10th June 2024
Dr. Jamie Stephenson, University of Leeds
Cosmin Toma (ed.), Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism (New York, London, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023)
Bloomsbury Academic’s Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series aims to comprehend a given thinker through literary and cultural modernism, while reciprocally reading those very modes of interpretation via the chosen philosopher’s work. Each volume adheres to a tripartite structure, ‘Conceptualizing X’, ‘X and Modernity’ (where ‘X’ pertains to the theorist under scrutiny), and a closing ‘Glossary’ which attends to several key ideas of the philosopher in question. Following previous anthologies on Henri Bergson (2013) and Gilles Deleuze (2014), the present collection discusses the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. The series’ theme of ‘reciprocity’ is apt given that the French philosopher explores conceptualisations of ‘community’, via a nuancing of Martin Heidegger’s Mitsein (‘being-with’), emphasising relationality as a crucial ontological force. Nancy purposefully pursues this democratic register so as to evade perpetuating thought as a grounding principle of being. These motifs of liminality and resonance place Nancy in close proximity with (and, one might argue, as precursor to) contemporary Anthropocene discourses which pursue a decentering of the human; consonant with bodies of theory including, but not limited to, speculative realism, new materialism, and ecocriticism. This latent theme of anti-anthropocentrism subtends many of Understanding Nancy’s essay topics, which include applications of Nancean theory to deconstruction and Christianity (Schalk Gerber), psychoanalysis (Jean-Michel Rabaté), science (Ian James), and Maurice Blanchot (Aukje van Rooden and Andreas Noyer; Jeff Fort). But what role does modernism play in all of this?
In his introductory essay, editor Cosmin Toma defines the relation between modernity and modernism as a tension connecting ‘then’ and ‘now’, as ‘the impossibility of [a] reconciliation […which] stresses […] necessary coexistence’ (9). The very nature of the active correspondence between this binary suggests not only a dialogue between two perpetually mobile sites (‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’), but also a paradoxical holding together-apart. This framing allows for the identity and difference of ‘then’ and ‘now’, for their consonance and dissonance. As a serial disruptor of reductive binaries, Nancy is undoubtedly one of the best suited thinkers through which to engage with this ‘groundlessness […] so characteristic of modernism’ ( 12). The essays contained herein employ Nancy’s amplification of radical reciprocity to explore how postmillennial modernist studies might rethink the predominant situatedness of the human within the world, thus efficiently accounting for a contemporary modernism: the simultaneous coexistence of ‘past’ and ‘presence’, their integration as equally active loci. This approach—history as perpetual loop or echo, ‘the notion of a radical yet repeating beginning’ (10), rather than teleological flow—facilitates questions such as: where, if anywhere, does ‘modernity’ end and ‘modernism’ begin?
If modernism is traditionally positioned in counterpoint to Romanticism, Nancy bucks this trend (as with Heidegger before him), through an implicit integration of Romanticism with modernism. Sympathetic to this, Stefanie Heine’s ‘Fort-Pflanzung: The Literary Absolute’s Botanic Afterlife’ , provides a nuanced close reading of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (Nancy’s long-term collaborator) and Nancy’s The Literary Absolute (1978/88). Heine plays creatively with the duality of meaning in the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century German Romantic concept, Fortpflanzung (‘reproduction’, or ‘propagation’). She also employs vegetal allegory in a study of autopoiesis, self-creation, and perpetuation, of how Romanticism precipitates modernism, in a thematic interstice of ‘incompletion and eternal becoming’ ( 56). This conceptualisation of a ‘metaphoric bloom’ ( 43) facilitates her closing interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical essay, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939), as a potential point of departure into future scholarly work on Nancy’s ‘distinguish[ing] between the “absolute” Romantic fragment and […] “modernist” fractality’ ( 56).
Nancy’s articulation of being through a reciprocal touching, via an affectual environment, allows contemporary thought to account for modernity, modernism, and the play between them through a poetics of resonance. Sarah Hickmott’s ‘After Listening’ offers a sustained consideration of this element of Nancy’s later writing, in pursuit of a ‘dynamic, resonant philosophy’ (75). In particular she provides a welcome review of the role played by music (and sound more generally) in a number of texts published subsequent to the more venerated Listening (2002/07). Hickmott explores another example of Nancy problematising established oppositions, in relation to the subtle yet fertile tension between écouter (listen) and entendre (hear). ‘The remarkable corollary of this,’ she writes, citing fellow Nancy scholar, Adrienne Janus, is that ‘“all objects, insofar as they resonate” are able, therefore, to be listening subjects; this has the consequent (and no doubt intentional) effect of making Nancy’s “human” subject less properly “‘subject’-like, less human.“’ (76) Hickmott tacitly evidences this by amplifying Nancean themes of coexistence, movement, and correspondence, arguing that the relations between modernity and modernism can be novelly and productively articulated through the ontological expressiveness of sonorous aesthetics.
Understanding Nancy contributes to a slowly growing number of scholarly collections dedicated to Nancy’s work. Where monographs on Nancy have tended to undertake more of an introductory or guiding approach to his thinking, one of the merits of Understanding Nancy is its broadening of disciplinary engagement and pedagogical approaches to this thinker’s complex systems of thought.[1] The achievements of this collection are twofold: its important contextualising of Nancy within the modernist continuum, and its opening up of a multidisciplinary dialogue with Nancy’s specific relationship with modernist studies.
Sources
Image Credit: Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism cover, 2023, Bloomsbury Academic
[1] Monographs on Nancy include Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); and Marie-Eve Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012). Nancean collections include Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense, ed. by Peter Gratton and Marie-Eve Morin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012); The Pulse of Sense: Encounters with Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. by Marie Chabbert and Nikolaas Deketelaere (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2022); and Jean-Luc Nancy among the Philosophers, ed. by Irving Goh (New York: Fordham University Press, 2023).
The Modernist Review 