As such, meaning does not consist in the transmission from a speaker to a receiver, but in the simultaneity of (at least) two origins of meaning: that of the saying and that of is resaying.
Being is exposed only in the intercorporeality of the saying. This does not signify that Being "is only a word," but rather that Being is all that is and all that goes into making a word.
This is the 'earth' we are supposed to 'inhabit' today. . . this is us, we who are suppose to say 'we' as if we know what we are saying and 'who' we are talking about. This earth is anything but a sharing of humanity. It is a world that does not even manage to constitute a world; it is a world lacking in world, and lacking in the meaning of world. It is an enumeration that brings to light the sheer number and proliferation of these various poles of attraction and repulsion. It is an endless list, and everything happens in such a way that one is reduced to keeping accounts but never taking the final toll. It is a litany, a prayer of pure sorrow and pure loss, the plea that falls from the lips of millions of refugees every day: whether they be deportees, people besieged, those who are mutilated, people who starve, who are raped, ostracized, excluded, exiled, expelled.
What I am talking about here is compassion but not compassion as a pity that feels sorry for itself and feeds on itself. Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness.
As a consequence, gaining access to the origin, entering into meaning, comes down to exposing oneself to this truth.
What this means is that we do not gain access to the origin: access is refused by the origin's concealing itself in its multiplicity. We do not gain access; that is, we do not penetrate the origin; we do not identify with it. More precisely, we do not identify ourselves in it or as it, but with it, in a sense that must be elucidated here and is nothing other than the meaning of originary coexistence.
This follows as an essential consequence: the being-other of the origin is not the alterity of an "other-than-the-world." It is not a question of an Other (the inevitably "capitalized Other") than the world; it is a question of the alterity or alteration of the world. In other words, it is not a question of an aliud or an alius, or an alienus, or an other in general as the essential stranger who is opposed to what is proper, but of an alter, that is, "one of the two." This "other," this "lowercase other," is "one" among many insofar as they are many; it is each one, and it is each time one, one among them, one among all and one among us all. In the same way, and reciprocally, "we" is always inevitably "us all," where no one of us can be "all" and each one of us is, in turn (where all our turns are simultaneous as well as successive, in every sense), the other origin of the same world.
The "outside" of the origin is "inside"—in an inside more interior than the extreme interior, that is, more interior than the intimacy of the world and the intimacy that belongs to each "me." If intimacy must be defined as the extremity of coincidence with oneself, then what exceeds intimacy in interiority is the distancing of coincidence itself. It is a coexistence of the origin "in" itself, a coexistence of origins; it is no accident that we use the word "intimacy" to designate a relation between several people more often than a relation to oneself. Our being-with, as a being-many, is not at all accidental, and it is in no way the secondary and random dispersion of a primordial essence. It forms the proper and necessary status and consistency of originary alterity as such. The plurality of beings is at the foundation [fondment] of Being.
A single being is a contradiction in terms. Such a being, which would be its own foundation, origin, and intimacy, would be incapable of Being, in every sense that this expression can have here. "Being" is neither a state nor a quality, but rather the action according to which what Kant calls "the [mere] positing of a thing" takes place ("is"). The very simplicity of "position" implies no more, although no less, than its being discrete, in the mathematical sense, or its distinction from, in the sense of with, other (at least possible) positions, or its distinction among, in the sense of between, other positions. In other words, every position is also dis-position, and, considering the appearing that takes the place of and takes place in the position, all appearance is co-appearance [com-parution]. This is why the meaning of Being is given as existence, being-in-oneself-outside-oneself, which we make explicit, we "humans," but which we make explicit, as I have said, for the totality of beings.
If the origin is irreducibly plural, if it is the indefinitely unfolding and variously multiplied intimacy of the world, then not gaining access to the origin takes on another meaning. Its negativity is neither that of the abyss, nor of the forbidden, nor of the veiled or the concealed, nor of the secret, nor that of the unpresentable. It need not operate, then, in the dialectical mode where the subject must retain in itself its own negation (since it is the negation of its own origin). Nor does it have to operate in a mystical mode, which is the reverse of the dialectical mode, where the subject must rejoice in its negation. In both of these, negativity is given as the aliud, where alienation is the process that must be reversed in terms of a reappropriation. All forms of the "capitalized Other" presume this alienation from the proper as their own; this is exactly what constitutes the "capitalization" of the "Other," its unified and broken transcendence. But, in this way, all forms of the capitalized "Other" represent precisely the exalted and overexalted mode of the propriety of what is proper, which persists and consists in the "somewhere" of a "nowhere" and in the "sometime" of a "no time," that is, in the punctum aeternum outside the world.
The outside is inside; it is the spacing of the dis-position of the world; it is our disposition and our co-appearance. Its "negativity" changes meaning; it is not converted into positivity, but instead corresponds to the mode of Being which is that of disposition/co-appearance and which, strictly speaking, is neither negative nor positive, but instead the mode of being-together or being-with. The origin is together with other origins, originally divided. As a matter of fact, we do have access to it. We have access exactly in the mode of having access; we get there; we are on the brink, closest, at the threshold; we touch the origin. "(Truly) we have access (to the truth)...." ["À la verité, nous accédons..."] is Bataille's phrase, the ambiguity of which I repeat even though I use it in another way (in Bataille, it precedes the affirmation of an immediate loss of access). Perhaps everything happens between loss and appropriation: neither one nor the other, nor one and the other, nor one in the other, but much more strangely than that, much more simply.
"To reach [toucher] the end" is again to risk missing it, because the origin is not an end. End, like Principle, is a form of the Other. To reach the origin is not to miss it; it is to be properly exposed to it. Since it is not another thing (an aliud), the origin is neither "missable" nor appropriable (penetrable, absorbable). It does not obey this logic. It is the plural singularity of the Being of being. We reach it to the extent that we are in touch with ourselves and in touch with the rest of beings. We are in touch with ourselves insofar as we exist. Being in touch with ourselves is what makes us "us," and there is no other secret to discover buried behind this very touching, behind the "with" of coexistence.
We have access to the truth of the origin as many times as we are in one another's presence and in the presence of the rest of beings. Access is "coming to presence," but presence itself is dis-position, the spacing of singularities. Presence is nowhere other than in "coming to presence." We do not have access to a thing or a state, but only to a coming. We have access to an access.
"Strangeness" refers to the fact that each singularity is another access to the world. At the point where we would expect "something," a substance or a procedure, a principle or an end, a signification, there is nothing but the manner, the turn of the other access, which conceals itself in the very gesture wherein it offers itself to us—and whose concealing is the turning itself. In the singularity that he exposes, each child that is born has already concealed the access that he is "for himself" and in which he will conceal himself "within himself," just as he will one day hide under the final expression of a dead face. This is why we scrutinize these faces with such curiosity, in search of identification, looking to see whom the child looks like, and to see if death looks like itself. What we are looking for there, like in the photographs, is not an image; it is an access.
Is this not what interests us or touches us in "literature" and in "the arts"? What else interests us about the disjunction of the arts among themselves, by which they are what they are as arts: plural singulars? What else are they but the exposition of an access concealed in its own opening, an access that is, then, "inimitable," untransportable, untranslatable because it forms, each time, an absolute point of translation, transmission, or transition of the origin into origin. What counts in art, what makes art art (and what makes humans the artists of the world, that is, those who expose the world for the world), is neither the "beautiful" nor the "sublime"; it is neither "purposiveness without a purpose" nor the "judgment of taste"; it is neither "sensible manifestation" nor the "putting into work of truth." Undoubtedly, it is all that, but in another way: it is access to the scattered origin in its very scattering; it is the plural touching of the singular origin. This is what "the imitation of nature" has always meant. Art always has to do with cosmogony, but it exposes cosmogony for what it is: necessarily plural, diffracted, discreet, a touch of color or tone, an agile turn of phrase or folded mass, a radiance, a scent, a song, or a suspended movement, exactly because it is the birth of a world (and not the construction of a system). A world is always as many worlds as it takes to make a world.
We only have access to ourselves—and to the world. It is only ever a question of the following: full access is there, access to the whole of the origin. This is called "finitude" in Heideggerian terminology. But it has become clear since then that "finitude" signifies the infinite singularity of meaning, the infinite singularity of access to truth. Finitude is the origin; that is, it is an infinity of origins. "Origin" does not signify that from which the world comes, but rather the coming of each presence of the world, each time singular.
Excerpted from Being Singular Plural
by Jean-Luc Nancy; translated by Robert D. Richardson & Anne E. O'Byrne.
#the odyssey
#art
#ao3
#star wars
