The original title of this book was La déclosion. That term may be said not to “exist” in the French language, and it is not farfetched to claim that the volume is itself an explication of its meaning. The word recurs frequently in many chapters, particularly the last one. That chapter shares its title with the volume as a whole, explicating the leitmotif of déclosion and carrying it to the brink of a further dialectical sublation. Therefore it may be useful at the outset to convey our understanding (without pretending to do any of the hard work Nancy’s texts themselves undertake) of déclosion.
Nancy uses déclosion to designate the reversal of a prior closing (foreclosure), an opening up. This opening is very general: more general than would be suggested by “disclosure,” which usage is pretty much limited to divulging classified information. Although Nancy’s subject matter is largely Christianity, as the subtitle, “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” states, it is not as ecclesiastical as a solution such as “de-cloistering” would have suggested. We have therefore settled on dis-enclosure, a term whose existential deficiency (like that of the French title it replaces) may be palliated by the fact that enclosure has been used, particularly by British historians, to refer to the movement by which lands previously held privately were made common domain, available for free-range grazing and other communal uses. Now this is, mutatis mutandis, precisely the sense Nancy heralds across a broad range of domains, in which history has closed in upon itself in its indispensable, inevitable, but eventually encumbering assignment of meanings.
This brings us to Nancy’s final “title” chapter, in which alongside déclosion another term appears (and this one has its ontological papers in order): éclosion. The word means “hatching,” and for flowers (notably in Ronsard) “opening, blossoming.” Why does Nancy need this less complicated companion term for déclosion? Because the last, short piece moves the reader to a more cosmic perspective, one in which the cancellation of sociological strictures is seen in a broader perspective and (perhaps) in collaboration with a manner of spatial burgeoning, a pregnant structuring of the void. Here we have turned to a real but obscure term, eclosure. It is used in the field of entomology to designate a butterfly’s metamorphosis from pupa to winged fulfillment.
Before leaving the issue of the title, we would be remiss not to mention that French déclosion is the usual translation of Heidegger’s Erschließung, rendered by Macquarrie and Robinson in English as “disclosure.”1 Nancy, whose familiarity with Heidegger may well have suggested the use of the term, appears to extend the notion, from its original phenomenological sense of the way in which things “give themselves” to us to a historical opening up of Christianity in deconstruction. But Nancy’s most original addition to the overdetermination of this particular signifier is to see Christianity itself as an opening up of meaning in history. This is what allows him to see his deconstruction of Christianity as a prolongation of Christianity’s own historical movement.
Nancy’s style presents serious challenges to the translator, not the least of which is his propensity to express crucial points in language that draws heavily on the signifier—the colloquialism, the Gallicism, the essentialist pun. His free and almost lyric interweaving movement, a farandole between signified and signifier, has often led us to resort to leaps in our own register, if not to the confessional footnote. If reading, as Blanchot said, is dancing with an invisible partner, to translate is to do everything he does, as Ginger Rogers is said to have said, backwards and in heels.
At Nancy’s request, sens has been translated “sense” throughout. As he explained to us, in his usage it signifes precisely not “meaning” but “sense” more or less as in “It makes sense,” that is, opening a direction, a possibility of value—a possibility of “meaning” but not a meaning.
The entire text of the translation has profited greatly from mutual criticism and consultation among the translators. The main translator of each essay is indicated in a translator’s line at its end. Michael B. Smith would like to express his gratitude to research librarian Xiaojing Zu of Berry College for her technical assistance. Bettina Bergo thanks Philippe Farah, David Bertet, and Héloïse Bailly for their assistance. We both thank Helen Tartar for making this project possible.
—Michael B. Smith