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Journal of Visual Culture
DOI: 10.1177/1470412909354252
2010; 9; 3 Journal of Visual Culture
Louis Kaplan and John Paul Ricco
Introduction: Regarding Jean-Luc Nancy
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Vol 9(1): 310 DOI 10.1177/1470412909354252
Introducton: 'Regardng Jean-Luc Nancy'
Lous Kaplan and John Paul Rcco
Nancy's Vsual Cultures
This issue approaches Jean-Luc Nancy as a philosopher whose thinking matters
to visual culture and to visual studies. With the publication and translation of such
books as The Muses (1996), The Ground of the Image (2005b) and Multiple Arts:
The Muses II (2006a), and with a number of recent essays including The Art of
Making a World (2005, unpublished), The Image: Mimesis & Methexis (2007a)
and Art Today (2007b) which is published for the rst time in this issue in English
translation, Jean-Luc Nancy has demonstrated his long-standing interest in and
writing on art and aesthetics. All in all, Nancy has made the question of the image
one of the crucial subjects of his regard. This body of writing is now attracting
attention and increasingly informs the work of scholars of visual cultural studies
as well as art historians, theorists, artists, lmmakers and curators. A few examples
would include the exhibition Common Wealth curated by Jessica Morgan (Tate
Modern, London, 2003), Trop curated by Ginette Michaud and Louise Dery
(UQAM Gallery, Montreal, 2006) and Claire Denis acclaimed lm LIntrus (The
Intruder, 2004). In addition, Nancy himself curated his own recent project on Le
plaisir au dessin (The Pleasure of Drawing) at the Muse des Beaux-Arts in Lyon
exhibited from October 2007 to January 2008.
This issue has its roots in the panel that we co-organized under the title of Jean-
Luc Nancy and the Sense of the Visual at the 2009 College Art Association Annual
Meeting in Los Angeles. We thank Philip Armstrong, Ian Balfour, Hagi Kenaan and
Ginette Michaud for their vital contributions to its success and for all their efforts
in expanding and revising their texts in response to our comments and feedback
in order to reach their presently published form. That initial conference panel
as well as the present issue have offered us the chance to take up conjunctures
between Nancys philosophical inections of concepts and contemporary art
discourses and practices on such issues as the grounding of the image in the
ethical and the singularplural, the aestheticpolitical project of art as the art
of making a world, the questioning of indexical theory for an understanding
of the photographic image, the consequences of the move from appearance to
4 journol o vluuol oullure 9(1)
exposure in order to make sense of the visual, the possibility of thinking non-
consensual futures in the tele-cinematic regime through a social ontology forged
out of the inoperative community and, last but certainly not least, the limits of
mimetic representation. Interestingly enough, all of these contributions take up
how Nancys philosophy deconstructs the logic of representation, whether by
means of the regard, methexis, exposure, or the nitude of the ethical image.
But this is not the rst time that Nancy has graced the pages of this esteemed
journal. We should recall that Nancys essay Chromatic Atheology was paired
with Martin Bubers reections on the Isenheim Altarpiece in journal of visual
culture 4(1), April 2005 (Nancy, 2005a).
The present issue Regarding Jean-Luc Nancy traces some intersecting lines of
thought and vectors to pose an encounter between Nancy and the visual by
means of seven original contributions by a group of leading scholars who hail
from a wide variety of disciplines (philosophy, lm studies, comparative studies,
photography studies, performance studies, queer studies and literary studies). The
disciplinary spaces that are present in this issue rarely invoke the frame of art
history for Nancys writings are not that interested in the chronological shape
and shaping of things, on the one hand, or anything like art for arts sake, on
the other hand. This new formation of intense interest attests to the recent turn
that has been taken by political and ethical philosophers to aesthetics and to the
realm of appearance. To a list that includes Nancy, one could add the names of
philosophers such as Jacques Rancire, Alain Badiou and Gianni Vattimo or look
to recent texts with titles such as The Political Life of Sensation (Panagia, 2009)
or The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-
Labarthe and Nancy (Ross, 2007). Clearly, it is the goal of this issue to expose
those associated with the disciplinary names of art history and visual studies
to this type of work in order to examine how Nancys thinking in particular
can be applicable to the ways in which one frames the sense of the visual (e.g.
the thinking of the image as ontological) and thereby to open spaces that move
between (or beyond) the bounds of philosophy and art history, of philosophy
and visual studies. In turn, this issue moves Nancys work in new disciplinary and
discursive directions, in part by setting its sights on topics not present in Nancys
own work.
In this way, Nancys regard for the image, as well as our regard for his relevance
to todays visual cultures, is something that is written (ex-scribed) across
disciplinary borders. This stems from the fact that the image is always associated
with that which absents itself and therefore with the place of displacement. In
the essay Distinct Oscillation, Nancy homes in on the paradoxes of the image
as a withdrawal and a displacement that is engaged in the imaging of absence.
What is this strange place where the image dwells but only restlessly? Nancy
responds:
The empty place of the absent as the place that is not empty: that is the
image. A place that is not empty does not mean a place that has been lled:
it means the place of the image, that is in the end, the image as place, and a
singular place for what has no place here: the place of a displacement, and
Kaplan and Rcco lnlroduollon: 'Pegordlng Jeon-Luo Nonoy` 5
metaphor, and here we are again. The image calls out: Make way! [Place!]
Make way for displacement, make way for transport! (Nancy, 2005: 68,
emphasis in original)
For Nancy, this means that to think the image means of necessity to think between
(and even beyond) disciplinary borders. The essays assembled here are delivered
in this metaphorical spirit of communication, contagion, and contamination as
they turn to Nancys thinking in order to nd new ways by which to envision
visual studies across aesthetic, ethical and political regimes and to be touched
by the visual.
(Louis Kaplan, 20 August 2009)
From Cave to Grotto
In 1994, in the context of essays on Georges Bataille and aesthetics, Jean-Luc
Nancy published an essay entitled, Painting in the Grotto, that in turn was
included in The Muses (1996), the rst of three collections of his writings on art
and aesthetics, and to my mind the most indispensable of the group, a trio of
books that also includes The Ground of the Image (2005b), and Multiple Arts:
The Muses II (2006a).
Nancys Grotto essay can serve as an initial reference point for all of the
contributions to this issue of the journal of visual culture in that each of
them demonstrates that, in regard to Jean-Luc Nancys thinking on aesthesis,
presentation and the ground of the image, we are no longer in Platos cave
that most classic prison house of art, representation, and visual images. Our
co-contributors enable us to measure the distance between cave and grotto, by
drawing our attention to the multiple ways in which Nancy thinks of arts work
not in terms of representation but of presentation and, even further, of art as the
staging and exhibition of a never-ending (or innitely nite in Nancys phrasing)
exposure to being as always being-with to existence as always co-existence.
This marks one of the most decisive splits from Heideggers existential analytic,
such that for Nancy, Mit-sein (being-with) has ontological priority over Da-sein
(being-there). Even more precisely, we can speak of the way in which being-
with as being-together, is a sharing in the separating and distancing that is the
there of being: elsewhere, beside, around and outside. These are various names
for the ground of co-existence that also trace and outline its form. In Painting in
the Grotto (1996), Nancy writes: There is only the inside of the world, like the
inside of the grotto The grotto is the world (p. 77). Which means that there
is no world outside of, or above, or beyond this world, the one that is ours as the
place the there of us.
Now, historically, we know that the grotto is an invention of the early modern
picturesque in 17th-century Italy. In its status as articial and simulated a small
constructed cave-like space in a park or garden (the latter being facsimiles of
nature in their own right) the grotto is the spatialarchitectural representation
6 journol o vluuol oullure 9(1)
of Platos scene of representation: the cave-image of Platos image of the cave, if
you will.
By afrming that the very spacing of existence and world is grotto, Nancy
attests to it not being the scene let alone the prison house of representation or
simulation, since there does not exist a more true or authentic reality to which
it can be said to relate, and to which we might want or need to escape. In fact,
the walls of the grotto, its innermost recesses as well as its yawning mouth,
only exist through the ars/techne/gesture that designs, draws, outlines and, in
doing so, raises the ground to the surface, and forms and creates the grotto as
the being-there in the world. Visual art (from drawing to photography to lm)
and the cultures of which it is a constitutive part, invent grottoes as the spaces/
architectures that are at once the form and the ground of the image and the
world. As Nancy states: the there is always a grotto (p. 71, emphasis in original).
Yet, as he goes on to argue, and in ways that will nd resonance in each of
the essays in this journal issue, if the there is always a grotto, then the ars/
techne/gesture that creates and invents the grotto, in the form for instance of
the outline of hands traced right on its surface, must be understood as an open
gesture. This is the grasp of a hand that offers up what it cannot hold on to,
namely, the sharingdividing that is, for us, the aesthetic, ethical and political
par-taking in our co-existence. It is the sense of this offering in its ungraspability
that the rst artists traced as the outline drawn around their hands on the walls
of the caves, a retreating of a touch that in its being at once a withdrawing and
a retracing, opens up and creates a peri- or around space. This is the grotto,
not as space of representation, signication and interiority, but of presentation,
exposure and exteriority. In the always beginning again of this retracing/
withdrawing exscription, which is to say, as the each time of being-together,
lies the periodicity of aesthesis, and the time of our world and of us.
To think this sense of the world, Nancy calls upon us to return to the Greek
notion of methexis, literally of participation, yet without being contained
or comprehended (enclosed) in terms of identity and the implied notions of
community, even of those structured in terms of cooperative collaboration and
consensus. Instead, methexis needs to be understood as the par-taking of non-
knowledge, not a Platonic sharing that links the individual to its singular form
or eidos, but rather as a sharing in separation, loss and nitude at (and as) the
origin of art, image and sense. Here is where we might locate the ground and
form of co-existence and compearance, of ethical decision, political praxis and
the aesthesis of the image. Without recourse, relation or return either to a self or
to a communal concentration, which is also to say: without redemptive sacrice,
revelatory appearance, or resurrectionary return.
This is the scene, then, in which the grotto or perhaps the tomb is empty,
and where a certain spectatorwitness is surprised. The history of Western
art rarely includes this image in its iconographic catalogue, for it would be the
deconstruction or the innite interruption and suspension of the Platonic
Christian cave called the West. Instead, we might take Nancys word intrusion
as a name for what we are here trying to dene as the technique of making the
Kaplan and Rcco lnlroduollon: 'Pegordlng Jeon-Luo Nonoy` 7
world appear in its innitely nite exposure. Yet intrusion understood not in
the sense of a trespass and transgression of, or an escape from the cave and its
mouth, but as the opening that lies at the caves innermost heart. It is this sense
of intrusion that afrms that the wall, surface, canvas and ground of the image
of each image, as the space of an intimate intrusion and an intruding intimacy
(for there are no other kinds) is always a threshold, an aperture, an opening.
This is the ex-static place of compearance, as the dis-enclosure of community:
the opening up of world, about which we must not cease to be surprised.
So to conclude, we might turn to the nal paragraph of Nancys Preface, dated
Christmas 2006 (Nancy, 2006b: xxv), to the English translation of his book
on Kant, The Discourse of the Syncope (originally published in 1976). As he
looks back to that time 30 years ago, he speaks of the old children of Europe,
those whom we might say still remained imprisoned in Platos cave, right up to
and including the Situationists pursuit of something more authentic and less
alienating than spectacle. Today, as we regard the world and contemporary
visual culture through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, we not only have a sense that
the globalized world has become a grotto, but we can also begin to afrm that, as
a grotto, it is no longer a prison. For to repeat: there is only one world, ours, in
all of its singular multiplicity, being-there right here in front of us. In our being-
together, it is a world for us no longer to interpret or perhaps even to change,
but to democratically create. Surely this is the simplest and the most difcult
of tasks, one that requires us to retreat from putting nitude, appearance, the
look and methexis to work, since their ethical and political potential lies in their
inoperativity. We need an art and technique that innitely sustains the nitude
of this worklessness.
(John Paul Ricco, 11 August 2009)
Our Regards
In their respective papers, both Philip Armstrong and John Paul Ricco focus
our attention on the political space of co-appearance, and of ways in which
to think it distinct from the current politics of consensus. Drawing upon the
deep yet rarely commented upon resonances between Jacques Rancires
partition/distribution of the sensible (partage) and Nancys shared-out/division
(partager) of sense, Armstrong nds evidence (a keyword for his discussion)
of democratic dissensus not in an essentialized in-between zone of relationality,
but in a partaking of, participation in, and exposure to, the disappearance
and departure from any common ground. This retreating and retracing of the
political, as Nancy (with Lacoue-Labarthe) has theorized it, is to be understood
as the only ground of our co-appearance. As Armstrong and Kaplans papers
each in their respective ways set out to demonstrate, photography offers
evidence of this ground.
Kaplans essay takes up Nancys recasting of the gure of the death mask, which
has been a favorite of indexical thinkers of photography such as Andre Bazin and
Susan Sontag in their attempts to articulate the photograph as a physical trace
8 journol o vluuol oullure 9(1)
of the referent. The gure of the death mask even enters into Martin Heideggers
thinking about the conditions of possibilities of any image. Invoking Bataille on
the ex-scription of meaning and Blanchots fascination with the images uncanny
absence as presence, Kaplan demonstrates how Nancy sets photography on
another path one that recalls being as posed in exteriority and one that puts
the death masks absence, withdrawal and loss as the ground of the photographic
image. Through a reading of selected writings by Nancy on photography and
lm, and their butting up against the discourse of phenomenology (Armstrong)
and theories of photographys indexicality (Kaplan), both authors enable us to
understand that photos and lms offer the evidence of this ground not simply
in the form of an apodictic visual representation or record, but as the very
presentation/exposition of the exteriority, alterity, separation and exposure that
binds us together.
Whereas the Situationists critique regarded this separation in the Marxist terms
of social alienation, and located the source of this in modern forms of spectacle,
and therefore as something to be overcome, Nancy has suggested that in its
very presentation of this non-communitarian sociality, spectacle may be one
of the ways in which to think political and ethical futures that are not ready
made in the name of consensus or consensuality. In his article on the work of
the contemporary Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli, Ricco draws upon Nancys
discussion of the society of the spectacle in order to demonstrate the ways in
which Vezzolis performative expropriations of tele-cinematic preview genres,
such as the movie trailer (absent the movie itself), are not images of a nostalgic
past or a utopian future, but operate as techniques by which the futurity of
being-together is already un-made and therefore always still-to-come.
Ian Balfour here is also interested in Nancys theorization of the evidence of lm,
specically as it has been articulated in the eponymous book on the work of
Iranian lmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. With a focus on three lms: Where Is the
Friends Home? (1987), And Life Goes On (1991) and Through the Olive Trees
(1994) (the last two of which are set in the aftermath of the devastating 1990
earthquake in northern Iran), Balfour engages Nancys theorization of a lmic
regard, distinct in its mobilization of stoppage and the motionless, which is to
say, from either static vision or unthinking recording.
With a focus on Nancys ontology of singularplural being, Hagi Kenaan sets
out to raise a series of questions regarding the extent to which this ontology,
including its emphasis on alterity and exteriority, serves as the ground for Nancys
thinking and writing on art. Keenan reads Nancys texts on art, and in particular
Painting in the Grotto, as lacking in their commitment to the very co-ontology
that Nancy draws from his own critical reading of Heideggers Mitsein (being-
with). Drawing upon Levinas structuring of the ethical, Kenaan goes on to
question the ethical import of Nancys ontology of the image.
In part one of her article, Ginette Michaud provides a summary reading of
Nancys lecture Art Today, also included in this issue of the journal. Part
two continues the preceding discussion of gesture, in its focus on Nancys
performative ekphrasis (as Michaud refers to it) and a lexicon derived from
Kaplan and Rcco lnlroduollon: 'Pegordlng Jeon-Luo Nonoy` 9
Derridean deconstruction on the line, trait, trace, retreat and outline. In the
third and culminating section of the article, Michaud discusses the dynamic and
mutual rapport between mimesis (imitation) and methexis (participation) so as
to arrive at an understanding of democracy as the art of actively participating in
making a world, as opposed to reecting and reproducing a pre-existing image
of it, or abandoning it in the revealed vision of some other world.
In his lecture on art today (in terms of its post-medium globalicity), Nancy puts
forth the notion that its principal role and responsibility lies in its reiterated
posing of the question What is art? and of never providing a denitive answer.
Instead, Nancy argues that art today essentially involves keeping the sense of this
very question open through its gesture, the name that he gives to the praxis that
renders sensible this open sense of the question. Nancy describes this gesture
as sending a signal out beyond the work of art, about the possibility of making a
world, to which each work is dedicated in its gesture towards carrying (in the
full sense of the word) that sense of possibility and world as being without nal
signication. It is in these ways that Nancy encourages us to think of the gesture
of art today as an innitely nite gestation: the periodicity of our time and the
instant exteriority of our world (parte extra partes).
We express our thanks to Charlotte Mandell for her ne translation of Nancys
lecture that captures the informality of the original presentation and we also
wish to thank both Jean-Luc Nancy and Ginette Michaud for their careful reviews
of the text in English. As a nal giving of our regards, we thank Marq Smith for
inviting us to share our work on Nancys visual cultures and for his steadfast
support throughout the entire editorial process.
References
Nancy, J-L. (1996) The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, J-L. (2005a) Chromatic Atheology, journal of visual culture 4(1): 11628.
Nancy, J-L. (2005b) The Ground of the Image, trans. J. Fort. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Nancy, J-L. (2005, unpublished) Lart de faire un monde (The Art of Making a World).
Nancy, J-L. (2006a) Multiple Arts: The Muses II, ed. S. Sparks. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Nancy, J-L. (2006b[1976]) The Discourse of the Syncope. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Nancy, J-L. (2007a) The Image: Mimesis & Methexis, theory @ buffalo 11: 926.
Nancy, J-L. (2007b) Larte, oggi (Art, Today), in Federico Ferrari (ed.) Del contemporaneo.
Milano: Bruno Mondadori.
Panagia, D. (2009) The Political Life of Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ross, A. (2007) The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger,
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
10 journol o vluuol oullure 9(1)
/RXLV.DSODQ is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Photography and
New Media in the Graduate Department of Art at the University of Toronto
and Director of the Institute of Communication and Culture at its Mississauga
campus. He has published widely in the elds of photo studies and visual culture.
His book American Exposures (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) analyses
the question of photography and community in a number of 20th-century
American photographic practices through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy. His recent
essay Being Exposed approaches the naked photography of Spencer Tunick via
Nancys thinking in Thinking Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Routledge,
2009). Kaplan is also the author of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings
(Duke University Press, 1995) and The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit
Photographer (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
$GGUHVV Graduate Department of Art, University of Toronto, 100 St George
Street, Toronto, Canada M5S 3G3. [email: louis.kaplan@utoronto.ca]
-RKQ 3DXO 5LFFR is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the
University of Toronto. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure (University of
Chicago Press, 2002) and is currently completing The Decision Between Us:
Aporetic Aesthetics and the Unbecoming Community (University of Chicago
Press). He is the editor of an issue of the journal Parallax on the theme of
unbecoming, and is the author of a number of essays on contemporary art,
architecture, sexuality and ethics. In 2008, he was Curator-in-Residence at
V-Tape, Toronto, where he organized a two-part exhibition of contemporary
queer video.
$GGUHVV Graduate Department of Art, University of Toronto, 100 St George Street,
Toronto, Canada M5S 3G3. [email: john.ricco@utoronto.ca]