The sacred heart of dissent

New Centennial Review

Volumn 2, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 109-138

  Egginton, William ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 25444434930     PISSN: 1532687X     EISSN: 15396630     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2002.0046     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), 155. Hereafter cited as E
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, "A Lecture on Ethics," Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 12
3. Sheri Hoelm, "Community and the Absolutely Feminine," Diacritics 26, no. 2 (1996): 50
4. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 24. Hereafter cited as IC
5. Jacques-Alain Miller, "Extimacy" in Lacanian Theory of Discourse, ed. Mark Bracher et al. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), 74-87, 76
6. The present participle "gaping" translates "bé ance" (Écrits [Paris: Seuil, 1966], 524), a nominal form that is rare in French, but whose dissemination in intellectual circles seems at least in part due to Lacans frequent usage. See Peggy Kamufs contribution to this volume, which explores this term in the context of Nancys LIntrus
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 13. Hereafter cited as BSP
8. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 204. Hereafter cited as PS
9. Juan García Ponce, De ánima (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1989), 10
10. David E. Johnson, "The Ethical Mark, in Other Words," unpublished manuscript, 38. Hereafter cited as EM
11. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 155. Hereafter cited as BP
12. In Kants case, this is true because the existence of practical reason depends on practical laws that determine the will (and hence are of the subject), and in Heideggers case, he explicitly states that "Dasein calls itself in conscience." See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. T. K. Abbott (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996), 32
13. And Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 254. Hereafter cited as BT
14. The Title of the Letter, trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). Hereafter cited as TL
15. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore 1972-1973), trans. Bruce Fink (New York/London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), 65-66
16. I do not think we can count Nancy among those who, with Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari, are rejected offhand as "priests of lack" (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 154)
17. For even if "Man," as he says, "bears witness foremost to a lack in being [manque à être]," this is only the case so long as one does not conceive of this lack as implying a backdrop of normative plenitude from which it withdraws. See "Is Everything Political?" trans. Philippe Adamek, in this volume
18. See Miguel de Beistegui, who draws analogies between Nancys thoughts on sacrifice and Lacans notion of a "pure signifier behind which no signified could be hidden." "Sacrifice Revisited," in On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy, ed. Darren Sheppard, Simon Sparks, and Colin Thomas (London: Routledge, 1997), 157-73, 163
19. See Nancys The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), in which he relates sense to openness and spacing, the space opened by ones orientation toward world (7 passim). Hereafter cited as SW
20. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 54. Herafter cited as VII
21. Charles Shepherdson has also emphasized the idea that the Lacanian real, of which das Ding was an earlier theoretical manifestation, cannot be grasped as being that which lies outside of signification, but rather as that which exceeds symbolization within the symbolic, is "excluded from within." See his discussion in "The Intimate Alterity of the Real: A Response to Reader Commentary on History and the Real (PMC v.5 n.2)" Postmodern Culture 6, no. 3 (1996)
22. Jacques Lacan, "Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever," in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 193. Hereafter cited as OS. A brief and clear explanation of the torus motif, which Lacan elaborated in his unpublished seminar on Identification, can be found in Joël Dor, "The Epistemological Status of Lacans Mathematical Paradigms," trans. Pablo Nigel, in Disseminating Lacan, ed. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 109-21
23. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse of Science (New York: Picador USA, 1998), 20
24. Juan-David Nasio, Les yeux de Laure: Le concept dobjet a dans la théorie de J. Lacan (Paris: Aubier, 1987), 154
25. See Rodolphe Gaschés discussion in "Alongside the Horizon," in On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy, 140-56, 144. Hereafter cited as AH. Nancys reading of Hegel is to be found in La remarque spéculative (Paris: Galilée, 1973). See, for example, 112, where Nancy argues that the speculative work, the Aufhebung of propositions, occurs precisely at the preposition an: "this is that is transformed into this passes to/occurs at that" ["ceci est cela" se transforme en "ceci (se) passe à cela"]. Although Nancys ultimate point is to critique Hegels implicit exclusion of grammar from speculative transformations, what seems most pertinent to this discussion is how the speculative moment, while transforming fixed being into movement, seems necessarily to turn around a fixed position, in this case a pre-position, itself not subject to speculative transformation. Nancy refers to such a point of non-dialecticity as "that point where the negative itself, in order to be the negative (in order to be the nihil negativum and not just the nihil privatum) must avoid its own operation and be affirmed as the absolute remainder that cannot be captured in a concatenation of procedure or operation. (It is the critical, suspended, inoperative point at the heart of the dialectic)" (BSP, 91)
26. See Lisa Block de Behars discussion in Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation, trans. William Egginton, forthcoming (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), chapter 4
27. Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova (Firenze: Sansoni, 1962), 16. Hereafter cited as VN
28. See Robert P. Harrisons beautiful reading of the poem, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)
29. Jean-Luc Nancy, LIntrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 17; translation modified. Hereafter cited as I
30. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz catalogue some of the figures and aspects of this turn in their introduction to The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York/London: Routledge, 2000)
31. The reference is to Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
32. Originally De Dieu qui vient à lidée (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 250, where, it seems to me, Lévinas is making a similar point
33. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London/New York: Verso, 2000), 1. Hereafter cited as FA
34. Jean-Luc Nancy, "La Déconstruction du christianisme," Études philosophiques 4 (1998): 512-13. Hereafter cited as DC
35. The formulation à même soi translates an sich for Nancy, and thus connotes both the beyond of the noumenal thingness and the at-itselfness of pure identity. See Gaschés discussion in AH, 144
36. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 15
37. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Touchstone, 1977), 16