The Fragile Skin of the World. Jean-Luc Nancy

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СКАЧАТЬ troubles us: the absence of origin and of end, an opportunity that is bound to be perilous, and (why not?) to say it once more, very clearly: the risk that the entire physical and metaphysical endeavour of three million years of humanity will be absorbed in the greeting of a salvation as tragic as it is ironic, addressed to no one, but as magnificent from the standpoint of sense as it is ruinous from the standpoint of signification.

      Like the life of every individual or every culture, every language or every civilization . . .

      We don’t like to hear this, and I don’t write it without bashfulness. But we must ask ourselves why, for such a long time (a century at least), we have obstinately ignored so many warnings – those of Valéry or of Heidegger, of Günther Anders or of Jacques Ellul, of Marshall McLuhan or of Neil Postman, among many others. We regard them as prophets of doom: we have remained too attached (once again, ‘we’, the upper middle classes of infinite progress) to the scheme of a history based on a single idea, one that propels itself towards a goal that we’ve basically imagined as almost achieved . . .

‘Imagined’: yes, we’ve projected an image for ourselves of a humanity that is certainly not perfect but sufficient, with its reason, its rights, its power, and its mastery of the universe. In this sense it is not surprising that for a long time our means of self-critique has been to critique our general store of images, the spectacle we put on for ourselves, and the unrealistic nature of the virtual. But this critique, which has now become a gimmick, rests on the oldest opposition of our tradition: that of the ‘real’ and the ‘simulated’ the basis of which is the same as that of the opposition between auto- and allo-. It therefore presupposes the substantial self-subsisting being of man – of the subject, of time, of being.

      If the time is coming, it means that subject and being are terms that will no longer – now or in the future – be at our disposal. Both the one and the other always, time and again, confront this coming, this arrival that is also a departure, this event – birth and death, encounter, salutation. That which each time takes place elsewhere. At a place different from where I am but not far: in the proximity of imminence.

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      Our history is at once opening and closing. The refugees who are here are at once foreigners and at home. ‘At home’ at once slides into the past and disperses itself in the time to come. It was always that way, but now it has been declared: it is open right in front of us.

The linear advance of the techno-economy at once locks the time to come within a calculable future and reveals its own aimlessness. What we call ‘the destruction of nature’ in fact destroys the very element that drives forth technics:⁸ this is the greatest point of tension, the issue most laden with anguish and expectation. If what is at stake is indeed self-destruction, then it is every bit as possible for the latter to consist of an annihilation as of a strong tremor that has come from elsewhere (elsewhere: where? Right here, of course).

      As possible as impossible. Unforeseeable, incalculable, but as certain as the coming of time.

      As ample, enveloping, and misleading as what Baudelaire calls ‘nature’ to designate that through which ‘man passes’ and only subsists by being carried away.

      As the long echoes, shadowy, profound,

      Heard from afar, blend in a unity,

      [. . .]

      Having dimensions infinitely vast [. . .]⁹

      This is why, if the ‘self-’ (the ‘auto-’) harbours danger, as I will say often in what follows, one must nonetheless not confuse it with the little ‘subject’ of our culture. We often reproach this subject for getting caught up in images, and for seeking to be ‘emancipated’, endowed with unlimited rights. But this unfortunate ‘subject’ is itself merely the product of a much larger expansion that has become pluriversal. The same goes for the subject as for the little ‘ego’ or ‘I’ of Freud at the surface of the considerable mass of the ‘id’ or ‘it’. And ‘it’ is also the resonance of all the long echoes of the time that is coming.

      Instead of giving moral lectures to the subject, let’s attempt to think within this resonance. People will say to me: but what do you mean? My response is that I simply want to allow what is being sought out to speak of its own right. What is trying to speak precedes us by a great distance. From very far ahead of us and also behind us: I’m speaking of the world, of life and death, of the possibility of our cohabitations.

There is nothing alarmist or apocalyptic in thinking that existence as such can be brought before its own transience and finitude. It is precisely there that it takes on its infinite, unique, and unsubstitutable value.

Man infinitely surpasses man: one might say that this phrase of Pascal opened the scansion of the time that is coming towards us.

Notes

      1  2 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, Munich, C. H. Beck, 1961, p.286. The text was originally published in 1956. [TR: My translation.]

      2  3 [TR: In English in original, both here and later in the chapter.]

      3  4 [TR: In English in original.]

      4  5 See François Raffoul, ‘Derrida and the Ethics of the Im-possible’, Research in Phenomenology 38.2 (2008), 270–90.

      5  6 See Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, tr. Christine Irizarry, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 310.

      6  7 It is nonetheless necessary to note just how strange it is that we have paid so little attention not only to Heidegger, but also to others such as Günther Anders or Jacques Ellul . . .

      7  8 [TR: On the term ‘technics’, see my translator’s note at the beginning of Chapter II.]

      8  9 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondences’, in The Flowers of Evil, tr. James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 19.

I A Time to Come without Past or Future¹

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      Today, we’re often tempted to perceive ourselves as forming a present deprived of a dependable past and future – ‘we’, inhabitants of the worlds that are called ‘developed’, which are enveloped a little more each day by a fog in which the contours and the sense of our progress become blurred. Our past, whether it’s that of humanism or that of communism, is of little help to us, and our future gives us more doubt than assurances. We also have a sense of immobility or of hesitating suspension in which we feel disoriented to the point of taking refuge in what certain have called a ‘presentism’. This term has had a theoretical meaning (the affirmation of the exclusive existence of the present) and a practical meaning (‘let’s focus on the present, the rest is out of our control’).

These attitudes are all ways of mourning history (a mourning that has been announced for more than a half century already) – of history, at least, understood as a relatively continuous process, a process relatively oriented towards a certain ‘good life’, to take up Aristotle’s expression qualifying the stakes of living in common. What for Aristotle depended on a judicious choice found itself being linked to progress, once the idea of perfecting techniques with a view to a better life was invented: from this point, history became in some way the instigator СКАЧАТЬ