Jean-Luc Nancy - Quotes

I wonder if it's possible to say there are people who are more — or less — real than others.
Nancy, Jean-Luc.

Photography is obsessed with showing the real, its vulnerability, its grace, its fleetingness.
Nancy, Jean-Luc.

Art is open to the fragmentation of sense that existence is. It was always open to this. But today, the yawning of this opening distends and even tears it from one end to the other: on the scale of an in-finity of sense that we expect to respond for us. Not, first of all, as an ‘aesthetic’ response but, rather, as an unprecedented art of being in the world.
Nancy, Jean-Luc.

That being is absolutely being — with — this is what we must think. With is the first mark of being, the mark of the singular plurality of the origin or of the origin within the With.
Nancy, Jean-Luc.

Communism, the word.Not the word before the notion, but the word as notion and as historical agent.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

Nevertheless, it is sure that the word “communist” existed already in the XIVe century, with the meaning of “people having in common a property belonging to the category of “main morte” – that is, not being submitted to the law of heritage”.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

Actually, those historical data are unable to give us the origin and the meaning – or, even better, the sense – of “communism”. No history, no etymology either, can produce anything like sense.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

Communism – the word, again. The word as presence, as feeling, as sense (more than meaning).To a certain extent, it seems strange that the inquiry or commentary about this word should be so rare. As if it were always considered as self-evident… It is, in a way – but in which way, this deserves a little more reflection …
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

The same question arises : what becomes of togetherness when a whole is not given, and perhaps even not to be given in any way?
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

Communism is togetherness - the Mitsein, the being-with - understood as the belonging to existence of the individuals, which means, in the existential meaning, to their essence. Society means an unessential - even if necessary - link between individuals who are, in the final analysis, essentially separate.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

But me, I, never exists alone. It exists essentially with other existing beings. The with is no external link, it is no link at all : it is togetherness - relation, sharing, exchange, mediation and immediation, meaning and feeling.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

...Communism says more and says something else than a political meaning. It says something about property. Property is not only the possession of goods. It is precisely beyond (and/or behind) any juridical assumption of a possession. It is what makes any kind of possession properly the possession of a subject, that is properly an expression of it. Property is not my possession : it is me.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

Collectivity means collected people : that is, people taken together from anywhere to the nowhere of the collectivity or of the collection. The co- of collective is not the same as that of communism. This is not only a matter of etymology (munire versus ligare) . This is a matter of ontology : the co- of collectivism is a mere external "side by side" which implies no relationship between the sides or between the parts of this "partes extra partes".
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

Or even better : if the we can only and each time be a speech act, then only a we existentially spoken may perform its significance (what is exactly this significance is another matter : for now, I note only that it implies a relationship, not a mere side-by- side).
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

Communism, therefore, means the common condition of all the singularities of subjects, that is of all the exceptions, all the uncommon points whose network makes a world (a possibility of sense). It does not belong to the political. It comes before any politics. It is what gives to politics an absolute requirement : the requirement to open the common space to the common itself - that is neither to the private nor to the collective, neither to separation nor to totality - but without permitting any political achievement of the common itself, any kind of making a substance of it. Communism is a principle of activation and limitation of politics.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

This is not politics, this is metaphysics or, if you prefer, this is ontology : to be is to be cum. (At the very moment I am writing this, I am surrounded by a singing crowd of futbol aficionados on a plaza in Madrid : there is there a multitude of symbols, problems, feelings about the common).
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

Another can be what I would name glory vs humility. ("The Humble", the name of a virtue became the name of poor people...). Capitalism is endlessness instead of infinity, or infinity as endless production of capital itself.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "On communism." in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

Sometimes, dream occurs. “Perchance,” as Hamlet says—he whose entire life and thinking are in a way devoted to nothing but sleep, to its shadow as well as to its shade (à sa tombée comme à sa tombe).
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The Fall of Sleep." in: Charlotte Mendell (Translator). lacanian ink. Vol. 33, Spring 2009. (English).

All of a sudden, awakening finds close to it a scrap left over from sleep. Something was brought back from nothing, and in effect it is a configuration of nothing.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The Fall of Sleep." in: Charlotte Mendell (Translator). lacanian ink. Vol. 33, Spring 2009. (English).

...scenes often colorful, with all kinds of tones, but whose dense coherency becomes blurred and quickly breaks apart in the acidity of day...
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The Fall of Sleep." in: Charlotte Mendell (Translator). lacanian ink. Vol. 33, Spring 2009. (English).

For me, “who” designated a place, that place “of the subject” which appears precisely through deconstruction itself. What is the place that Dasein, for example, comes to occupy?
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Interview with Jacques Derrida." in: The Symptom. Vol. 10, 2009. (English).

But the “what” is no better, for example the “process”, the “functioning”, the “text”…
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Interview with Jacques Derrida." in: The Symptom. Vol. 10, 2009. (English).

For me, the subject is above all, as in Hegel, “that which can retain in itself its own contradiction.” In the deconstruction of this “property”, it seems to me that the “that which”, the “what” of the “itself” brings forth the place, and the question, of a “who” which would no longer be “to itself” in this way. A who which would no longer have that property, but which would nevertheless be a who. It is “him/her” I want to question.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Interview with Jacques Derrida." in: The Symptom. Vol. 10, 2009. (English).

When you decide not to limit a potential “subjectivity” to man, why do you then limit yourself simply to the animal?
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Interview with Jacques Derrida." in: The Symptom. Vol. 10, 2009. (English).

The Freudian invention begins here: the subject tells itself, it becomes through its story.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Freud, so to Speak." in: lacanian ink. Vol. 31, Spring 2008. (English).

To be pressured by meaning signifies that one must appear as if carried away by what one is meant to carry. This is what speech abides by as myth: it does not invent stories, it does not create fiction, and it tries to let what precedes speech speak, which is signification at its statu nascendi. Trieb - growth, movement, pulsation, passion, being carried away - is the “name” found by Freud (explicitly against “instinct”) to talk about an effort, or forced meaning before and after signification: the power of desire, which carries man beyond himself.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Freud, so to Speak." in: lacanian ink. Vol. 31, Spring 2008. (English).

The body exposes itself to the depths of its guts, between the fibers of its muscles and along its vessels.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Strange Foreign Bodies." in: Liz Wendelbo (Translator). lacanian ink. Vol. 32, Fall 2008. (English).

This is the truth of the world: it comes out of nothing, it is created, which means that it is unproduced, unformed, and not constructed. It is an alteration and a spasm of nihil. The world is an explosion and an expansion of an exposure (which can be called “truth”, or “meaning”). The chiasm of the body and of the world exposes exposure to itself—and with it, the impossibility to finally bring the world to the spirit, and bring meaning to significance. The body is a strangeness which is not preceded by familiarity.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Strange Foreign Bodies." in: Liz Wendelbo (Translator). lacanian ink. Vol. 32, Fall 2008. (English).

“In numerous respects,” you say… I feel like asking the questions right away : what do you mean by that? But you will specify that for me later. I will try, first, to understand you, or to guess what you mean. A survivor—I certainly am in the sense that I would have died in 1991 if it hadn’t been possible for me to have a heart transplant. Which means either that I would have died ten years earlier, or that without a the availability of a transplant on time I would be dead (I had, when I received the transplant, about six months to live).
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

I eventually tell myself that these two forms of “survival” are after all really banal: who couldn’t say “at such a moment, if such a circumstance hadn’t been avoided, I could have, or should have, died”?
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

So, what does “survival” mean? Isn’t life always an escape from death? And this escape from death—which at the same time doesn’t cease moving towards death, of course—what is it if not life itself—that is, not the grand movement of all the living of the world, vegetable and animal, which for its part integrates into itself the death of individuals, all the dead, from the most premature to the most belated, but rather the quite small, the slight, singular movement of a “some one” that accidentally slips it “own” life to the heart of and to the edge of this great living thing?
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

But this “more” is a “less”: less than Life as a meeting between self and auto-affection, but more than Life as exposure [exposition] to chance, to the accident of existing [l’exister]…
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

Perhaps one could say that this “survivor” goes towards… survival itself: if the latter is “more than life,” it is the non-relation to self, the neither-conservation-nor-transformation of self, the departure of self towards an absoluteness outside of space and outside of time—this eternitas that Spinoza says we feel is provided for us, that is itself our experientia..
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

For the other-than-life is death… It is a matter of thinking death, or rather in death this other-than-life that is itself other than the cessation of life, the extinction and disappearance of a “self.” And thus the departure of this self beside itself [“hors de soi”].
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

So in the end, this dream to the contrary, we have to leave death to its unpredictable work and ourselves to our weakness, to our fear, to our unconsciousness. (It’s the model of consciousness that torments us…).
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

Yes, to go towards… dust as towards the absolute, to go towards the dust of the absolute…
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

“Outside-of in the middle of me,” yes: let’s make it clear that the only “outside” that there really is is never the one we see out the window, which is only “outside” due to its difference from the “inside.”
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

That is, an opening, a gaping hole that can be understood as a wound or as an access route—of entry and exit—or even as mouth, ear, nostril, anus, sex, eye. You can easily imagine how each of these openings can give rise to ample variation on the proper modality of the outside-of it evokes: the outside-of of the breath, of desire, of excrement, of speech, of all kinds of sensations, and in the end in each of these modes a modalization of “sense” [sens], that is of reference from “me,” to other, to “outside” [du renvoi de “moi” à de l’autre, à du “dehors”]. More precisely, I would say: to that of the other which is outside or is done outside, that is, not the presence of another before me (with its own “inside”) but non-closure, non-return to the self, neither of the other, nor of me.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

...in the same way my spiritual heart, if you will allow me the expression, or my ontological, essential heart, my mystical heart if you prefer (in the sense of “mystical body”) is what, in me, opens and extracts itself from “me,” that is from the return-into-oneself [retour-en-soi] or as-self that the “me” implies.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

The state that we call in French “being beside onself” [“être hors de soi”]—the exasperation of anger, the extreme irritation of desire, the exaltation of passion, the enthusiasm of admiration, of ambition, or of worship, everything that removes “us” from “ourselves” opens, quite simply, an outside-of according to which we don’t come back to ourselves, we don’t recover ourselves, nor do we find ourselves. It isn’t a matter of invoking madness. The models of madness that have exerted influence recently recall something of what I’ve said—but without implying an alteration of the “self” that remains an alteration of the self. While the outside-of [hors] that opens us and that opens in us opens our “in,” our “in [our]self” to every other thing that doesn’t change it, that only projects it far, very far, infinitely far “to the heart” of it-“self.”
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

But that also means that ultimately all philosophies speak of some of the same “things,” truths or meanings. Perhaps of just one thing in the end: our presence/absence, our body/mind. One same and single thing, one same and single distance from ourselves that constitutes us and that thoughts indefinitely modulate.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

What is a thought “of our time”? One that, at the same time, knows that it picks up at just the same starting point as every other —
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

Issue, exposition: what, moreover, leaves before me and goes far ahead, further, so far that sense is lost, the voice ceases to resonate, the body remains vibrating and empty. Reveling [jouissant], suffering, speaking, holding its silence…
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

Strangeness is none other than this strangenes to ourselves, in ourselves. It is our torment, as tragic as it is erotic.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The real outside is "at the heart" of the inside: Interview." in: ATOPIA. 2007. (English).

For us the image of a nude is a sweet, almost soothing representation. It participates in a very ordinary transgression that, as a consequence, transgresses nothing. In reality, it confirms rather the pleasure of the presentiment of a caress, already ready, on the skin that is offered to us, done up in silk or in velour in the play of the grain and the light.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "To The Exhausting Nude..." in: Barbara P. Fulks (Translator). lacanian ink. Vol. 30, Fall 2007. (English).

...that is that to love means in one way to give the self as possession, the self as present to itself, and in another way to give and to abandon to the other something that the other himself has, to say that it is in the same way for himself because he is as well a self. In other words, love is to share the impossibility of being a self.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Love and Community." in: European Graduate School. Round-table discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell and Wolfgang Schirmacher. August 2001.

I would say the community of love is a community living to share the absence of common being. Not the absence of being–in–common, but the absence of common being.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Love and Community." in: European Graduate School. Round-table discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell and Wolfgang Schirmacher. August 2001.

That is the core of the Christian story, that the neighbour is everybody, without any distinction. That is something that is also at the core of the whole structure of Western thinking, a thinking of equality and perhaps, to a certain extent, of the fraternity of all men. Then what does that mean? Precisely, if you think about how difficult it is to love your neighbor.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Love and Community." in: European Graduate School. Round-table discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell and Wolfgang Schirmacher. August 2001.

Lastly, the third and quite different way is perhaps precisely to understand how nothing is not a thing.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Love and Community." in: European Graduate School. Round-table discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell and Wolfgang Schirmacher. August 2001.

I think that for us now it is very important to learn about the distinction of a community as such, for example to think of it as, among other ways, a way of love, and to think of politics as a special order where of course the community has to establish a law to guarantee management as a management of justice, equality, the rule, etc.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Love and Community." in: European Graduate School. Round-table discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell and Wolfgang Schirmacher. August 2001.