Nancy, Myth, Literature

JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE Author(s): Jed Deppman Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 10, No.
2, Heidegger & Co. (Spring/Summer 1997), pp. 11-32 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686071 . Accessed: 07/10/2013 19:57
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JEAN-LUCNANCY,MYTH, AND LITERATURE

Jed Deppman
categories. One of his more striking and fundamental theses is that even though literaturedoes not have an identifiable essence, some how in the way that it "interrupts" myth it reproduces the truthof community, the very truthof how we are together. Readers of Nancy know that such a claim can be understood in several ways: as a thesis on the ontology of literariness, a phenom of the act of reading, a postmodern enological description
Jean-Luc Nancy stands out among recent theorists of community for to use myth and literature as important analytical his willingness
(anti)constitutive theory of community, even (were itdrawn out) a negative statement about the possibility of effective political activity in the time of late capitalism. These and other possibilities are usu ally inplay when Nancy invokes myth and literature, and thismulti is one reason that he has attracted more
valence
attention from
political than from literarytheorists. Another obvious reason is that his use of literature always seems to some extent opportunistic more the consequence of his proximity to Derrida and post-structur alism than the result of any real engagement with literary texts. Each
inthe contraction Americancirculation ofNancy'swork has systolic thus been led toemphasize thesecond terminhis "literary commu
theory incorporating
nism" and to construe his work as a political
Qui Parle vol. 10, No. 2 Spring/Summer 1997
12
JED DEPPMAN
oddly formed literary locutions. Indeed despite many differences in approach, Nancy Fraser (1984), David Ingram (1988), Dennis Foster
a (1994), and ToddMay (1997) all agree that Nancy isprimarily

theorist.'
Christopher Fynsk therefore speaks formany when he intro duces The Inoperative Community as a book that is "trying towork a
political
why does Nancy write so much about the political while he refuses to produce a politics? Although this question has produced a rich line of inquirywhose summum iscertainly Ingram's essay, ithas not yet been able to interrogate Nancy's analyses of myth and literature inany depth. (Fynsk isagain representative of the trend: inhis twenty eight page foreword to IC, he makes only passing reference tomyth and literature.) Iwill argue that in fact Nancy mutes the political "imperative" and restores the philosophical
and
or a thought of difference, thought of finitude, into political terms us as to to that continue speak imperatives despite their loss of philo sophical meaning."2 Fynsk repeatedly asks Fraser's main question:
meaning
to "myth," "lit
erature,"
inmodernity these terms have so many meanings that any attempt at clarification will seem quixotic. To contextualize will be necessary to present in some detail Nancy's work therefore it his own use of the terms and to examine, modern
Of course
"community."
critical approaches which inheres in his careful ed myth. As we will see, Nancy's uniqueness an two and imbrication of development things: ontological under standing of myth and a deconstructive understanding of literature.
if only indicatively, some treat literature as myth or as fail
Much
of the theoretical capital for this double business comes from the College of Sociology, Martin Heidegger's existential analytic, dcriture, and, perhaps most problematically, Jacques Derrida's Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of consciousness. One goal of this essay is thus to follow through on Nancy's use
to think intoits detailsa thesisthat ofmythand literature by starting he oftenputs forth: "The problem (withPhilippeLacoue-Labarthe) from that of art."3Intheessays that ofmyth isalways indissociable art is literature, make up The Inoperative theprivileged Community,
and Nancy articulates a complex set of relations between it, myth, and community which he derives less from the famous twentieth
JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE
13
century myth critics (forexample, James Frazer, Lucien L6vy-Bruhl, Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss) and the psychologists (Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, and Carl Jung) than from the intellectual crucible of the College
of Sociology, a school formed by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Roger Caillois for the purpose of analyzing the manifestations of the sacred in society.4 Broadly speaking, the Col
with the results of lege combined Nietzschean philosophemes to propose in modern social science to produce theses about-and terventions into-ecstatic, mythic, and sacred forms of being in society. Bataille's influence on Nancy will be taken up inmore ,de tail later,but it is worth noting at the outset how clearly Nancy echoes (without ever citing) the more conservatively scientific and structur alist Caillois' Myth and Man (1938), a text whose opening salvo could be an incipit forNancy's Myth Interrupted: "It doesn't seem that the ability to create or to live myths has been plaining them."5 Nancy is attracted to Caillois', replaced by that of ex
and the College's, ambitiously a of using synthetic strategy fine-grained analysis of the experience of art (and of imaginative life ingeneral) to give structure to a theory of modern community. Indeed he expands into new philosophical regions Caillois' view thatmyth acts simultaneously on the highest levels of society and the self.As Caillois puts it,"myth takes place at
the extreme
a firm, ifultimately inexplicable, "hold" on modern sensibility (he even points to the idea of a psychological complex), for Nancy mythic speech has become abundant but powerless. Moreover, Caillois de cides that although literature isnot themodern replacement for myth a possible future (despite "rapprochement" between them), litera ture does transform the communal, ritualized, moral and imaginative
limitof society's superstructure and of the mind's activ ity" (MH, 18). However, while Caillois argues that modern myths still respond to "rather essential human needs" (MH, 153) and have
more privateforms forms ofmyth intothe of esthetic delight.(See To understand to the MH, 154ff.) ways Nancywe must be attentive
he both preserves and radicalizes these basic positions. Let us there fore turn to the strategies and sources he employs as he strives to turn literature's "transformation of myth" into a more disruptive "in-. terruption of myth."
14
JED DEPPMAN
InNancy's texts, art is usually literature, and literature is usu ally writing that points to and away from both the world and itself. Literary texts summon up images, scenes, messages and heroes from traditional myths and then "interrupt" theirown transmission. In fact,
may always choose to hear the poetic thunder of undecidable irony and form approaching rather than receding in the paradoxes Nancy so often proposes: "Community is the sacred, ifyou will: but the sacred stripped of the sacred" (IC, 35); "literature reveals the unrevealable" (IC, 63). Ultimately, however, such aphorisms are more we keep in mind thatNancy's larger intelligible and less derivative if
they do not "present" these traditional things so much as show their own process of self-interruption. This may sound like a New Critical literaryambivalence or a deconstructive technique, and indeed one
project
isone of analyzing modern communities rather than of sim ply offering a theory of literature as textuality. In fact, as Nancy might say, literature as anything-culture, aesthetic inscription, historical document, even, in an important
founding, institutional speech. It is a self-less language that simulta nor is. "Neither dialogue neously speaks itself and speaks what . . . it is self is the the of many unique speech monologue, myth (IC, 50). Myth in this sense narrates origins and communicating" destinies and thereby organizes and distributes being. In the lan guage, structure, tone, style and totalityofmyth, the cosmos somehow structures itself 'as,' or 'in,' logos and does so in a revelatory or de
limited to examining rather than experiencing the content of previ ous myths, we are in no position to create new and better myths for ourselves. All we can do is re-present myth: it is, let us say, a full,
unsustainable involves a philosophically sense, ecriture-always form of literature as myth. Since, as he declares, "we no longer have we are more or less anything to do with myth" (IC, 46) and since
clarative way. Heroism, transcendence, and pure identification are all aspects of myth: "In myth ..,. existences are not offered in their
to the contribute of particularity but thecharacteristics singularity: in holds of life' which where back, system the 'exemplary nothing
where, on the contrary, ev nothing remains within a singular limit,
iscommunicated and setup foridentification" (IC 78). For erything
15
Such a language would be self-differential, incomplete and would not communicate only itself, as impure in the sense that it would not bind commu would myth. Perhaps most importantly it word. nity in theway we cannot know-that myth did. Communism" opens with Bataille's Nancy's essay "Literary comment: "Literature cannot assume the task of directing the collec imagine-we tive necessity"
Following Nancy then, in the hortatory subjunctive and forour own purposes, letus let literaturebe that language which cuts across myth and exposes its limitsand failures, inhabiting and interrupting it.Let literature, as writing, be what simultaneously gestures toward transcendence and halts or suspends the delivery of being to the
Nancy all of these statements explaining what myth "was" or "is" cannot pretend to reproduce the truthof a previous time in itses sence. Today, since myth's real power (as we represent it) is gone, myth can only assume the forms thatwe imagine it to have taken.
(IC, 71). In a phrase Iwill explicate furtherbelow, Nancy explains that literature designates "that singular ontological quality that gives being in common, thatdoes not hold it in reserve, before or after community, as an essence of man, of God, or of the
State achieving itsfulfillment incommunion" (IC, 64). Literature, then, truthfully inscribes the way we are together in a non-mythic way, that is, as an "offering" which
essence.
does
not hold, found, or seize our
common
in part because any ultimately it is not. The idea is unacceptable critical language which defends the utility or importance of litera ture tends, if only strategically, to transform literature intomyth. In academic tween them, for example, Comparative Literature: institutions one can often find an outright equation be inMichael defense of Holquist's
Although the idea that fictive literary language is fundamen different from the ontologically hierarchical and explanatory tally to theorists of all kinds, language of myth might seem acceptable
and Brzezinskisuggestthatthefundamental Huntington can be graspedonlyby look differences amongsocieties ing at the stories people tell themselves about
16
JED DEPPMAN
themselves-and
about
others-that
define
them as
selves. Certainly Anderson, the social scientist cited in my firstanecdote, holds this view: his whole theory of nationalism isbased on the premise that the power hold ing individuals in the embrace nation is at bottom narrative.6 of the community of the
guage which confirms the validity and value of the category of the is the kind of language we use to lend self, the acting agent-this to urgency "literary" study. Holquist stretches the fabric of myth over literature because he would like literary study to have the consis tency and real-world power thatwe like to imagine myth once had. Thus many readers both use and mention a Nancian articula tion of myth, if itsdistance from literature. Unlike only tominimize
is the heart of Holquist's case for the cen tralityof literarystudy in the changing academy, one can recognize a description of myth and not literature, inother words, "the stories ... that define them as selves." tell people Defining language which hierarchizes and distributes the being of beings, metaphysical lan
In this description, which
Holquist, however, critics such as William Cain see a real gap be tween literature and myth. In his discussion ofMelville, Twain, and Faulkner, for example, Cain writes: "These writers illuminate the di
richer possibilities thatwould give greater grounds for hope."7 For Cain, writers who merely "illuminate" without "working through the contradictions"
lemmas of slavery, prejudice, and miscegenation with tremendously complex insight; they cannot, however, work through the contradic tions they articulate in order to envision a society and culture of
are somehow limited because they do not resolve literature intomyth. Cain is somewhat frustrated by these authors and his logic seems to be that literature is as good as it ismythic: it should institute, construct, found, and build a world or a possible
world.
In his felicitous phrase, itshould "give greater grounds." His is an appealing itcasts the critic in the central com logic because munal role of making literaturemythic. Indeed whenever literature qualities (Cain), criticism can itselfbecome an exercise inwriting
isreadasmyth(Holquist), or forits'mythic content' other despite its
17
myths and counter-myths: critics can, and should, become active agents making their communities commune. InNancy's terms, one would say that Cain supplements literature with a mythic language which enacts for its readers-and returns to them-the full thereby presence of their immanent participation in a community of shared essence. Cain draws attention to another result of privileging the
mythic components of literature: politicized teaching can take pre cedence over the act of reading. He writes: "Du Bois and the others Ihave named ... one would want to call 'great artists.' They are that.
project political lessons, who craft embodiments of political truth." Houston A. Baker, Jr. isone critic who describes his efforts as "the process of writing a revisionary tale or countermyth," and he becomes his own epic hero as he narrates his exemplary journey through and beyond is not conceitedness the New Criticism to the Black Aesthetic.9 This
But from another point of view, their status as artistsmatters less, in the classroom, than their exemplary performance as writers who
they are race critics, but because unlike Holquist they feel and thematize a gap between myth and literaturewhich they tryto overcome with their criticism. Similar examples could be drawn from across the spectrum of contemporary literaryand cul tural study. (In the context of Nancy, one thinks of Nancy Fraser's ture not because
on Baker's part; it is the natural result of his to with mythic speech. Cain and Baker attempt supplement literary are good examples of the modern academic use of myth and litera
feminism.) At any rate, it is clear that reducing or denying Nancy's distinction between literatureand myth can help to give grounds for political hopefulness. Such optimism has indeed tended to accom pany those contemporary strategies of reading which stress the constructed, historical and discursive nature of literature over and against the non-discursive, Yet the equation
tion it has often enjoyed inthepast.
fictive, stylistic and extra-cultural reputa seems to make
a blindeye to thefactthat has to turn everything simpler, today myth meremyth. is Not onlydoes the mean word "myth" "a lie popularly which others the of stories who believe,"but multiplicity explaining
"myth = literature," which
18
JED DEPPMAN
we
also an empty activity: inThe Nazi Myth, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe display impatience with the kind of self-congratulatory "unmasking" that has become so fashionable In fact, in their view the "undoing" Barthes' manner,
from have lost their mythic power to transform, hierarchize, and distribute being. In short, stories of "self definition" are everywhere and yet they are everywhere unconvinc ing.Moreover, their supposed opposite, the debunking of myths, is
are and where we
come
in thewake of Barthes' Mythologies. (ddmontage) of "mythologies" in
is to say media, of their images and their seeming. Which one to that the veritable myth, ifthere is one, the which there isadhesion and identification, holds itself back ina more whole
In general, the denunciation secrete these mythologies. of of "myths," "images," of "media," and of "what seems" from now on is part of the mythological system of the
has been able to become, inour time, an integral part of the ordinary culture transmitted by the same "media" that
tion of myths.10
itdirects, perhaps, the subtle retreat, fromwhere scene (ifnecessary, as the myth of the denuncia
myth-unmasked-as-truth Mythic language and itsDoppelganger, revealed, have both become powerless, uncreative, and repetitive are languages. The myths and countermyths of literature and the self
today unbelievable. They may be enough to motivate revolutionar ies, identity-politicians, or fund-giving university bureaucrats, but one could are unsatisfying.With great patience philosophically they show that the modern critical attempt to force the literature/world relationship to parallel the myth/world relationship (as those rela tions have been constructed by theorists) has resulted in failure. The inevitable failure will continue not only for the reason Maurice has given-literature has never worked
Blanchot world-but
action in the well at politics,nor has itproducedmuch effective

also for the reason that Bataille
very hard or very
of theabsence ofmyth.(This istheparadoxical time meaning of the The Nazi "the realmyth"mentioned in thepassage quoted from
has given: now
is the
19
Myth.) Bataille's analysis of modernity as the epoch of "the absence of myth" has been articulated in numerous and perhaps irreconcil
ogy (Heidegger), the failure of master narratives (Lyotard), the loss of transcendental signifiers (Derrida), the unreliability of the linguistic itself artifact (de Man). Yet no matter how it is put, it announces whenever we use the negative power of the word myth, when we dismiss a truthclaim or a storyon the grounds that it is a myth. we can Following Bataille, Nancy asks us to accept that today projected and realized concept of being-to a which, among gether, a spirit-work, fusion of individuals, a fusion in other things, death is fulfillment, sublation, salvation, transcendence, immanence-anything but unmasterable excess and unworking nega tivity. "By now," he writes, ... we have nothing more than the bitter consciousness of the increasing remoteness of such a community, be it a
able ways: as the interruptionof myth (Nancy), the advent of nihilism (Nietzsche), the 'Enframing' of representation in the age of technol
of shared essence,
have no faithinthe mythic projectofworkingtobuild a community
the people, the nation, or the society of producers.... Millions of deaths, of course, are justified by the revolt of those who die: they are justified as a rejoinder to the in social, political, technical, military, religious oppression. But these deaths are not sublated: no dialectic, no salvation leads these deaths to any other immanence than that of. .. death. against tolerable, as insurrections
(IC, 13)
and
since rethinking what has been known to philosophers Descartes as "the subject." This has always been an important prob lern forNancy. When he was given the chance in 1988 to guest edit entails
ForNancy, death, literatureand community must be thought together; in the time of interruptedmyth, this task of integrative thought
an issueof thephilosophical journal,Topoi, he asked seventeen French thesubject?""' philosophersthequestion,"WhOcomes after his editorial he flashed who angerat thinkers Explaining procedure,
treated this grand postmodern problem as a mere "scholastic quar
20
JED DEPPMAN
a scholastic quarrel. Profoundly uninterested inHeideggerian onto Descombes elucidates the quarrel through a logical destruction, Wittgensteinian interpretation of Kant.) then, Nancy often begins his essays with the gesture of rejecting the Cartesian-Kantian model of Heideggerian the subject as an active, synthesizing individual (the subject present to itself in self-representation, the site of itsown certitude, and so Unsurprisingly,
suppositions and to return, as though nothing had happened, to a style of thinking thatwe might simply call humanist" (3). (The "one is presumably Vincent Descombes, whose contribution exception" to the volume in fact treats the "problem of the subject" as precisely
rel": "With one exception Idid not send my question ('Who comes after the subject?') to those who would find no validity in it,to those it ison the contrary more important to denounce for whom itspre
mism or irony is required towrite books with such titles as A Simple Theory of the Self.12) The second, more difficult point is that these reminders are not simultaneous creations of new myths of the non
forth).He goes on to demonstrate that once this self-destruction has taken place, traditional forms of community and community-build ing become impossible. Two things are crucial to note. First, this we are con process of self-destruction takes place always anew, for if the sheer volume and variety stantly reminded-by, nothing else, the failure of myths of the self. (More and more opti of options-of
on the foundation provided by a metaphysics of the subject, even if so this is what many theories of the postmodern subject tryto do by and isolating combining attributes of the selves in question: race, class, nationality, colonialism, gender, age, height, sexual orienta tion. No matter how complex or nuanced one's model of the subject may be, no matter how much itprotests against essentialism, or how many factors it takes into account,
self, just as denying the equation of myth with literature is not tantamount to creating a "new myth." Today we cannot build or hope to build a model of community
one can build a community The humanist community. myththat by andwe can no longer rupted, hope to beginwith conceptsof the
subjects, however complexly construed, has been inter
itcannot found any thinking of
combining
21
essence.
humanity to be produced again nor a new essence "yet to come" it is inno sense a work to be produced. Our being-together isnothing broken needing fixing, nothing lost needing finding, and thus we
individual and "add up" to a "higherWe," or a communion of shared As Nancy argues, community is neither a lost essence of
you stop reading points can perhaps be rendered ina visceral way: if this essay and ponder the many ways you are with other people some of these, arguably, unmediated by language or thought-you will perhaps agree that your being-with is not and never will be an
cannot set concepts out in frontof us to organize it. We cannot bet a ter approach concept of community by working on our selves or by transforming our self-transforming selves into community. These
illustration of a general concept of community or of the self. If you do not agree, perhaps it isbecause you represent yourself to yourself as an individual. Yet as Nancy is fond of pointing out, "individual," with itsconnotations of indivisibility and separation from a previous collective, isontologically an inadequate bad, in fact, as "identity." Debates term for what we are-as
over myths, literature and community are largely caused by, and founded on, our recurring attempts to understand the relationship of these forms to individuals or groups of individuals.
Postmodern Nancy, for his part, having done away with individu atoms released or broken away from community-proposes als-as that there are, or we are, singularities, thrown beings whose being is finite and always already being-with. He writes: is not the individual, is the [t]he singular being, which finite being. What the thematic of individuation lacked,
as it passed from a certain Romanticism to Schopenhauer and to Nietzsche, was a consideration of singularity, to it nonetheless came quite close. which Individuation
a formless detaches closed offentitiesfrom ground

only communication, contagion, or commun
whereas
ionconstitute the Butsingularity does beingof individuals.

not proceed from such a detaching of clear forms or fig ures. ingularity perhaps does not proceed from any thing. It isnot a work resulting from an operation. (IC, 27)
22
JED DEPPMAN
As this passage suggests, what we are-singular beings-is grasped much better by Heidegger when he names itDasein, or being-in the-world, a primordial component of which is being with others.
But Nancy does not follow Heidegger all the way in redirecting Husserlian questions of the phenomenology of experience and epis temology to questions of ontology and existence. Nor, most of all,
as being-with, all being already being-with-these play a role indi cated by but not integrated into the analytic of Dasein, a role which as: the relation of death to each of us and to com might be phrased munity is a relation of presentation. As Nancy comments, "Sharing comes down to this:what the community reveals tome, inpresent
does he accept the heavy weight Heidegger gives in the existential For Nancy our relation to death isa analytic to being-towards-death. structure of existence, though not the definitive one, and it is specifi cally literary ina way thatHeidegger does not explicate. Community,
. my existence outside myself... ing tome my birth and my death, is Community does not sublate the finitude itexposes. Community it self, in sum, is nothing but this exposition" (IC, 26). Justas it ismy community which shows me my birth, and shows me the death of others, so too does my community show me my death (see IC, 14 15). Today this showing is not mythic but literary.
Why is this the case? For Nancy the presentation belonging to (in one's ek-stasis, the revealing of the state of being-outside-oneself own birth, one's own death, and the death of the other), is an active offeringwhich initiates the forms of communicative and contagious being which "are" community itself. Embedded in this formulation is the criticism that Heidegger's existential analytic never fully inte grated being-towards-death and being-with. While and complex problem forNancy as well-besides this isan ongoing using an exposi
of sublime tory neo-Kantian analysis 'presentation without to he also read Bataille's attempts presentation,' anthropological into it-what is important here is that the difficulty of materialism this integration occurs in literature and is literature. This is because an essential
a truthful the 'impossibility of any showingof two impossibilities:

and all knowing' which death's unworkability entails, and the 'im
truthof being-with
is literature's truthof representation,
23
as anguish)thatthethought of death of being at all' (felt possibility

causes by exceeding knowledge. Nancy writes: Community is calibrated on death as isprecisely impossible tomake a work of death, as soon as one tries tomake on that of which (other than a work a work of it).Com it
munity occurs inorder to acknowledge this impossibility, or more exactly-for there isneither function nor finality here-the
Community nity is revealed in the death of others.... members of theirmortal truth.... the presentation to its excess
impossibility of making a work out of death is as "community." Commu inscribed and acknowledged
is It
is the presentation of the finitude and the irredeemable that make up finite being: itsdeath, but also its can present me my birth, and birth, only the community
well as the impossibilityofmy crossing over into my death.
as ofmy relivingit, and alongwith itthe impossibility (IC, 15)
site of community's presents death as one privileged presentation to itselfof unpresentability (not of 'the unpresentable'). Again, since theway community "shows" impossibilities is largely stead
In this passage Nancy decisively modulates the Heideggerian prob lematic of Dasein's being-towards-death-its "possibility of an its of attendant rhetoric impossibility"-and authenticity, and he in
into by imagining, or fictioning, limit experiences and the passage or better and than literature myth impossibility non-knowledge, phi losophy "shows" that there is a sharing (partage) of limitswhich characterizes not a communion
what is,and in so doing itspeaks thepresence of all that is and distributes and exemplifies whatness hierarchically being; it organizes andwhoness, transcending between theconnections and the limits
and among singular, finite beings: "you" and "me" and others. Yet the limits between us cannot be transcended, reified, or spoken for.
emotional, erature speaks this being-with. Myth does not do so, formyth says
our being-with. It must be stressed that this sharing is or a of essence; it isa sharing of the tactile, joining intellectual and other limitsbetween us. Again, only lit
24
JED DEPPMAN
We
imagine them, signal them, feel them, ignore them, and so we cannot transcend them. but forth, Occasionally Nancy incorporates the physical aspects of liter into his thinking. One of his writings, "Corpus" the bodily aspects of being-with and ends with a
can
ary presentation (1990), examines listof forty-onewords. Offering neither a mystical nor a philosophi cal transcendence of the body, he interruptingly "shows" that the physical stratum of literarypresentation defies discursive thought: The parts of the corpus do not combine into a whole, or ends of it. Each part can are not means to it suddenly take over thewhole, can spread out over it,can become whole, tion and sharing out [partagel. There the body. There is no body.
never takes place. There is no it,a whole-that no totality of the body-but itsabsolute separa
is no such thing as
Instead, there are patient and fervent recitations of numerous corpuses. Ribs, skulls, pelvises, irritations, shells, diamonds, drops, foams, mosses, excavations, fingernail moons, minerals, acids, feathers, thoughts, claws, slates, pollens, sweat, shoulders, domes, suns, anuses, eyelashes, slicing, squeezing, leaving, flowing-3 is less remarkable for its literaryachievement than for This passage itsphilosophical commitment to the significance of style. In the last dribbles, liqueurs, slits, blocks, smashing, removing, bellowing,
burrowing, spoiling, piling up, sliding, exhaling,
phrase several body-parts (nouns) gradually give way to activities (verbs), but there are no links of grammar, thought, or logic. Nancy offers us synesthetic, paratactic, active and resolutely finite being. In
the finalbickinsoniandash-that unrepresenting, unfinished typo
as partage graphical inscription of "with" and "without"-being-with can be felt, seen, moved, even sensed in every sense of sense, but it does not give way (and this is what literature re-marks) to a transcen dence or a shared essence.
25
One can always say to someone else: we share a common limitof experience, but Ican experience neither the experience you have of yourself nor the experience you have of our shared limit. Moreover one can say: a fusion of our experience is impossible. simple truthsand others like them are surface indications that the experiential "limits" between beings are simultaneously too im mediate and too distant to be intelligible either to a theory of "the These self" or of "selves." Following Bataille, Nancy senses perhaps, though he does not thematize it,an even more difficult problem: we simply do not understand our own "inner experience" much less its link to
corporeality. From the heavily written traditions of mysticism and the sublime to the less-analyzed problematic of moods, the problem of innerexperience has inall itsforms a disruptive potential for think as ing about community. If, Heidegger suggests, moods are ontically to "available" and inevitably part of us, they are also, ontologically speaking, perpetually obscure. Whether or not one accepts the clari
fying project of fundamental ontology, one can broadly agree with Heidegger that littleadvance has been made since Aristotle in un
distracted to-and-fro literature: "'literature' inscribes the sharing: the limit marks the advent of singularity, and its withdrawal" (IC, 78). So while your experience of yourself is denied to me inprinciple, the running frontierof contact between us, the clinamen inNancy's lexi
derstanding either the "communal" or the "singular" onset ofmoods.14 mind, Nancy consistently asso Perhaps with such considerations in ciates the activity along the limitbetween beings with the active and
as thecommunity mulationof the moderncommunity of theabsence a ofmyth, community whose truthful expressionNancy finds in
Derridean
symbolically), is forNancy scriptuary and specifically literary. At bottom, then, Nancy is seeking to reinterpret Mitsein and other structures of Dasein and to integrate them with Bataille's for
duced
con, the leaning-toward-each-other that each of us has and which is governed to a certain extent by chance, this shared limit, the "with" in being-with (which can never be grasped by concepts or repro
from forth Mitsein tothisideaof literature? Letus plainly Heideggerian

state the theses to be connected: 1) Human being is always being
6criture. How, one might ask, does one move
back and
26
JED DEPPMAN
(or the finite singular being) comes primordially to with, and Dasein an awareness of mortality through the deaths of others. 2) Literature is the only truthful expression of a community not held together (any Nancy, through a reading of Bataille's evolving thought since the 1930s, learns to analyze the very private experience of the as the absencing of myth: thewithdrawal of myth and itspower both
bymyth. longer)
or fusion. Nancy finds in Bataille the critical point thatmodernity's on the level of experience of these "overturnings" has consequences
experience of the overturning of a nostalgia for a lost community and as the overturning of a faith in the possibility of transcendence
Which
innerexperience, an experience, Nancy writes, "whose content, truth, or ultimate lesson is articulated thus: 'Sovereignty is NOTHING.' is to say that sovereignty is the sovereign exposure to.an ex cess (to a transcendence) that does not present itselfand does not let itselfbe appropriated (or simulated), that does not even give itself
but rather towhich being isabandoned" (IC, 18).We can start to see how this description of Bataille's thought, which turns sovereignty into an experience of the sublime (being's exposure to an offered
ence that singular beings have of community during the absence of an which will allow myth, Nancy needs understanding of literature for the specificity, both epochal and personal, of the reader's experi
ence.
offered but absent possibility of transcendence. However, we can also see that inorder to register this particular exposure, the experi
presence whose process of presencing never gives full presence15) can allow for the passage inNancy's own work frommyth to litera ture. Myth appears here as the possibility of transcendence and literature as the inscription of the experience of an exposure to the
This necessity may be what causes Nancy to claim that the ontological structure of singular beings is literary: "A singular being ('you' or 'me') has the precise structure and nature of a being of writing, of a 'literary' being: it resides only in the communication its advance and its retreat. Itoffers which does not commune-of
insuspense"(IC,78). One mightsay that itholds itself itself, being

with, or community, can never be characterized by a language of presence and that literature is precisely not a language of presence
27
but of offered, proposed presence. Myth appears then as the possi bility of transcendence and literature as the inscription of modern communal experience: the experience of being exposed to the of understanding of literature relies to equate the being of community with spe upon phenomenology cifically literary inscription. His metaphors for the interruption of myth, for example, rely primarily upon phenomenological thought. that Nancy's fered possibility of transcendence. Itnow appears
meant
to 'show' how, in He uses figures of voice, sight and consciousness the time of the absence of myth, myths are still present and brought intopresence in a specific way. For just as the "death of God" never to Nietzsche that the churches were empty, the phrase "ab sence ofmyth" does not designate any lack of mythic speech. Today situations, itsheroism, everything pertaining to mythic speech-its
materially in his work and found his exposition of literarycommu nism: "in the interruptionofmyth isheard the voice of the interrupted community, the voice of the incomplete, exposed community speak ing as myth without being in any respect mythic speech" (IC, 62). We hear voices on all sides which seem "to play back the declara tions ofmyth, for in the interruption there isnothing new to be heard, there is no new myth breaking through; it is the old storyone seems to hear" (IC, 62). This seeming-hearing, which ison the order of an
not only not disappeared but has flour itsepic stage, its tones-has for the of ished; interruption myth is not a 'silencing' but a 'change in voice.' Nancy's metaphors for this change constitute "literature"
epoch, is on one occasion concentrated by Nancy into two much more immediate, phenomenal figures: music and a voice breaking off or interrupted: [lIn some way the interrupted voice or music imprints the schema of its retreat in the murmur or the rustling to which the interruption gives rise. . . .The interruption
inthe rustling has a voice, and its schema imprints itself own dispersion. of thecommunity When exposed to its thatresists mythstopsplaying,thecommunity comple
tion and fusion, the community that propagates and makes itselfheard in a certain way. Itdoes exposes itself,
28
JED DEPPMAN
that is taken up, held, and at the same time an echo that is not a repetition.... Thus there in exposed is a silence which is not total; there isa hearing (present) and a remembering, a confusion, an echo which does not 'repeat that of which it is the reverberation.' . . . [I]t avows without avowing, states without declaring, more ingmusic precisely itpresents, without enunciating, the mythless truthof endless being-in-common. (IC, 62) ever we were If
not speak, of course, nor does it But the make music.... interruption itselfhas a singular voice, a voice or a retir
with structures of consciousness, then the subject endowed writtenness and the metaphoricity of this self-reflexive passage sug gest rather that his analysis is another (non)example of interruptive presence. Nancy is neither demythologizing nor remythologizing, have "no real relation" to myth anymore. The in the midst of so much mythic speech, commu point still makes itself heard somehow: it"does not speak, of course, nity nor does it make music .. . it is an echo which is not a repetition." The unique speech of an epochality whose truthful self-signifying is that even mythless is literature: "A name has been given to this voice speech is we adopt the acceptation of of interruption: literature (orwriting, if thisword that coincides with literature)" (IC, 63). What may seem hardest to accept in this 'account' is its reli ance on literature as the kind of being which both continues mythic presentation and interrupts it.Yet Nancy's argument can be under stood as an extension literature.One of Derrida's for in his terms we
tempted to see the important descriptive gesture in Nancy's work as a "new myth," a hypocritical designation of a so cial totality,or a "higherWe" and another storyof society as a greater
clearest and most relevant, since itbrings literature and community
of a familiar phenomenological view of is of literarity perhaps the descriptions
through together phenomenology:

Moreover, is literary in itself. there is no text which Literarity isnot a natural essence, an intrinsicproperty of the text. It is the correlative of an intentional relation to
29
of each scribed
or institutional-social, in any case. Of course, this does not mean that literarity ismerely projective or subjec tive-in the sense of the empirical subjectivity or caprice reader. The on
the text, an intentional relation which integrates in itself, as a component or an intentional more or less layer, the of rules which are conventional implicit consciousness
noematic
convention, institution,or history of literature.This noe matic structure is included (as "nonreal," in Husserl's
subjective side of the noetic act. There are "in" the text features which call for the literary reading and recall the
literary character of the text is in the side of the intentional object, in its structure, one could say, and not only on the
a certain cal-type language to be necessary, even ifat must yield towhat, in the situation of writing or point it reading, and inparticular literary writing or reading, puts
is non terms) in subjectivity, but a subjectivity which and linked to an intersubjective and empirical transcendental community. Ibelieve thisphenomenologi
in crisis.... There is therefore a literary phenomenology a functioning and literary intentionality, an experience rather than an essence of literature.16
Derrida moves
briskly to abolish the idea of literaryessence and to into the complex intentional structure of read instead place literarity Instead of ing. stressing the aesthetics of texts A la Bloom, or the sociopolitical situatedness of readers and writers A la Baker, Derrida, ina gesture reminiscent of Caillois' treatmentofmyth, locates literarity in both the subjective and the objective poles of intentionality. Lit erature thereby becomes intelligible both as a singular experience and as a noematic structure belonging to a transcendental commu
What isof particular interest is thatDerrida's analysis of literarity nity. relies on the Husserlian concept of a transcendental, intersubjective
which his philosophical work, following community Heidegger's,

thrown into doubt. Nancy's "literature," as the pro near-future, imminent-yet-deferred arrival of presence has,
has generally posed,
30
JED DEPPMAN
seen, the somewhat modified character of a Heideggerian existential structure (such as angst).What Derrida's discussion shows as we've initially inHusserlian phenomenology of consciousness. Where the theoretical linkbetween literature and a given (ex made through a phenomenology ofwith perience of) community is drawal, the conclusion can be drawn that: in the end, what corresponds in the work towriting as as to community is that by means of which such a ... the limit, the suspense, and the tracing exemplifies interruptionof itsown exemplarity. What thework gives larity,and what
must be rooted is that for literature to perform this existential role it
well
us to understand
singular beings are never founding, originary figures for one another, never places or powers of remainderless identification. (IC, 79) While on myth relies exemplarity and identification, literature ex one gives emplifies the failure of examples. Nancy's problem is that if one in of this the that way gives examples of examples dynamic
(to read) is thewithdrawal of its singu it communicates is the following: that
literaryeffect (for instance, "this is the incomplete hero," or "here we see myth being interrupted by itsown ecriture"), then he will confirm phenomenology without inscribing its limitand fall prey to (de)mythifying gestures he is at such pains to reject. sense of this trap even explains his failure to pro his keen Perhaps detailed vide readings of the literarytexts he mentions. the mindless this may be, it is noteworthy that Nancy follows very closely in using a phenomenological language to give a access to cannot be fully grasped initial literaryexperience which However
Derrida
as ifphenomenology were for both thinkers by that language. It is because of itsvery insufficiency so pa the best language-perhaps Derrida-in which to register the incomplete documented by tiently ness, withdrawal, or interruptionof transcendence that occurs in all reading. Yet, while Derrida expressly avoids historical patterns and
Nancy epochs, affirmingthat "one must cross typologywith history,"17
JEAN-LUC
NANCY,
MYTH,
AND
LITERATURE
31
demonstrates more fidelity to Heidegger and Bataille by looking and listening intentlyfor themetaphysical underpinnings of his commu
nity and his age. That he should turn to literature as the properly epochal expression of our mythless community signals both that our
now coming to presence "after the subject," and that being-with is our language for being-with has become more material and inter ruptive than our theories and our myths had ever shown.
New GermanCritique33 (Fall 1984): 127-54; re thePolitical?" Deconstructing

printed
Nancy
Fraser,
"The
French
Derrideans:
Politicizing
Deconstruction in Contemporary
or So
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: Minnesota from University Press, 1991), xi. Hereafter cited as /C.All quotations this volume have been taken from Peter Connor's translations of the first three 1-42; "Myth Interrupted," 43-70; "Literary essays: "The Inoperative Community," 71-81. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French texts Communism," are my own.
nis A. Foster, "Pleasure and Community inCultural Criticism" American Literary no. 2 371-82. vol. Todd May, Reconsidering Differ (Summer 1994): 6, History, ence: Nancy, Derrida, L?vinas, and Deleuze (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
cial Theory, Minnesota 69-92. David Ingram, Press,1989), (Minneapolis: University "TheRetreat of thePolitical inthe ModernAge: Jean-Luc Nancy on Totalitarian ism XVIII(1988):93-124. Den andCommunity" Researchin PhenomenologyVoi.
inUnruly Practices:
Power, Discourse
and Gender
3 4
de
Le mythe nazi Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, l'aube, 1991), 15. See Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 1937-39, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988). as .
(Marseille:
Editions
trans. Betsy Wing
cited Caillois, Le Gallimard,1938), 17.Hereafter Roger Mytheet l'homme(Paris:

Literature Departments, Foreign Language grams," Profession (New York: Publications
6 Michael Holquist, "ANew Towerof Babel: RecentTrendsLinking Comparative

Departments, of theModern and Area Studies Pro
1997), 111.
Language Association, (Madison: University
7 8 9 10
William
and the Politics of Criticism Cain, F.O. Matthiessen ofWisconsin Press, 1988), 207. Ibid., 211.
Houston
Aesthetic Nancy
A. Baker, Jr., Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem (Madison: The University ofWisconsin Press, 1988), 6. and Lacoue-Labarthe, Le mythe nazi, 20-21.
and the Black
32
JED DEPPMAN
11
the Subject? (NewYork:Routledge,1991). 12 David Mann, A SimpleTheory of the Self {NewYork: Norton,1994).
13 Jean-Luc Nancy, 14 15 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 138ff. See Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections
See Eduardo Cadava/Peter
Connor,
and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who
Comes
After
Stanford (Stanford: Press,1993),207. University
"Corpus,"
in The Birth to Presence,
trans. Claudette
Sartiliot
and Edward Robinson trans. Geoffrey
and RachelBowlby(Stanford: Stanford Press,1991).Nancy University Bennington

pursues 16 17 Sublime, inDu line of thought in his "L'offrande sublime," ed. Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Belin, 1988), 37-75. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby the same neo-Kantian
on Time,
(NewYork:Routledge,1992),44-45.
Ibid., 45.

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JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE Author(s): Jed Deppman Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 10, No.

JEAN-LUCNANCY,MYTH, AND LITERATURE

nism" and to construe his work as a political

Qui Parle vol. 10, No. 2 Spring/Summer 1997

a (1994), and ToddMay (1997) all agree that Nancy isprimarily

if only indicatively, some treat literature as myth or as fail

JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE

where, on the contrary, ev nothing remains within a singular limit,

iscommunicated and setup foridentification" (IC 78). For erything

JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE

not hold, found, or seize our

In this description, which

isreadasmyth(Holquist), or forits'mythic content' other despite its

JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE

tion it has often enjoyed inthepast.

fictive, stylistic and extra-cultural reputa seems to make

"myth = literature," which

are and where we

in thewake of Barthes' Mythologies. (ddmontage) of "mythologies" in

action in the well at politics,nor has itproducedmuch effective

very hard or very

has given: now

JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE

have no faithinthe mythic projectofworkingtobuild a community

itcannot found any thinking of

JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE

a formless detaches closed offentitiesfrom ground

ionconstitute the Butsingularity does beingof individuals.

a truthful the 'impossibility of any showingof two impossibilities:

is literature's truthof representation,

JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE

as anguish)thatthethought of death of being at all' (felt possibility

well as the impossibilityofmy crossing over into my death.

as ofmy relivingit, and alongwith itthe impossibility (IC, 15)

burrowing, spoiling, piling up, sliding, exhaling,

the finalbickinsoniandash-that unrepresenting, unfinished typo

JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE

from forth Mitsein tothisideaof literature? Letus plainly Heideggerian

6criture. How, one might ask, does one move

insuspense"(IC,78). One mightsay that itholds itself itself, being

JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE

clearest and most relevant, since itbrings literature and community

of a familiar phenomenological view of is of literarity perhaps the descriptions

through together phenomenology:

JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE

which his philosophical work, following community Heidegger's,

has generally posed,

must be rooted is that for literature to perform this existential role it

(to read) is thewithdrawal of its singu it communicates is the following: that

Nancy epochs, affirmingthat "one must cross typologywith history,"17

New GermanCritique33 (Fall 1984): 127-54; re thePolitical?" Deconstructing

trans. Betsy Wing

cited Caillois, Le Gallimard,1938), 17.Hereafter Roger Mytheet l'homme(Paris:

6 Michael Holquist, "ANew Towerof Babel: RecentTrendsLinking Comparative

Language Association, (Madison: University

and the Black

See Eduardo Cadava/Peter

and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who

Stanford (Stanford: Press,1993),207. University

in The Birth to Presence,

and Edward Robinson trans. Geoffrey

and RachelBowlby(Stanford: Stanford Press,1991).Nancy University Bennington

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