P.-P.J.: There are two notions we should touch upon now based on your work After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes:1 the present and presence. In the analysis of what is mistakenly called a “news clip”—a testimony to a world that has become what you call “struction” in your most recent book, What’s These Worlds Coming To?2—we’re encouraged to depart from a thought of crisis and planning, that is, from a certain vision of temporality and history. This change might lead us to distinguish between two senses of the present: the present as it’s been criticized in the “metaphysics of presence” (being present to oneself, etc.) and the present that should be taken into account more seriously in the sense of what is ephemeral, in the words of Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer you cite. In other words, has the moment come for carrying out a displacement of our thought, from a problem of time to a problem of space?
J.-L.N.: Yes, a problem of space as in spacing, which may also be the spacing of time, which even our own Western tradition knows very well. All of us have in mind these lines from Lamartine: “O time, suspend your flight, and you, auspicious hours / Suspend your sequence on: / Let’s savor the rapid, evanescent delight / of beauty’s finest hour”—words pronounced by the woman whom the poet loves.3 It’s the request that the flow of time be interrupted, if you like, and this interruption is not a cut or an absence of continuity, but the suspension of the continuity through which it can present itself to itself. The female lover implores for the suspension of time, for spacing instead of the haste of successive moments, which end up nullifying the present moment. It’s often been noted that the present moment—the nun of Aristotle and the jetzt of Husserl—is not even ephemeral, it’s what does not take place, and in it the present is the extreme tension between what Husserl calls “protention” and “retention.” Here we have a fundamental experience of the Western world’s constitution, an experience that keeps step one moment after another, thus giving rise to the impossibility of seizing a “now,” of “savoring” it, as Lamartine writes, condemning one, one could say, to what keeps one from enjoying the present and that then turns the present into what in effect has been disqualified as the “metaphysics of presence” since Heidegger. But in this metaphysics, presence is actually considered to be something thrown on the shores of the river of time and that remains there in a sort of abandoned immobility. This is what Heidegger calls Vorhandenheit, that is, “Being-present-at-hand” [être-là-placé-devant], a dense, motionless, silent, insignificant thing, to be differentiated from something “ready-to-hand” [sous-la-main] that is available for the activity or project of an existent, or what Heidegger calls Zuhandenheit. But one could say just as well that presence in this sense, even with the distinction between the two nuances, is not present at all or is present only for the existent that has it at its disposal.
Still, one can understand presence in a completely different way as being intimately connected to manifestation or appearance, as we were saying, in the same sense as when one says that someone has a “presence” or that certain actors have a particular “presence,” which means the exact opposite of a thing’s presence. In this case, this presence is a “coming” (one “comes into the presence of”), an “appearing.” In reality, one retains the use of the word “presence” for what happens between everyone; when people grace each other with their “presence,” a relationship gets created. If there’s no relationship, there’s no presence, because being present means showing up or “presenting oneself” (of course not in the sense of a simple “social obligation” [mondanité]). This specific presence [présence-là] is probably always somewhat ephemeral in the sense that when one shares their life with someone, as one says, there are moments of absence and moments of presence. And one must show up [se présenter], in the sense of paying attention, in order to show that one is paying “attention to,” but not out of a sense of obligation—a pretty dry way of behaving in general—because it translates something which can actually only be done without a maxim into a maxim. This presence as “presence to” asks for a gesture and this gesture is subtracted from the flow of time, from pure succession; it removes, in effect, moments from time, and in a sense, it is ephemeral. But this non-duration is, at the same time, something that pervades duration itself. So we find ourselves in the realm of the ephemerides, which we pay very little attention to in general; the succession of days has for itself something cosmic, cosmological, and it’s also the succession of “everyday” continuation or of a way of coming into the world. Every morning, one comes back to the world after being truly absent during sleep, which is connected to this poor, physiological, biological truth: Without sleep, one can’t live for long.
P.-P.J.: One can’t help but mention here the ambiguity in the title of your work The Fall of Sleep [Tombe de sommeil].4
J.-L.N.: Of course, but it’s a book that remains very much on the side of the “aesthetic” instead of the metaphysical. In the end, I think it’s a very significant fact that we have to become absent from the world and ourselves in order to come back to it everyday, that is, according to a rhythm that’s also the rhythm of day and night.
P.-P.J.: A little like when one says, in other circumstances, “I had a close call,” when one has come close to dying; but after all, death is often viewed as a “final resting place” or an “eternal sleep” …
J.-L.N.: Yes, one has a close call every day and so, in a very sensible way, the present of waking up or falling asleep is the present of a distancing, a distention of time; one is no longer really in a succession, but in either an inauguration or a closure or conclusion. Time continues but as Kant says so well, “everything passes in time, except for time itself.” I’d say “time itself” is the tempo; there’s a very important question of rhythm here.
P.-P.J.: Speaking of rhythm, Jacques Derrida offered a commentary on the “blink of an eye,” which you took up. One is actually tempted to say that time passes “in the blink of an eye.”
J.-L.N.: Yes, but the blink of an eye takes time, as Derrida said about Husserl’s Augenblick in Voice and Phenomena.5
P.-P.J.: The blink of an eye takes time, so one returns to oneself all the time. One is always in this coming, this repetition of the coming that one mistakenly calls “presence.”
J.-L.N.: I think there’s something very important here because you were speaking earlier about the possibility of “subtracting oneself” from thinking of the plan as well as the crisis.
P.-P.J.: Allow me to briefly quote from After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes: “Our thinking must no longer be either about crisis or plan. But we know no other model for thinking about the ‘better.’ ”6 A few pages further you say, “What would be decisive, then, would be to think in the present and to think the present.”7 Finally, you mention Haruki Murakami’s speech in June 2011 on the occasion of the ceremony that’s called hanami in Japanese: “ ‘we cherish the cherry blossoms of spring, the fireflies of summer and the red leaves of autumn’—to contrast with the irremediable destruction ‘of ethics and values.’ ”8
J.-L.N.: It’s true that this thought and the actions that it alludes to seem meager, fragile, and absolutely measly to us in comparison to the Fukushima catastrophe as well as to the very necessity of making plans to prevent these kinds of events from happening again. But at the same time, if we make only these kinds of plans, we unequivocally hold onto a finality, the finality of energy, the finality of a certain development, the finality of a certain growth, and so we continue on with all of the civilization that has produced this vision of the world. I’m not saying that one should give up on all plans in order to live day-to-day, and to give ourselves over to what some have called a “presentism.” The question isn’t to relate to a future in the sense in which the latter, as Derrida says, is a present-future that has already presented itself. If the plan consists in representing to ourselves what will be, what must be, what we must make come, then the present, the present of the Vorhandenheit, of the “deposited” thing, has already affected the future. If, on the contrary, one stands in the present as something ephemeral that only passes by and is fragile—the mayfly insect is called an “ephemera” because its life lasts for a day—then one remains attached to duration, and one winds up once again entrusting everything to a projection of what’s to come, which ultimately makes it present in advance.
P.-P.J.: As if we wanted to have a guarantee [assurance], in every sense of the word … I would suggest translating “ephemeral” as “fortuitous.”
J.-L.N.: I agree, and incidentally in Adoration, I chose the word “fortuitous”9 because I like what it evokes: the ephemeral, but also chance, evanescence.
P.-P.J.: What interests you about the “fortuitous” is that it’s not a question of necessity or chance. One can find in your works many examples of this writing strategy, that is, in this approach to thinking: its economy of “neither … nor …,” if one may put it this way. We aren’t in the coincidentia oppositorum, nor are we in a dialectical logic; we are trying to go “between” …
J.-L.N.: Probably, even though this practice in my writing isn’t intentional. It’s tempting to compare this turn of phrase, “neither … nor …,” with Maurice Blanchot’s “neutral” because the neutral (ne-uter) is “neither one … nor the other …” But perhaps Blanchot makes the neutral into too much of an authority, “The Neutral.” I’d say more simply that the use of this trope, “neither … nor …,” is imposed by a situation that we’re in, a sort of extremity of signification’s possibilities; we always seem to oscillate between several possibilities, none of which are truly satisfying. So to think about what’s to come isn’t a question about the future, as we were saying, nor about a “coming” that one would be waiting for endlessly. Derrida’s “différance”10 might offer some help, on the condition that one avoids the misinterpretation of seeing a simple delay or an indefinite procrastination in it. In fact, we have few means at our disposal to express this “coming,” which is really placed within the course of time, day after day, and which, at the same time, isn’t found in the simple indifference and the leveling out of the everyday. We’re in between two formulations: “nothing happens” and “it will happen later.”
P.-P.J.: So neither advent nor event?
J.-L.N.: I’d say both are there. And so, it wouldn’t be “neither … nor …” but “both … and …”; “event and advent,” because in any case there’s “-vent,” if I can put it that way, there’s a “coming” [venue]. This is largely responsible for establishing the category of the event in Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, or Claude Romano. There’s already the beginning of an analysis in Hegel when he speaks about Geschehen; I talk about it at the end of Being Singular Plural …
P.-P.J.: The surprise of the event.
J.-L.N.: Yes, exactly, the idea of surprise is very important for our purposes. Surprise is what one doesn’t expect. I know Heidegger wrote a lot about surprise, wonder, and marveling before Being. But the accuracy of his remarks doesn’t stop him from overloading this notion too heavily, perhaps to the point of making it a sort of appeal, to make something come to pass [faire advenir], which can be something dangerous. It’s possible that this is a form of what one calls “messianism,” which is probably why I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable about Derrida’s proposal to speak about a “messianic without messianism.” A bit uncomfortable because I could hardly see how to really dissociate the two notions, even if there are two distinct notions in “-ic” and “-ism.” Sure, I understand that the second term implies a system, an entire and homogenous content of thought while the first alludes to a character, a trait … Derrida wanted to indicate that there’s perhaps a “messiah” trait that’s inherent to all of the Western world, a disposition turned toward a “coming about” [survenue] or even a “coming to pass” [advenue] but not a predictable or programmable one. Which is certainly accurate. But I told him that the sacred characteristic of the Messiah (the one who is anointed by the Lord) to me seemed too attached to the word or name (which Islam has maintained, and which Christianity has Hellenized into Christos). Still the “coming about,” the event that comes from no process, approach, or necessity, remains to be thought. This is certainly why we’re more attentive today to contingency. (I’d like to use this occasion to point out a recent work that I think is important in this regard, La Contingence du présent, a thesis by Sandrine Israël-Jost that’s not yet published.)
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
2. Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurélien Barrau, What’s These Worlds Coming To?, trans. Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
3. Lamartine, “Le lac de B …” in Méditations (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1968), 48. [Our translation—Trans.]
4. [In Nancy’s Tombe de sommeil, “tombe” may be translated as either “fall” or “grave”—Trans.] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).
5. Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011).
6. Nancy, After Fukushima, 35.
7. Ibid., 37.
8. Ibid., 64.
9. One may also read the article “Fortuite, furtive, fertile” in the journal L’Étrangère 26/27 (2011).
10. On the word “différance,” one may read Jean-Luc Nancy’s article “La différance, ici et maintenant” in Le Magazine littéraire 498 (June 2010).