technique of the work lie in what Nancy describes as the “absence of beginning and ‘exhaustion of ends.’ ”¹⁴ Felix’s pieces of candy and sheets of paper (singuli) are not fragments of the work of art, but parts outside of parts (partes extra partes), in which no one piece of candy nor the totality of pieces constitutes the work. Gonzalez-Torres clearly specifies this in the certificates of authenticity that accompany the purchase and ownership of the work. While we already recognize many of the ways in which the work disrupts a strict market economy of art and its commodity-form, the work of art, we also do not want to overlook the fact that, like any work of art, those by Gonzalez-Torres are also bought and sold. Yet in the case of the purchasing of one of his spills or stacks, the buyer does not acquire a given amount of candy or paper, but rather a

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certificate of authenticity and ownership that briefly outlines the aesthetic-material and ethical-social conditions and dimensions of the work’s manifestation as an installation. As part of a long-standing tradition in modern conceptual art dating back to Duchamp, but more extensively deployed by so-called Conceptual artists in the 1960s, a Felix certificate is the material item that the purchaser receives when buying one of his candy spill or paper stack works. Purchase, then, is made of a concept and a set of instructions and parameters that initially outline the way in which to materialize and exhibit the work. In this regard, we might say that the work’s most consistent form of evidentiary archival certitude is little more than a piece of paper. The certificates include information on the paper or candy that Felix had used in creating each work the first time. For instance, the weight and color of the paper, as well as a precise description of the content and formatting of whatever text and/or image(s) is (are) to be printed on each of the sheets (that is, if they are to have something printed on them), and in the case of the candy spills, the brand and/or kind and vendor of the candy. However, the certificates make considerable allowance for variation when they state, “If this exact paper is not available, a similar paper may be used,” and “If this exact candy is not available, a similar candy may be used.” These contractual terms clearly express that the manifestation of the work does not require the identical replication of its original form, but rather can follow a logic of similarity in which the degree of sameness remains—within the terms of the contract—forever unstipulated. This is immediately followed by what we take to be the most important statements of the certificates’ contractual language. The first speaks to an aspect that we have already encountered—namely, that “a part of the intention of the work is that third parties may take individual sheets of paper from the stack” (or pieces of candy from the pile). The second, that “these individual sheets [or pieces of candy] and all individual sheets [or pieces] taken from a stack [pile or spill] collectively do not constitute a unique work of art nor can they be considered the piece.” So, for instance, if you were possessed by a hubristic impulse and were to take all of the candy piled up in the gallery, you would not have a work by Gonzalez-Torres, and in turn and

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more modestly, if you were to take just one piece, you also would not have a Gonzalez-Torres. In other words, the work operates beyond the logics and limits of the work of art as a single entity, whether reducible to its synecdochal fragmentation or totalized in its accumulated amassing of parts. Which immediately raises two inextricable questions: if the sheets of paper and pieces of candy do not equal the work, then what does the work consist of, and, in a reversed logical relation, if the sheets of paper and pieces of candy are not the work, then what are they exactly—in other words, what is their status and destiny as things? In their offering of an endless supply of pieces of candy or sheets of paper, and the decision to take a piece, sheet, or part, Felix’s candy and paper installations are scenes of an infinite offering and partaking of finitude. An overflowing offering and a partaking in withdrawal that in their mutual excess are two forms of fulfillment that at the same time are the impossibility of converting finitude into finish (i.e., transforming the piece into a fragment, and then the fragment into a whole/work). If to take a piece of candy is not to take the work or even a part of it, then to partake in the work can only mean to “take a part” that is not a part, and thereby to share not secondarily and through a mode of participation,¹⁵ but primarily and through sharedseparation, which, as we understand, is semantically borne by the French word partager, meaning “to share, to divide.” It is this semantic double meaning that I wish to retain and make evident in my use of the English word partaking. The work—its praxis and technique—exists neither in author, audience, or produced object, but rather in the gestures of offering and partaking, and more precisely, in the inoperative offering of an invitation (it too being inoperative, as we have seen) to act in a way that remains to be decided (to take, to keep, to eat, to transmit, to shareout) and to partake in the withdrawal and disappearance of the work, and thereby also to partake in sustaining the worklessness of the work, through a shared exposure to the exposition of art as vestige. These gestures of shared-separation are the inoperative aesthetic, ethical, and political praxes and techniques of those anonymous some-ones withdrawing those equally anonymous readymade some-things and thereby partaking, not in the destruction, reduction, or shattering of

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the work into fragmentary pieces, but in what Nancy at one point describes as “the in-finite explosion of the finite”—in-finishing.¹⁶ This is also what makes the work something other than a communal substance such as the Christian sacrificial gift, and its fragmentation, dissemination, and consumption in the form of the Eucharist. For each piece of the latter, given, taken, and eaten in the sacramental ritual of Communion, is theologically defined as the whole body of Christ and not simply a part. Which means that whole corporeal presence is believed to be present in the infinite division, fragmentation, and dissemination of the body of Christ. It is precisely this sense of wholeness in each and every part that renders the Eucharist a corpus mysticum. A sacrificial gift of death that—like the body of Christ of which it is believed not to be a symbolic representation but the very presence of the body in its wholeness—is a transiting of the transcendent into the immanent (incarnation) and of immanence into transcendence (resurrection, redemption). Whereas pieces offered and partaken of, in the Gonzalez-Torres works—especially the possible alimentary consumption in the case of the candy works— are not claimed to contain the entirety of the work, but as I have discussed, are non-fragmentary parts devoid of any sense of wholeness that could be given or desired. So, as Nancy has written, “On this account, art appears as a eucharist (the ‘gift of a grace’) that remains in broken fragments, that consists in their fragmentation. A eucharist without communion. A eucharist that would be the deconstruction of the eucharist.”¹⁷ As he goes on to point out, if the art of religion is deconstructed, so too must any religion of art, including in the sense of aesthetics and the work of art as something other than in terms of the offering, gesture, and vestige that Nancy has argued are what remain in the wake of this venturing beyond the limits of the “aestheticotheological.”¹⁸ Indeed, as Nancy has noted, “Art has hitherto been considered, in all possible ways, in terms of both ‘creation’ (poiesis, genius and so on) and ‘reception’ (judgment, critique, and so on). But what has been left in the shadows is its befalling and devolving, that is to say, also its chance, event, birth or encounter.”¹⁹ It is this “befalling and devolving” of art—of its presentation as already-unmade—that all of my work has been dedicated to thinking and writing. An aesthetics of withdrawal, loss, and disappearance that opens up and sustains, � � �  �  182

through a separated gesture, spaces of sociality structured in their shared exposure to finitude and the outside, including as the praxis, sense, and scene of decision. With the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, we return to some of the same kinds of questions regarding number, being-with, and the nonevidentiary praxis of the already-unmade that were discussed in the first two chapters of this book. We recall that in that first chapter, “Name No One Man,” it was argued that through erasure and the with-drawing of drawing in Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, an incalculable number of “men” are drawn together into a space of shared anonymity, which in turn was taken to be a scene of pleasure and the sociality or being-with of shared-separation. Here the pleasure of drawing lies in the emptying out of drawing, such that Rauschenberg has left the space of drawing—but also sociality—not empty but unmade. The title of that chapter is intended to enunciate a tension between the sense of absence (no one there) and of multiplicity (no one as in not only one) that structures the work and the scene of shared-separation that it aesthetically presents. More specifically, it is meant to point to the ways in which multiplicity is irreducible to the numerical and other forms of calculation. In a somewhat unexpected yet entirely apropos way, these same issues were raised by John Cage in his “26 Statements re Duchamp,” from 1963, in which at one point he resorts to metaphors from arithmetic and mathematics in order to describe three of the principal artists and achievements in twentieth-century art, and a fourth that at the time was, according to Cage, anticipated and yet to be fulfilled. Cage writes, “Duchamp showed us the usefulness of addition (moustache), Rauschenberg showed the function of subtraction (De Kooning). Well, we look forward to multiplication and division. It is safe to assume that someone will learn trigonometry. Johns.”²⁰ As you might expect, I want to suggest that when it comes to that artist who will show us the “usefulness” and “function” of multiplication and division, we need not wait any longer. Indeed, since the late 1980s / early 1990s, and his first installations of paper stacks and candy piles, Felix Gonzalez-Torres has offered us just that, and fulfilled the collective anticipation expressed by Cage for the work that would succeed Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q.; Rauschenberg’s Erased � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  183

de Kooning Drawing; and following Cage’s reference to “Johns,” what we might imagine to be any one of Jasper Johns’s Numbers paintings. In Felix’s stacks of paper and piles of candy, “multiplication” might be said to take the form of the endless supply of readymade objects, and “division” is threefold: (1) the ongoing act of taking these things; (2) the dividing up of parts; and (3) the shared-separation that is the relation of those who decide to take part in the infinite withdrawal of the work’s finitude. Which is also to note that Gonzalez-Torres’s aesthetic praxis and technique of multiplication and division at the same time rely upon addition and subtraction.²¹ Thus, we are led to consider the ways in which the replenishing and withdrawing of candy and paper is more than a simple matter of addition and subtraction, or perhaps even how such endless acts of shared subtraction can generate “the in-finite explosion of the finite”—which is to say, sharedseparation as the spacing of sense in all directions at once.²² In turn, in “The Confronted Community,” Jean-Luc Nancy’s relatively recent essay dedicated to Maurice Blanchot and their encounter and conversation on the question of community, Nancy reminds us that his seminal essay “La Communauté désoeuvre” (The inoperative, workless, or unoccupied community) was originally published in the spring of 1983, in an issue of the journal Aléa, under the theme “La communauté, le nombre” (Community, number), as designated by the editor Jean-Christophe Bailly. As Nancy describes it, “The perfectly executed ellipse contained in this statement [Community, number]—where prudence rivals elegance, in the manner that was Bailly’s great art—gripped me as soon as I received the call for papers, and I have never ceased to admire its aptness.”²³ Indeed, the aptness of the statement is the way in which it writes the tension between community and number, a tension that structures all of the various ways in which we think about the relations between the common and the numerous. These are the terms by which to understand how the innumerable—in the form of each piece of candy being taken from the pile by anonymous some-ones—is a partaking in the infinite withdrawal and retreat of finitude or, as Nancy has put it, of “infinitely singularizing the ends.”²⁴ Just as Nancy enables us to imagine “the perfectly executed ellipse” as drawing the single orbit traced by the two foci of community and number in their mutual and constant distance from each other, so � � �  �  184

too do we once again in this study imagine the ellipsis to be the writing or drawing of the infinite withdrawal of finitude (the extending out of the point or period) and hence also finitude’s infinite opening up. In other words, the ellipsis—especially when in the form of three consecutive dots at the “end” of a sentence—is the means by which, in writing, one gestures to the outside of the text and underlines that outside as the text’s “intrinsic exteriority” (to quote Derrida). To this praxis of ex-scription, as Nancy has come to theorize and name it, he has also assigned the name creation—yet creation in a wholly a-theological and anti-productivist sense. For instance, as when he writes, If “creation” means anything, it is the exact opposite of any form of production in the sense of a fabrication that supposes a given, a project, and a producer. . . . The idea of creation, is above all the idea of the ex nihilo. . . . The world is created from nothing [ex nihilo]: this does not mean fabricated with nothing by a particularly ingenious producer. It means that it is not fabricated, produced by no producer, and not even coming out of nothing (like a miraculous apparition), but in a quite strict manner and more challenging for thought: the nothing itself.²⁵

In other words, since the source, reason, principle, and ground of the world is nothing, it is this nothing itself from which creation comes (ex) and toward which it goes (ex), and it is this outside and opening from nothing that is written as ex nihilo. As the withdrawal and retreat of any given or readymade ground, creation is not the poietic production or work, and/or the asymptotic relation to ends (as in certain weak versions of ontologies of “becoming”), whether this is in terms of “process” (absolutely infinite production/work, Marx) or “progress” (ultimately finite production/work, Hegel). Rather, creation is to be understood as the inoperative praxis of the already-unmade.²⁶ Which is also to say that the sense of existence and its place is neither readymade (and oriented toward yesterday) nor yet-to-bemade (awaiting its time in the future), but already-unmade “here and now every moment” at each time and in each decision, as Nancy has said.²⁷ It is in this way that Nancy has argued that existence is always created, yet not by some distanced and detached creator or author (God), � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  185

but solely by existents in their very existence. Such that, as he states in a section of his essay “Being Singular Plural” titled “The Creation of the World or Curiosity,” “Existence is creation, our creation; it is the beginning and end that we are. This is the thought that is the most necessary for us to think.”²⁸ On a number of occasions Felix expressed a commitment to just such an a-theological ethics and politics, and a sense of responsibility tied to an immanent sense of things. For instance, in an interview with fellow artist Tim Rollins, in 1993, Felix stated: I have a problem with the cultural traps and constructions of God. I think that it is a good excuse for us to accept any situation as natural, inevitable. Once we believe that there is no God, that there is no afterlife, then life becomes a very positive statement. It becomes a very political position because we have no choice but to work harder to make this place the best place ever. There is only one chance and this is it. If you fuck it up this time you’ve fucked up forever and ever. . . . Once you agree that there is not any other life, that there’s nothing except here—this thing, this table, you, me—that’s it. That becomes a very radical idea because you have to take responsibility to make it the best.²⁹

While clearly divorced from a belief in transcendent existence (“no afterlife”), Felix’s notion of responsibility is clearly ameliorative (“to make this place the best place ever”) yet in a way that is not to be understood as the pursuit or actualization of an absolute Idea or ideal. This is evident in the way in which Felix uses the word ideal in the certificates of authenticity, in which the responsibility to manifest a candy pile or paper stack is described in terms of an “ideal weight” and “ideal height,” respectively. Here the word ideal is meant to signal that the works are malleable. Meaning that ideal must be understood as referring to a measurement of weight or height that should be considered when installing and maintaining the work, but only in the sense of providing a parameter to be interpreted and negotiated by the owner when manifesting the work, and not as an impracticable framework and unattainable end.³⁰ Here, the ideal is measured by a sense of perfection and suitability specific to the decision of the

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person(s) manifesting and maintaining the work, and therefore, we can think of the ideal in the same way that through the work of Gonzalez-Torres we have come to think of the infinite: not as potentially but as actually ideal—the ideal-in-act. Which is a situation (or scene) that, as Felix said in the statement above, is not “natural, inevitable,” neither given nor yet-to-come, but is to be created and sustained (decided), here and now, when and where all forms of common measure no longer apply or exist. Except perhaps in terms of “some,” such that the expressions “some candy” and “some paper” in their indetermination would most properly describe and determine the ideal weight and ideal height of a candy pile or paper stack, respectively. Some is the indeterminate name for the indeterminate measure and value of the singularity of whatever thing, and the name for the indeterminateness of the thing—in the singularity of its multiplicity—as “whatever.” To manifest the piles and stacks with some candy and some paper (some-things) is neither to deny the determined concretion of the thing, nor to posit the determined signification of the thing, but instead to affirm that whatever, in the indeterminateness of its singularity, is always some-thing of which there is always more than one. As Nancy defines it in his essay “The Heart of Things,” “Whatever” is the indeterminateness of being in what is posited and exposed within the strict, determined concretion of a singular thing [piece of candy], and the indeterminateness of its singular existence.³¹

In other words, the piece of candy is some thing of some things: an indeterminate thing (whatever) of an incalculable many (partes extra partes). As Nancy further points out, the indetermination of whatever thing—of “some”—is also its free necessity, and by inviting us to partake in the work by taking a piece of candy or sheet of paper for free, and to take it as nothing other than some piece or some sheet, Felix offers us the decision to take responsibility for this free necessity, which is also the free necessity of that very decision. By entering into this space of decision, we are exposed to the anonymity of ethical existence, in which every one in its singularity is equal to every other one: the some of someone. The some of one that is not the name, or perhaps as Nancy has suggested, some- as the name before the name

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and quite properly and literally before the one. The pro-nomination or fore-name of someone, yet here not even the first or personal or given name of someone (as in the German word Vorname).³² Within the logic of the work, including the terms of its certified contract, with its lack of insistence on the need to use an exact type or kind of candy or paper in the material installation and presentation of the work, the very availability of Felix’s paper and candy is always open to a freedom of indetermination, in which it is “some candy” or “some paper” before or beyond its having to fulfill the need for a specific identity and (brand) name. Furthermore, this indeterminate availability and this available indetermination of whatever is commensurate with those anonymous some-ones, us, whomever, to whom the invitation to take is extended. Which is to say that the invitation and decision to partake in the work offer an experience of sharing in the taking of anonymous some-things by anonymous some-ones.³³ In this regard, the work is without proper destination, it operates without an intended audience, prescribed outcome, or imagined point of arrival or completion. As Nancy states in his essay “The Sublime Offering,” offering is the destiny of art, and the destiny of art is to be without proper destination. This is what, in the invitation that he extends through his work, Felix offers. In offering “some” candy or paper, Felix’s work offers us anonymous some-ones something(s) to think about, including what we might refer to as the destiny of that piece of candy or that sheet of paper that we have decided to take.³⁴ As Nancy has argued, the relation between the numerous, community, and being-together never lies in a thing (for instance, in the form of a common substance, figure, or identity), and it is this no-thing that the nihilo of creation ex nihilo refers to. Here, the nihil is not reducible to either the One or to zero—that is, neither to absolute unity nor to nihilism (which is perhaps even less than zero)—but is to be thought in terms of multiplicity. Which is also to say: in terms of the numerous distinct from number, and thus multiplicity distinct from multiplication. An innumerable, incalculable, and incommensurable multiplicity—what in English is perhaps most aptly expressed as “a lot of.” So I want to suggest that what is shared between artist and audi� � �  �  188

ence—that is, what is offered by Felix’s work and partaken in by those who encounter it—is not a readymade commodity, an object of exchange or symbolic communion, a gift, or even a souvenir, but rather a decision to sustain this scene (or spacing) of decision, through the incessant withdrawal and retreat of finite readymade things. It is a sustaining—by sharing together—in the separation between us. A spacing out of nothing (and to nothing) that thereby is the nihilo (nothing) from which ex-istence is sensed and takes place as opening and outside (ex). In other words, creation. What remains is not a thing, but the “ex” of creation ex nihilo, and as Nancy has said, something like a gesture. Gesture in the sense of a partaking in the “extra” of partes extra partes, by taking a part or piece that is not one part of a greater whole (i.e., a fragment) but a singular multiplicity or, again as Nancy has named it, a vestige. As we shift our thinking and language from fragment to gesture, let us note that there is no such thing as a fragmentary gesture. Every gesture is the infinite index of finitude, or what we might take Nancy to mean when he refers to the “infinite in act.” Prior to any signifying function, a gesture is first and foremost the index of spacing and the incommensurable relation or shared-separation between here and there. A gesture signals (it gestures to) the “there is” (il y a) of existence and its sense, as here, now, this. At the same time, a gesture is a grasping of what is not (or no longer) possessed or what can be given. We might say that the mode of having or giving particular to the gesture is a grasping of that which is slipping through one’s fingers. In other words, distinct from substance and property, the propriety of the gesture is wholly in-appropriable, and this in-appropriability is precisely what the gesture gestures toward. At the same time, we might thus speak of an “emptying” of gesture (as in the kenosis of the divine), all the while affirming that there is no such thing as an empty gesture in any absolute sense. Like Nancy’s definition of the image (discussed in chapter 1), a gesture is “the empty place of the absent as a place that is not empty.”³⁵ In turn, there are no static gestures, but rather all gestures are moving, they are the transiting and transmission, the rhythm and emotion, of existence. In his “Notes on Gesture,” Giorgio Agamben tells us that according to the ancient writer Varro, gesture is neither acting (praxis) nor making (poiesis), but carrying on or sustaining.³⁶ In the context � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  189

of our discussion, then, we might further specify gesture to be the shared-sustaining of the spacing of the “with” (of being-together) as already-unmade. As I suggested above, gesture is the very spacing of shared-separation. Thus, gesture—as ars and teknē—is mediality without means (i.e., process—whether infinite or finite) and without ends (i.e., completion, finish). Which is to say that gesture is the deconstruction of what Hannah Arendt referred to as the “unending chain of ends and means.”³⁷ Gesture is the spacing or what Agamben describes as “the sphere of a pure and endless mediality,” and, as he goes on to say, “The gesture is, in this sense, communication of a communicability,” another name for which is art. We might now understand that such phrases as “the gesture of art,” “the art (or aesthetics) of gesture,” and “the separated gesture” are pleonasms: expressions that even in their limitation to two terms, use one word too many. From the sheet of paper as space of withdrawal and scene of shared sociality, to the unexpected encounter or rendezvous with the passerby, stranger, or intruder, to the scene staged by the body in its relation to other bodies and things in their common retreat, to the exposure to loss and the force of finitude, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work can be perceived as the convergence of all of the major questions and themes of this book. In a statement that would seem to describe not only his work but mine as well, Felix at one point stated, “[This work] constitutes a comment on the passing of time and the possibility of erasure or disappearance, which involves a poetics of space. . . . [It] also touches upon life in its most radical definition, its limit: death.”³⁸ Given our discussion throughout the book, here we can understand Felix’s invitation as an offer to partake, not in a communal substance, but in a shared exposure to the inappropriability of death and our incommensurable relation to it. Which is quite simply to say that “what” is offered through the work is a sense of sharing in that which cannot be shared either here or elsewhere. A sharing in non-sharing or sharing-out that finds its most unavoidable and irreducible example in life defined in terms of finitude or, as Felix said, “in its most radical definition, its limit: death.” Just as death’s irreplaceability cannot be subsumed within an economy of exchange, so too can death not be shared, and re� � �  �  190

mains an impossible experience for each and every one of us, in the singularity of our finitude (what Nancy refers to as “the last burst of singularity”³⁹). However, “dying”—as “within” existence and thereby intimately tied to life, and therefore distinct from death—can be shared. In terms of our existential finitude, or what Heidegger referred to as “beings-toward-death”—that is to say, as creatures that in living are always also dying—it might be said that dying is what we most share in common, and it is this that defines our coexistence. Life, meaning: sharing-dying, and as that which can neither be given nor taken (i.e., exchanged, replaced, substituted for by another). There is, then, outside of onto-theology, no gift of death, and therefore, there is no “gift of life” either. Neither life nor death is given. There is only birth/existence and death/existence, and the singularity of each birth and each death, including in their incommensurable relation, is, as discussed in chapter 2, the evidence of intrusion as ontological force. Which might partially explain why each of us, while “present” at the instant of our own birth and death, cannot bear witness to either, and that the relation that we hold to the singularity of our own birth and death is inescapably one of non-knowledge. The instant or event of birth and of death is truly that of the each time just this once, and this is what it most shares with decision, such that we can speak of the decision of existence. The singularity of existential finitude is that which is infinitely decided—each time, just this once. Therefore, no one can die in my place or make a decision in my place, if that death or that decision is to remain mine. The relation between one death and another death remains incommen­ surable, and thereby no one’s death is granted more privilege than another’s, and it is this infinite incommensurability that we share in the singularity of our finitude. This is what Derrida identifies as the “secret” of death, meaning: absent of ontology, epistemology, and phenomenology.⁴⁰ It is this secret—the secret that belongs to no one and remains inappropriable— that cannot be shared. This is the “nothing” that is most intimately shared in the distance between us, and that offers us the sense of our coexistence as separated—the secret that is a secret about nothing and a sharing that shares in this nothing that is kept secret between us. As Derrida reminds us, one meaning of the Latin secretum is “secreted away,” as in that which is withdrawn from view and � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  191

made separate (and therefore is more precisely not “shared-in” but “shared-out”). It is this withdrawal and separation that is the secret that remains between us, and that marks our coexistence as finite beings. Gonzalez-Torres’s work—especially the candy and paper—certifies, exhibits, and opens up an access to the indeterminateness of finite existence and thereby affirms that finitude, as the “determined concretion of a singular thing” (Nancy), is already offered to the world as unmade. By presenting finitude as that which is infinitely sharedout, in and as its incessant withdrawal and retreat, he thereby also affirms that this is the way in which we come to partake in the world’s infinite finitude, as the very sense of the world. If we then want to continue to speak in terms of Felix’s offering, we might say that he offers up the taking place of the finitude of existence as that which neither he nor anyone else can offer (and perforce, take away, appropriate, sacrifice). Felix Gonzalez-Torres performs the inappropriation that is the appropriating event of finite existence.⁴¹ Following Nancy, we might say that Felix, like all of the other artists and writers discussed in this book, has set himself the task of presenting scenes of aesthetic, ethical, and existential exposure to “the infinite absence of appropriable sense”⁴² and this is the spacing/decision between us. The “infinite absence of appropriable sense” is one way of describing the finitude of existence (existence’s in-appropriability, since it is infinite and belongs to no one). In turn, sacrifice would be one of the names for the attempt to appropriate the sense of existence by appropriating its finitude for the purposes of redemption—in other words, by turning existence into what earlier I briefly discussed as a gift of death. Rather, as Nancy states at the end of his essay “The Unsacrificeable,” “Existence isn’t to be sacrificed, and can’t be sacrificed. It can only be destroyed or shared.”⁴³ Yet in “The Indestructible,” which we might take to be the companionate essay to the aforementioned, Nancy states that “destruction attacks sense rather than life.”⁴⁴ How are we meant to reconcile these two statements, seemingly at odds with each other? In order to do so, two steps are necessary: (1) to understand what Nancy means by “sense” and its relation to existence, and (2) to understand the distinction that he seems to be making between “existence” and “life.” In Nancy’s philosophy, including any ontology that we might as� � �  �  192

cribe to him, there is no existence that exists separate and apart from sense, and vice versa, there is no sense that lies separate and outside of existence. For Nancy, for there to be existence is for there to be sense, and to think existence without sense is not even nonsensical— it is the very abandonment of sense and therefore of existence. Yet there is no inherent or proper sense to existence, just as there is no sense that is wholly unified. Rather, sense is always already separated from itself, and this is how it comes to “make” or to “have” sense. Which is to recall our previous discussion regarding the notion that separation is sense’s most proper sense—a division that is the spacing “across,” “between,” or “through” which sense “has” something to sense (to touch) in the first place. The “originarity” of sense is sense sensing itself as self-separated, but in this impropriety of sense’s proper sense is the opening and making room for its being shared. For like any instance of shar­ ing, separation is the act and spacing by which sharing happens. We also come to share in things because we remain separated from each other in the singularity of our finite existence. Sharing is, then, as Nancy has taught us again and again, always a sharing-separating, and thereby an affirmation (if we can put it this way) of the fact that existence (the world, you and me, and us) consists, in its singular fini­ tude, of many things, at once separated and therefore capable of being shared, together. Thus, the sharing of this separation is the praxis of our coexistence, of the shared sense of being-together, as singular plural some-ones, incommensurable in being irreducible to any one single common measure and sense. So when Nancy states that destruction attacks sense rather than life, he means that destruction is the attempt to reduce the spacing of separation—that is, of sense—into pulverized unshareable pieces. This is exactly what he says when, further in “The Indestructible,” he writes, “Once we’re left with broken structures, dislocated joints, displaced pieces, there is no longer any sense.”⁴⁵ It is in this way that we can begin to understand Nancy’s statement about existence as that which can only be shared or destroyed. For just as much as the sense of existence is—ontologically speaking—shared, then without the shared-separation that is its spacing and sense, existence is effectively destroyed. And so, as Nancy goes on to argue, “Destruction strives not simply to annihilate being, but to shatter the � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  193

very structure [spacing of shared-separation, its sense] that renders it possible, reaching into its origin and its end, tearing from it its very birth and death.”⁴⁶ Rather than the force of intrusion, as discussed in chapter 2, which, in its sustaining of the incommensurable relation between life and death is the ontological force and form of being and of existence, the force of destruction is the appropriation of birth and death, not in the forms of life or of death, but of their reduction to the (oftentimes bureaucratic) status of “alive” or “dead.”⁴⁷ In part, we take our cue from J. M. Coetzee, who, in an early version of his recent novel Diary of a Bad Year, wrote, “Whether the citizen lives or dies is not a concern of the state. What matters to the state and its records is whether the citizen is alive or dead.”⁴⁸ By placing in permanent suspension any definitive mark of the work’s beginning or ending, absolute plenitude or absolute annihilation, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s certificates of authenticity and ownership operate opposite the archival logics of the birth certificates of the state-sanctioned maternity ward and the death certificates of the county morgue—that is, those pieces of paper by which the state attempts to certify and authenticate the origins and ends of human existence and resist its “infinite absence of appropriable sense.” Yet Felix’s certificates should not be understood to merely document the intended and invited participation in the work’s disappearance, postproduction, but also to certify that destruction lies at the very origin of the work, both in the sense of the originary force of the work’s existence, and as a technique that Felix appropriates, readymade. Here is the way Felix expressed this: This work originated from the fear of losing everything. This work is about controlling my own fear. My work cannot be destroyed. I have destroyed it already, from day one. The feeling is almost like when you are in a relationship with someone and you know it’s not going to work out. From the very beginning you know that you don’t really have to worry about it not working out because you simply know that it won’t. The person cannot abandon you, because he has already abandoned you from day one—that is how I made this work. That is why I made this work. This work cannot disappear. This work cannot be destroyed the same way other things in my life have disap� � �  �  194

peared and left me. I destroyed it myself instead. I had control over it and this is what has empowered me. But it is a very masochistic kind of power. I destroy the work before I make it.⁴⁹

This statement is truly astounding in its admission to an exposure to finitude, loss, and disappearance, and its aesthetic, ethical, and existential appropriation, that although spoken in terms of control and empowerment is also recognized as specifically masochistic. There are a number of important things to note here. First, when we read Felix as saying that he has destroyed the work, we should not understand this in terms of any kind of actual practice or process of destruction. This is the case not only because Felix does not say that he first constructed the work and then subsequently destroyed it, but also because destruction is, by definition, the annihilating attack on what has been previously constructed, which effectively places destruction after construction, whereas Felix clearly states, and more than once, that he destroyed the work “already, from day one.” Which is to locate the work’s destruction at (and as) its very origin, and even prior to its construction. Instead, we can only understand the originarity of destruction here as the praxis and perhaps even the technique by which Felix gives himself over—via a power that can only be described as masochistic—to the force of destruction as in the form of loss, disappearance, and death, which is at the very heart of things, in their self-separation and spacing as sensible and shareable things. Beginning there, Felix attests to the originarity of separation, and that this is what existence in its finitude is exposed to, already from “day one.” In turn, it is this exposure that is presented in the exposition and installation of his work, and it is this exposure that the work invites others to partake in, and to share-out, by taking a part or a piece (of candy, paper), and through this participation in the work’s exposition, to in part take responsibility for the work’s never-ending disappearance—its infinite expenditure. It is in this way that the work’s existence is (in a Heideggerean idiom) taken care of, by being sustained as that which is already-unmade, such that one can no longer properly speak of the being or the becoming of the work of art, but instead, must think the work of art, in its very worklessness, as unbecoming. To locate finitude, loss, and disappearance at the beginning is � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  195

not to (sadistically) triumph over it, but instead to rid oneself of the worry, anxiety, and concern over its arrival, by understanding that in its never-ending ending, it is always-already present. This is how Felix’s analogy to an interpersonal relationship proves to be especially instructive. Through it, he asks us to imagine what it might mean to acknowledge and accept (by one or both of the people involved), at the outset of the relationship, that it will not last forever, that it not only will reach an end in what we commonly refer to as the moment of separation, but that the relationship has finitude built into it, and from its very beginning. In a way that is as logical as it is seemingly paradoxical, this shared-exposure to finitude is what instills a sense of freedom, since the two (or more) people can proceed with the relationship, absent the anxiety or fear that it might, one day, eventually end, and (or) that the other person(s) might abandon you. For in this scenario, the relationship is understood to have never existed outside of the force of finitude and abandonment, and thereby is able to open up a space in which the question of ethical sociality can be confronted, a sense of being-together that would no longer operate through the modalities of destruction or construction, and would no longer be forced to answer to that most disagreeable, and indeed ethically compromised, of questions: where is this relationship going?— a sure sign that it is going nowhere. Which is another way of saying that it has been placed on the path of its inevitable destruction because of an insistence on constructing the relationship along a single determined path toward a common destiny without separation. But perhaps as we have now come to understand, all sharing is a sharing in separation, and so to place separation as that which exists only at the end of a relationship is not only to perpetuate the myth of coupled union and fusion, even more critically it is to deprive the relationship of the very “substance” through which it can even be said to be one that is shared. So we now understand that to destroy the work would entail its no longer being shared. There are three ways in which this can be imagined, each of which the work effectively resists, and calls upon us to refuse: (1) by thinking in terms of original and/or ideal plentitude that the work is not only oriented toward but can in fact attain; (2) by positing a moment when the taking from the work, which had been ongoing, was made to cease, and perhaps permanently, as through an � � �  �  196

arrest of participation; and (3) by imagining the absolute emptying out of the work through the taking of every last piece or sheet without subsequent replenishment. Returning once again to Nancy’s statement that “existence can only be destroyed or shared,” we recognize in what he goes on to say a description of the offering and partaking of Felix’s work: This is the unsacrificeable and finite existence that is offered up to be shared: methexis [participation] is henceforth offered as the sharing out of the very thing that it shares: both the limit of finitude and respect for the unsacrificeable.⁵⁰

The inoperative praxis of partaking in infinite finitude of the work’s offering—“offered as the sharing out of the very thing that it shares”—operates through the rigorous logic of any paradox, such that one can say that at the very same time that there is something more to take, there is at the very same time less to take than the time before. The relation between the two is incommensurable, and as Nancy states, “It is the incommensurable that measures us. The incommensurable measures each of our destructions, their impotence. Existence resists. None of which either prevents destruction or justi­ fies it; rather, it marks its absolute limit.”⁵¹ In other words, existence remains indestructible in its very incommensurability, as that which is without common measure, comparative term, or sacrificial and communal substance. As Nancy explains, based upon the formula first conceived by Bataille: the sovereignty of existence “is nothing; the res, the thing itself, is nothing, no actual thing; it is reality itself.”⁵² Felix’s invitation is an offer to partake in the incommensurability of existence as what can be shared or destroyed but never sacrificed, and as the praxis of creation ex nihilo, remains to be decided each time and in resistance to appropriation, identification, and signification. As I approach the final section of this chapter, I want to pose the following question: is there an economy of the gesture? That is, in the reversal of aesthetic value inaugurated by Duchamp a century ago and extended by Rauschenberg and more recently by GonzalezTorres, in which art as inoperative praxis opens up aesthesis as a space of infinitely finite withdrawal and retreat—which is in part to � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  197

say, beyond use-value, exchange-value, and perhaps even exhibitionvalue in the more limited sense of that term—we might ask not only what it is that gesture sustains, but also what is it that sustains gesture? Through my reading of Nancy alongside the paper and candy installations of Gonzalez-Torres, I would argue that what sustains gesture—and hence a shared aesthesis or sense of existence as alreadyunmade—is precisely this reversal of the relation and the value of production and all of its conceptual and material cognate forms, forces, and effects. This “reversal of the relation of production” is what Nancy has identified as Marx’s revolution. Yet as Nancy explains, “Marx’s revolution presupposed that this reversal was equivalent to a conversion of the meaning of production (and the restitution of created value to its creator).”⁵³ In other words, it remained committed to an economy of production, while as Nancy argues, “What we have begun to learn is that it is also a matter of creating the meaning or value of the reversal itself [i.e., creation as inoperative praxis]. Only perhaps this creation will have the power of the reversal” (i.e., creation ex nihilo).⁵⁴ So we might say that what sustains gesture is the very gap and separation of its spacing, the nihil or nothing from which creation happens, yet always as an inoperative praxis, “in excess or in deficiency with respect to its work,” and that comes to define art and the relation of enjoyment and pleasure to it, that in addition to, yet distinct from, both Kant and Freud, even Marx himself was aware of. As Nancy writes, “The work of art is always also a meaning at work beyond any meaning that is either given or to be given”⁵⁵ (readymade or gifted). As he goes on to write, “But opening without finality is never a work nor any product: it is the enjoyment of which Marx spoke, as enjoyment by human beings of what opens their humanity beyond all humanism.”⁵⁶ For Marx, but for others too, as we shall see, this sense of enjoyment and pleasure is found in naïveté and play, and in particular in those forms of naïve play that are without “a goal of mastery (domination, usefulness, appropriation)” and that “exceed . . . all submission to an end” belonging to childhood and the gestures, offering, and sharing of separation that would seem to be the specific ars and teknē of a child’s pleasure and enjoyment. For while Marx notes to� � �  �  198

ward the end of the introduction to the Grundrisse that “a man cannot become a child again or he becomes childish,” he immediately goes on to ask, “But does he not find joy in the child’s naïveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage?”⁵⁷ It is this “effect of perpetual childhood freshness” (as Nancy describes it) that led Freud to resort to examples and scenarios such as the Mystic Writing Pad and the fort/da enunciation. Yet once we note that both of these forms of play are structured through techniques of erasure, withdrawal, disappearance, and the retracing of these acts of retreating and departure, we realize that there is a sense of loss intimately located at the heart of children’s play, and that this loss can be, nonetheless, a source of pleasure and enjoyment. Joining this insight with Marx’s own, we can understand what Nancy means when he writes that “perhaps art is the infans par excellence, the one who, instead of discoursing, fragments instead: fraying [frayage] and fracture of the access.”⁵⁸ It is precisely this fraying of the path and fragmenting of the course of things, including any discourse “which takes” or appropriates, that Roland Barthes described as his method of teaching in his Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France in 1977. As he stated, “I am increasingly convinced, both in writing and in teaching, that the fundamental operation of this loosening method is, if one writes, fragmentation, and, if one teaches, digression, or, to put it in a preciously ambiguous word, excursion.”⁵⁹ Excursion (this word): which we take to literally mean “the course or path out,” this excursus as a fracturing and fraying of discourse and its appropriating gestures of fragmentation, and a gesturing that might also be the art and technique of partaking in departing, or sharing in separation. For Barthes, this is the work of the child at play, at the limit of praxis that is not invested in the object or perhaps even in the giver or receiver, but in the gesture of offering itself. I should therefore like the speaking and the listening that will be interwoven here to resemble the comings and goings of a child playing beside his mother, leaving her, returning to her a pebble, a piece of string, and thereby tracing around a calm center a whole locus of play within which the pebble, the string come to matter less than the enthusiastic giving of them.⁶⁰ � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  199

Like the child in Barthes’s image and scenario, those who partake in the infinite incompletion of the work of Gonzalez-Torres’s candy piles and paper stacks partake in a gesture of offering, the meaning or sense of which does not lie in any one or all of the pieces of candy or paper, but in the offering itself, the offering of no-thing that is res (the thing), at once res omnium (thing for everyone) and res nullium (thing for no one). Thus, we might say that this is an originary ambiguity that all gestures possess. Such that, as Maurice Blanchot explains, ambiguity is more essential than negation, since before the beginning (that im­ possible space-time) nothingness is not equal to being, but is only the appearance of being’s concealment.⁶¹ Therefore, existence in terms of separated sense is more a matter of dissimulation than of negation. Such that we might come to understand that the separated gesture is not a matter of the dialectic, and that in its ambiguity and dissimulation, gesture gestures toward existence not as a question of being or becoming, but toward existence as unbecoming, which is to say already-unmade—and that the praxis, art and technique of existence, is inoperative. For if, as Blanchot argues, dissimulation is more original than negation and cannot be captured by negation, this is because existence has been already-unmade before it can be negated. When it comes to the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, each of us, and the artist as well, is the young girl who succeeds the muses, the child who, as Nancy writes, “exposes art that consents to its own disappearance: not in order to be resuscitated but because it does not enter that process.”⁶² For rather than the production of a product, the latter of which as Marx said “only obtains its ‘last finish’ in consumption,”⁶³ the inoperative aesthetic, ethical, and political praxis of Gonzalez-Torres and all of the other artists whose work this study has been dedicated to thinking—in which the notion of a final finish is rendered impossible—leaves us with the following question, which is also Nancy’s: “What if art were never anything but the necessarily plural, singular art of consenting to death, of consenting to existence?”⁶⁴ The incalculable sharing-out of this non-dialectical double consenting (to existence, to death) is, for Nancy, the definition of art, and in its oscillating rhythm (blackout, gap, touch) is what I have referred to as the separated gesture of offering and partaking. It is also the � � �  �  200

syncopated temporal and spatial gap and opening at the incommensurable heart of each encounter or rendezvous, including in those elements that go by “the names of art or love, friendship or thought, knowledge or emotion.”⁶⁵ So art, love, or friendship, not as the event or even the advent of chance, opportunity, or encounter, but as “an advening without advent.”⁶⁶ Something like the rendezvous in and as its waiting, passing, and missing—not simply the incommensurable rendezvous, but the rendezvous as incommensurable, including that most incommensurable of rendezvous: the one “between” existence and death. Therefore, the consenting to both, at once, is the incalculable measure of art or love, friendship or thought, knowledge or emotion. Just such a story of a missed encounter is conveyed by Jacques Derrida toward the end of his book On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, amid his persistent sense that he will never reach (touch) Nancy “precisely, in an appropriate, fitting [apte] way,” and therefore will “never get to it, to the truth, and . . . never touch the point of departure, not to mention the end.”⁶⁷ Yet, of course, it is precisely in this impossibility, and in Derrida’s telling of it as a story in writing, that the truth of the encounter, of touch, of friendship and of thought, is sensed and shared—including perhaps between Derrida and Nancy. Here is the story told by Derrida, or as he described it, “No, not even the story, then, but certain stories that are more or less anecdotal, of what touched me while I was trying to write ‘On Touching’ ”: Thus, for example, this scene of friendship, of meetings, and contretemps; the contretemps at the rendezvous in 1992, probably. I remember one of our meetings, that of a missed rendezvous one evening at the Strasbourg airport on the eve of one of those innumerable colloquiums on the geophilosophy of Europe. Impossible to get in touch on the telephone. Jean-Luc is punctual and comes to join me after having missed me at the airport, and after I had already gotten to town; he is accompanied by our friend Jacqueline Risset, to whom I had just written to say (on the eve of that day), rather belatedly, how much I liked and admired, once again, L’amour de loin [Love from a Distance].⁶⁸

Written in an idiom that is linguistically, temporally, and spatially tensed seemingly to the brink of contradiction, Derrida’s anecdote � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  201

performs in writing the scene of friendship as missed rendezvous and encounter. It enacts the contretemps (the unexpected and unfortunate occurrence) that it seeks to describe, and does so in the literal meaning of the word, as the motion, act, or event out of, or against, time. For instance, Derrida remembers one of their “meetings, that of a missed rendezvous,” and also that he had written to their mutual friend Jacqueline Risset “rather belatedly” and yet “on the eve of that day” (and so earlier) and at the same time “once again”—therefore, a temporality that is at once before or prior to (“on the eve),” after (“rather belatedly”), and in reprise (“once again”). Derrida wrote to Risset to say “how much [he] liked and admired” her novel Love from a Distance—a title that aptly captures exactly what we are calling the incommensurability of being-with or shared-separation that defines friendship, art, and thought. Further, Derrida uses the word eve not once but twice: in the sentence about Risset, and earlier when he speaks of “a missed rendezvous [with Nancy] one evening at the Strasbourg airport, on the eve of one of those innumerable colloquiums on the geophilosophy of Europe” (emphasis added; let us also not overlook the issue of number and community that appears here). We might imagine that the most appropriate travel document to accompany one through such a series of missed rendezvous at the airport, chance encounters in the city, and other unexpected occurrences that seem to happen prior to, after, and once again is the one that Felix Gonzalez-Torres describes in a letter that he wrote to his gallery dealer Andrea Rosen, dated February 14, 1992 (Valentine’s Day)—its own expression of love, friendship, thought, and art from a distance (which may be the only place from which the intimacy of love, friendship, thought, and art can be expressed). Part of the letter reads: The other day I was still thinking about this piece and how it fulfills me now even more. You know, the title: (Passport) is very crucial and significant—a white empty blank uninscribed piece of paper, an untouched feeling, an undiscovered experience. . . . A simple white object against a white wall, waiting.⁶⁹

The work that Felix is remembering, still thinking, and writing to his friend Rosen about is “Untitled” (Passport), (fig. 6) a paper stack � � �  �  202

Figure 6. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Passport), 1991; paper, endless supply; 10 cm at ideal height ´ 60 ´ 60 cm (original paper size) (4 in. at ideal height ´ 23 in. ´ 23 in. (original paper size). © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

from 1991 that consists of large monochromatic white sheets of paper placed up against a white wall. With these words about this work, Felix enables us to imagine how “a white empty blank uninscribed piece of paper”—its description without punctuation marks— can be an ongoing source of thinking and fulfillment. And further, how such a sheet of paper, to the precise extent that it is empty blank and uninscribed by signs and marks of identity, portraiture, address of origin or destination, and so on, can be the access and path out to “another place, to another life, to a new beginning, to chance; to the chance of meeting that other that makes life a moving force . . . and unexpected reasons for being”⁷⁰ and thereby serve as the invention of a new kind of passport for an excursion, the course of which is toor toward that non-destinal destination that is simply outside. An excursion infinite in its finitude as I have discussed and as perhaps � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  203

Figure 7. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (The End), 1990; print on paper, endless copies; 22 in. at ideal height ´ 28 ´ 22 in. (original paper size). © The Felix GonzalezTorres Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

most explicitly named and offered by Gonzalez-Torres in another of his paper stacks, “Untitled” (The End), from 1990 (fig. 7). Here, as some-one having partaken in some-thing that is infinite in its finitude and therefore bears the title The End as the only name proper for it, there one is at that open-ended place that, in its indetermination, is most properly and simply named some-where. At the end that is never-ending, with a passport without a name, we some-ones partaking in some-things find ourselves simply there, at the “some” of some-where, which at the same time, and in its anonymity, is not exactly nowhere. Or it might be both at once, as in the doubled white paper stacks, paired together, and aligned with a small space between them, from 1989–90, and simply titled “Untitled” (fig. 8). On the sheets of paper of one of the stacks is printed the phrase “Somewhere Better � � �  �  204

Than This Place,” and on the sheets of the other stack, “Nowhere Better Than This Place.” Rather than read the words this place as indicating, in each case, the place occupied by each of the two stacks, respectively, we might understand this place to refer to the space that is shared by both of them, and therefore does not designate the place of their own proper space, but the place that separates and divides them and that they at the same time bracket (parenthetically, as it were). Which is to say that this place might be taken to refer to the space between the two stacks of paper, a space of separation that is shared between them. In

Figure 8. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled,” 1989–90; print on paper, endless copies; 26 in. at ideal height ´ 29 ´ 56 in. overall; two parts: 26 in. at ideal height ´ 29 ´ 23 in. (original paper size) each. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �   �  205

their pairing and non-identical doubling, then, they do not so much cancel each other out as open up and stage the sense of there being “somewhere better than this place,” and there being “nowhere better than this place,” as equal. In our encounter with this work, we are offered the decision to take from one, both, or neither of the two stacks, and we can easily imagine that most people will reduce their decision to a choice between one of the two stacks and their respective printed statements of spatial contentment or discontentment. Yet by pairing the two stacks, Felix’s invitation is doubled, and we are offered the opportunity to take not just from one or the other stack, but from both. To do so is not only to refuse one’s decision being made reducible to the choice between one of only two options, it is also to sustain the aporia of (the space of) decision—impasse and passage, and without principle, at once. And not only the space of decision, including, as here, the decision of place (somewhere, nowhere), but of decision as this very aporetic place. Indeed, this work would seem to affirm that the ideality (if not idealism) of Felix’s work is aporetic, as though when talking about wanting to make this place better, one heard expressed the sense that there is somewhere better than this place and nowhere better than this place. Somewhere and nowhere at once: this is where we are left, this is the place that remains. Somewhere better than this place without saying where, and nowhere other than this place, and so somewhere too. Jean-Luc Nancy, our principal guide throughout much of this study, once said that “beyond modernity is the time of things,”⁷¹ and on another occasion, following one of his own guides, he quotes Heidegger as saying that “we would have to learn to recognize that things themselves are places, and do not merely belong in a place.”⁷² This too is what I believe Felix Gonzalez-Torres sought for us to recognize: that things themselves are places, and that through this recognition, we find ourselves in the space of decision, including the decision about things and places, which are not reducible to the categories of work of art, audience, artist, gift, commodity, communal substance, readymade, and in the end, not even of art. In these works we are offered the chance to decide to take responsibility for partaking in, sustaining, and taking care of the inappropriate space between us as no-thing and already-unmade. By � � �  �  206

taking some-thing in its finitude as partes extra partes, and through a praxis of sharing in what cannot be shared (loss, death), to sustain this infinite sense of this finitude, as the decision of existence, a decision that lies (and must remain) in-finished, just between us. This would be to think infinite expenditure as the generosity and spaciosity of separation in and as its infinite finitude. A necessarily immeasurable giving and taking of inappropriable sense, which is nothing other than the generosity and spaciosity of freedom. For as Nancy makes clear, freedom is what measures itself according to the incommensurable, and the incommensurable is what we share, including as the decision between us. This is the decision that preserves this freedom (and in this way preserves itself), by offering existence in and as its withdrawal, of being drawn into the finitude of coexistence as infinitely shared-separation. This is the freedom that decision in its withdrawal offers, including as the decision to sustain this withdrawal, and it is this very decision that the work of Felix GonzalezTorres offers, each time it is decided to accept the invitation to partake in the inoperative praxis of the work as already-unmade. It is here that we might begin to understand that beyond modernity and the time of things, our time is the time of scenes. Our time, we innumerable and incommensurable some-ones with some other ones, some-where and with some-things—all of which can only be destroyed or shared. It is in this way that we are confronted not with a choice but with a decision, and a hypothesis of sorts: What if things, including works of art, ask of us nothing, nothing other than the ethical task of sustaining the separated-spacing that is shared between us and things, and invite us to decide not once and for all, but each time, just between us? Not in terms of being or of becoming, sameness or difference, wholeness or fragmentation, fullness or lack, but in terms of unbecoming as the name for the shared-separation that is the only source, sense, and pleasure of being-together.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 74. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Concealed Thinking,” trans. James Gilbert-Walsh, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 40, emphasis in original. 3. Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 323–24, emphasis added. 4. John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Non-consensual Futures: Pornographic Faith and the Economy of the Eve (in progress). 5. Nancy, Creation of the World or Globalization, 90. 6. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Being Singular Plural,” in Being Singular Plural, trans. Rob­ ert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 47. 7. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Scene: An Exchange of Let­ ters,” in Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, ed. Rich­ ard Thomas Eldridge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Ibid., 275. Ibid., 287. Ibid., 286. Ibid. English translation: Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 13. Ibid., 90. See also my “An Unbecoming Introduction” to an issue of the journal Parallax that I edited on the theme of “unbecoming,” in which I address this very sort of configuration of various unbecoming figures that populate that collection of essays—dirty old men, patient zero, the friend with AIDS, the Times Square pervert, traitors, strangers, and intruders—each of which 8. 9. 10 11. 12.

is undoing the formalization of the political, including in terms of figuration, and some of whom return here in this book. John Paul Ricco, “An Unbecoming Introduction,” in “Unbecoming,” special issue, Parallax 11, no. 2 (April– June 2005): 1–3. 14. Nancy’s ontological figurality might be understood as a figurality (if not a formality) that resists being consigned to the negative status of what LacoueLabarthe called “onto-typology,” but at the same time does not entirely give up on thinking the scene as space of presentation, in order, quoting Catherine Malabou, “to privilege the formless, the unpresentable, the ‘defiguration,’ the scenic removal,” as Lacoue-Labarthe can rightly be accused of. Following Malabou, a “plastic reading” of the scene would be one that “seeks to reveal the form left in the text (image, etc.) through the withdrawing of presence, that is, through its own deconstruction.” A withdrawal, we might add, that is the way a body exists in the singular exposure of its shared finitude, which is to say something about the way in which a body “lives on” and sur-vives in and as the persistence of presentation, exhibition, and exposition of corporeal sense and spacing of the scene. Catherine Malabou, Plasticity and the Dusk of Writing, trans. Carolyn Shread, Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 52. 15. Jacques Derrida said something of the sort in Grammatology, when he wrote: “Theatrical representation, in the sense of exposition, of production, of that which is placed out there (that which the German Darstellung translates) is contaminated by supplementary re-presentation. The latter is inscribed in the structure of representation, in the space of the stage.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravotry Spivak, Corrected Edition. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 304. 16. Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, trans. John McKeane, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 17. In this regard, my project is at odds with Ignaas Devisch’s recent estimation of the limited value of “naked existence,” as when, in a conversation with Nancy, he argued: “If we begin (and end) with, let’s say, ‘naked existence’ [l’existence nue], as in your thought, the problem is perhaps not only the risk of stifling the singular but also the empty, exposed nature of this naked mode of existence. Naked existence is not nothing, but it’s certainly not much. It could be true that living together is nothing more than that, but this truth itself perhaps does not form any bond.” As in my previous work, so too here do I want to question the need and desire for something more, as I recognize that the kinds of scenes examined in this study, as scenes of being-together, are often taken as “not much” and perhaps as “not enough” for a bond, rapport, or relation to form. Alena Alexandrova et al., eds., Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 311.

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18. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Two Moments from the Post-medium Condition,” October 116 (Spring 2006). 19. These questions will be further elaborated in my next book, currently in progress: Non-consensual Futures: Pornographic Faith and the Economy of the Eve. 20. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 1st ed., vol. 23 (1937–39) (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 300. 21. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Psyche,” trans. Emily McVarish, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 393. 22. Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 2, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 20. 23. Nancy, Adoration, 41. 24. Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille, “Body Fluids,” in Power and Invention: Situating Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 237. 25. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 103. 26. Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 318. We recall that “the time of things” is also a phrase used by Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle, and in particular his critique of the “triumph of irreversible time” due to “the mass production of objects according to the laws of the commodity,” and “the abstract movement of things” in which it is argued that time is no longer lived. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (original French, 1967; repr., Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), sec. 142. 27. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, vol. 82, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 77. Chapter One 1. I derive the phrase from Gilles Deleuze. See “Occupy without Counting: Boulez, Proust and Time,” In Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 292–99 (New York and Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2006). 2. Freud as quoted by Derrida: “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 196–231 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 223. 3. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 1st ed., vol. 19 (1923–25) (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 230.

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Ibid., 19:232. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 229, emphasis in original. Ibid., 212. As quoted in Derrida, Writing and Difference, 229. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, 1st ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 98–107. 9. William Haver, “The Art of Dirty Old Men: Rembrandt, Giacometti, Genet,” Parallax 11, no. 2 (April–June 2005): 25–35. William Haver, “Really Bad Infini-

ties: Queer’s Honour and the Pornographic Life,” Parallax 5, no. 4 (1999): 9–21. See also Haver’s “Foreword: The Logic of the Lure and the New Pornography,” in John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xi–xiv. 10. Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg: (A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture) (Houston and Chicago: Menil Collection and University of Chicago Press, 2000), 19. 11. Maxine de la Falalise McKendry, “Robert Rauschenberg Talks to Maxine de la Falaise McKendry,” Interview (1976): 34–36. 12. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 188, emphasis in original. 13. Ibid. 14. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 226. 15. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 2. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. Ibid., 7. 18. Ibid., 13. 19. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 50. 20. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 224. 21. Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, 101. 22. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 230. See also Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” also in Writing and Difference, 265. 23. “The page is white but it has been written on from time immemorial; it is white through forgetfulness of what has been written, through erasure of the text on which everything that is written is written.” Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 310. 24. Nancy, Ground of the Image, 67–68. 25. Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg, 20. 26. We note that the curious basis for fame and notoriety is one that these two artists share with John Cage, given that perhaps his most well-known sound composition is the silent one: 4'33", discussed above.

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27. Rosalind Krauss, “Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image,” Artforum 13, no. 4 (December 1974): 36–43. 28. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 148. 29. For theorizations of non-identitarian and impersonal sameness, see Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 30. Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. and with an introduction by David B. Allison

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–60. Quoting from the translator’s note: “Derrida introduces a neologism here; from the French ‘différence’ he derives the term ‘différance.’ As in the Latin ‘differre,’ the French ‘différer’ bears two quite distinct significations. One has a reference to spatiality, as the English ‘to differ’—to be at variance, to be unlike, apart, dissimilar, distinct in nature or quality from something. This is even more evident in its cognate form, ‘to differentiate.’ The other signification has a reference to temporality, as in the English ‘to defer’—to put off action to a future time, to delay or postpone.” From the above-cited text, 82n8, emphasis in original. Jean Genet, Funeral Rites, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 249. The Duchamp represents a return or relapse to painting on the part of the artist, as well as a return to some of his earlier works in the form of painted shadows of his readymades (i.e., bicycle wheel, hat rack). Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 23. The quotations that follow in the body of my text are all drawn from pages 23–24 of Nancy’s book. Tom Conley, “From Image to Event: Reading Genet through Deleuze,” Yale French Studies, no. 91 (1997): 49–63. Ibid., 55. Ibid. Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 57. Ibid., 59. In interviews with Madeleine Gobeil and Hubert Fichte, Genet recounts the moment in his life when, while in prison sometime between 1937 and 1939, he first took on the task of writing, and the way in which the grainy materiality of the paper, or more precisely the card stock of a postcard, and its white surface, were the conditions for, and also the subject of, this inauguration of writing—its fore-scene. In the Gobeil interview, published in Playboy 2, no. 4 (April 1964): 45–53, Genet recounts that “the first time I became conscious of the power of writing was when I sent a postcard to a German friend [Anna Bloch] who was in America at the time. I didn’t really know what to say to her. The side I was supposed to write on had a sort of white, grainy texture, a little like snow, and it was this surface that led me to speak of a snow that was of course absent from prison, to speak of Christmas, and instead of

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writing just anything, I wrote to her about the quality of that thick paper. That was it, the trigger that allowed me to write. This was no doubt not the real motive, but it’s what gave me the first taste of freedom.” Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, trans. Jeff Fort, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 9–10. In the Fichte interview, excerpts of which were originally published in the German newspaper Die Ziet, no. 8, February 13, 1976, 35–37, Genet tells the story this way: “I think I was around twenty-nine or thirty years old. I was in prison. So that was in ’39, 1939. I was alone, in solitary, or in a cell, at any rate. First I should say that I had written nothing except a few letters to friends, both men and women, and I think that the letters were very conventional, I mean full of ready-made phrases I had heard or read, but never really felt. Well, I was going to send a Christmas card to a German friend. . . . I had bought it in the prison, and the back side of the card, where you’re supposed to write, was rough and grainy. And this grain on the card really struck me. Instead of writing about Christmas, I wrote about the texture of the postcard and the snow that it evoked for me. That’s when I started to write. I believe that was the trigger. It’s the trigger I was aware of and able to register.” Genet, Declared Enemy, 140–41. 39. Genet, Fragments of the Artwork, 49. 40. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 14. 41. Haver, “Art of Dirty Old Men,” 34. Chapter Two 1. Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 91–99, originally published in Tel Quel. 2. William Haver, “The Art of Dirty Old Men: Rembrandt, Giacometti, Genet,” Parallax 11, no. 2 (April–June 2005): 25–35. I know of no other text that more adequately addresses the political dimensions of the complicated imbrications between Genet’s social ontology and what, for lack of a better word, we will call his aesthetics than this essay by Haver. 3. Jacques Derrida has described the chiasmic structure of these two columns of text as follows: “Two unequal columns, they say [dissent-ils], each of which— envelop(e)(s) or sheath(es), incalculably reverses, turns inside out, replaces, remarks, overlaps [recoupe] the other. . . . Each little square is delimited, each column rises with an impassive self-sufficiency, and yet the element of contagion, the infinite circulation of general equivalence relates each sentence, each stump of writing . . . to each other, within each column and from one column to the other of what remained infinitely incalculable. Almost.” Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 1, bracketed material and emphasis in original.

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4. Genet, Fragments of the Artwork, 91–92, emphasis in original. 5. Indeed, Genet’s use of the same word buta (which Haver translates as “butted” and Mandell as “stumbled”) to describe both the look of the other man and his own effectively serves as the semantic marker for the force of visual perception that mutually intrudes upon these two men. 6. Genet, Fragments of the Artwork, 93. 7. Ibid., 94. 8. Ibid., 95. 9. Ibid., 96, emphasis added. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 97. 12. Jean-Luc Nancy, “La Comparution / The Compearance: From the Existence of ‘Communism’ to the Community of ‘Existence,’ ” trans. Tracy B. Strong, Political Theory 20, no. 3 (1992). 13. In a slightly earlier discussion of the compearance of singularities, Nancy writes, “Singularity—for this reason [e.g., self-separation of singular being] distinct from individuality—takes place according to this double alterity of the ‘one time,’ which installs relation as the withdrawal of identity, and communication as the withdrawal of communion. Singularities have no common being, but they com-pear [com-paraissent] each time in common in the face of the withdrawal of their common being, spaced apart by the infinity of this withdrawal—in this sense, without any relation, and therefore thrown into relation.” Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 68, emphasis and material in second set of brackets in original. 14. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 47. 15. In this articulation, we take a cue from Jean-Luc Nancy, whose understanding of the abandonment of being coincides with our understanding of intrusion’s own temporal abandonment. Our respective formulations are nearly wordfor-word transpositions of each other, as, for instance, when Nancy writes, “The time of abandonment is the time, the wavering, of the instantly abandoned instant; time abandons itself, and that is its definition. And in time we are abandoned to time, just as time abandons us.” Nancy, Birth to Presence, 41. We also note that this relation between here and there, staged by the intrusion of bodies in their coexposed existence, is taken up in the following two chapters in part 2 (“Naked Sharing” and “Naked Image”). 16. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 161–70. 17. Haver, “Art of Dirty Old Men,” 28–29.

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18. Hence, as with the story of Erik and Riton on a rooftop in Paris, which we theorized in the previous chapter, here too we are confronted with a story from the German occupation of France during World War II and, as we shall see, another scene of traitorous collaboration that opens up a space of futurity and survival. 19. Blanchot, Instant of My Death, 5. 20. Ibid. The Vlaskov Army was also known as the Russian Liberation Army, and sent to the West (including France) in late 1943 and early 1944. While subordinate to the Germans, as early as 1944 this military group was riddled with

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

mutinies and desertions. Hence, in regard to the event recounted by Blanchot, they can be understood as double traitors. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 89–97. It is rather remarkable to be able to note that Blanchot first writes of the “resurrection of death” in 1941, in the first version of his novel Thomas the Obscure, and then experiences this impossible experience—the instant of his death—three years later, in 1944, when he is suddenly still alive after facing a row of armed soldiers, outside his family’s château. For even an abyss is only ever a muddy hole in the ground and yet still remains all too dedicated to work—such is, at least, “the madness of day,” presented in Blanchot’s eponymous story from 1973. In it, we read of an incident nearly identical in part to the one remembered in The Instant of My Death: “Shortly afterward, the madness of the world broke out. I was made to stand against the wall like many others. Why? For no reason. The guns did not go off. I said to myself, God, what are you doing? At that point I stopped being insane. The world hesitated, then regained its equilibrium. [Then a bit further he writes] One day they thrust me into the ground; the doctors covered me with mud. What work went on at the bottom of that earth! . . . (Yet I knew who I was; I lived on, did not fall into nothingness) . . . the void certainly disappointed me.” Maurice Blanchot, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha, trans. Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, and Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1999), 191–99, here quotation across 191–93. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Two Secrets of the Fetish,” Diacritics 31, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 7, emphasis in original. Haver provides a more extended explanation than what I can provide here, when he writes, “If this is so, Genet mused, it is because erotic enchantment is entirely a matter of individuality, rather than singularity or multiplicity, because it is a matter of ‘form” as that which transcends abject materiality, because it is a question of characteristics, qualities, predicates—that is, abstractions, resemblances, translations of the sensible into the intelligible.” Haver, “Art of Dirty Old Men,” 30.

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26. In arguing against a reading of general equivalence in Genet’s “Rembrandt” essay, on this point I stand opposite to the estimation put forth by Jacques Derrida. See Derrida, Glas, 43. 27. Nancy, Experience of Freedom, 71. 28. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, vol. 82, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 299. 29. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 132–33. 30. Ibid., 132. 31. Nancy, Birth to Presence, 179. 32. Nancy, Dis-enclosure, 97. 33. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Intruder,” in Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 163. 34. Maurice Blanchot, “Intellectuals under Scrutiny,” in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1995). 35. Jacques Derrida, “Countersignature,” in “Genet,” ed. Mairéad Hanrahan, special issue, Paragraph 27, no. 2 (July 2004): 7–42. 36. Ibid., 31. 37. Ibid. 38. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Just Ideas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 51, emphasis in original. 39. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Insufficiency of ‘Values’ and the Necessity of ‘Sense,’ ” trans. Steve Barstow, Journal for Cultural Research 9, no. 4 (October 2005): 441. Chapter Three 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 21. His book The Birth to Presence includes an earlier version of the “Corpus” essay, written around 1992, as well as the essay “Psyche,” from 1977. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 2. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 1st ed., vol. 23 (1937–39) (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 300. 3. We note that Nancy refers to this posthumous note at the end of his book on Descartes, suggesting not only that perhaps this resonates with Descartes’s notion of the “quasi permixtio” of the union of body and soul, but that it also stands in excess of all psychoanalysis. Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego Sum (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 161.

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4. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). For Aristotle’s text, see Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 5. Nancy, Corpus, 15, emphasis in original. Judith Butler also has recently written of “a new bodily ontology” that is at the same time a social ontology. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 6. As for the question of freedom in this context, Nancy writes that it “is the

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

common non-presupposition of this mutual intimacy and distancing [between there and here] where bodies . . . have their absence of ground (and hence, identically, their rigorous equality).” Nancy, Corpus, 101. Derrida has noted that “he [Nancy] . . . very often makes use of this ‘here’ in a remarkable, differentiated way. His ‘here’ deserves a study of its own.” Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 339n28. Nancy, Corpus, 132. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 100, ellipsis in original. Nancy, Corpus, 132. In an exchange with Medard Boss in 1972, Heidegger said about Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous indictment of him for having devoted only six lines to the body in Being and Time: “I can only counter Sartre’s reproach by stating that the bodily [das Leibliche] is the most difficult [to understand] and that I was unable to say more at the time.” Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations, Letters, ed. John McCumber and David Kolb, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard R. Askay, SPEP Studies in Historical Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 292, bracketed material in original. The work of Richard Askay, including his translation of, and writing on, the Zollikon Seminars, is an indispensable resource for any understanding of Heidegger’s thinking on corporeality, his non-relation to Freudian psychoanalysis, and French existential phenomenology (see the bibliography). Heidegger, Being and Time, 101. Further on in the book, in a note to his discussion of the disclosedness of being that lies in the disclosedness of “the there,” Heidegger asks, “How does it ‘lie’ there and what does being [Seyn] mean?” Ibid., 138. As Sarah Sorial relates it, Edward Casey has argued that in Heidegger, “both mind and body are suspended in order to explore what happens in the space between them.” Sarah Sorial, “Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the Question of Dasein’s Embodiment,” Philosophy Today 48, no. 2 (2004): 228. In this essay, Sorial provides a comparative reading of embodiment, corporeality, existence, spatiality, and ethics in the work of Heidegger and Nancy, primarily in an attempt to redress the extensive criticism of Heidegger’s apparent

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reticence on these questions by suggesting a certain affinity between the two thinkers. 14. Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, 127. Yet we might also ask the question as to the difference between lying and standing—of being as lying there like Psyche (Nancy via Freud) and being as standing-open (Heidegger). 15. Sorial, “Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the Question of Dasein’s Embodiment,” 228. 16. Heidegger, Being and Time, 100. 17. Richard R. Askay, “Heidegger, the Body, and the French Philosophers,” Continental Philosophy Review 32 (1999): 33, emphasis in original. 18. Nancy, Corpus, 132–33. 19. Ibid., 124. 20. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe have described this convergence, and the means of its critical-theoretical approach, in the following way: “As one can see, the convergence of Heidegger and Freud henceforth poses an entirely different problem from that of the introduction of a few themes from one of these discourses into the other: it poses the problem of the very status of such discourses, measured against this proximity which nonetheless refers only to their radical distance and to their reciprocal exclusion. Here too, as if by chance, it is a question of a relation without relation. The relation without relation of psychoanalysis and of philosophy also draws a common limit, which once more involves the political.” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “La panique politique,” in Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks, Warwick Studies in European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), 18. 21. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Being-With of Being-There,” trans. Marie-Eve Morin, Continental Philosophy Review 41 (2008): 3–4. 22. Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 23. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 24. Jacques Derrida, “Ellipsis,” in Writing and Difference, 294–300 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 25. I am tempted to find confirmation of the deep resonance between Derrida’s essay on the ellipsis and Nancy’s on psyche, and therefore on the elliptical sense of psyche, in the placement of their remarkably short essays as the very last and “at the end” of their respective books. In this speculation, one might come to read Nancy’s as well as Derrida’s text as a performative inscription of the ellipsis, a writing that in its unbecoming end and completion, can be said to proceed, à corps perdu (in all of the possible meanings of the phrase). I explore these questions of the figure of woman as opening at the end in a

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recent unpublished essay “The Securitized Footprint and the Economy of the Eve,” which will eventually be included as a chapter in my book, currently in progress: Non-consensual Futures: Pornographic Faith and the Economy of the Eve. 26. Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Atopia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 129–45. 27. In a manner that is equally as curious as the translation made by Althusser and discussed by Rancière, verbally referring to the graphic mark of the empty parentheses as a dotted line, is the persistence within common parlance of the signatory “dotted line” even when the line to be signed is not fragmented into a series of dots but instead takes the form of a “solid line.” 28. John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 29. Rancière, Flesh of Words; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Series Q (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 30. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Elliptical Sense,” trans. Jonathan Derbyshire, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 110. 31. Ibid., 106. 32. Ibid., 94. 33. “The recitation of an empirical logos that, without transcendental reason, would be a gleaned list, random in its order or in its degree of completion, a corpus of the body’s entries: dictionary entries, entries into language, body registers, registers of bodies.” Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus,” trans. Claudette Sartiliot, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 189. 34. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Heart of Things,” trans. Brian Holmes and Rodney Trumble, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 182. 35. Nancy, “Corpus,” 198–99. 36. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Res ipsa et ultima,” trans. Steven Miller, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 312. 37. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 67, emphasis in original. 38. Nancy, “Res ipsa et ultima,” 318. 39. “The between-bodies reserves nothing, nothing but extension that is the res itself, the areal reality through which it happens that bodies are exposed to each other. The between-bodies is their images’ taking-place.” Nancy, Corpus, 121, emphasis in original. These are the naked images of naked sharing. 40. In his theorization of partes extra partes, Nancy parenthetically adds that “(Descartes’ error consists in conceiving the extra as a void, undifferentiated, when it’s precisely the place of differentiation, of ‘corporation,’ a taking-place of weighing, and consequently of the community of the world).” Ibid., 97.

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41. Ibid., 95. 42. Ibid. 43. Nancy, “Res ipsa et ultima,” 315. 44. Nancy, Sense of the World, 72–73. 45. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “La panique politique,” 18. 46. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 21. 47. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Concealed Thinking,” trans. James Gilbert-Walsh, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 37. 48. Nancy, “Psyche,” 393. 49. Nancy, Sense of the World, 178n29. 50. This describes the deconstructive operation of Derrida’s différance. For examples particularly germane to our discussion here, see Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 51. This statement in its entirety reads: “The unconscious is the world as totality of signifiability, organized around nothing other than its own opening. For psychoanalysis, this opening opens on nothing, and this is what, from the standpoint of psychoanalysis, it is necessary for the subject to come to be able to sustain or to bear.” Nancy, Sense of the World, 47. 52. Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Finite Thinking,” trans. Edward Bullard, Jonathan Derbyshire, and Simon Sparks, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 14, emphasis in original. 53. Nancy, “Concealed Thinking,” 37. 54. Nancy, “Being-With of Being-There,” 13, emphasis in original. 55. In French, exposition also means “exhibition,” and this semantic resonance between exhibition and exposure, including the exhibition or staging of exposure, is something that Nancy deploys throughout his work. 56. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Abandoned Being,” trans. Brian Holmes, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 46, emphasis in original. Chapter Four 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Concealed Thinking,” trans. James Gilbert-Walsh, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 40. 2. Ibid. 3. Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 4. Catherine Breillat, Anatomy of Hell, film, 77 min. (France, 2004).

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5. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Scene: An Exchange of Letters,” in Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, ed. Richard Thomas Eldridge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287. 6. Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove, 1986). 7. Catherine Breillat, Pornocracy, trans. Paul Buck and Catherine Petit, Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2008). 8. Duras, Malady of Death, 56. 9. As Pierre Joris notes, quoting P. Adams Sitney, in the translator’s preface to Blanchot’s Unavowable Community, “the récit is a ‘movement toward an unknown point.’ ” Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988), xxii. 10. Martin Crowley, Duras, Writing, and the Ethical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 235. 11. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Series Q (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 12. Ibid., 75. 13. Again, “acting” is here to be understood as a reciting from memory. 14. Sharon Willis, “Staging Sexual Difference: Reading, Recitation, and Repetition in Duras’ Malady of Death,” in Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, ed. Enoch Brater, 109–25 (London: Oxford University Press, 1989), 110. 15. Duras, Malady of Death, 29. 16. Ibid., 14–15. 17. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Heart of Things,” trans. Brian Holmes and Rodney Trumble, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 185. 18. Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Finite Thinking,” trans. Edward Bullard, Jonathan Derbyshire, and Simon Sparks, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 10; and Nancy, “Heart of Things,” 185. 19. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 90, emphasis in original. 20. Duras, Malady of Death, 40. 21. Ibid., 32–33. 22. Ibid., 34, emphasis added. 23. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988), 38. 24. Ibid., 39, emphasis added. 25. Mary Lydon, “La Maladie de la mort: Love in Marguerite Duras,” in Remains to Be Seen: Essays on Marguerite Duras, ed. Sanford Scribner Ames, 113–26 (New York: Peter Lang, 1988). Maurice Blanchot expressed a similar sense as to the seemingly irresolvable interpretation and perplexing meaning of Duras’s title. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, 34.

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26. Duras, Malady of Death, 48. 27. Ibid., 54, emphasis added. 28. This reading is one that I share with Martin Crowley, who writes that “there is no suggestion that this gulf might be bridged; the man’s failure is, rather, the failure to welcome and to love this impossibility.” Crowley, Duras, Writing, and the Ethical, 215. In his reading of Malady, Blanchot conceives of the intimacy of this inaccessibility as the definition of love in and as its very impossibility: as the relation or exposure to the infinitely finite space between lovers. 29. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, 42. 30. Breillat, Pornocracy, 31. 31. Kofman, Selected Writings, 237–41. 32. Ibid., 238. 33. Ibid., 238–39. 34. Ibid., 239. 35. Breillat, Pornocracy, 100. 36. Ibid., 32. 37. Ibid., 71. 38. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Being Singular Plural,” in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 47. 39. Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon, 1987). 40. Ibid., 61. 41. Ibid., 80–81. 42. Ibid., 94. 43. Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 2, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 44. Ibid., 14. 45. Ibid., 14–15. 46. Ibid., 20. 47. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 48. Ibid., 89. 49. Ibid. 50. Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, trans. John McKeane, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 102; and Tim Dean, “An Impossible Embrace: Queerness, Futurity, and the Death Drive,” in A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy, ed. James J. Bono, Tim Dean, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, 122–40 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 51. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

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52. Ibid., 78. 53. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 224. 54. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1n2. 55. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 1st ed., vol. 23 (1937–39) (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 300, emphasis in original. 56. Nancy, Birth to Presence, 227, 232; and John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 57. Ibid., 232. Nancy argues that Freud stumbles upon all of this, recognizes and at the same time dismisses it, precisely in order to preserve psychoanalysis as a science of interpretation, including of art. 58. Ibid., 227, 32. 59. Jean-Luc Nancy, “In Statu Nascendi,” trans. Brian Holmes, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 218. 60. For Nancy’s argument regarding the inadequacy of these dualities, see “In Statu Nascendi,” 218. 61. And as Earl Jackson has said, “A toy cannot be an idol, and the god starves.” Earl Jackson Jr., “Explicit Instruction: Teaching Gay Male Sexuality in a Literature Class,” in Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (New York: Modern Language Association, 1995), 147. 62. Quoted in Nancy, Sense of the World, 1. 63. We note that Felix loved the idea that the image on the billboard was conceptually ambiguous and could effectively mean anything to any number of people. My discussion of the work seeks to sustain this conceptual openness, which I argue entails resisting the desire to approach the work and its image as something that is either lacking in content (and thereby needs to be analytically filled in) or hiding its content (and thereby calls for this to be interpretively excavated). 64. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 83. Chapter Five 1. Perigraphy, a term that Barthes derives from Antoine Compagnon, can be understood to mean both writing as an inscriptive spacing or opening “around,” and as the “around” of writing’s most proper spacing—for example, in the form of such typographic devices as the ellipsis, dash, parenthesis, blank spaces, or what Barthes refers to as “blank alineas.” (For the latter, see Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, trans. Kate Briggs [New York: Columbia University Press, 2011], 18.) I might further note that my theorization of the

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peri-performative scene is meant to trouble the very notion of a centered authorial subject that Compagnon identifies in his definition of perigraphy, when he writes, “a scenography that brings the text into view, with the author at its center. . . . Notes, tables, bibliography, but also prefaces, forewords, introductions, conclusions, appendixes, annexes.” From Compagnon, La Seconde Main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979), quoted in Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 412n2. 2. Roland Barthes, “Writing Reading,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard

3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

Howard, 29–32 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). Barthes gravitated toward the notion of co-presence, and early on in his course The Preparation of the Novel, in a discussion of John Cage’s interest in mushrooms having been predicated upon the proximity of the word to the word music in the dictionary, Barthes explains, “They’re present to one another yet they’re not connected; a mode of co-presence that’s very difficult to conceptualize; to conceive of a co-presence without it being metonymical, antithetical, causal, etc.; a consecution without logic yet without it signifying the destruction of logic; a neutral consecution.” Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 32–33. Barthes, Rustle of Language, 56–64. Barthes, “Writing Reading,” 31. It should be noted that at the end of the short annual summary of his teaching as professor of literary semiology, in 1978, Barthes lists the following: “Mission: research seminar on the theory of reading taught in the School of Humanities at the Universities of Fez and of Rabat (Morocco), February 1978.” See Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 212. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 121–28. Ibid., 121. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 87, emphasis in original. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard, 1st American ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982); Barthes, Rustle of Language, 76–79; and Barthes, Neutral, 7, 11. Nancy, Dis-enclosure, 123. Johnnie Gratton, “The Poetics of the Barthesian Incident: Fragments of an Experiencing Subject,” Nottingham French Studies 36, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 63n2.

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Barthes, Neutral, 13–14. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. Barthes, Neutral. The complete dedication reads, “In homage to L’Imaginaire, by Jean-Paul Sartre.” 19. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 159–60. 20. Barthes, Rustle of Language, 356. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Ibid., 360. Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 71. Ibid., 81. Roland Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Eric Marty, 5 vols., vol. 5, 1977–80 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 5:475. 25. Quoted in Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 409n17. For the original, see Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, 5:475. 26. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 55, emphasis in original. 27. Ibid., 59. 28. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 73, emphasis in original. 29. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 57, emphasis in original. 30. Ibid., emphasis in original. 31. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 72. 32. Ibid., 105, emphasis added. 33. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), 57. 34. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 59, emphasis in original. 35. Ibid., 41–42. 36. Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, 5:688–702; and Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 177–94. 37. Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, 5:705–20; and Barthes, Responsibility of Forms, 157–76. 38. Barthes, Responsibility of Forms, 158. 39. Barthes, Rustle of Language, 243–44, all emphasis in original. 40. Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 80. 41. Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, 5:760–66; and Diana Knight, “Idle Thoughts: Barthes’ Vita Nova,” Nottingham French Studies 36, no. 1 (Spring 1997): esp. 94–95. 42. Roland Barthes, Incidents, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 43. “Bernard Faucon,” in Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, 5:471–74.

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44. Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, 5:299–302. 45. Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, 5:301. Avedon’s photograph Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory, 30 October 1969 is reproduced in this volume of Barthes’s complete works. 46. Ibid., 5:299. 47. Nancy, Sense of the World, 44–45. 48. The original reads, “la plus grande intensité de sens, et finalement le manqué meme du sens.” Nancy, Sense of the World; see esp. the chapter “Space: Constellations,” 42–45. 49. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), 74, emphasis added. 50. See, for instance, his essay from 1975 “On Leaving the Movie Theatre,” in which “leaving” portends an aesthetics and erotics of living, of being drawn out—bodily—by a lure, toward a place that is elsewhere, and of “taking off.” This would be to argue that the space of photography is neither absorptive (Fried) nor projective, nor a theatrical tableau vivant even, but rather a periperformative scene of withdrawal, one that is affectively shared, including in terms of a neutral mourning. Barthes, Rustle of Language. 51. As Barthes wrote in “Soirées de Paris” (in Incidents), and specifically therein, the diary entry dated September 14, 1979, the first sentence of which is, simply: “Futile Evening,” echoing the beginning of the diary entry earlier that year, dated April 25, 1979, and discussed in this chapter below. 52. “Délibération,” in Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, 5:668–81. Originally published in Tel Quel, no. 82 (Winter 1979). Translated into English as “Deliberation,” in Barthes, Rustle of Language, 359–73. 53. “Sur des photographes de Daniel Boudinet,” in Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, 5:316–29. Originally published in Créatis, no. 4 (1977). 54. The April 25, 1979, diary entry that Barthes includes in the essay “Deliberation,” and that is published by Tel Quel the following winter, is one of two diary entries made on that day. This second entry, published posthumously, in Incidents, in the chapter titled “Soirées de Paris,” provides us with a further perspective on this “futile evening.” In it, we discover that he was at Café Flore accompanied by his close friend Eric Marty, to whom “Deliberation” is dedicated (in fact, Barthes expresses this intention to Marty: “I tell him I want to dedicate to him [Marty] the text I have just written for Tel Quel, and his spontaneous pleasure touches me (the evening’s recompense).” Barthes, Incidents, 55. It is also worth noting that a second diary entry, dated September 14, 1979, that, as noted above, also begins with the words “Futile Evening,” also involves attending an art exhibition opening, in this case, of Marcelin Pleynet paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. Barthes, Incidents, 70–72. 55. Barthes, Rustle of Language, 363–64. 56. Barthes, “To the Seminar,” in Rustle of Language, 332–42 (here: 335).

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57. See their beautiful essay “Notes on Love and Photography,” in Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” ed. Geoffrey Batchen, 105–39 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 113. 58. That first entry, dated October 26, 1977, reads, “First wedding night. But first mourning night?” Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010), 3. 59. Ibid., 18. 60. Barthes, Neutral, 148. 61. Ibid., 142. 62. Barthes, Mourning Diary, 133, emphasis in original. 63. Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 74. 64. Quoted in Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 410n21. 65. This is one of the principal themes of his courses on both The Neutral and The Preparation of the Novel. For instance, in the “Novel” lecture of January 27, 1979, his notes include the following: “The Nuance, the Void: a pointed theme when it comes to writing (to ‘creating’). Never forget Mallarme’s text (declaration made to Lefébure in 1867): ‘My work was only created by elimination, and every truth established born only of the loss of an impression which, having sparkled, burnt itself out and allowed me, thanks to the timbres it emitted, to go deeper into the sensation of the Absolute Shadows.’ ” Barthes goes on to comment, “To create (poetically) is to empty, to exhaust, to deaden the shock (the sound) in favor of the Timbre.” Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 47. 66. Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 177. I have maintained the arrow symbol that Barthes used extensively in his lecture notes to indicate the logical transiting of an idea from one statement to the next. 67. Carol Mavor goes so far as to claim that Gonzalez-Torres “must have been inspired by Barthes’s use of the Boudinet picture.” While neither I nor, I assume, she has any evidence to legitimate such a claim, I remain doubtful of any causal link, indirect or otherwise. Inspiration is, as always, such an abidingly amorphous and tricky notion, not to mention “a narcissistic distortion,” as Barthes put it. Best not to entertain it. As for unmade beds, we might say of them what Barthes said of headaches: that “everyone has his own headache.” Carol Mavor, Reading Boyishly (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 137; Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 134; and Barthes, Neutral, 75. 68. Barthes, Mourning Diary, 143, emphasis in original. 69. Ibid., 220, emphasis in original. 70. Robert Pogue Harrison, “Saved by the Vision of Beatrice,” New York Review of Books, May 26, 2011, accessed June 10, 2013, http://www.nybooks.com /articles/archives/2011/may/26/saved-vision-beatrice/ ?page=2. 71. Based upon a two-part taxonomy that he derives from Mallarme, for Barthes, the Album is a textual genre of the contingent and concupiscent notation of incidents and little scenes that are affective, in counterdistinction to the Book,

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which sets out to present an architectural and premeditated image of the entire world. 72. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 73, emphasis in original. 73. Nancy, Sense of the World, 73. 74. “As a student [Sheehan] once wrote in one of my courses: ‘For me, the text outside of the secretive punctuation is my studium, and what lay within, my punctum. While Camera Lucida can only be described as a personal journey, it is within the parentheses that I find the author. They are the gaps in the text, where contradiction finds a home.’ ” Mavor, Reading Boyishly, 151. 75. Quoted in Barthes, Neutral, 223n3; originally published in Pretexte: Roland Barthes, Colloque de Cerisy, ed. Antoine Compagnon (Paris: Union Generale d’Edition, October 18, 1978), 413. 76. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 14. At a number of places in The Infinite Conversation, a text that Barthes knew very well and drew upon for his courses on The Neutral and The Preparation of the Novel, Maurice Blanchot theorizes the link between neutral meaning and parentheses. As when, in a section titled “Parentheses,” he writes, “Again neutral, if meaning operates or acts through a movement of retreat that is in some sense without end, through an exigency to become suspended and by an ironic outbidding of the épochè. . . . meaning itself can only bear meaning by placing itself in brackets, in parentheses or quotation marks.” And a bit further in the text, he goes on to say, “The neutral would thus be related to that which in the language of writing gives ‘value’ to certain words, not by bringing them forward but by placing them in quotation marks or parentheses, through the singularity of an effacement that is all the more efficacious for the fact that it does not signal itself—a subtraction subtracted and dissimulated without, however, resulting in duplication.” Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, vol. 82, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 304. 77. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 105. 78. Ibid., 106, emphasis in original. 79. This two-part enunciation is what Barthes describes as “the unheard-of identification of reality (‘that-has-been’) with truth (‘there-she-is!’); it becomes at once evidential and exclamative; it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being.” Barthes, Camera Lucida, 113, emphasis in original. 80. “Deliberation,” in Barthes, Rustle of Language, 373. 81. Ibid. 82. Barthes, Mourning Diary, 234. 83. Ibid., 233, emphasis mine. 84. Clearly my argument is completely at odds with all of those many analyses that have emphasized the maternal bond that was shared between Barthes and his mother. For a particularly hyper-maternalized reading of Barthes,

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in which a maternal protective embrace, maternal appetite (of and for the mother), and a maternal link (umbilical, apron strings, etc.) is theorized to be at once the condition of the relationship between the author and his mother, but also the condition and discourse for photography, see Mavor, Reading Boyishly, esp. chap. 4, “Pulling Ribbons from Mouths: Roland Barthes’s Umbilical Referent,” 129–61. For Mavor, the question of direction and sense in Barthes is fundamentally “toward meaning (the mother)” and thereby exactly opposite of the way in which I have attempted to theorize sense for Barthes as being, in Barthes’s own words, an exemption from meaning (and perforce, from the mother). 85. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 161. 86. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 76. 87. It is worth noting that Maurice Blanchot shares a very similar notion of photography as the prefigurative fore-scene, when, in a footnote to “Everyday Speech” in his book The Infinite Conversation, he writes, “Photography—mobile, immobile—as exposition: the bringing to the fore and setting up of the conditions for the appearance of a human presence (that of the street) that does not yet have a countenance and that one can neither approach nor fully look at face-on.” Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 456n4. 88. This is a play on Jean-Luc Nancy’s own play on the Spanish word nosotros (“we”) and the French phrase nous autres (“we others”) in one of his recent essays on photography. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Nous Autres,” in The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 100–107. 89. Barthes’s handwritten notes for the “Vita Nova,” along with their typeset transcription, are included in the published version of his lectures on The Preparation of the Novel. Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 389–406. 90. Barthes, Incidents, 38; Barthes, Neutral, 185; and Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 156. 91. Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 156. Note that Richard Howard’s translation of Barthes’s original French rendering of this poem—“(‘Assis paisiblement sans rien faire, le printemps vient et l’herbe croît d’elle-même’)”—in the final chapter of his 1977 book Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse (itself based upon a course that he taught the previous year at the École des Hautes Études), betrays Barthes’s understanding of the poem and his emphasis in 1979 on sitting as the retreating of the subject, by including the first-person pronoun, such that the Howard translation reads, “(‘As I sit calmly, without doing anything, spring comes and the grass grows of its own accord’).” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 233. 92. Barthes, Incidents, 38. 93. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 75. 94. Barthes, Lover’s Discourse, 233.

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Chapter Six 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Look of the Portrait,” in Multiple Arts: The Muses II, ed. and trans. Simon Sparks, 220–47 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 2. Felix Gonzalez-Torres created his first paper stack work, “Untitled,” in 1988. It consists of a wooden pedestal and an endless supply of copies of photocopy paper printed with a list of annular dates and corresponding events, and formatted as two lines of text at the bottom of the horizontally formatted sheets of paper. This work, then, combines the format of the paper stacks with the imageless text works that he referred to as “historical portraits.” Felix would continue to create many more paper stack works over the course of the next five years, with the final iteration being “Untitled” (Passport #II), 1993, which consists of stacks of endless copies of small bound paper booklets of twelve pages, printed with black-and-white photographs that Felix had taken of clouds and one or two birds in flight. The first work that took the form of a pile of identical individual pieces or things was “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner), which, unlike nearly all of the other such works that followed, consists not of individually wrapped pieces of candy, but of approximately ten thousand fortune cookies, in a potentially endless supply, and typically piled up in a corner of the exhibition space. The last of the candy pieces was “Untitled” (Placebo-Landscape—for Roni), first executed in 1993, and dedicated to his close friend and fellow artist Roni Horn, with whom he shared a subtle, pared-down yet affectively powerful aesthetic sensibility. 3. See, for instance, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 98. 4. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 14. 5. The recent volume Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ed. Julie Ault (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Publishers, 2006), provides a large selection of the most important texts on Gonzalez-Torres. In addition, the reader is encouraged to consult: Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995; repr., 2007); Dietmar Elger, ed., Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols.: vol. 1, Text; vol. 2, Catalogue Raisonné (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Cantz, 1997); and Tim Rollins, Susan Cahan, and Jan Avgikos, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ed. William S. Bartman (New York: A.R.T. Press, 1993). One of the most thoughtful, insightful, and beautifully written meditations on the work is the catalog essay that accompanied a recent exhibition of Felix’s work in Buenos Aires: Alan Pauls, “Souvenir,” in Algún lugar / Ningún lugar (Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, 2008). Additional texts are cited in the chapter notes and in the bibliography. 6. The work does not operate within even the most simple or basic logic and economy of the gift, given that, as theorists from Marcel Mauss to Jacques

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Derrida have noted, the gift is predicated upon an implicit obligation of reciprocity (to give a gift in return for one that one has been given), which is clearly not present in the exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres’s work. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 52. Ibid., 51. Nancy’s neologism ontotheoerotology is a portmanteau of the words ontology, theology, and erotics. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 53. This “non-destinal” thought and praxis is an issue that I return to toward the end of this chapter. Octavio Paz, “The Ready-Made,” in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph

Masheck (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 86. 12. Ibid., 87. 13. Ibid., 86. 14. From the translators’ introduction to Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 15. 15. As Gilles Deleuze noted with such succinctness, “To participate is, at best, to rank second.” Herein lies the strongest indictment against any and all of the myriad forms of contemporary art that go by such names as “arts of participation” and “relational aesthetics.” In the undeniable condescension of granting someone the possibility to participate lies the undisturbed figure (and power and authority) of the “unparticipated,” which in the context of our discussion would take the form of the artist. Drawing upon the analogy of marital betrothal, Deleuze outlines the triadic structure of participation in the following way: the unparticipated (the foundation, the father), the participated (the object aspired to, the daughter), and the participant (the pretender, the fiancé). Deleuze writes, “The foundation is that which possesses something in a primary way; it relinquishes it to be participated in, giving it to the suitor, who possesses only secondarily and insofar as he has been able to pass the test of the foundation.” Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 255. 16. Nancy, The Sense of World, 130. 17. Ibid., 195–96n138. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 133. 20. John Cage, “26 Statements re Duchamp,” in A Year from Monday (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 71. 21. The endless supply of mass-produced candy pieces and their being taken, again and again, might also recall for us the language of multiplication and repetition in Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of work and labor. However, whereas for Arendt, “Multiplication should not be confused with repetition,” given that, as she goes on to state, “Multiplication actually multiplies things

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[and hence belongs to work], whereas repetition follows the recurrent cycle of life in which its products disappear almost as fast as they have appeared” (and hence belongs to labor), we must recognize the extent to which these distinctions are blurred, and the chain of means and ends is deconstructed by the inoperative praxis that I am seeking to theorize here. See Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. and with an introduction by Peter Baehr (London: Penguin, 2000), esp. 174–75. 22. As Nancy has recently written, “Elle est multiplication de fins sans fin, plûtot que moyens ajustés à des fins: errance, distinerrance (Derrida). Elle est aussi moins ‘oeuvre’ que mise hors de soi, ex-position.” Jean-Luc Nancy, “Hors Colloque,” in Figurs du Dehors: Autour de Jean-Luc Nancy (Nantes: Éditions Nouvelles Cécile Defaut, 2012), 535. (“It is multiplication of ends without end, instead of means adjusted to ends: errance, distinerrance [Derrida]. It is also less ‘work’ than putting outside of self, ex-position” [my translation].) 23. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Confronted Community,” trans. Amanda Macdonald, Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 27. 24. Nancy, Creation of the World, 61. 25. Ibid., 51. 26. “The withdrawal of any given thus forms the heart of a thinking of creation.” Ibid., 69. Most contemporary engagements with Jean-Luc Nancy’s anti- productivist aesthetics and politics have not gone far enough in their rethinking of the author and the audience, and the “collaborative work” that can occur between them. For any theorization of aesthetic praxis that retains the language of participation, process, making, and construction thereby remains committed (implicitly or otherwise) to a modernist ideology of work, including the hope and goal of the end of work in the form of the ultimate completion of the work. 27. Ibid., 74. 28. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Being Singular Plural,” in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne O’Byrne, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 17. 29. Rollins, Cahan, and Avgikos, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 29–30. 30. I am grateful to Emilie Keldie at the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation (New York City) for her help in clarifying this point. Much of the language I use here is drawn from her own comments on these issues and questions. 31. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Heart of Things,” trans. Brian Holmes and Rodney Trumble, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 174. 32. Ibid., 175. 33. For, as Nancy states, “ ‘Some’ is anonymous, and speaks of anonymity: here it is not a question of names.” Ibid. 34. In general, this raises a number of extremely interesting and I think important questions concerning the destinal in thinking and thought, including

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in philosophy and its bearing on art and aesthetics. In speaking of destinal thought, I mean to speak of the notion that, through thought, one is headed somewhere, not only in a direction or even any number of related directions (which is not only desirable but unavoidable, and is the way in which we come to understand the very sense [sens] of thinking), but that this indeterminate some-where is converted into a destination (a horizon, a border, a limit, and an ultimate end), something other than the anonymity of some-place. Indeed, I would want to suggest that there is always the need to discern whether this destinal impulse, imperative, and demand exists in thought (one’s own or another’s), and to question the need for such positing a destiny, and whether it is not the extension of the thought but rather its preemptive cessation. Nancy speaks to this directly, when, in “The Heart of Things,” he writes, “To think this: to leave behind all our determining, identifying, destining thoughts. That is, to leave behind what ‘thinking’ usually means. But, first of all, to think this, that there is something to think, and to think the some of this thing at the heart of thought [so neither the plenitude nor synecdoche of thought]. This would be completely the opposite of ‘whatever’ thought [which I take to mean: negligent and indifferent]. This would be the thought—itself undetermined, included as it is in all thought—of what determines us to think: neither concept, nor project, but rather thought brought up short against the heart of things. Our history is concentrated, suspended, at the point where this exigency piles up [along with all of the innumerable things, as in the detritus of Benjamin’s image of the Angel of History, who is blown backward into the future by the storm called “progress,” “which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet”].” Ibid., 174–75, emphasis added. For the Benjamin quotation, see Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. I will return to these questions toward the end of this chapter, but for now we might close this note by considering that Martin Heidegger, in his discussion of the shoes represented in several of van Gogh’s paintings of such things, failed in his very own attempt to think the shoes as things. For rather than taking them in their anonymity as simply some things, and in turn as some shoes of an equally anonymous some one, he famously assigned and inscribed an identity onto them, thereby granting them a destiny “in the name of ” a peasant farm woman. 35. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 68. 36. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 57. 37. Arendt, Portable Arendt, 177.

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38. Nancy Spector, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Travelogue,” in Parkett, no. 39 (1994): 24. 39. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 70. 40. Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth” (Mourir—S’attendre aux “limites de la vérité”), trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 74. 41. What Heidegger named Ereignis. 42. Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Finite Thinking,” trans. Edward Bullard, Jonathan Derbyshire, and Simon Sparks, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 76. 43. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Unsacrificeable,” trans. Richard Stamp and Simon Sparks, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 77. 44. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Indestructible,” trans. James Gilbert-Walsh, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 79, emphasis in original. 45. Ibid., 80. 46. Ibid. 47. Here we note Nancy’s definition: “ ‘Life’ and ‘death’ represent, respectively, the absolute antecedence of self-appropriation and this appropriation’s absolute failure to pass itself on.” Nancy, Birth to Presence, 184. 48. J. M. Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year,” New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007. 49. Ault, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 112. 50. Nancy, “Unsacrificeable,” 77, emphasis in original. 51. Nancy, “Indestructible,” 85–86. 52. Ibid., 86. 53. Nancy, Creation of the World, 54. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. It is in this way that at one point Nancy defines art as distinct from both a poiesis and a praxis, when he writes, “What art does is to please: and so it is neither a poiesis nor a praxis, but another kind of ‘doing’ altogether that mixes together with both of the other kinds an aesthesis and its double entelechy.” Nancy, Sense of the World, 134, emphasis in original. 57. Karl Marx, Outline of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie), trans. Martin Nicolaus (1857; repr., New York: Penguin, 1973), 111. 58. Nancy, Sense of the World, 132. 59. Roland Barthes, “Lecture,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 15, emphasis in original. 60. Ibid. 61. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. and with an introduction by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 264.

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62. Nancy, Muses, 54–55. 63. Marx, Grundrisse, 91. The phrase “last finish” was in English in the original German publication. 64. Nancy, Muses, 55. 65. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, trans. Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 17. 66. Ibid., 16. 67. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 277. 68. Ibid. 69. Ault, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 160. 70. Ibid. 71. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Res ipsa et ultima,” trans. Steven Miller, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 318. 72. For the original source of the Heidegger quotation, see Martin Heidegger, “Art and Space,” in The Heidegger Reader, ed. and with introduction by Günter Figal, trans. Jerome Veith (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 308.

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Index

abandonment, 54–56; of being, 56, 94, 96–97, 215n15; erasure, 28, 32; Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 194, 196; iden­tity, 45; intrusion, 54; Psyche, 84–85; scene of, 148; of sense, 193; voice of, 96 abjection, 53, 57, 216n25 aesthesis, 143, 197–98, 235n56 affective, 14, 43, 136, 165, 227n50; bond, 38, 138, 158–59, 166; equivalence, 53; erotic, 137, 141, 145; force, 134, 140–44, 167–68; individualization, 60; negative, 132; repugnance, 53; sociality, 137; spacing, 141, 145, 159; temporality, 134, 140–41, 158; thing, 60 Agamben, Giorgio, 189–90 already-unmade: aesthetics, 5–6, 176, 179, 182–83, 195, 207; creation, 185; existence, 198, 200; photography, 13, 160; readymade, 14, 30, 41, 48, 160; scene, 11, 40, 73, 122; spacing, 190, 206; work, 175, 179, 207 anatomy, 110–11, 114; lesson, 99, 101, 109, 111–12 Anatomy of Hell, The (Breillat), 13, 73, 99–100, 112–13 anonymity, 14, 46, 110, 183, 187, 204, 233n33, 234n34 anonymous, 25, 38, 110, 114; name/ naming, 10, 66; object, 177–78, 181; scene, 8; someone, 5, 181, 184, 188, 233n33, 234n34

aporetic, 66, 87, 90, 93, 114, 119, 168, 206; aesthetics, 121; Barthes, Roland, 140, 150, 153, 156–58, 166; image, 29; so­ ciality, 112; spacing, 104–5, 137, 165, 206; techniques, 45; writing, 156–57, 166, 168 aporia: of decision, 206; of reading, 19, 168; spacing of, 29, 87, 104, 137 archi-trace, 30, 32, 43 Arendt, Hannah, 190, 232n21 Aristotle, 7, 41; Peri Psuches, 8, 74–75, 83–84; Poetics, 6, 8 ars, 6, 190 art’s work, 25, 30, 46, 49, 68, 111 Askay, Richard, 77, 218n11 asleep, 74–75, 94–95, 99, 104 audience, 14, 101, 175–78, 181, 188, 206, 233n26 Avedon, Richard, 148–50; Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory, 149, 149–151 Barthes, Roland, 73, 127–72; Acolouthia, 136–37, 170; blind field, 142–45, 154; butterflies, 142–43, 151; Cage, John, 225n3; Cerisy-la-Salle, 134–35, 155, 163; cruising, 132–33, 143, 152–53, 169; death, 127, 139, 149; decisive event, 168–70; erotic, 137, 141–47, 149; ex­ emption of meaning, 63, 129, 131, 136, 139–40, 142, 157, 161, 164, 167–68; futile, 132, 134, 152–53; idleness, 147,

Barthes, Roland (cont.) 169–70, 172; Morocco, 168–169, 171, 225n6; mother, 127, 133, 139, 152–53, 155–61, 169, 172, 199, 229n84; mourning, 132–33, 135, 156; neuter, 61–64; neutral, 134–35, 139, 170, 225n3; The Neutral (course), 132–34, 147, 155, 157– 58, 168–69; neutral mourning, 14, 127, 134, 138–39, 157, 172; notation, 127, 132, 134, 153, 158, 164–65, 228n71; pornographic, 143, 145; The Preparation of the Novel (course), 127, 132, 138, 148, 158, 170; punctum, 134, 138, 140–45, 163, 167; reading, 128, 225n6; sitting, 170–71, 230n91; studium, 134, 142, 145; Vita Nova, 134, 147, 155–56, 158, 162, 168–71; Winter Garden photo­ graph, 161–66, 169, 171; Zenrin poem, 170, 230n91. See also image-repertoire; Moroccan child; perigraphic —publications: La chambre claire, 148; “The Death of the Author,” 35; “Deliberation,” 136, 152–53, 155, 227n54; The Empire of Signs, 134, 138; Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse, 132, 165, 172, 230n91; “The Image,” 134, 137, 155, 163; “L’Imaginaire,” 134, 143, 165; Incidents, 133, 148, 155, 170; Mourning Diary, 156–57, 161, 165–66, 169; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 62, 131, 134, 143, 164–65; Writing Degree Zero, 10, 50, 62, 131; “Writing Reading,” 128–29. See also Camera Lucida (Barthes) Bataille, Georges, 12, 92, 147, 197 Bazin, Andre, 142 bed, 11, 100, 113, 116, 159–60; unmade, 10–13, 73, 98, 113, 117–18, 122, 148, 164. See also Faucon, Bernard; GonzalezTorres, Felix: unmade bed bedroom, 73, 103, 116, 148; Anatomy of Hell, 99, 113; Camera Lucida, 160; Malady of Death, 108. See also Faucon, Bernard; Gonzalez-Torres, Felix: unmade bed � � � � �   �  246

being-together, 2, 80, 95, 124; finitude, 13; intrusion, 66; scene of, 3, 9, 96; sense of, 12, 106, 110; spacing of, 5, 40, 96, 106, 112. See also under Nancy, Jean-Luc Benjamin, Walter, 234n34 Bersani, Leo, 38 betray, 58; drawing, 26 betrayal, 37, 46, 49, 60, 66–67; death, 59–60; identity, 45; subjectivity, 43 between-us, 2; nakedness, 73, 96–99 Blanchot, Maurice, 3, 15, 56, 66, 177; ambiguity, 200; immediate, 56; The Infinite Conversation, 15, 63; The Instant of My Death, 57–60; The Madness of the Day, 216n23; The Malady of Death, 107, 109, 222n25, 223n28; neuter/neutral, 61–64, 229n76; The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, 10, 50, 60, 63, 98, 101; photography, 230n87; resurrection, 216n22; Thomas the Obscure, 216n22. See also worklessness Blue Eyes, Black Hair (Duras), 114. See also Duras, Marguerite Boudinet, Daniel, 73; The Bright Room, pl. 3; Polaroid, 152, 160, 165 Breillat, Catherine, 101, 109; The Anatomy of Hell, 13, 73, 99–100, 112–13; Pornocracy, 112 Butler, Judith, 218n5 Cage, John, 212n26; Barthes, Roland, 225n3; Duchamp, Marcel, 183–84; Rauschenberg, Robert, 4, 25, 32, 37, 124, 159 Calle, Sophie, 12 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 14, 127–72; frontispiece, 152, 160, 164; zerodegree writing, 132. See also Barthes, Roland; palinode child, 198–200; play, 118, 122, 199; toy, 21–22, 122. See also Moroccan child Coetzee, J. M., 194 coexistence, 1–3, 10, 31, 46, 55, 66, 79– 80, 86–100, 141, 191–93, 207 coexposure, 3, 87, 98, 121, 154

collaboration, 33–34, 45, 49, 59, 155, 216n18; traitorous, 25, 37–39, 43–46, 49–50, 58–59, 65, 67 collaborative, 39–40, 233n26 collaborator, 6, 25, 37, 42, 46 commodity, 3, 175, 177, 179, 189, 206, 211n26 communion, 182, 189 community, 3, 14, 38, 46–47, 81–83, 124, 129, 184, 188, 202, 220n40; figure of, 5, 137, 168; politics, 25, 40. See also under unbecoming corpse, 81, 99–100, 110, 135 countersignature, 67–68, 155. See also signature creation, 23, 38, 78, 150, 182, 185–86, 189, 198, 233n26 creation ex nihilo, 185, 188–89, 197–98 Crowley, Martin, 223n28 Dante: Commedia, 161–62; Vita Nuova, 158, 161–62, 170 Dasein, 12, 76–78, 116. See also Heidegger, Martin Dean, Tim, 118 death, 3–4, 8, 12–14, 33, 37, 57–60, 74, 85–89, 95, 100–101, 104–18, 128–29, 133–40, 149, 156, 159–71, 190–95, 200–201, 207 death drive, 104, 118 Debord, Guy, 211n26 de Kooning, Willem, 9, 24, 32, 36, 45, 48–49, 67, 155, 159, 183; drawing, 4, 26, 33–38 Deleuze, Gilles, 43, 124, 232n15 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 36, 141, 202; community, 83; ellipsis, 219n25; erasure, 212n23; Foucault, Michel, 117–18; Freud, Sigmund, 9, 21, 23–24, 28; Genet, Jean, 67, 214n3; gift, 232n6; Hegel, 81; Heidegger, Martin, 12, 116; invitation, 174–76; Nancy, Jean-Luc, 74, 201–202, 218n7; paper, 30–32, 36; Ponge, 79–80; secret, 191; theatrical, 210n15. See also différance � � � � �   �  247

Descartes, Rene, 12, 75, 86–87, 217n3, 220n40 désoeuvrement. See worklessness destinal, 233n34 Devisch, Ignaas, 210n17 différance, 36, 213n30, 221n50 drawing: de Kooning, 4, 26, 34, 37; erasing/erasure, 26–27, 31–38, 42–44; exemption from meaning, 129; figurative, 10; forgetting, 33; invisible, 44; withdrawing, 9, 28, 183; work of, 30; and writing, 23–24, 27–28, 44. See also Erased de Kooning Drawing (Rauschenberg); erasing; scene (of ): drawing Duchamp, Marcel, 180, 197; Cage, John, 183; L.H.O.O.Q., 183; readymade, 178, 213n32; Rembrandt, 48; Tu m’, 40–42, 213n32 Duchampian paradigm, 14, 177–78 Duras, Marguerite: Blue Eyes, Black Hair, 114; The Malady of Death, 13, 73, 100–104, 106, 112–13 ellipsis, 5, 52, 80–83, 87–88, 97, 163, 166; Barthes, Roland, 224n1; Derrida, Jacques, 219n25; Nancy, Jean-Luc, 184–85 end-pleasure, 14, 117, 119–20 Epoche, 136 Erased de Kooning Drawing (Rauschenberg), 9–11, 19, 20, 24–25, 30–35, 38, 42–50, 123, 155, 183–84 erasing, 8–10, 23–24, 30, 32, 34–38, 42–43, 48 erasure, 3–4, 10, 19, 22, 26, 28–35, 42, 106, 116, 199; Barthes, Roland, 159, 167; drawing, 183; Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 190; readymade, 178; share, 155; writing of, 153, 212n23. See also Erased de Kooning Drawing (Rauschen­ berg); under-erasure erotic, 3, 43–45, 49, 60, 65, 137, 141–51, 216n25, 227n50, 232n8 Eucharist, 182

exposure, 28–29, 43, 61, 86, 106, 113, 115, 221n55, 223n28; body, 75, 78–79, 83, 88–89, 117, 121; finitude, 4, 13, 29, 44, 59, 92, 95, 98, 106, 111, 128, 163, 183, 190, 195–96, 210n14; freedom, 73; infinitely finite, 150; to the outside, 3, 7–13, 28, 54, 82, 95, 102, 105, 110–11, 183; shared, 25–26, 44–45, 54, 61, 65, 76, 81, 87, 90, 95, 98, 100–101, 111, 113, 116, 129, 137, 143, 163, 175, 181, 190, 196. See also coexposure; scene (of ): exposure ex-scription, 185 faith, 134; betrayal, 59; pornographic, 101 far niente, 170 Faucon, Bernard, 73, 138, 148; First Room of Love, pl. 2; Thirteenth Room of Love, pl. 1 figuration, 6–8, 106, 210n13; and identification, 124, 129; nude, 147 figure: of artist, 176; of being-together, 5–8, 114, 124, 137, 188; death, 109, 135; nude, 147; scene, 6, 124; withdrawal of, 160, 167–68 finitude, 3, 115, 133, 166; anteriority of, 134; being-together, 13; body, 99–100, 109; death, 57, 59; eve of, 139, 160; existence, 4, 13, 29, 96; existential, 191–92; exposure to, 11, 13, 44, 73, 92, 95, 98, 101, 111–12, 128, 159, 163, 183; image, 29; incompletion, 39; infinite, 13, 14, 29, 60, 65, 95–96, 100, 105–6, 150–51, 159, 179; intrusion, 58, 60, 65, 95; of knowing, 95; partaking in, 184, 206–7; shared, 154; withdrawal, 185 flatbed picture plane, 11 fore-pleasure, 89, 101, 117–22, 160 fore-scene, 8–9, 40, 42, 44, 89, 160; beingtogether, 9; drawing, 28, 30; forepleasure, 101, 117–22; photography, 168, 230n87; psychoanalysis, 91; writing, 158–60, 213n38 Foucault, Michel, 68, 117–18, 151 frayage, 23, 199 � � � � �   �  248

Freud, Sigmund, 8–9, 12–13, 23, 198, 224n57; body of Psyche, 74–75, 78–79, 84, 91, 93, 104, 110; death drive, 118; fore-pleasure, 122; Heidegger, Martin, 219n20; sexuality, 119–20. See also Psyche (body of ) —publications: “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” 118, 122; Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 24; “A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad,” 21–22, 31, 36, 122, 199; Postscript to an Autobiographical Study, 91; Project for a Scientific Psychology, 21, 24; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 118 Fried, Michael, 167, 227n50 Genet, Jean, 9–10, 37, 43–44, 216n25; Funeral Rites, 37, 43, 45, 50; neuter, 64; “Rembrandt” essay, 9, 48–51, 57, 60–61, 64, 215n5; writing, 213n38 gesture: aesthetic, 175–78, 182; body, 147, 154; creation, 189; economy of, 197; ellipsis, 185; erotic, 145–46; negligence, 146; offering, 178, 181, 199– 200; partaking, 178, 181, 200; separated, 183, 200; shared-separation, 181, 190; victory, 38; workless, 178 Giacometti, Alberto, 44–45 gift, 9, 15, 31, 89, 149, 162, 174–76, 189, 198, 206, 231–32n6; of death, 182, 191–92; sacrificial, 182 Gille, Didier, 13 God, 185–86 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 13–14, 173–207, 224n63; offering, 192, 197; paper stack, 231n2; unmade bed, 73, 123–24, 148, 160, 228n67; “Untitled,” 204–5; “Untitled” (Passport), 202–3; “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), pl. 4, 173; “Untitled” (The End), 204 Greenberg, Clement, 11, 30 Guattari, Felix, 124 haiku, 132, 138, 158; and photography, 138

Haver, William: art’s work, 25, 46; Genet, Jean, 49, 52, 55, 57, 214n2, 216n25 heap: Barthes, Roland, 147–49, 150, 171; Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 173 Hegel, 81, 84, 92, 185 Heidegger, Martin: being-there, 76–78, 218n12; being-toward-death, 95, 105, 191; being-with, 41, 79; body, 75–79, 84, 218n11, 218n13; care, 195; decision, 1; Freud, Sigmund, 219n20; image, 30; Mitsein/Mitdasein, 79–80; peasant shoes, 234n34; Sartre, Jean-Paul, 218n11; sexuality, 116; spatiality, 12, 76; things, 206; withdrawing, 27–28. See also Dasein; Mitsein/Mitdasein; Zollikon Seminars identification, 5, 7–8, 20, 66, 91, 114, 129, 168 image-repertoire, 129, 136, 157, 164, 167, 172. See also Barthes, Roland immediacy/immediate, 56–57, 93 in-finishing, 39, 59, 85, 174, 182 inoperative, 6, 42–43, 69; offering, 181; praxis, 173, 176, 185, 197–98, 207, 233n21; work, 179 intimacy, 27–29, 31, 37, 93, 114, 202, 218n6, 223n28; death, 58–59; immediate, 57; intrusion, 57, 66; life, 13, 59, 109; nothing, 99; shared-separation, 29, 109 intruder, 5, 57, 59–60, 66–68, 190 intrusion, 3, 8, 13, 49–69, 111, 116; being-together, 66; force, 9–10, 49– 50, 54–63, 66, 118, 191–92, 194; Genet, Jean, 215n5; scene of, 49–50, 66–67; temporality, 215n15; thought, 65 invitation, 5, 10, 174–76, 181, 188, 190 Johns, Jasper, 183–84 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 12, 30, 36, 55, 91–92, 139, 198 Knight, Diana, 148 Kofman, Sarah, 99, 109–12 � � � � �   �  249

Kooning, Willem de, 9, 24, 32, 36, 45, 48–49, 67, 155, 159, 183; drawing, 4, 26, 33–38 Krauss, Rosalind, 11–12, 35 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 6, 8, 91, 100, 210n14, 219n20 Ma, 139, 153 Malabou, Catherine, 210n14 Malady of Death, The (Duras), 13, 73, 100–104, 106, 112–14. See also Blanchot, Maurice: The Malady of Death; Duras, Marguerite Mapplethorpe, Robert: Self-Portrait, 143, 144, 145–46, 151–55 Marx, Karl, 185, 198–200 Mitsein/Mitdasein, 79–80. See also Heidegger, Martin Moroccan child, 147–48, 169–71 Mystic Writing Pad, 21–22, 31, 36, 122, 159, 199 Nancy, Jean-Luc: abandonment, 215n15; Barthes, Roland, 130–131; beingtogether, 5, 7, 106, 114, 122, 130; between-us, 3; body, 84–85, 99, 218n13, 220n33; body as stage, 7, 11, 100; compearance, 54, 215n13; creation, 185–86, 233n26; death, 105, 118; Der­ rida, 201–2; Descartes, 217n3, 220n40; desire, 175–76; distinct image, 28–30; ellipsis/elliptical, 81, 83; figure and figuration, 6–7, 114, 210n14; freedom, 207, 218n6; Freud, 8, 78, 86, 90, 199, 224n57; gift, 175–76; Heidegger, 76– 79; image, 123, 189; immediacy, 85, 94; infinite finitude, 13; inoperative praxis, 6; Marx, Karl, 198; “mute music,” 39–42; neuter, 64; nonknowledge, 13; offering, 176, 188; photography, 230n88; portrait, 173; presentation, 6, 8; Psyche, 12, 74–75, 84, 88, 90, 94, 108, 110, 219n25; psy­ choanalysis, 221n51; resurrection,

Nancy, Jean-Luc (cont.) 154; retreat, 5; scene, 6–7, 100; seduction, 121–22; sense of existence, 2, 5, 105, 131; sideration, 150; singularity, 215n13; time of things, 14, 87, 206 —publications: “Blanchot’s Resurrection,” 59, 64; Corpus, 74–75, 79, 88, 90; “The Inoperative Community,” 184; “The Intruder,” 57; The Sense of the World, 130 neuter, 61–64. See also under Barthes, Roland; Blanchot, Maurice; Nancy, Jean-Luc neutral, 3, 5, 9, 14–15, 65, 116; image, 137; mourning, 5, 14, 127, 134, 138– 139, 157, 172, 227n50; sociality, 50; writing, 62. See also under Barthes, Roland; Blanchot, Maurice neutrality, 61–64, 116–17 Newman, Barnett, 25, 31 noeme: of photography, 138, 140, 159, 163, 165 non-knowledge, 12–13, 82, 84, 90–96, 99, 101, 107–8, 115, 191 offering, 3, 5, 9, 89, 149, 175–76, 197–200, 207; art, 182, 188, 198; finitude, 181; Gonzalez-Torres, 175–82, 188, 190, 192, 197–200; image, 29. See also under gesture palindrome, 19, 36, 45, 65, 155 palinode, 140, 151–56, 165 paper: blank sheet, 9, 14, 42; Genet, Jean, 213n38; Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 174, 178, 180, 190, 194, 202–3; sheet of, 4, 9–10, 19, 21–24, 30–32, 35, 42–46, 73 parentheses, 63–64, 81–83; Barthes, Roland, 142, 154, 162–68, 170, 224n1, 229n74; Blanchot, Maurice, 229n76; empty, 220n27 partager, 1, 31, 36, 83, 94, 130. See also partaking; shared-separation partaking, 9, 13–14, 19, 92, 97; alreadyunmade, 175, 179; decision, 65; � � � � �   �  250

expenditure, 195; finitude, 181, 184, 192, 207; gesture, 178; the part, 66; sense of existence, 175; space, 94, 206; withdrawal, 179, 181 partes extra partes, 31, 43, 95, 179, 187, 220n40; extra, 3, 54, 88, 189; finitude, 207; gesture, 189; Psyche, 92; some, 46, 86, 95 participation, 175, 232n15 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 133 passerby, 190 Paz, Octavio, 177–78 performative, 67, 99, 114; reading, 128, 167; spacing, 128, 144; stage, 143. See also writing perigraphic, 14, 128–29, 140, 224n1; reading, 130; writing, 130, 137 peri-performative: exposure, 142; scene, 103, 109, 115, 224–25n1, 227n50; Sedgwick, 8, 103–4, 124; spacing, 67, 90, 97, 101–3, 127–28, 143; speech-act, 87 peri-scopic, 129, 137 peri-space (and peri-spacing/perispatiality), 137; bodies, 84, 91, 94, 96, 105, 107, 111, 154; coexistence, 94, 96; image, 150; non-knowledge, 115; Psyche, 93 photography, 8, 13–14, 127–32, 138–52, 158–69 poiesis, 6, 182, 189, 235n56 poietic, 6, 177–78, 185 Ponge, Francis, 79–80 praxis: aesthetic/artistic, 6, 11, 49, 50, 97, 178–81, 235n56; coexistence, 1, 193; decision, 2; of erasure, 122; of ex-scription, 185; fantasy, 144; gesture, 189; inoperative, 6, 9, 173, 185, 197–98, 200, 207, 233n21; intrusion, 56; mise-en-scène, 23; retreat, 19; sense, 5, 150; social, 62–63; standing, 4; withdrawal, 19; workless, 177 preparation, 4–5, 32; of scene of writing, 158–60, 168 presentation, 13, 30, 43–45, 69, 178, 182; decision, 15, 175; image, 29–30, 33;

retreat, 68, 173; scene, 2, 6, 8, 13, 40, 73, 97, 102, 111, 137, 143, 210n14; with­ drawal, 68, 128, 179; writing, 49, 64, 82, 128 primal scene, 4, 24, 89, 117, 121–22 Psyche (body of ), 73–74, 81, 84–85, 88–93–96, 103–4, 110, 115, 121 punctum, 134, 138, 140–45, 163, 167, 229n74 queer theory, 2, 114 Rancière, Jacques, 20, 46, 81–82, 220n27 Rauschenberg, Robert, 19–50, 67, 155, 159, 183, 197; and Cage, John, 4, 25, 32, 124, 183; Steinberg, Leo, 11, 26. See also Erased de Kooning Drawing (Rauschenberg) readymade, 6, 9, 14, 30, 41, 48, 185, 189, 198; Duchamp, Marcel, 177–78, 213n32; Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 173–75, 184, 194, 206; ground, 185; photography, 160; places, 73 relational aesthetics, 232n15 remainder, 35, 48, 67–68 Rembrandt, 9, 48–51, 57, 69, 99; The Anatomy Lesson, 109, 111–12. See also Kofman, Sarah res cogitans, 5, 77, 86–87, 89 res extensa, 5, 77, 86–87 retreating: aesthetics, 5–6, 179; portrait, 173; retracing, 5–7, 11, 23, 118, 153, 168, 199; sense, 140, 167, 172; sound, 39; subject, 230n91; writing, 132, 159, 168 Risset, Jacqueline, 201–2 Rosen, Andrea, 202 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 170 sacrifice, 9, 29, 192, 197 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 75, 134, 218n11 satori, 139–40, 168 scene (of ): around, 88; being-together, 3, 9; cruel and exact knowledge, 99; decision, 67, 183, 189; drawing, 8–10, 21, 24, 42–43; erasing/erasure, 4, 8–11, � � � � �   �  251

21, 24, 28, 42, 44, 46; ethics, 61, 101, 124; exposure, 8, 11, 14, 90, 111, 116–17, 128–29, 159; finitude, 181; friendship, 202; intrusion, 67; naked sharing, 13, 101; non-knowledge, 101, 103–4, 107; path-breaking, 49; photography, 160; presentation, 210n14; retreat, 173; seduction, 116, 121; sex/sexuality, 4, 12, 101; shared-separation, 2, 114, 129–30; time of, 6, 13, 15, 87, 207; withdrawal/withdrawing, 8, 11, 28, 123, 227n50; the world, 23, 192; writing, 9, 21, 23–24, 32, 37, 67, 160. See also fore-scene Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 8, 82, 101 sense: being-together, 2, 7, 12, 106, 110, 116, 131, 193, 196; of equivalence, 52– 53, 61, 64; exemption from, 131, 150, 167; of existence, 1–2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 97, 105–6, 129, 175, 185, 189, 191–93, 198; future, 133, 140–41; of loss, 158–60, 173, 199; partake in, 13, 31, 189; photography, 163, 165–166, 168; pleasure, 98, 120, 198, 207; praxis, 5, 150–51; self-separated, 46, 117, 129–31, 172, 193, 200; shared, 3, 14, 115, 130–31, 190, 194, 201; of things, 130, 186 sex, 3, 12, 102, 110, 114, 116 sexual: acts, 24, 37, 119–20; aesthetics, 11; difference, 112, 116–17, 121; iden­ tity, 46, 65, 99, 101, 113–14, 121; relation, 100; tension, 119–20 sexuality, 4, 114, 116, 119, 152 shared-separation: gesture of, 181, 190; intimacy of, 29; scene of, 2; of silence and sound, 39; sociality of, 25; spacing of, 2, 11, 15, 28, 41, 49, 168. See also under scene (of) sheet of paper. See under paper signature, 10, 19, 34–35, 38, 66–67, 81, 155, 164; Duchamp, Marcel, 177. See also countersignature silence, 25, 39, 115 sleep/sleeping, 84, 104, 107, 109, 113–14, 148

Socrates, 137, 170 Sorial, Sarah, 77, 218n13 souvenir, 174–75, 189, 231n5 Spivak, Gayatri, 99 Steinberg, Leo, 11, 26, 34 Stengers, Isabelle, 13 striptease, 146–147 substance, 3, 8, 13, 68, 77, 86, 88, 114, 120, 159, 162, 188–89; of  beingtogether, 5, 7, 114, 122, 130–31, 168, 196; communal, 175, 182, 190, 197, 206; extra, 97; remainder, 67; sacrificial, 15; separation, 54, 129 technē, 6, 43, 190 traitor, 37, 45, 58 traitorous. See under collaboration Twombly, Cy, 146 unbecoming, 6, 9, 14, 31, 37, 166, 207, 209n13; community, 25, 68, 73, 82, 93; existence, 200; ontology, 86; photography, 160; pleasure, 121; work of art, 195 under-erasure, 5, 32 unmade. See under bed

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unworking, 30–31 Utsuroi, 139, 160 vestige, 7, 67, 189; art, 181–82 Wahl, François, 132 Warhol, Andy, 149, 151 workless, 9, 11, 170, 177–78, 184 worklessness, 6, 27, 48, 59, 82; Du­ champ, Marcel, 177–78; GonzalezTorres, Felix, 181, 195 writing, 7, 23, 27, 35, 64–66; colorless, 62; and drawing, 21, 27–28, 42–44; erasing, 21–23, 153; fore-scene, 213n38; neutral, 62; originary, 9, 30–31; performative, 128, 167; and reading, 36, 167; spacing of, 153, 159; two-handed, 22–23, 50. See also scene (of ); zerodegree Wunderblock. See Mystic Writing Pad Wu-shi, 139 Zen Buddhism, 138, 159, 170 zero-degree: drawing, 50, 65; notation, 132; sociality, 50, 65; writing, 132, 155 Zollikon Seminars, 77, 218n11