The season of festivals, biennials, and other art fairs and markets has revived here and there the furious quarrel ignited about twenty years ago around what we call, in a singular manner, contemporary art. The most manifest sense of this expression, “contemporary art,” is to designate an art constantly in tune with its own debate, contemporary with its own questioning or its own suspension; in short, contemporary with this distancing from itself, with this intimate dissociation that one must have in order to experience oneself, in whatever domain, as the “contemporary” of something or someone.

I like this quarrel, whose violence simultaneously reveals and conceals the importance of the issue—it reveals this importance through its intensity, but often conceals it with the noise it makes. Let us try to discern, without making too much noise, the importance of what’s at stake. “Art” is the name for a practice with a double specificity: on the one hand, it can be identified, in the final instance, only in terms of works (productions, constructions, creations, tangible things) and not in terms of categorized objects (as would be the case with knowledge, power, salvation, happiness, justice, etc.); on the other hand, this practice has its unity only in the diversity of its concrete modalities (painting, music, cinema, performance, etc.). The specificity of “art” is thus found twice over in exteriority and in diversity, or even in disparity: it has neither the categorial unity of the object, nor the intuitive unity of the sensible work. Nonetheless, there’s a certain unity, a certain “unitary” content designated precisely by the word “art”—a word that, taken in this sense, has been around for barely two centuries, as we know (but the history of this word undoubtedly marks out a great shift in history as such, even if the “one” thing found in “art” is as old as humanity: the early life of this word evokes a power that has been nurtured from the very beginning. . .).

The manifest and obscure sense of the word art is precisely what foments the quarrel. It is the sense of an impossible unity, the sense of a missing sense. Or rather, it is a lack of sense that never ceases making sense, obstinately—at the very least the sense of this quarrel that furiously argues over its proper character in exclamations divided up among various voices: “This is art!” or “This is not art!” or “What actually is art?”

We learn something essential from this: among the various human activities, there is one practice whose meaning cannot be categorized (submitted to a signification) but whose sensible effectivity is always both irreducibly multiple and compellingly necessary: this necessity, indeed, is not that of individuals who wish to be “artists” without being conjointly that of a common world that wants to enjoy works of art (whether it be popular art or, on the contrary, esoteric art is another question).

We could say this: we have an exigency to give ourselves the sense or the feeling—together and each by himself—of an overflow of meaning. We have the desire to sense and to feel according to a truth that no meaning can saturate (neither knowledge, nor salvation, nor justice, etc.) and that no unity can sublimate.

Thus contemporary art, with its quarrel, brings forth a desire that is neither the desire for an object nor the desire for a meaning but a desire for feeling and for feeling oneself feel—a desire to experience oneself as irreducible to a signification, to a being or an identity. A desire to enjoy, in sensibility, the very fact that there is no unique and final form in which this desire would reach its end.

Perhaps psychoanalysis provides us a valuable clue about this desire. Not by attempting to analyze art—we know all too well the poor results of such attempts—but on the contrary, by describing art, or at least the artistic gift, as “unanalyzable,” as Freud insisted on several occasions. The unanalyzable character of this gift corresponds to the fact that the work of art appears in the place of the symptom, as he also says. Replacing the symptom means moving out of the order of interpretation. A work of art is the failure or the disconnection of interpretation (or its infinite rebeginning and opening up, which amounts to the same). The work of art is thus akin to the “navel of the dream,” which Freud refers to as the point at which interpretation will and must be lost without return. (I add here, mischievously, that Freud himself refers to analysis as an “art of interpretation”. . . which should then appear as the formula of a contradiction—unless, pushing a bit further, we can deduce from it that art is, in the final account, the desire and/or the dream of Freud and of psychoanalysis as a whole. . . which thus becomes a symptom for the contemporary period. . .)

The desire for art—like the dream-wish, and perhaps, if I dare say, like the dream-wish of the community or, if you prefer, of the “us”—would then be the desire beyond every sensible object, the desire for the sense of desire itself. Spinoza perhaps would have recognized in it his conatus, Nietzsche his will to eternal return, Heidegger his decision of existence. . .

But, at the same time, no philosopher could adhere to this without also eventually freeing himself from the greed for knowledge contained in his concept of desire. A philosopher or an analyst, as much as an epistemologist, a theologian, or a political scientist, encounters at this limit the insistence of a nonknowledge, the impulse and the pulsation of a nescience, multiple and sensible by nature, which is the only way to comprehend the denouement of sense that must be apprehended in every possible sense. What is taken in charge in this denouement, in this unbinding that creates a sensible work, is nothing less than the energy that brings us into the world, that puts us in relation to ourselves, each one and everyone together, in a silent protest against all imposition of sense and in the affirmation of a speech always moving beyond itself and directed against every form of “last word” that would like to fix the truth.

Freud used to say that he could say nothing of music, not even analyze it, as he believed he could do with painting. He thus reluctantly recognized that what approaches speech without taking on signification, what allows us to hear [entendre] how it is a matter of listening without understanding [entendre] anything, what proposes a presence in a state of permanent imminence and thus in the rhythmic repetition of its effacement, of its slipping away—that this and this alone is what opens our ears, as well as our eyes, and every part of us that can be open.

27 June 2003