Paris, 2000. “Pompéi—villa du mystère en trop.”
While visiting Jean-Luc Nancy in the year 2000, François Martin noticed a patch of water damage on his wall. The two men must have chatted briefly about the shape of the damage before Martin picked up some graphite and sketched this figure over the damaged surface. At some point before the wall was re-plastered, Jean-Luc took a photo of François’ drawing and titled it, Pompéi—villa du mystère en trop. This title could refer perhaps to original drawing or its preservation in the photo.
Hamburg, May 2015.
Jean-Luc Nancy gives a lecture that will be titled “Sexistenz”. This title plays on the existenz of existentialism.
“What is made, then, when we make love?” he asks rhetorically. “We make nothing in the sense of production (if a child results, whether or not he or she is considered a production, that child is not love as such, which can very well be completely absent).” What we make is murky.
“We make in the sense of performing an act, but the designated act is not an act; it is a sentiment, a disposition, the arousal of relation that reaches beyond itself toward something that seems destined either to renew it indefinitely or to surpass it in an embrace where it concludes without us knowing how to interpret that sense of concluding,” Jean-Luc continues. The work of performance seems to be accomplished by the statement itself.
Then:
Expression indicates an effectiveness of love that no declaration, no demonstration, no testimony can claim to convey. This is why, in a sense, it is not impossible to make love outside the limited sense of a sexual relation: the exchange of looks, of such and such contact, of words too that can venture into the terrain of this “making.”
For at least one thing is sure: love cannot merely be said; even its saying must be a doing.
He classifies “I love you” as a “performative” that “does what it says.” Under this condition, the statement does all the work. A physical embrace “only adds an excess saying, performing its own limit.” The limit of the limitation is the invisible constraint.
“E. M.” French.
“(Related question: in how many languages does one say, more or less literally, make love?)”
—- Jean-Luc Nancy, “Sexistenz”
Unlike French, Romanian is a minor language. This was unbearable to Emil Cioran. Unbearable to exist in a language that could not contest its own disappearance. Unbearable to be born into this tongue that marked itself insignificant. In a letter to a friend, Emil decided he would only use the Romanian language for cursing.
In Paris, E. M. (formerly Emil) vowed to marry a French woman who lacked any ties to Romania. By adopting a foreign tongue, Cioran planned to distance himself from the homeland-craziness associated with Romanian. "The acceptance of this linguistic discipline has moderated my delirium," he wrote. The voluptuary of exile would be his new belonging, but his point of origin would haunt him and inflect his writings. Fortunately, Simone Boue allowed the notorious pessimist to exert his charms on her, and became his official French wife. It is lovely when love works out that way.
Paris. March 5, 1944.
Georges Bataille reads "The Laughter of Nietzsche" aloud to a group of intellectuals. In this paper, he argues that Zarathustra made laughter sacred. Bataille quotes Nietszche: "to see the shipwreck of tragic figures, and to be able to laugh, in spite of the profound understanding, emotion, and sympathy. One feels, that is divine."
Hamburg, May 2015.
“If it can only be made, performed—which, of course, has nothing to do with what is called “sexual performance” (nothing except perhaps precisely the fact that this representation of performance, of perfection in making [love], and of the capacity to enjoy and to give enjoyment, must be related to this preeminence of making [love])—if, therefore, it can only be made and if perhaps even love with all its values can only be an act and a “work” in the sense that Christianity has given to this term, it is perhaps now necessary for us to try to think and say something about the actuality of this act,” Jean-Luc tells his audience.
This “actuality” — the sex— has been stifled and silenced by modesty in most cultures, an inhibition that Jean-Luc specifies as a “restraint in terms of what could never be shown or what could only be shown between the lovers doing it.” He then shifts to a quote from Emmanuel Levinas’ Eros, littérature et philosophie: Essais romanesques et politiques, notes philosophiques sur le thème d’éros, published two years prior, in 2013.
What is interesting about this book is the fact that its editors include a man and a woman, namely, Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, himself. The nature of this quotation gives it the aura of an inscription:
As Emmanuel Levinas writes in an isolated note: “Obscene: love that others make.”
Jean-Luc qualifies the note: “This also means that what we make is not obscene. However, in making it, we do not speak about it—or else what we say participates in the obscene, is an exclamation of the obscene.”
Thus, speech (or expression) is what renders the love we make obscene. A notion like this also parses the legal conceptions of pornography. Behind it lies the conception of sex as sacred. But that isn’t quite where Jean-Luc takes this. In fact, he will develop the sacred side in the book titled Sexistence, a title that shifts from the existential implications of that “z” into a longer meditation on embodiment and ecstasy.
1933 - 1947. German.
In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein worked through his earlier view that philosophy should be composed in the manner of a poem. He locates his thinking across time in relation to his own perspective, situating it with respect to past, future, or present thoughts.
What changed between 1947 and his earlier writings? Alternately, what follows from this line written by Wittgenstein in 1933?
"For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what I would like to be able to do."
His statement is my question.
Hamburg, May 2015.
“Sex opens up the existent to an abyss and a violence that certainly do not deplete the deviating and exposed traits of existence,” Jean-Luc told his audience. What this abyss and violence do is “bring us to the border of a ‘making’ that essentially touches at the same time the dual beyond of the animal and the divine, two names that articulate nothing but existence as its own dehiscence, a sexistence.”
Dehiscence is “a partial or total separation of previously approximated wound edges, due to a failure of proper wound healing” that usually occurs 5 to 8 days following surgery when healing is still in the early stages. It is a failure to heal: a failure to adhere the edges. As one who lived with transplanted organs, Jean-Luc knew the failure to heal intimately. He knew it as someone knows the “gape” that Roland Barthes used to inscribe the erotic. The hole that needs sutures and seams.
I was thinking about seams today because one of the teens asked why I didn’t get my “scars fixed”. The question interests me in its aesthetic presumptions. "For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what I would like to be able to do."
Repetitio rerum: a removal and repetition of original founding acts which create the field for their continuation.
Italy. January 5, 1921.
Rainer Maria Rilke sends a letter to Inga Junghanns that speaks to the role names play in our memorial imaginaries:
... Yes, how curiously things do happen in life; were there not a bit of arrogance somewhere in it, one would indeed like very much to stand outside, confronting everything, that is, everything that occurs, so as surely not to lose anything—; one would then still remain fixed, perhaps for the first time really so, in the actual center of life, where everything comes together and has no name;— but then again, the names have bewitched us—the titles, the pretenses of life— because the whole is too infinite, and we recover by calling it for a while by the name of one love, much as it is just this impassioned restriction that puts us in the wrong, makes us guilty, kills us …
I don’t know when Herbert James Draper executed this study for The Lament for Icarus, but I am interested in what kills us. Or the ways time abolishes its possibility, whether through prophecy, apocalypse, or atrocity. There is something about flying that haunts the shape of a body in the air before the moment of impact. The memory of it feels absent, yet the traces are recognizable in my urges. This, too, is a history of the self that is forced to imagine what defines it.
Lived remembrance is never archival: it is discovery. The authentic historian is also a poet of precise imagining.
—- George Steiner