Translatorâs Foreword
Thinking Singular Plural
DAVID WILLS
The French title of Jean-Luc Nancyâs book on books is Sur le commerce des pensĂ©es. I found myself obliged to render the plural pensĂ©es, with its echoes of Pascal and the rest (although perhaps not all the way to those small, delicate flowers we call âpansiesâ), as âthinking.â Why, one might well wonder, would English be uncomfortable with a plural such as âthoughtsâ in the context of an essay on books and the bookstore? Why would that seem to imply an unacceptable crassness, or indeed commodification, of thinking, when that is precisely one of the things Nancy wants to evoke by means of the word commerce?
Answers to such questions would have to begin at the level of sonorityâin French pensĂ©e (singular) is homonymic with pensĂ©es (plural)âand extend as far as the Germanic etymological network from which English thinking and thought emerge, in contrast to the Latinate pensĂ©e. Yet another line of resolution would have to investigate the different philologico-philosophical traditions of one or the other culture, a French tradition perhaps more at home with itself and with its pervasiveness, and so requiring less that thought be protected from the banalization or promiscuity of thoughts, an English one precisely nervous about such an assimilation of philosophical reflection to everyday cognitive processes.
Yet another, which brings me to my point, would have to raise the question of the book. First of all, obviously, such differences as that between the 18 Ă 21.5 cm. format and textured ivory laid paper (âwatermarked with parallel lines from the wires on which the pulp was laid in the process of manufacture: opposed to woveâ; Websters) of Nancyâs Ăditions GalilĂ©e text, and the 5.25 Ă 8 inch trim size of this volume, and by extension the different forms of bibliophilia that are practiced here or there and that give rise to all the different means by which the book is marketed, including, of course, online purchasing, and the success or failure of the bookstoreâneighborhood or conglomerateâin preserving its niche as the preferred retail outlet for printed and bound texts.
But the logic of Nancyâs discussion points to another relation between the Idea and its âdeliveryâ in a book, namely, that when thinking or thought âreachesâ the book it necessarily does so in a form that is the basis for commerce, and hence the importance of his plural. The book, and the bookstore, become the contexts within which quantities of thoughts get passed around, bought, sold, and exchanged: hence commodifiable, commercializable. But those thoughts, now irrevocably plural, are passed around not in some rarefied vacuum but among readers, also necessarily plural: among the members, therefore, of a community. If thoughts become the objects of commerce, it is precisely only because they imply and require such a community of readers.
The word community is never once used in Nancyâs text, where the emphasis is less on readers than on reading. It is, however, common to much of his other writing, so much so that it amounts in his work to a grand philosophical project, asking simply, and complicatedly, what being together means in the wake of the monumental perversions and abortions of mass aspirations in the twentieth century. What community categorically does not mean, can no longer mean, is the sort of fusional melding of singularities that the previous century was witness to, not just because of how a mass came then to be misused, or to misuse itself but, more fundamentally, because the notion of singularity, subject, or individual presumed in numbers to comprise that mass is itself the most fraught of concepts: âWhat is a community? ⊠The common, having-in-common or being-in-common, excludes from itself interior unity, subsistence, and presence in and by itself. Being with, being together, and even being âunitedâ are precisely not a matter of being âone.ââ In the book from which that quote is taken, and which inspires the title of this foreword, Being Singular Plural, published in France in 1996 in the shadow of a Sarajevo become the earthâs âmartyr-name,â one of Nancyâs vaunted words for a community beyond the violence of identitarian politics is mĂȘlĂ©e. The word can mean everything from a wrestling match or rugby scrummage to a disorganized mĂ©lange or pell-mell free-for-all brawl. Nancy considers the risk of such uncontrolled intraand interpersonal mixing, even to the point of forms of violence, to be far smaller than the risk of, and incontrovertibly documented facts of, violence stemming from social and political formations based on subjectivities and identities. What is required is to re-make a culture and thinking that is not âcrude or obscene like every thought of purity,â for the simplistic praise of purity âhas supported and still supports crimes.â1
The commerce written of in On the Commerce of Thinking cannot, therefore, reduce to a mercantile exchange, even if that is an element within it. It is, rather, a commingling that has something of the mĂȘlĂ©e about it (and indeed the word is used to describe the plurality of worlds that constitute reading), perhaps most evident in the originary contamination (âthe mĂȘlĂ©e is not accidental; it is originaryâ2) uncovered at the level of the signifier. If Nancyâs reflection on books, thoughts, and their commerce seems to engender an inordinate attention to etymological nuance, it is because, in following the semantic traces, one finds not some touchstone of meaning but the very unstable mixing at work in the source, what gives rise to meaning as a movement of drift and divergence. Because a word, from the outset, determines its sense in comparison and contrast, in conversation and contact with other words, it begins as a pluralization that is an intercourse and a commerce. The verbal rough and tumble that makes for a book is therefore more than the fact of its being composed of more or less many words; it is similarly a function of each of those words being with itself as a plurality, being with itself as another to the point of being against itself.
Community is obviously not the predominant form of social or political being together that is in play in the case of the book, even if Nancy expresses a profound respect for the guild of professions that produce and sell books, and describes frequenting the bookstore as a profoundly sensual experience, savored even by those who are touched by words without reading them. Rather, the particular form of sharing relevant to the commerce of thinking, a thoughtâs being with it self and being with others, is called âcommunication.â And just as community contradicts the self-enclosed entities presumed to constitute it, breaking them open, making singularities plural, so communication is never a simple transmission but also, as Nancy writes below, âresonance, and disseminationâall the way to dispersion, metamorphosis, and reinterpretation.â In being communicated thought disintegrates, becomes a book and hence the possibility of commerce.
Sur le commerce des pensĂ©es is Nancyâs main title. His subtitle is Du livre et de la librairie. If stylistic considerations led me to translate pensĂ©es into an English singular, a converse operation takes place in the subtitle, where it sounds better for us to hear Of Books and Bookstores, even if the French is in the singular. Logically speaking, that negates much of what I have just argued concerning thought vis-Ă -vis thoughts, es...