THE ARRIVAL OF MIMESIS AND METHEXIS IN THE ENQUIRIES OF JEAN-LUC NANCY N I ALDRIDGE PhD 2014 1 THE ARRIVAL OF MIMESIS AND METHEXIS IN THE ENQUIRIES OF JEAN-LUC NANCY NICHOLAS IAIN ALDRIDGE A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy the Manchester Metropolitan University 2014 2 Acknowledgements Without the love and support of Helen and my family this thesis would not exist. But without Joanna’s inspiration, guidance, and fight, I would not even have started it. And Keith, I will be forever grateful for your timely doses of sober realism. Furthermore, this thesis would not have taken the form it does without: Gary Banham, Leda Channer, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Nicola Crosby, David Deamer, Rosalyn Diprose, Terry Dooley, Tom Gibson, John Hutnyk, Ian James, Martin Kratz, Duncan Large, Rob Lapsley, Eileen Pollard, Alison Ross, Berthold Schoene, Adam Skevington, Henry Somers-Hall, Tanja Staehler, Richard Stamp, Celine Surprenant, Fred Tremblay, and Robert Zaborowski. 3 Abstract This thesis advances from the conjecture that Jean-Luc Nancy's work demands to be interpreted according to the logic it describes. For Nancy unity is irreducible from exposure, because a distinct entity cannot be abstracted from its boundary conditions. It is my contention, therefore, that Nancy's work must be treated accordingly, as a syntactic unity that can only be understood in its exposure to other syntactic unities. Two interrelated claims are therefore made. First: that the current literature on Nancy’s work fails to identify that an inheritance from Plato and from Greek philosophy more widely is a key to the specificity of Nancy’s thinking, and second that only by retrieving this connection can Nancy’s contribution to contemporary ontological debates be made out. The thesis attempts to take a preliminary step in this direction by positioning Nancy’s work within a contemporary philosophical scene definitively characterised by its exposure to Ancient Greek philosophy. This investigation places a conceptual focus on the Platonic terms μίμησις and μέθεξις, terms which bear a rich history of implications in philosophies of immanence, transcendence, production, and art. I argue that in showing that there is never μίμησις without μέθεξις, and vice versa, Nancy shows that there is never immanence without transcendence, and vice versa. Furthermore, I argue that this mutuality places sensibility at the core of Nancy’s thought, and determines the artwork to be a privileged site at which the reciprocity of immanence and transcendence is presented. In this much, I suggest Nancy’s work offers an alternative to the demand for some mutually exclusive decision between immanence and transcendence. 4 Table of Contents Acknowledgements.............................................................................................. 3 Abstract ............................................................................................................... 4 Table of Contents ................................................................................................ 5 CHAPTER ONE Introduction ............................................................................................................. 7 1.1 Introduction: the arrival of μίμησις and μέθεξις ............................................... 9 1.2 A terminological background of μίμησις and μέθεξις .................................... 17 1.3 Immanence and transcendence as contemporary philosophical themes..... 32 1.4 Sense .......................................................................................................... 43 1.5 Themes in the critical reception of Nancy’s philosophy ............................... 54 1.5.1 Community, or the exposition of bodies .................................................... 58 1.5.2 Writing, or the exposition of sense ............................................................ 61 1.5.3 Exposition qua exposition: from art and ontology to methodology ............ 68 1.6 Thesis structure ........................................................................................... 76 CHAPTER TWO Immanence with or without transcendence: the contemporary reception of an ancient problematic ............................................................................................... 79 2.1 Introduction: The end of transcendence and the birth of philosophy ........... 81 2.2 Chapter Structure ........................................................................................ 94 2.3 Heidegger on the Greeks ............................................................................. 98 2.4 Heidegger’s rejection of μέθεξις ................................................................. 112 2.5 Heidegger’s affirmation of μίμησις ............................................................. 123 2.6 Deleuze on Heidegger ............................................................................... 128 2.7 The concept of univocity ............................................................................ 133 2.8 Deleuze’s “reversal” of Platonism .............................................................. 139 2.9 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 147 CHAPTER THREE A hermeneutics of finitude .................................................................................. 151 3.1 Introduction: the interpretation of interpretation ......................................... 153 3.2 Chapter structure and outline of ‘Sharing Voices’ ...................................... 157 3.3 Gadamer’s affirmation of μέθεξις as a refutation of Hartmann’s critical ontology ........................................................................................................... 162 3.4 Gadamer’s interpretation of μέθεξις as an ontological presupposition of dialogue ........................................................................................................... 178 5 3.5 Gadamer’s ontological interpretation of μέθεξις as the temporal and communal structure of Dasein ......................................................................... 186 3.6 Nancy reading Gadamer reading Heidegger ............................................. 194 3.7 Nancy’s interpretation of Dasein as absolutely conditioned finitude .......... 202 3.8 Nancy’s interpretation of μίμησις and μέθεξις in Plato’s Ion ....................... 210 3.9 From μίμησις and μέθεξις to ecotechnics ................................................... 219 3.10 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 230 CHAPTER FOUR An art of plural origins ......................................................................................... 233 4.1 Introduction: aesthetics as first-philosophy ................................................ 235 4.2 Chapter structure ....................................................................................... 243 4.3 Heidegger’s mimetic origin ........................................................................ 245 4.4 Gadamer and the end of μίμησις ............................................................... 256 4.5 Nancy on the myth of participation............................................................. 264 4.6 Adorno: negative μίμησις and catastrophic μέθεξις .................................... 275 4.7 Nancy on the presentation of presentation ................................................ 281 4.8 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 291 CHAPTER FIVE Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 293 5.1 Summary ................................................................................................... 294 5.2 Ancient Greek themes ............................................................................... 298 5.3 Nancy’s position......................................................................................... 302 5.4 Paths for Future Exposition ....................................................................... 309 Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 315 6 CHAPTER ONE Introduction 7 With regard to the μέθεξιν it was only the term that he changed; for whereas the Pythagoreans say that things exist by μιμήσει of numbers, Plato says that they exist by μεθέξει - merely a change of term. As to what this μέθεξιν or μίμησιν may be, they left this an open question.1 ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics That no mimesis occurs without methexis (under threat of being nothing but a copy, a reproduction): here is the principle. Reciprocally, no doubt, there is no methexis that does not imply mimesis, that is, precisely production (not reproduction) in the form of a force communicated in participation.2 NANCY, The Image: Mimesis and Methexis 1 Aristotle, Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes, XVII: The Metaphysics, trans. by Hugh Tredennick (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1989) (Greek elements from: Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, ed. by William David Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1924)), 987b. 2 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Image: Mimesis and Methexis’ (2007), trans. by Ron Estes & Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in Theory@Bufallo, 11 (2007), 9-26 (pp. 10-11). 8 1.1 Introduction: the arrival of μίμησις and μέθεξις The concepts of μίμησις and μέθεξις3 first appear in combination in Nancy’s work in 1980, in ‘Le mythe nazi’ [‘The Nazi Myth’], a paper co-authored with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe4 and delivered at Schiltigheim that May, at a colloquium entitled Les Mécanismes du fascisme.5 There the two thinkers state: German tradition adds something to the classical, Greek theory of mythic imitation, of mimesis - or develops, very insistently, something that, in Plato for example, was really only nascent, that is, a theory of fusion or mystical participation (of methexis, as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl will say), of which the best example is the Dionysian experience, as described by Nietzsche.6 The word μίμησις, literally “imitation” or “mimicking”, is already a loaded term at this juncture, both for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, and for the wider conversation in which they are working.7 In their co-authored 1978 work L'Absolu littéraire: theorie de la litterature du romantisme allemand [The Literary Absolute: The 3 Due to the many different ways in which Greek terms are transliterated throughout the literature, including in many of the quotes I have embedded within this thesis, I have opted to write them in Greek wherever they appear in my own prose to avoid confusion. 4 The concept of μίμησις is a central theme of Lacoue-Labarthe’s work, but what I am pointing to here is the inflection it takes on when said alongside μέθεξις. See for example: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (1979), ed. by Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 5 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe & Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’ (1980), trans. by Brian Holmes, Critical Enquiry, 16.2 (Winter 1990), 291-312 (p. 291). 6 Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’, p. 302. 7 At least since its central place in 1972’s La dissemination, the word μίμησις implicates a conversation with Derrida. Indeed in 1975, both Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy contributed essays to the collection Mimesis: des articulations, which contains Derrida’s essay ‘Economimesis’. Nancy’s paper, ‘Le ventriloque (A mon père, X.)’, sets the tone for his future interrogations by approaching the status of the concept in the dialogues of Plato. See: Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (1972), trans. by Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981); Various, Mimesis: des articulations (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975); and the English translation: Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’ (1975), trans. by Richard Klein, in Diacritics 11.2 (Summer 1981), 2-25. 9 Theory of Literature in German Romanticism], for instance, Nancy and Lacoue- Labarthe had already pursued what they refer to there as the mimetic ‘ambivalence’8 that problematises literature’s and philosophy’s mutual reliance upon one another, an ambivalence that Nancy asserts, many years later, is given rise to for the reason that in μίμησις ‘the non-given must be sought through the given’.9 For ‘[a]s Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has repeated and articulated throughout all his work’, Nancy goes on, ‘the true character of mimesis is to be without model’,10 that is, a copy or a copying without an original. The word μέθεξις, literally rendered “participation” or “sharing”, invokes a family of problematics as old as philosophy, particularly when said in combination with μίμησις. Two years after the 1980 seminar paper, in a rich text entitled Le Partage des voix [‘Sharing Voices’], Nancy asserts of Plato’s dialogue Ion (a dialogue which, in fact, never explicitly names μίμησις within its concerns11), that it demonstrates the way in which μίμησις, copying, when bereft of a given original, is revealed as ‘active, creative, or re-creative’,12 which is to say, it re-produces only insofar as it produces both itself and an original, neither of which pre-exist the operation, and this means that μίμησις ‘proceeds from methexis’, participation, or conversely, that ‘mimesis is the condition of this participation’.13 8 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe & Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1978), trans. by Philip Barnard & Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 68. 9 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing (2007), trans. by Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 61. 10 Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, p. 61. 11 Plato, ‘Ion’, in Plato With an English Translation, III: Statesman, Philebus, Ion, trans. by Walter Rangeley Maitland Lamb (London: Heinemann, 1962), pp. 407-47 (including parallel Greek text). 12 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Sharing Voices’ (1982), trans. by Gayle L. Ormiston, in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. by Gayle L. Ormiston & Alan D. Schrift (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 211-60 (p. 238). 13 Nancy, ‘Sharing Voices’, p. 238. 10