Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness

Philosophy and Powers of Existence

Daniele Rugo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780937038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness is the first book in English to provide a sustained account of the relationship between Nancy, Levinas and Heidegger. It investigates Jean-Luc Nancy's reading of Heidegger, focusing on the question of Being-with, and starting with the problem of otherness in Heidegger, the book goes on to establish a dialogue between Nancy and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. With intellectual agility and command of cinema, literature and visual art, Daniele Rugo insists on the critical significance of Nancy's project for any future philosophy attempting to define itself beyond foundational acts, and according to the continuous crossings at the heart of existence. By discussing Nancy alongside Heidegger and Levinas, Rugo underlines the essential indecision between philosophy-as-literature and philosophy as the re-appropriation of the question of Being. Rugo offers unexpected associations which return thinking to the play of specificity, rather than restricting it to the passage of abstract formulations.

1
Exposures

Heidegger: A review

Heidegger does not speak about the body. Famously Being and Time contains almost no reference to corporeality. To be more specific, the only reference one finds is a rather dismissive statement: ‘“Bodily nature” hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here’ (Heidegger 1962: 124). Heidegger explicitly declares his intention to forego a discussion of Dasein’s bodily nature. However one could have reasons to be suspicious given that this passage appears in Section 23, at the point where Heidegger takes up the question of de-severance (Ent-fernung) and directionality (Ausrichtung). It is in Section 23 that Heidegger discusses Dasein’s way of orienting itself in the world. Perhaps this hasty dismissal should then be read as a praeteritio, a figure that allows one to achieve emphasis by passing something by. The passage from Section 23 seems to produce an interruption, whilst leaving at the same time an empty space there where the ek-statical opening of the world promises a phenomenological and existential investigation of the body.

The only mention of the body therefore appears when Heidegger sets off to explain what it means for Dasein to spatialize. De-severance is ‘a kind of Being which Dasein has with regard to its Being-in-the-world’ (ibid.: 139). It is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, a state whose factical modes go from ‘extremely close’ to ‘absolute remoteness’. Dasein opens space, makes space for itself. Dasein’s spatiality is linked with its Being-in-the-world; it is one of the ways through which Heidegger specifies the nature of ‘in’ and the concept of world. Dasein’s spatiality is not that of an object inside the world, Dasein is not in the world as present-at-hand; rather its happening in a space has an ontological connection to the world. In Being and Time Heidegger writes that Dasein’s spatiality ‘cannot signify anything like occurrence at a position in a “world-space”, nor it can signify Being-ready-to-hand at some place’ (ibid.: 138). Dasein’s way of being in space is of a different nature: Dasein relates to things present at hand by becoming familiar with them, by concerning itself with them. It is through this concernful dealing that Dasein situates things in space, making them available and accessible. Dasein brings what it encounters within-the-world into its sphere of concern, namely it brings things at a distance.

Heidegger insists on assigning this kind of spatiality to Dasein’s existential characteristics. The expression ‘bringing close’ indicates not only objects drawn near for immediate use, but denotes also that which is cognitively discovered. However one should not deduce from this that Heidegger is implying here a subjectivist stance. Dasein does not change the nature of the entities it encounters; it rather reveals them as that which always already matters. This ‘primordial spatiality’ precedes every measuring (whether rigourous or casual, scientific or everyday) because it is intended as a way of relating, rather than serving as a device for quantitative calculations. This is what Heidegger means with the example of the street, whose touch one feels at every step – ‘it slides itself as it were along certain portions of one’s body’ (ibid.: 142) – whilst at the same time it remains more remote than what one can encounter at a distance on that same street. Dis-stancing as bringing close does not mean drawing something nearer to my body, encumbered by my body as it were; it means bringing something at a distance existentially, becoming concerned with it. The corporeal involvement of Dasein appears here as existential: it discloses a world without necessarily bringing this world here.

In order to understand the existential character of one’s body, one should pay attention to the body’s involvement with the world. This involvement implies the activity of reaching as that of disclosing a region without performing any particular action. Furthermore it entails the almost passive situation of being always stretched between here and there. One could say that in these passages Heidegger is pointing to a structure that understands the body as never fixed, never belonging to one place, but always at each time opening the conditions for a ‘somewhere’. This is the starting point where Jean-Luc Nancy takes up the Heideggerian silence over the body and develops it into the relation between the body and existence. This relation – that one could call ‘exposure’ – is structured around the fact that Dasein moves between a ‘here’ in which it finds itself (without ever simply being or resting there) and a ‘there’, which it ‘makes’ each time. The fact that Dasein ex-ists and that its nature is ek-statical – always already played out in the outside where it has transcended all beings, including itself – constitutes the central question of the body. As François Raffoul puts it: ‘transcendence is the taking place of any place’ (Raffoul 1999: 152). Therefore, despite the fact that in Being and Time Heidegger does not articulate any explicit argument with regard to the body, it seems possible to reopen the aforementioned question from a Heideggerian perspective, regardless or even because of Heidegger’s silence.

As mentioned the existential character of the body is disclosed moving from Section 23 of Being and Time. It is at this point that Heidegger attempts to liberate the body from its metaphysical ‘history’: the body is not a substance, but a particular way of existing in the world. The body is a fundamental way of being of Dasein, exposing Dasein’s throwness, its involvement with the world (Being-in) and with others (Being-with). This suggestion and its links with Dasein’s there is precisely what Nancy attempts to retrieve from Heidegger’s silence. As Heidegger puts it: ‘Dasein is proximally never here but yonder; from this “yonder” it comes back to its “here”; and it comes back to its “here” only in the way in which it interprets its concernful Being-towards’ (Heidegger 1962: 142).

In Heidegger’s work the question of the body becomes then the question of Dasein’s leaping over and of its concernful Being-in-the-world as dealing with and working. Because Dasein is neither vorhanden nor zuhanden, neither present-at-hand nor ready-at-hand,¹ one could say that it is not only factically that the body occupies a crucial juncture in Heidegger’s thinking. The body is not only what is present-at-hand for other Daseine. Existentially it is the ek- that displaces any place. The taking place of any place happens existentially with the body. It is as a body that Dasein assumes a distance and inhabits the world as the outside towards which it has transcended. The body is in charge of possibilities as the horizon of ek-sistence. This could also be put in the following way: something about the body is already explained by its bare being-there, but this something comes to be articulated only once the body exists as dis-stance from the world.

Despite the fact that the question of the body is again not addressed frontally, the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic takes up the question of Dasein’s neutrality. Heidegger makes clear that his choice of ‘Dasein’ over ‘man’ is made in the name of neutrality. Dasein’s neutrality allows Heidegger to investigate the being for which its own proper mode of being in a definite sense is not indifferent prior to factual determinations: existence prior to its concretions. This peculiar neutrality, however, should not be taken as indifference. It is a way of addressing Dasein’s potency. Neutrality here stands for openness to possibilities disclosed by Dasein in view of the realization of factual humanity. As Heidegger puts it, ‘neutral Dasein is indeed the primal source of intrinsic possibility that springs up in every existence and makes it possible’ (Heidegger 1984: 137).

This line of reasoning allows Heidegger to separate his existential analysis from worldviews and philosophies of life. As neutral Dasein gets immediately dispersed. Its dispersion is what exists. Dasein exists as its own dispersion. Seen in this light neutrality translates an original situation: Dasein is originally neutral, its neutrality stands for ‘the not yet of factical dispersion’ (ibid.). It is at this point that Heidegger inscribes bodiliness: ‘as factical Dasein is in each case dispersed in a body’ (ibid.). One should immediately caution that Heidegger does not introduce dispersion as a negative term, and that the lexicon deployed at this stage – splitting, dissociation, disaccord, division – cannot be heard only in its negative resonances. As for other concepts belonging to Dasein’s facticity – falling, throwness, They and destruction, among others – the register suggested by the terminology should not be taken literally. Dispersion – further defined as bestrewal [Streuung] and dissemination [Zertstreuung] – is first of all a descriptive term. It describes Dasein’s relation with the ‘multiplication’ of possibilities, its standing against and disclosing of this proliferation. This multiplication is already present in Dasein’s neutrality and is realised in its essence: existence. Heidegger writes that embodiment is an organising factor of this dispersion. Dispersed in a body, Dasein then assumes its proper multiplication, it occurs in the world as extension [Erstreckung]. As Derrida writes commenting on these passages: ‘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’ (Derrida 2008: 20). The extension that Dasein assumes as factically dispersed in a body belongs to its ontological character, to its existential structure, and decides of both Dasein’s temporality and of its spatiality. As dispersed Dasein is in between: both in a temporal sense (extended between birth and death) and in a spatial one (‘here’, ‘there’ and all other spatial connotations belong to this dispersion). The body is at this point the organising factor of this original dispersion. Heidegger again stops here. Nothing more is mentioned with regard to how embodiment organises the aforementioned dispersion. Nevertheless what one could retain from these passages of The Metaphysical Foundations is the ‘lexical swarm’, invoked by Derrida, the scattering of dis-, ‘the series of “dissociation”, “distraction”, “dissemination”, “division”, “dispersion”’ (ibid.: 17).

In the Zollikon Seminars hosted between 1959 and 1969 in Zurich by the psychiatrist Medard Boss, Heidegger takes up the question of the body in more explicit terms. The first emergence of the term is to be found within a discussion of the phenomenon of making-present. Heidegger tries to clarify to an audience of non-philosophers the philosophical presuppositions that natural and physical sciences take for granted when explaining physiological and psychological processes.

The phenomenon of making-present, Heidegger says, cannot be considered as self-evident and immediately understood. Heidegger criticizes science for its assumptions and blind attitude: ‘Science becomes blind to what it must presuppose and to what it wants to explain’ (Heidegger 2001: 75). According to Heidegger there is then something unsatisfactory in the way sciences approach perception. Heidegger shows the impossibility of distinguishing between body and mind, saying that a simple principle cannot be found; instead, one moves in a circle. Contrary to what Nietzsche thought, the phenomenon of the body is not the more distinct and comprehensible and this is why, Heidegger says, its treatment has been passed by in Being and Time. Given these premises one can explain why Heidegger always appears sceptical with regard to the possibility of providing a solution to the question of the body. His intention is rather to open a field of questions.

Phenomenologically the body is the most resistant of concepts.² In a tone not different from the one deployed in Being and Time, Heidegger says that ‘Dasein is not spatial because it is embodied. But its bodiliness is possible only because Dasein is spatial in the sense of making room’ (ibid.: 81). As a consequence of this, the body is not identical to any ‘being-here’ of Dasein’s being in a particular place. The body is the most distant to us in space. These passages serve Heidegger to develop the argument according to which whilst the body is a relation with my ‘here’, this relation is not that of presence-at-hand or readiness-to-hand; Dasein’s mode of presence is other. One cannot properly say that the body is here in some place, ‘in each case the here is this one’ (ibid.: 94). Rather the body always leaps forward and in so doing takes up space. The fact that the body takes up space, rather than occupying a point in it, means that the ‘here’ of the body is never specified, because it is simply a ‘somewhere’: the body discloses a somewhere, without ever identifying with a specific site. At each time the body discloses a somewhere, this somewhere is opened, made by the body at each time and resists being reduced to specific coordinates.

From these remarks one could conclude that Heidegger intends the human body differently from a simply corporeal entity. The body has to be linked more intimately with the question of Dasein, with existence.

The limits of the body are not the limits of the body as a corporeal thing. They extend beyond, and in this beyond one should understand existence. Thus the question of the mineness of my body has nothing to do with the limit of my skin. My body is not limited by or within my skin. Heidegger says that ‘the bodying forth of the body is determined by the way of my being […] The limit of bodying forth (the body is only as it is bodying forth: ‘body’) is the horizon of being within which I sojourn’ (ibid.: 84).

Further on, Heidegger attempts to explain the body as organising factor in the following terms: ‘within philosophy […] we must characterise all comportment of the human being as being-in-the-world, determined by bodying forth of the body’ (ibid.: 90). The body is an organising factor in that it expresses Being-in-the-world. This expression, which manifests itself as gesture – ‘one’s gathered bearing and comportment’ (ibid.) – should not be taken as an expression of something interior – the body pushing to the outside that which exerts a pressure from the inside. The body is an interpretation of Being-in-the-world in the way of an existential disclosure. As Levin says, this gesture could be heard perhaps in terms of ‘a deep sense of inherence, belonging, rootedness, and grounding that normally and for the most part remains deeply, darkly implicit, pre-reflective, unthematized, unquestioned’ (Levin 1999: 132).

These few passages – from the almost total silence of Being and Time to the explicit argumentation as a response to natural and medical sciences in the Zollikon Seminars – do not exhaust the list. What emerges though is the possibility of reading the body in relation to Dasein’s existential disclosure of the world. The path, however, remains in Heidegger’s work nothing more than a prospect, whose articulation is always precarious. Nevertheless those references provide a possibility to understand how Jean-Luc Nancy’s work tries to address the question of the body within a Heideggerian perspective, whilst remaining silent with regard to Heidegger’s silence.

Nancy endeavours to re-open the question of the body from within Heidegger, which in a few words means to link the body most explicitly with the question of an existence without essence.

However it should not be surprising that one finds no explicit reference to Heidegger in Nancy’s Corpus. The volume in fact tries to make its own space. Thus it often takes on trajectories that, whilst respectful of the procedure of philosophical praxis, do not follow a specific model of philosophical presentation. The risk of this discourse betraying the canon of philosophical writing is always open, in particular when one stumbles upon propositions that can neither be derived nor refuted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Exposures
• 2 Between Us
• 3 Separations
• 4 Powers of Existence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index