Lecture 5 - Jean-Luc Nancy
Contradictory Joinings
Nancy is interested in what he calls ‘contradictory joinings’, two things which should not be (supposedly) possible at the same time.
He thus opposes a tradition which thinks of nudity in terms of dichotomies, e.g. naked and nude.
He thinks nudity is not about dichotomies, but about a trans-experience, a crossing of experience.
‘Nude Enumerated’ in Coming by Jean-Luc Nancy
'“Nude: conquered, triumphant; undone, reassembled; lost, found; undressed, costumed; obvious, indiscernible; shameless, virtuous; sexed, neutralised.
Nude knot tied up in contradictions. Not dialectical for all that. No mediation between naked dearth of hair and the luxuriance of tufts. No middle way or replacement or surpassing. But rather contradictory joinings. Fragile sturdy; smooth rough; dry wet; empty full; open closed.”
Nancy and the trans- of nudity
Trans-immanence:
transgender
hermaphrodite/intersex
male - effeminate virile
female - effeminate virile
Nancy and the “Hermaphrodite”
Hermaphrodite: archaic term for living organism having both male and female sex organs or other sexual characteristics (replaced by the term intersex)
“What makes the equivocal appeal, the trouble and the anxiety, sometimes even the anguish, of the spectacle, the thought or the encounter of the hermaphrodite, is precisely the impossibility of dividing and splitting, without a remainder, Hermes and Aphrodite. The one and the other do more than touch each other; they mingle, they intersect, without being confounded.”
Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus
“What I remember most is that all the queens I knew hated her. Violently. In her portraits of drag queens, she stripped them and showed them as men. To me, the queens were not men. My work was much more respectful to them. I’ve never thought of a drag queen as a man. That’s really the last thing I think about when I look at them. They weren’t women either, by the way, they were another species.”
Trans
Nancy mentions that in the Renaissance, there is a hesitation with regard to (sexual) difference that makes the categories of masculine and feminine waver, e.g. Leonardo’s effeminate men; Michelangelo’s virile woman. Nancy states that with contemporary art this reappears with the iconography of transgender.
Nudity is not about immanence (the here and now) or transcendence (what is beyond here and now), but “transimmanence”.
Again, contrast this with Kenneth Clark’s dichotomies: vulgar or celestial, vegetable or crystalline, the former being linked to immanence, the latter to transcendence.
Immanence (the here and now):
naturalism: the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual or metaphysical explanations are excluded or discounted.)
Transcendence (what is beyond here and now):
metaphysics (Platonism, Christianity), an ascending to some place above or outside the world (“scandere”, climb)
“Transimmanence”:
transimmanence is a crossing or passage (trans-), but only to another world “within” as opposed to another world beyond (e.g. metamorphosis)
Goldin’s achievement is to show how the nude is always this “placing into question of sexual identity, this never-ending crossing of identities” with “a passage between two or more presences”
“There is no solitary nakedness. If I am naked and alone, I am already an other to myself, another with myself. By its very essence, a nakedness touches on another nakedness.”
In this experience of passage between two or more presences (e.g. I/other) “the body experiences itself as its very own outside, as that which comes from outside, but from an outside that is all there.”
The outside of transcendence = an outside that is all there (such as the following bodily experience: “If I am naked and alone, I am already an other to myself, another with myself.”)