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The Mystery of Body: Nancy's Corpus and the Christian Body
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2020
Abstract
After the initial contextualization of the topic, by following Nancy's juxtaposition strategy, this article points to two senses of the body that, according to him, have defined the Western culture. The first one, logos (principle precedes the body and gives it meaning); the second, sarx (the meaning of the body comes from the body itself, so that the body comes out of itself, alienates itself, and deconstructs its own representative activities). Next, I give a more precise depiction of Nancy's deconstruction of the body through an analysis of Corpus because it is precisely with this work (in the chapter On the Soul, which is also the title of Aristotle's well-known treatise dealing first and foremost with the body, and in the chapter The Extension of the Soul) that Nancy most explicitly deconstructs hylomorphic somatology, which largely influenced the Christian theology of the body. Furthermore, I interpret Genesis 2:18–25 (in constant dialogue with Nancy) as a theological reaction on Nancy's deconstruction of the body. In other words, on the basis of biblical texts, the “mystery of the body” is depicted. Finally, the article ends with a comparison of Nancy's “inoperative community” (communauté désoeuvrée) and the Body of Christ (church).
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References
1 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, Der Tragödie, erster Teil, Herausgegeben von Wolf Dieter Hellberg (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2017), 24.
2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. Samuel, Horace B. (Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis, 1913), 46Google Scholar.
3 See Elders, Leo, The Philosophy of Nature of St. Thomas Aquinas (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 247–48Google Scholar.
4 In one of his earliest articles, “Nietzsche: Mais où sont les yeux pour le voir?” Esprit 3 (1968), 482–503, Nancy points to Nietzsche's importance in terms of contemporary thought. Namely, contrary to Heidegger's claim that Nietzsche is the last metaphysician, Nancy claims: “Nietzsche escapes from the theoretical space of metaphysics” (500) and offers the philosophers the means of doing so. Cf. James, Ian, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 17–21Google Scholar.
5 Nancy conducts his project of the deconstruction of Christianity through an interpretive scheme in accordance with Heidegger's concept of Destruktion, which does not imply destruction (Zerstörung), but is characterized by dismantling (Abbau, démontage). Hence, deconstruction, remarks Nancy, is not destruction, nor is it a return to the archaic, nor a suspension of adherence, but the intent of the incoming (l’à-venir), the penetration. It is enclosed in a space through which the construction is articulated piece by piece. Deconstruction is, therefore, a law, a logic, a scheme of the construction. To deconstruct means to disassemble, decompose, introduce into the game the very assembly, in order to extract a certain possibility between the parts from which the assembly arises, but which the assembly itself conceals. Deconstruction, which is neither critical nor perpetuating and which witnesses the relation to history and tradition, cannot be found in Kant, Hegel, or Husserl but only, according to Nancy, within the framework of Christianity. The deconstruction of Christianity therefore means a disintegration process directed to the source or the meaning of deconstruction, which does not belong to deconstruction itself. In other words, the entire process is about realizing whether we can, in Christianity itself, indicate a certain source “deeper” than Christianity, a source that could lead to the emergence of a completely different resource. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Dis-Enclosure. The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bergo, Bettina, Malenfant, Gabriel, and Smith, Michael B. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 10Google Scholar. See also Alexandrova, Alena, Devisch, Ignaas, Kate, Laurens ten, and Rooden, Aukje van, eds., Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 22–40Google Scholar; Schrijvers, Joeri, “What Comes after Christianity? Jean-Luc Nancy's Deconstruction of Christianity,” Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009): 266–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watkin, Christopher, Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 38–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cariolato, Alfonso, “Christianity's Other Resource: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Deconstruction of Faith,” in Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense, eds. Gratton, Peter and Morin, Marie-Eve (Albany: State of New York University Press, 2012), 27–42Google Scholar; Hutchens, B. C., Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; James, The Fragmentary Demand; Morin, Marie-Eve, Jean-Luc Nancy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012)Google Scholar. Additionally, Benjamin C. Hutchens, Ian James, and Marie-Eve Morin provide comprehensive and systematic accounts of Nancy's philosophy; see Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy; James, The Fragmentary Demand; and Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy.
6 Peter Fritz, Joseph, “Keeping Sense Open: Jean-Luc Nancy, Karl Rahner, and Bodies,” Horizons 43 (2016): 257–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Fritz furthermore discusses Nancy in “On the V(I)Erge: Jean-Luc Nancy, Christianity, and Incompletion,” Heythrop Journal 4 (2014): 620–34, and “Capitalism—or Christianity: Creation and Incarnation in Jean-Luc Nancy,” Political Theology 5 (2014): 421–37.
7 Smerick, Christina M., Jean-Luc Nancy and Christian Thought: Deconstruction of the Bodies of Christ (London: Lexington Books, 2017)Google Scholar.
8 Garrido, Juan Manuel, “Jean-Luc Nancy's Concept of Body,” Epoché, 1 (2009): 189Google Scholar.
9 For an example, see Summa contra gentiles II, 57, 68–69, 86; Summa theologiae I q. 8, a. 1 ad 2; ST I, q. 76, a. 1, a. 5; ST I, q. 98 a. 1; Quasestiones disputatae de anima, 1. According to Aquinas, were we to ask ourselves if the soul is identical to the body, we should, as Leo Elders suggests, respond by following this distinction: the term “body” normally implies an organized, organic body extending into space. In this sense, the body contains accidentals, which are not identical to the substantial form of the human person. If we understand the body as a substance, it follows that the body is “composed” of matter and form. The form is the (spiritual) soul, therefore it can be said that the difference between body and soul is inadequate or partial. However, Elders notes that we must bear in mind that the soul is more than just the bodily form. The soul performs its own activity—thought. In turn, the person must be understood—Elders concludes—first and foremost from the perspective of soul, meaning that a person is a person because of being endowed with “a mind.” Elders, The Philosophy of Nature of St. Thomas Aquinas, 259–60.
10 In his Himmelska kroppar (2007), Ola Sigurdson asserts that theological tradition lacks a critical somatology. He strives to establish it upon phenomenological hermeneutics (which, according to him, offers a methodology for interpreting the body without objectivization) and a postliberal theological cultural-linguistic approach. Sigurdson mentions Nancy only incidentally, when speaking of “transcorporeality.” Sigurdson, Ola, Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze, and Embodiment in Christian Theology, trans. Olsen, Carl (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 350–51Google Scholar.
11 Nancy, Jean-Luc, Corpus, vol. 1, trans. Rand, Richard A. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 65–69Google Scholar.
12 After claiming that the divine Trinity does not mean that God is divided into three, nor that he forms the union of the three, Nancy continues: The “generation” of the Son by the Father should not be understood as a descendance, but according to their identity of nature, within which opens up the possibility of “relation” as such, the “relation” that is an echoing and referring (renvoi) of sense from one to the other. This is how the Son can be said to be “begotten, not made”: he is not exterior to the Father, but somehow opens in him the relational dimension. This dimension, in its turn, is called the Spirit. Spirit is relation, or sense, according to which subjects, which do not exist independently of relation, are able to present themselves to one another. Or rather, relation is the nonbeing according to which beings can make sense, beings that therefore cannot subsist outside of this nonbeing. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity, vol. 2, trans. McKeane, John (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 51Google Scholar.
13 See Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 81–84.
14 The sentence is borrowed from Freud's notes written on August 22, 1938, comprising only four lines. Derrida, Jacques, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Irizarry, Christine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11–12Google Scholar.
15 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 21.
16 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 95.
17 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 123–26.
18 Starting with Lacan's assertion, il n'y pas de rapport sexuel (Livre 17, L'Envers de la psychanalyse [1969–1970]), Nancy wrote an article, L’ “il y a” du rapport sexuel, in which he depicts a kind of relation ontology. After reviewing Kant's division of judgments and categories, whereby relation is one of four categories, Nancy concludes: “It is important that this logic of relation [rapport] is not the same as the logic of substance or predicate (including the relationship of predication). The difference lies in what is known as relation ontology: relation is not a being, it is between beings” (italics in original). This then means that the relation is disembodied, and the disembodiment, according to the Stoics, determines the space, time, void, and lekton (exposed, pronounced, known). These four instances of disembodiment are four conditions of relation: the relation assumes the difference between place, time (including what is known as simultaneousness), empty space between the body, and the possibility of emitting and receiving the statement (which is optional). According to Nancy, the relation is a relation if there is no relation; it is a “non-relation relation.” The relation and separation of subjects are one and the same. The sameness itself is the same as the difference from itself and the shifting of itself, that is, to want or to love oneself—which is foreign to the symmetrical logic of the constituent lack of separation. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Corpus: Writings on Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. O'Byrne, Anne (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 6–8Google Scholar.
19 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 127–28. Elsewhere (in Corpus, vol. 2) Nancy notes that to say that the soul is the form of the body means that the body contains nothing, that its inside is not a spirit (which cannot be content because it has no extension, nor dimension, nor form) nor an inside that would be a kind of inside of the very body; hence, it is only a multiply-folded area of exposure or existence. To say that the soul is the form of the body means in fact that the whole body is exposed to exteriority, that its outside and inside are mutually conditioned. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 2, 84.
20 See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 129.
21 One such place is Descartes’ letter to Princess Elizabeth of June 28, 1643, which is, according to Nancy, undoubtedly the most important text of Descartes on the unity of the soul and the body (this unity is contemplated in view of everyday activities, not in view of thought and imagination as separate powers). See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 136–44.
22 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 131.
23 For Nancy, the touch is obviously not a contact between the touching and the touched, between an active and passive surface, but the interval between two syncopated “strokes” of presentation and withdrawal. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Le Discours de la syncope: I. Logodeadalus (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), 14Google Scholar. Syncope simultaneously binds and separates. The touch is a syncopated contact and a contact in syncope. It is, therefore, a touch beyond the touch. It is a critique of the classical haptic theory presented as a metaphysical privilege of presence (classical metaphysics considers the touch, tactus, as the sense of direct perception ensured by the certainty of the empirical knowledge).
24 Nancy emphasizes that the matter is always singular and designated (materia signata)—it is not determined by the meaning, but identified as singular. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 131.
25 See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 51, 53.
26 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 19, 25. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considers that Nancy is vague when it comes to the matter of cataloguing the body because the corpus as a catalogue remains in the domain of logos, that is, it remains logocentric. Catalogue, according to Spivak, becomes, in fact, the example of the subordination of the body to logos, that is, a group of signs for each and every part of the body and bodily operation, which means that the body is signified. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Response to Jean-Luc Nancy,” in Thinking Bodies, eds. MacCannell, Juliet Flower and Zakarin, Laura (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 32–51Google Scholar.
27 See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 121.
28 Artaud, Antonin, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” in Selected Writings, ed. Sontag, Susan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 571Google Scholar; Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 40Google Scholar.
29 Nancy's project of deconstructing Christianity, as well as other similar perspectives, emphasizes Hutchens, have often been utilized in an effort to “rejuvenate religious philosophy.” Hutchens uses Graham Ward as an example, according to whom Nancy's critical atheism could aid the post-secular opinion. As Hutchens points out, however, co-opting Nancy in this way would be the result of a rather serious miscontextualization. In short, theology would need to violate Nancy's thought, to ignore its “nihilistic” tone. Post-secular efforts to “fragment” the notion of “God” and disseminate its meaning through “traces” in secular discourse and practice, Hutchens emphasizes, result only in a polyatheism, a lack of reference for the many empty names of “God.” Nancy is not merely offering yet another secular discourse of “the body” that can be taken up and put to religious use. On the contrary, it is precisely such an appropriation that Nancy insists would forbid any inquiry into the singularity of the sense of the body in plurality, or into the sense of the body's singularity. See Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy, 99–102. James asserts that it is arguable that Nancy's fragmentary philosophical writing is highly resistant to any possible co-option into a school or method. See James, The Fragmentary Demand, 4. Derrida notes that only Christianity can deconstruct itself. Dechristianization of Christianity would therefore be its own victory, its “hyperbole.” “Deconstruction of Christianity,” says Derrida (if it is even possible), should commence by separating Christianity from its own destructio tradition. See Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 54, 60, 220. In referring to Derrida (in particular to his evocation of Luther and Heidegger), Nancy notes it is true that Martin Luther spoke about destructio as a form of ecclesial tradition, but before the more prominent mention of Luther's use of this term and also before the possible reexamination of Heidegger's Destruktion/Zerstörung/Abbau (or Husserl's Abbau) one should limit oneself to what is important: the gesture of opening or reopening in the direction of what must precede each construction. This is by no means destruction. See Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 189n8.
30 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 47.
31 Even though Boethius’ definition of the person as naturae rationalis individua substantia predominates in the Western philosophical tradition, one must mention the Cappadocians who laid the groundwork for an “ontology of person” in the book of Genesis. They identified “hypostasis” (ὑπόστασις, substantia) and “person” (πρόσώπον, persona) with a concept to which ontological content could be attributed within the framework of a particular thinking being, leading to an understanding that a person is no longer an adjunct to the hypostasis, but is itself the hypostasis of the being. In the Trinitarian postulate, μία ούσία, τρία πρόσώπα (one substance, three persons), God is not one persisting as three persons, but God constitutes the divine substance. This substance is not an “I” in self-isolation, but a relation: a divine communio. Scholastic theological tradition emphasized the relational nature of the person as well (Summa theologica I, q. 40, 2).
32 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 33–5.
33 The expression tardemah appears only once more in the Torah, after Abraham complains to YHWH for having no offspring (Gen 15:12). In other texts of the Hebrew Bible, this expression appears several times, whenever unusual things occur, either during sleep or immediately upon awakening (1 Sam 26:12; Isa 29:10; Job 4:13; 33:15).
34 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 2, 9.
35 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 37.
36 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 2, 9.
37 See Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 155Google Scholar.
38 See Nancy, Jean-Luc and Ferrari, Frederico, Being Nude: The Skin of Images, trans. O'Byrne, Anne and Anglemire, Carlie (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 2–3Google Scholar. Corpus ego, unlike ego-corps (I-body), has no propriety, no “ego-ness.” In that sense, the body is always foreign. There is no “one's own” body. The body is always the other, a stranger. It is appropriated. There is no mere body as such, but only the exteriority, the otherness, the relation to another body. This is nakedness, for Nancy (Corpus, vol. 1, 154). The “naked existence” is an existence without a world—beyond and without essence. See Nancy, Adoration, 58.
39 See John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006), 159. The book contains 129 catechetical talks delivered by John Paul II between 1979 and 1984, with a pause due to the assassination attempt on the pope in 1981. These talks were soon given a recognizable and popular name, the “theology of the body.” As emphasized by John Paul II, they speak of the reconstruction of “authentic anthropology,” mainly by considering human corporeality. In the thirteenth catechesis, the pope writes about “authentic anthropology.” “This concept [essentially human experience] determines the very principle of reduction, characteristic of the philosophy of man, indicates the limit of this principle, and indirectly excludes the possibility of going beyond this limit. An adequate anthropology rests on essentially ‘human’ experience, opposed to the reductionism of the naturalistic type, which often goes hand in hand with the evolutionistic theory about the beginnings of man.”
40 Thus, the body is “a witness” to creation as a fundamental gift, and therefore a witness “to Love as the source from which this same giving springs.” John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 233. The entire “Kantian revolution” rests on nothing other than a question of “creation,” claims Nancy. Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. Raffoul, François and Pettigrew, David (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 66, 122n12Google Scholar. From Kant onward, nature no longer constitutes a given order and becomes the “order—or always possible disorder—of an enigma of ends,” Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 63. The origin of the world ceased to be sought in creative causality, which led to a completely new understanding of “creation.” Nancy claims that the world is neither given nor set, but only present. This presence neither differs nor is derived from any other presupposed presence, any more than from an absence that would be the negative of a presence. See Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 71. Furthermore, Nancy writes, “Presence is impossible except as co-presence. If I say that the Unique is present, I have already given it presence as a companion (even if such presence constitutes the Unique, and I have split it in two). The co- of co-presence is the unpresentable par excellence, but it is nothing other than—and not the Other of—presentation, the existence which co-appears.” Nancy, , Being Singular Plural, trans. Richardson, Robert D. and O'Byrne, Anne E. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 62Google Scholar. When writing about the “coexistence of presence,” Nancy mentions that they (coexistent presences) do not come from the dispersion of a presence; they are existing, disposed together, and exposed to each other. The co- is implicated in the ex-. Nothing exists unless with, because nothing exists unless ex nihilo. The first feature of the creation of the world is that it creates the with of all things; that is to say the world, namely, the nihil as that which opens (ouvre) and forms (oeuvre) the world. See Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 73. So, what we know as the “creation of the world” Nancy considers, “is not the production of a pure something from nothing—which would not, at the same time, implode into the nothing out of which it could never have come—but is the explosion of presence in the original multiplicity of its division. It is the explosion of nothing; in fact, it is the spacing of meaning, spacing as meaning and circulation. The nihil of creation is the truth of meaning, but meaning is the original sharing of this truth. It could be expressed in the following way: Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.” Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 2–3. If creation is ex nihilo—Nancy is playing with a classical theological term—this does not signify that the creator operates “starting from nothing.” This signifies that, on the one hand, the “creator” himself is nihil, and, on the other hand, this nihil is not something “from which” that which is created would come, but it is the very origin and destination of something in general, and of everything. Not only is the nihil nothing prior but there is no “nothing” that preexists the creation—it is the act of appearing (surgissment), it is the very origin insofar as it is understood only as what is designated by the verb “to originate.” If this “nothing” is not anything prior, Nancy concludes, what remains is only the ex, which determines this creation-in-action. There is only appearing or arrival (venue) in nothing. Nothing is, therefore, the dis-position of the appearing. The creation is “this singular ex-position of being,” which means that its real name is existence. “Existence is creation—our creation; it is the beginning and the end of what we are.” Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 16–17. Therefore, creation is the creation without the creator, empirical logos, random variety, permanent modalization, the absence of plan and end—the creation alone would be the end. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 99. Creation is the τέχνη of bodies. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 89.
41 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 159.
42 See Ward, Graham, Cities of God (New York: Routledge, 2000), 82–83Google Scholar.
43 “Resurrection,” writes Nancy, “is the uprising (surrection), the sudden appearance of the unavailable, of the other, and of the one disappearing in the body itself and as the body.” Nancy, Jean-Luc, Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Clift, Sarah (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 15Google Scholar. The resurrection is the extension of a body to the measure of the world and of the space in which all bodies meet (côtoiement). Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, 44.
44 Jacques Lacan, Ward believes, returns the subject to the nihil. In turn, the crucifix reminds Christians of creation—the state of being given ex nihilo. See Ward, Graham, “Bodies: The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ,” in Radical Orthodoxy, eds. Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine, and Ward, Graham (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 172–75Google Scholar.
45 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 33.
46 Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 51.
47 After quoting Jesus in Latin, the language which shaped the “Christian culture,” that is, his speech delivered during Pesach (Hoc est enim corpus meum), Nancy claimed that Jesus’ body is the Holy Spirit embodied. The Spirit is, writes Nancy, the nonform (non-forme) or the ultra-form (l'outre-forme) of the “hole” into which the body throws itself. Spirit is the substitution, the sublimation, the subtilizing of all forms of bodies. The Spirit is the body of sense, or sense in the body. Spirit is the organ of sense, or the true body (vrai corps), the transfigured body (le corps transfiguré). Spirit is also that which is without extension, without exposition, thus the Spirit is in fact the body in the sense that body is a substance, mass, impenetrable. The Spirit is a presence without the representation, without the image. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 75–77, 124.
48 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 2, 90–91.
49 See Ward, Cities of God, 101–02. Ward emphasizes that human desire is not reserved for man only, but that there is also God's desire for humanity. Ward, Cities of God, 107. In fact, one could say that “the image of God,” the divine in humanity, is the very desire to “be-one-body.”
50 Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Experience of Freedom, trans. McDonald, Bridget (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 66Google Scholar.
51 The Eucharist is therefore not a mere ritual of the community, nor it is a matter of a certain transsignification, that is, prefunctioning, but it is “new creation”: “I am making everything new” (Rev 21:5). Thinking about the Eucharist, Saint Augustine had rightly exclaimed: O signum unitatis! O vinculum caritatis! (In Ioannem 26, 13). By emphasizing the matrimonial structure of “being-one-body,” we are emphasizing that “being-one-body” is not an undistinguishing mystical fusion of the resurrected Christ and the community of believers (the head, which is Christ, and the body, which is the church). In other words, “being-one-body” does not happen by the extinction of one's “self” nor by the identification as “consuming the other,” but by “eating” the body of the one who gives his resurrected body without losing it.
52 Apart from the body, fundamental notions that Nancy uses to think about community are existence, being in common, inoperativeness (désoeuvrement), sense, being singular plural, sharing (partager), and the political. Nancy begins the analysis of the existence by using Heidegger's thinking position, deeming that death is one of its designations and that human existence is finite. For Nancy, however, finality does not represent a definite end of our existence, but the fact that we exist according to a multitude of various senses, situations, contexts, and that we are defined by space and time. No moment is eternal or universal, but singular and thus finite. The existence is simply not defined by beginning and end. The sense of existence is a multitude of singular senses, one of which is death. Death is primarily a relation toward the other and, in a certain way, presents the constitution of the relation. In that sense, Nancy rejects Heidegger's solipsistic understanding of death. Although death is “only mine,” it is also an announcement “that I am dead,” therefore in speaking of one's death, we come across a certain form of communication by way of announcing death. Only another can say: “He is dead.” Hence, the experience of community is first and foremost the experience of announcing death. Moreover, the existence signifies the inability to give or sacrifice—which, for Nancy, is always something theological-political, pretending at the truth and rejecting finality. It is only an exposition to another existence and through this exposition that the community is formed.
53 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 31.
54 In differentiating between “politics” and “the political,” authors such as Derrida, Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri—to mention the most famous ones—work to consider politics not as a ruling instrument, but as a structural condition of human relations that cannot be reduced to multiple categories.
55 Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 100–01.
56 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 59.
57 Marchart, Oliver, Post-Foundational Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
58 May, Todd, Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas and Deleuze (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 41Google Scholar.
59 After a sort of vision, St. Augustine wrote, “I am the food of grown men, grow, and thou shalt feed upon Me; nor shalt thou convert Me, like the food of thy flesh into thee, but thou shalt be converted into Me.” The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. Edward B. Pusey (New York: Modern Library, 1949), 88–89. The beginning of Augustine's profound insight is, in fact, reminiscent of Psalm 78:25: “Human beings ate the bread of angels; he sent them all the food they could eat.”
60 See Ward, Cities of God, 113. Because the Body of Christ is the telos of salvation—to mention this as well—the question of feminist criticism, “Can a male saviour save women?” (R. Radford Ruether) seems wrong. Namely, as Ward incisively notices, all attempts at determining the gender of Jesus’ body are nothing but contemporary symptoms of the “new quest” for the so-called “historical Jesus.” That such a quest is flawed has long been shown by Albert Schweitzer. It is misguided, Ward believes, because it strives to interpret the “big mystery” by relying on a narrowed empirical verifiability and “metaphysics” based on atomism, positivism, atemporality, immanentism, and subjectivism. Ward, Cities of God, 113. It is misguided because it neglects the mystery of the body.
61 Nancy believes that when speaking on the subject of the body (de corpore), we always have to speak from the body (ex corpore). Speaking about the body should be projected out of the body. A discourse about the body should always be a discourse ex corpore, coming out of the body, but also exposing the body, in such a way that the body would come out of itself, alienate itself, to self-destruct its own representations—which means it does not have a constant and stable meaning. The problem of the discourse about the body, concludes Nancy, is that the incorporeality of the discourse should nonetheless touch the body. A discourse on the body or of the body, continues Nancy, is both touched by and touches upon something that is not discourse at all. This means that the body's discourse cannot produce a sense of the body; it cannot give sense to it. A discourse of the body has to touch on what, by the body, interrupts the sense of discourse. The interruption of the incorporeal sense ought to give sense to everything else. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 124–25.
62 Derrida, Jacques, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. F. Graham, Joseph (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 171Google Scholar.
63 Ibid., 165.
64 See Nancy, Adoration, 5, 9, 13, 46.
65 See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 59.
66 See Ward, Cities of God, 93.
67 See Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 33. Manchev asserts that although the thesis developed in Corpus indicates a Spinozist tendency, it is a radical, paradoxical Spinozism: a Spinozism with no substance. See Manchev, Boyan, “Ontology of Creation: The Onto-Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy,” in Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 273Google Scholar.