P.-P.J.: In The Truth of Democracy,1 you indicate that one has to have the expectation that political power knows how to limit itself, that it no longer assumes that the community is a totality, and that it creates spheres in which the heterogeneity of singulars can unfold. You name these spheres: “thought,” “desire,” “art,” and so on. I’d like to ask you a question about the situation of art today, in which “today” designates, in your own words, “a time in which the notion of art is no longer interconnected with the notion of cosmos or the notion of polis.” In your view, then, what appears in what we sometimes call the crisis of art?
J.-L.N.: I do think that the crisis of art displays the decomposition, if not the rotting or certain disrepair or disassembling of something that was held to be a cosmic and cosmetic2 order until our time, or perhaps until the so-called “world” wars—though geographically they were not exactly that. This good and beautiful order, as it was thought about from the perspective of Europe or the United States, usually presented itself in the form of the nation-state. Besides, at the time of World War I, this order of the City, which could be monarchical while also already taking on a republican or democratic form, began to crumble. Here we can’t avoid returning to Hegel, to whom one always attributes the phrase that suggests art is dead or over, but whose actual words are that art is “a thing of the past.” With this expression, Hegel wanted to say that art as a representation of the truth, as the bearer of the representation of a general layout, was over, and I think he was spot on.
As a result, he made it possible and necessary to remove art from this function of representing a cosmetic cosmic; this, one could say, is the positive aspect of Hegel’s legacy. As a result, art began to grasp itself in a stripped down, essential fashion, in something very simple or fundamental: what’s at stake in art initially is not transmitting the representation of a world or an order (natural, social, and so on); art consists of the gesture of taking sensation to a particular intensity. What is music but the intensification and the selection of sound in noise? I’m borrowing this idea of “intensification” from André Schaeffner—in his Origine des instruments de musique [Origin of Musical Instruments],3 and in this intensification of the sensible, I tend to see the mark of desire, not in order to represent a world, but to bring out an order whose sense is close to “form” here (one “brings out a form”), a term that also indicates beauty in Latin (formosus signifies “beautiful”).
As for the negative aspect, in the almost complete absence of cosmic or political order that could be represented, the situation of art today is one in which art finds itself confronted by the complete absence of beauty, that is, what points out or indicates beauty. On the contrary, art can claim ugliness, horror, or the ridiculous. I find the development of Mickey, or rabbits with big ears installed in Versailles by Jeff Koons, extremely striking in contemporary art, as well as the development of horror, disgust, and self-mutilation by David Nebreda or, perhaps a little less violently, in the works of Orlan. All of this is a deliberate resort to what can only appear as the opposite of a beautiful form because for us, in any case, the beautiful is somehow always inseparable from what we’ve been habituated into calling beautiful—a certain canon, certain proportions, certain harmonies. Speaking of which, it’s interesting that all of these forms of contemporary art, whether they are plastic or musical, are reserved for a much smaller audience than the audience who goes to retrospectives of more classical art: Monet, Matisse, and Artemisia are the most visited exhibitions in Paris at the moment. There are certainly people at the documenta in Kassel or the Venice Biennial because they’re international exhibitions, but it’s not possible to compare this phenomenon to an exhibition in which visitors, by their number, bear witness to a certain nostalgia for an art in which one recognizes the idea of a beautiful form. This is the “negative” aspect of what comes after Hegel …
P.-P.J.: When you speak about intensification concerning sounds, is it analogous to what you call “the pleasure in drawing”?4
J.-L.N.: Yes, very much so. The “pleasure in drawing” also consists of isolating and intensifying the completely natural gesture of leaving a trace. Maurice Blanchot’s text on the origin of art says it admirably well: One either sees the traces of the bear on the walls of the cave, or it’s the human being itself who leaves a trace of its dirty fingers, or it’s the immaterial trace of smashing flint into pieces, which generates the pure pleasure of smashing something into pieces. Nevertheless, for me, it’s preferable to say all of this in terms of Kant: “Fine art is the art of genius,”5 and he specifies: “Genius draws from the very source of nature.”6 Let’s say it like this, even though this isn’t a self-evident thought. It’s like another creation, a recreation of the world and when there isn’t actually a creator or organizer of the entire world anymore, then this gesture becomes detached for itself, but this gesture has always been the gesture of art, of opening the possibility of an ordering. And I think that one can say that the human being is the one who has to bring out a world, both as a form and as sense, or as language.
P.-P.J.: The form we’re speaking about is the form one gives to matter, to a sound. The word “form” is also a possible translation of Plato’s “idea.”
J.-L.N.: Yes, that’s right.
P.-P.J.: What underlies this is perhaps a hierarchy or a distinction in any case between intelligible and sensible forms.
J.-L.N.: We should be wary of how we’re accustomed to interpreting Plato because the way we read this author is always a little biased and filtered through Neo-Platonism, Christianity, and so on, so that when we speak of “forms”—while being wary of the expression “intelligible form,” since “intelligible,” at least, is not a word from Plato—we find ourselves referred back to some sort of ethereal realm, whereas if the ideas are “forms,” it also means that they are sensible. This is why I was just speaking about sensation and the sensible. But later I was planning to try and displace, or perhaps nullify, the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible in order to say that the gesture of art consists in a “form,” let’s say a mode of intelligibility, which is not conceptual, abstract, or logical (however one wants to put it). Modern art is a way of referring to this elementary gesture of intensification—a very sensible approach in two areas, painting and music. Contemporary art—let’s say art since the beginning of the twentieth century—did go on to promote color considerably to the point of creating monochromatic paintings, or at least abstract paintings with one or a few colors: I’m thinking about Rothko, Barnett Newman, Twombly, and so many others. One finds something that had never been done in this, or at least made visible as such in art: to do color for color’s sake, to prompt colors to play with one another, to produce a color for its own value. Yves Klein, for example, fabricated his own blue.
P.-P.J.: He even patented its formula.
J.-L.N.: It is, in fact, a very singular blue. The great difficulty with colors is that one can hardly talk about them with precision; it’s a blue that’s on the side of ultramarine, but with its own tonality. So on the side of color, it’s as if we’d come to grasp an elementary, sensible quality somehow and to make it have a value in itself. A big part of contemporary music—since twelve-tone music, serial music, and then concrete music, and electronic music in between—consists, so to speak, in grasping the birth of sounds, making sound be heard for itself as it is being produced. One might think of Pierre Henry’s “Variations for a Door and a Sigh”—which inspired a choreography by Maurice Béjart in 1965 and one by George Balanchine in 1974—but also of Luigi Nono or György Ligeti. The same phenomenon could be observed in the area of poetry. Antonin Artaud’s “glossolalia” revealed more than the rage, destructive furor, and self-regenerating fury that were part of his madness. It’s a gesture that could probably only take place today: the grasping of language as it’s being born.
P.-P.J.: I was also thinking, in a less dramatic and less pathetic sort of way, about the experience of “lettrism” initiated by the Romanian-born writer Isidore Isou …
J.-L.N.: As well as Ghérasim Luca, who has the same background …
P.-P.J.: Deleuze liked him and cited him frequently.
J.-L.N.: Yes, I like him a lot, too, even if his case is a bit different: “I love you not, I love you not, I love you, no …, I love you …” [“Je t’aime pas, je t’aime pas, je t’aime pass, je t’aime passio …”],7 as if he were plucking a daisy backwards; it’s both a stammering that, rather than referring to being completely in love, whether happily or unhappily, refers to the inherent difficulty in the declaration of love itself, and to the babbling of the child who is not searching for their words like when we search for the appropriate term, but rather who is trying to access the word itself. One could find a large amount of evidence of this kind of regrasping of the isolation and identification of a sensible order. In the case of language, it has to do with regrasping a sensible order in which language responds to these words of Paul Valéry: “In poetry, meaning begs for sound.” In the end, I wanted to extend this phrase of Valéry to all of art: it’s always the case that sense, the sense of the world, the sense that we’re in charge of, and which gives us concern and unrest, begs for the sensible in general.
P.-P.J.: What you said about sense and the sensible reminds me of something you said about our current situation: We won’t be able to hold on for much longer to the “evident” division between the intellectual and the emotional, between the reasonable [sensé] and the sensible, the sensual, etc. These are distinctions that don’t seem relevant anymore, or at least they’re being called into question.8
J.-L.N.: Absolutely. And these distinctions create a division within what was, or at least what seems to us to have been, the condition of an ancient, archaic person, for whom the intellectual understanding of the world, life, relationships, and so on was unable to be detached from a number of sensible signs and interactions. Of course, one can say that the keystone of such a world was for a long time human or animal sacrifice, and even the sacrifice of the first fruits of the harvest, and that we have become completely foreign to this world. But our distance from this without a possibility of returning to it makes the following question all the more pressing: How does one relate to the world when in the end one is completely divided between the intelligible and the sensible? Contemporary art faces this straining, this quartering, between having no real relation of intelligible understanding to an ordered whole of the world, to common existence, and, on the other hand, having a very acute, raw, and exposed sense of the importance of the gesture through which one brings about a form by intensifying a register of the sensible.
But what is a form? Henri Focillon offers a beautiful definition of it in The Life of Forms in Art: “form signifies only itself,”9 unlike the sign, which signifies something. That’s what happens in art when one brings forth color for its own sake; in this sense, color is a form in the same way that sound is a form.
P.-P.J.: One does not paint with blue, one does not paint in blue, one paints blue.
J.-L.N.: So, the distinction between sensible regimes appears more clearly and allows us to see something we’ve always known in a new way—that is, the diversity of senses. The drive for intelligibility, however, represented by philosophy in particular throughout the classical age, has always wanted to reduce this diversity of senses. In philosophy or classical thought, a hierarchy of the senses, and thus of the arts, has always been a question more or less. It’s not by coincidence that most often poetry has been given the highest position because it’s precisely in this art of language that we’re in the realm of intelligibility.
P.-P.J.: It’s the least “bulky” materially.
J.-L.N.: Yes, absolutely, and sometimes it’s music that’s been promoted to this rank, particularly since Schopenhauer, that is, from the moment in which a certain sensibility for pessimistic thinking manifests itself, which gives up on the possibility of enunciating the truth of the senses and which, because of this fact, assigns a particular value to this sound element, just like in the case of speech, but here it’s without speech or goes beyond (derives from) speech. Following this will to hierarchize at the end of the nineteenth century—this isn’t by chance, either—the idea of “total art” appeared. At the same time, many reflections, which were less about aesthetics and more about esthesiology, questioned themselves about sensibility in general, about synesthesia, about how several realms of sensation correspond, and even about the sensibility that all sensations have in common …
Still today, we are, on the contrary, led back toward taking into account once more a fundamental, radical heterogeneity between the sensible orders, which doesn’t simply correspond to the five senses that tradition has distinguished. Whatever possibilities are offered by technology in order to multiply or modify senses, whatever pathologies may alter the senses, this remains a matter of the body: eyes, ears, a nose, a mouth, and skin. The sensible orders are defined in this way, and they are never reducible to one another: One will never be able to see a sound. On the other hand, it’s also certain that from one order to another there are many cross-references: One can comprehend very well that when one hears a certain piece of music, one is drawn toward a certain form, or color …
P.-P.J.: Are you referring to Kandinsky’s reflections on Klangfarben?
J.-L.N.: Klangfarben, that’s it: the idea of composing a melody with colors, each of which works as a sound. It’s nevertheless preferable that the project within this enterprise remains at the level of an evocation or allusion, which is true for any sensible experience. In order to avoid the confusion of indeterminacy, in order to play with the cross-references from one order to another, a gap must be maintained. So it’s important to insist on the diversity and complexity of the arts, which doesn’t stop a work of art from having both auditory and visual aspects, or from taking into account all of the kinds of different qualities of the visible: painting, drawing, film, photography, video … One must underscore that by insisting on the truly heterogeneous multiplicity of the registers or regimes of the sensible, we take into consideration the ontological range of what we’re after. Affirming the irreducibility of sensible multiplicity and challenging the division between the sensible and the intelligible are closely related because in philosophical discourse there’s always the idea that unity goes along with the intelligible and that the sensible is multiple. The intelligible is fundamentally attracted to unity, even if at the same time one could remark that very heterogeneous, intelligible, or intellectual regimes exist: philosophy, literature, art, religion, science … One should begin by saying that if this is the case, it’s because they’re regimes of different “intellectual sensibility.”
P.-P.J.: My question about art, about the arts and their irreducible plurality, was based on your work The Muses, in particular on a passage in which, after underscoring the heterogeneity of art, you ask: “… to conclude, so as not to be finished with it, what if the truth of the singular-plural of art was in fact that the arts are themselves innumerable, and of their forms, registers, calibers, touches, exchanges through mimēsis and methexis …?”10 Is this the limit of a phenomenology? And a few lines further in your text: “The things of art are not a matter for a phenomenology—or else, they are themselves phenomenology, according to an altogether logic of this ‘-logy’—because they are in advance of the phenomenon itself. They are of the patency of the world.”11 This notion of “patency” often reappears in your thought, for instance, in The Sense of the World …12
J.-L.N.: Yes, it’s true that I like this word “patency,” even if it’s a bit heavy. In fact, I found it in Spinoza in his expression: “Veritas se ipsam patefacit.”13 And I willingly speak of “patency” because “patency” means something evident, an evident manifestation, a showing or “monstration.”
P.-P.J.: The word may be a bit heavy, nevertheless, “patency” is the opening, patere is to be open.
J.-L.N.: You’re right—this is the sense of the Latin patere. So, “Veritas se ipsam patefacit” means “truth reveals its own self”14 and this is what makes art. In the end, I’d even twist my words to say that art comes from the fact that it is not a particularly refined type of operator. I’m thinking about the objections that Jacques Rancière in particular always puts forward to what he considers to be an unnecessary resort to an overessential, superb, metaphysical idea of art, which shouldn’t be invoked, according to him. Still, I don’t see very well what he’d do so differently if he held onto the false representation, according to which, when one says “art,” one appeals to a superior virtue, a sort of religion even, of religiosity—which used to exist, it’s true. But this isn’t the question: the opening of the truth of the world, of things, of Being—however one might say it—is particularly manifest by the fact that man is compelled into this gesture of intensification of a sensible regime in order to bring out a form. If one thinks about a man drawing a line on a wall, who starts playing with his voice, not just speaking, perhaps already singing, we’re no longer in the realm of phenomenology or we’re “in the place of” or “replacing” phenomenology, but not in the sense that Husserl gave to this. We’re not presupposing a subject or an object, or a phenomenon as an “object coming before a subject.” It’s a question of, more mysteriously, the fact that suddenly, within a certain being, Dasein, as Heidegger would call it, the world itself shows itself. I’d almost like to say that the world shows itself to itself entirely. Including the world that exists before the human being and which is only there through the human being: It’s also we who manifest the dinosaurs, the ice ages.
P.-P.J.: At times you’ve mentioned when speaking about Schelling that, in the end, through the human being, nature expresses itself.
J.-L.N.: Yes, exactly, Schelling speaks about the “tautegory of nature,” about nature enunciating itself.15 And I’d like to be able to say—without being in too much of a metaphysical phantasmagoria, or even, sure, to take this provocation further, to be in a phantasmagoria rather than in a phenomenology—that the entire world tries to speak itself out or rather to patefacere itself, to show itself, to open itself, that is, to declare itself for what it is. This would amount to saying that there’s never a thing that’s entirely deprived of a world, simply standing there, that is. Because of some schematics of “physics,” things are different from how we’re used to seeing them: the big-bang, then all sorts of living beings, then the living that speaks, that symbolizes, that produces forms … In fact, the entire world has never stopped looking for an expression.
One can say, through the double value of the genitive, that the human being is both the expression of the world and the world’s expression: The human being is the inhabitant of the world, but at the same time, it transforms the world deeply through its technē, its technology, what in Latin gets translated as ars, its art. It seems difficult not to say, along with Heidegger, that technology is the last “sending of Being,” which means that the enormous technological machinery without which we can no longer live isn’t simply a group of supplements, tools, and instruments, but testimony of a complete remodeling of the world. This machinery isn’t only pregnant with catastrophes as Heidegger saw it—it really is, nevertheless—it also renders manifest this human capacity to give oneself another world. Still the relationship of the human being to the world isn’t the relationship of a subject to an object, of a subjectivity to an objectivity or an objectness [objectité]. The phenomenon of the world doesn’t quite have to be taken as the appearance of the world to the human being, to a subject, a consciousness; the world itself is the phenomenon—if one wants to retain the word phenomenon because it always runs the risk of being on the side of an appearance that’s distinct from reality. Here I’d like to make a reference to a certain passage in the last text that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe wrote, the “Postface” of his posthumously published book, Préface à “La Disparition”: “this world in its entirety, which is because it appears, without any exceptions.”16 A few lines further, he indicates that “the condition of poetic existence (…) is not to get beyond appearances (there are no appearances exactly) but to take the risk of standing in the place, at the point of the origin of appearance, which is everything.” Nevertheless, one should indicate—and this nuance is fundamental—that one can’t speak about a world in which everything only appears. Nothing happens in a world that would be a container. It must be understood: “The world is the fact that it appears” and one could return here to Wittgenstein’s well-known expression: “Creation is that the world is here.”17
P.-P.J.: In the passage from The Muses that we were referring to, there’s mention of a lux without fiat,18 without any creator subject or source, but as the source itself diffracted, radiant, explosive, shattered, a lux that one could almost say is anterior to any lumen.
J.-L.N.: In any case, like the text you’ve read says, it occurs without fiat.
P.-P.J.: At the same time, to say that creation is that the world appears, this implies saying, since it isn’t a question of the manifestation of something that would be “behind” something or the manifestation of something that would “appear,” because it can only be a question of a plurality that co-appears, in the double sense of phenomenality and justice (in German, this is said in one word: Erscheinung). It’s logically connected.
J.-L.N.: Absolutely, yes.
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
2. We might recall that “cosmic” and “cosmetic” have the same Greek etymology; the verb kosmein and the noun kosmos contain the idea of order and beauty at the same time.
3. André Schaeffner, Origine des instruments de musique: Introduction ethnologique a l’histoire de la musique instrumentale (Paris: Payot, 1968).
4. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
5. Immanuel Kant, “Fine Art Is the Art of Genius,” in Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 174.
6. [Nancy appears to be paraphrasing or quoting Kant’s Critique of Judgment from memory. See, for instance, “Genius […] as nature […] gives the rule,” in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 175—Trans.]
7. Ghérasim Luca, “Passionnément,” in Le Chant de la carpe (Paris: Le Soleil noir, 1973).
8. This idea was developed at a talk entitled “Au présent,” which was given in Paris in January 2012 as part of the seminar “Adoration et phénoménologie” at the Collège International de Philosophie.
9. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles B. Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 34.
10. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 32.
11. Nancy, The Muses, 33.
12. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
13. Baruch Spinoza, “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,” in The Ethics; Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect; Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Seymour Feldman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 243.
14. Ibid. English translation modified—Trans.
15. F. W. J. Schelling, Historical-critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
16. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Préface à “La Disparition” (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2009), 45–46.
17. [Nancy is paraphrasing the opening of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “The world is all that is the case.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, with an Introduction by Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1961), 5.—Trans.]
18. “Lux fiat” (“Let there be light”) is the Latin version of God’s speech creating light (Gen. 1:3); lux designates light’s brightness, its outpouring; lumen signifies the light in which we “bathe.”