L'Irréconciliable

New Centennial Review

Volumn 2, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 23-36

  Fynsk, Christopher ^a  

^a BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60049094670     PISSN: 1532687X     EISSN: 15396630     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2002.0048     Document Type: Review

References (4)

1. This phrase, as it is used in L'Intrus, is not easily translated since the meaning of "la vie" remains very much in question. To the extent that 'propre" comes to qualify it, it probably cannot be thought apart from the problematic of selfhood (as Heidegger thinks it in his work of the twenties and thirties, for example). I will accordingly refer at times to the "self" in pursuing Nancy's work with this phrase. But it is clear that "life" itself (or perhaps I should write: "life 'itself'") remains something of an enigma for Nancy, and we should be prepared to follow this question along the lines pursued by Heidegger both when he attempts to approach the term via Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and his notion of "being-in-the-world" (see Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982], 172-73, and when he evokes the "proper" of the Daseins bodily being in his later work.
2. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1999), 189-200. The passage continues as follows: "That gave me something to think about. The discovery was not a pleasant one. It seemed to me that I was losing a great deal. I asked myself, wasn't I sad, hadn't I felt my life breaking up? Yes, that had been true, but each minute, when I stayed without moving in a corner of the room, the cool of the night and the stability of the ground made me breathe and rest on gladness. Men want to escape from death, strange beings that they are. And some of them cry out, 'Die, Die,' because they want to escape from life. 'What a life. I'll kill myself, I'll give in.' This is lamentable and strange. It is a mistake."
3. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 140.
4. I have been citing from the late poem attributed to Hölderlin entitled, "In lovely blueness." It is collected in Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Cambridge, 1980), 601-5.