nancy, myth, literature

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JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATUREAuthor(s): Jed DeppmanSource: Qui Parle, Vol. 10, No. 2, Heidegger & Co. (Spring/Summer 1997), pp. 11-32Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686071 .

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JEAN-LUCNANCY,MYTH, AND LITERATUREJedDeppman

Jean-Luc Nancy stands out among recent theoristsof community forhis willingness to use myth and literature as important analyticalcategories. One of hismore strikingand fundamental theses is thateven though literaturedoes not have an identifiable essence, somehow in theway that it"interrupts" myth itreproduces the truth ofcommunity, the very truth f how we are together.Readers of Nancy know that such a claim can be understoodinseveral ways: as a thesis on theontology of literariness, a phenomenological description of the act of reading, a postmodern(anti)constitutive theory of community, even (were itdrawn out) anegative statement about the possibility of effective political activityin the time of late capitalism. These and other possibilities are usually inplay when Nancy invokesmyth and literature,and thismultivalence is one reason that he has attracted more attention frompolitical than from literarytheorists.Another obvious reason is thathis use of literature always seems to some extent opportunisticmore the consequence of his proximity toDerrida and post-structuralism than the resultof any real engagement with literarytexts. Eachsystolicontractionnthe merican irculationfNancy'sworkhasthus een ledto mphasizethe econdtermnhis "literaryommunism" and to construe his work as a political theory incorporating

Qui Parle vol. 10, No. 2 Spring/Summer 1997

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12 JED DEPPMAN

oddly formed literary locutions. Indeed despite many differences inapproach, Nancy Fraser (1984), David Ingram (1988), Dennis Foster(1994), and ToddMay (1997) all agree thatNancy isprimarilypolitical theorist.'

Christopher Fynsk therefore speaks formany when he introduces The Inoperative Community as a book that is"tryingtowork athought of difference, or a thought of finitude, into political termsthatcontinue to speak to us as imperatives despite their lossof philosophical meaning."2 Fynsk repeatedly asks Fraser's main question:

why does Nancy write somuch about the political while he refusesto produce a politics? Although this question has produced a richlineof inquirywhose summum iscertainly Ingram's essay, ithas notyet been able to interrogateNancy's analyses ofmyth and literatureinany depth. (Fynsk isagain representative of the trend: inhis twentyeight page foreword to IC, he makes only passing reference tomythand literature.) Iwill argue that in fact Nancy mutes the political"imperative" and restores the philosophical meaning to "myth," "literature," and "community."Of course these terms have so many meanings inmodernitythat any attempt at clarification will seem quixotic. To contextualizeNancy's work therefore it ill be necessary to present insome detailhis own use of the terms and to examine, ifonly indicatively, somemodern critical approaches which treat literatureas myth or as failed myth. As we will see, Nancy's uniqueness inheres inhis carefuldevelopment and imbrication of two things: an ontological understanding of myth and a deconstructive understanding of literature.Much of the theoretical capital for this double business comes fromthe College of Sociology, Martin Heidegger's existential analytic,Jacques Derrida's dcriture, and, perhaps most problematically,Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of consciousness.One goal of thisessay is thus to follow through on Nancy's useofmyth nd literaturey startingothinknto ts etails thesis hat(with hilippeLacoue-Labarthe) e oftenputsforth: Theproblemofmyth is lways indissociable rom hat f art."3 nthe ssays thatmake up The Inoperative ommunity,he rivilegedrt isliterature,and Nancy articulates a complex set of relations between it,myth,and community which he derives less from the famous twentieth



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JEAN-LUC NANCY, MYTH, AND LITERATURE 13

century myth critics (forexample, James Frazer, Lucien L6vy-Bruhl,Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss) and the psychologists (SigmundFreud, Jean Piaget, and Carl Jung)than from the intellectual crucibleof the College of Sociology, a school formed by Georges Bataille,Michel Leiris, and Roger Caillois for the purpose of analyzing themanifestations of the sacred in society.4 Broadly speaking, the College combined Nietzschean philosophemes with the results of

modern social science to produce theses about-and topropose interventions into-ecstatic, mythic, and sacred forms of being insociety. Bataille's influence on Nancy will be taken up inmore ,detail later, ut it is orth noting at theoutset how clearly Nancy echoes(without ever citing) themore conservatively scientific and structuralistCaillois' Myth andMan (1938), a textwhose opening salvo couldbe an incipit forNancy's Myth Interrupted: "Itdoesn't seem that theability to create or to livemyths has been replaced by that of explaining them."5

Nancy isattracted toCaillois', and theCollege's, ambitiouslysynthetic strategyof using a fine-grained analysis of the experienceof art (and of imaginative life ingeneral) togive structure to a theoryof modern community. Indeed he expands intonew philosophicalregions Caillois' view thatmyth acts simultaneously on the highestlevels of society and the self. As Caillois puts it, myth takes place atthe extreme limit f society's superstructure and of the mind's activity" (MH, 18). However, while Caillois argues thatmodern mythsstill respond to "rather essential human needs" (MH, 153) and havea firm, ifultimately inexplicable, "hold" on modern sensibility (heeven points to the idea of a psychological complex), forNancy mythicspeech has become abundant but powerless. Moreover, Caillois decides thatalthough literature isnot themodern replacement formyth(despite a possible future "rapprochement" between them), literaturedoes transform the communal, ritualized, moral and imaginativeforms fmyth into hemore privateforms festhetic elight. SeeMH, 154ff.)o understand ancywe mustbe attentiveothewayshe both preserves and radicalizes these basic positions. Let us therefore turn to the strategies and sources he employs as he strives toturn literature's "transformation ofmyth" into a more disruptive "in-.terruption ofmyth."



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14 JED DEPPMANInNancy's texts, art isusually literature,and literature isusu

ally writing that points to and away fromboth theworld and itself.Literary texts summon up images, scenes, messages and heroes fromtraditionalmyths and then "interrupt" theirown transmission. Infact,they do not "present" these traditional things so much as show theirown process of self-interruption. This may sound likea New Criticalliterary mbivalence or a deconstructive technique, and indeed onemay always choose to hear the poetic thunder of undecidable ironyand formapproaching rather than receding inthe paradoxes Nancyso often proposes: "Community is the sacred, ifyou will: but thesacred stripped of the sacred" (IC, 35); "literature reveals theunrevealable" (IC, 63). Ultimately, however, such aphorisms are moreintelligible and less derivative if e keep inmind thatNancy's largerproject isone of analyzing modern communities rather than of simply offering a theory of literatureas textuality.

In fact, as Nancy might say, literature as anything-culture,aesthetic inscription, historical document, even, in an importantsense, ecriture-always involves a philosophically unsustainableform of literatureas myth. Since, as he declares, "we no longer haveanything to do with myth" (IC, 46) and since we are more or lesslimited to examining rather than experiencing the content of previous myths, we are inno position to create new and bettermyths forourselves. All we can do is re-presentmyth: it is, letus say, a full,founding, institutional speech. It isa self-less language that simultaneously speaks itself and speaks what is. "Neither dialogue normonologue, myth is the unique speech of themany . . . it is selfcommunicating" (IC, 50). Myth in this sense narrates origins anddestinies and thereby organizes and distributes being. In the language, structure, tone, styleand totality fmyth, thecosmos somehowstructures itself as,' or 'in,' logos and does so ina revelatory or declarative way. Heroism, transcendence, and pure identification areall aspects ofmyth: "Inmyth ..,. existences are not offered in theirsingularity:ut thecharacteristicsfparticularityontribute o thesystem f the exemplaryife' nwhich nothing oldsback,wherenothing remains within a singular limit,where, on the contrary, everythings ommunicated nd setup for dentification"IC 78). For



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Nancy all of these statements explaining what myth "was" or "is"cannot pretend to reproduce the truthof a previous time in its ssence. Today, since myth's real power (aswe represent it) isgone,myth can only assume the forms thatwe imagine itto have taken.

Following Nancy then, inthe hortatory subjunctive and forourown purposes, letus let literaturebe that language which cuts acrossmyth and exposes its limits and failures, inhabiting and interruptingit.Let literature,as writing, be what simultaneously gestures towardtranscendence and halts or suspends the delivery of being to theword. Such a language would be self-differential, incomplete andimpure in the sense that itwould not communicate only itself,aswould myth. Perhaps most importantly itwould not bind community intheway we imagine-we cannot know-that myth did.

Nancy's essay "Literary Communism" opens with Bataille'scomment: "Literature cannot assume the taskof directing the collective necessity" (IC, 71). In a phrase Iwill explicate furtherbelow,Nancy explains that literaturedesignates "that singular ontologicalquality thatgives being incommon, that does not hold it in reserve,before or after community, as an essence ofman, ofGod, or of theState achieving its ulfillment in ommunion" (IC, 64). Literature, then,truthfully inscribes theway we are together ina non-mythic way,that is, as an "offering"which does not hold, found, or seize ourcommon essence.

Although the idea that fictive literary language is fundamentally different from the ontologically hierarchical and explanatorylanguage of myth might seem acceptable to theorists of all kinds,ultimately it is not. The idea is unacceptable inpart because anycritical language which defends the utility or importance of literature tends, ifonly strategically, to transform literature intomyth. Inacademic institutions one can often find an outright equation between them, for example, inMichael Holquist's defense ofComparative Literature:

Huntingtonnd Brzezinski uggest hat hefundamentaldifferencesmongsocieties anbe grasped nlyby looking at the stories people tell themselves about



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themselves-and about others-that define them asselves. Certainly Anderson, the social scientist cited inmy first necdote, holds this view: his whole theory ofnationalism isbased on the premise that the power holding individuals in the embrace of the community of thenation isat bottom narrative.6

Inthis description, which is the heart of Holquist's case for the centralityof literary tudy inthe changing academy, one can recognizea description ofmyth and not literature, inotherwords, "the storiespeople tell ... that define them as selves." Defining language whichhierarchizes and distributes the being of beings, metaphysical language which confirms the validity and value of the category of theself, the acting agent-this is the kind of language we use to lendurgency to "literary" study.Holquist stretches the fabric ofmyth overliterature because he would like literary study to have the consistency and real-world power thatwe like to imagine myth once had.Thus many readers both use and mention a Nancian articulation ofmyth, ifonly tominimize its istance from literature.UnlikeHolquist, however, critics such asWilliam Cain see a real gap between literature and myth. Inhis discussion ofMelville, Twain, andFaulkner, forexample, Cain writes: "These writers illuminate the dilemmas of slavery, prejudice, and miscegenation with tremendouslycomplex insight; they cannot, however, work through the contradictions they articulate in order to envision a society and culture ofricher possibilities thatwould give greater grounds forhope."7 ForCain, writers who merely "illuminate" without "working through thecontradictions" are somehow limited because they do not resolveliterature intomyth. Cain is somewhat frustrated by these authorsand his logic seems to be that literature isas good as it ismythic: itshould institute,construct, found, and build a world or a possibleworld. Inhis felicitous phrase, it hould "give greater grounds." Hisis an appealing logic because itcasts the critic in the central communal role ofmaking literaturemythic. Indeed whenever literatureisread smyth Holquist), rfor tsmythicontent' espite its therqualities (Cain), criticism can itself become an exercise inwriting



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myths and counter-myths: critics can, and should, become activeagents making their communities commune. InNancy's terms, onewould say thatCain supplements literaturewith a mythic languagewhich enacts for itsreaders-and thereby returns to them-the fullpresence of their immanent participation ina community of sharedessence. Cain draws attention to another result of privileging themythic components of literature:politicized teaching can take precedence over the act of reading. He writes: "Du Bois and the othersIhave named ... one would want to call 'great artists.' They are that.But fromanother point of view, their status as artistsmatters less, inthe classroom, than their exemplary performance as writers whoproject political lessons,who craft embodiments of political truth."Houston A. Baker, Jr. sone criticwho describes his effortsas"the process ofwriting a revisionary tale or countermyth," and hebecomes his own epic hero as he narrates his exemplary journeythrough and beyond the New Criticism to the Black Aesthetic.9 Thisis not conceitedness on Baker's part; it is the natural result of hisattempt to supplement literary ith mythic speech. Cain and Bakerare good examples of themodern academic use ofmyth and literature not because they are race critics, but because unlike Holquistthey feel and thematize a gap between myth and literaturewhichthey trytoovercome with their criticism. Similar examples could bedrawn from across the spectrum of contemporary literaryand cultural study. (In the context of Nancy, one thinks of Nancy Fraser'sfeminism.) At any rate, it isclear that reducing or denying Nancy'sdistinction between literature nd myth can help togive grounds forpolitical hopefulness. Such optimism has indeed tended to accompany those contemporary strategies of reading which stress theconstructed, historical and discursive nature of literatureover andagainst the non-discursive, fictive, stylisticand extra-cultural reputationit asoften njoyed inthe ast.Yet the equation "myth= literature,"which seems tomakeeverythingimpler,as toturn blind ye tothefact hat odaymythismeremyth.Not onlydoes the ord "myth"opularlymean "a liewhich others elieve,"butthemultiplicityf storiesxplaining ho



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18 JED DEPPMAN

we are and where we come from have lost theirmythic power totransform,hierarchize, and distribute being. Inshort, stories of "selfdefinition" are everywhere and yet they are everywhere unconvincing.Moreover, their supposed opposite, the debunking of myths, isalso an empty activity: inThe Nazi Myth, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe

display impatience with the kind of self-congratulatory "unmasking"thathas become so fashionable inthewake of Barthes' Mythologies.Infact, intheirview the "undoing" (ddmontage) of "mythologies" inBarthes' manner,has been able to become, inour time, an integralpart oftheordinary culture transmitted by the same "media" thatsecrete these mythologies. Ingeneral, the denunciationof "myths," of "images," of "media," and of "what seems"from now on ispart of themythological system of themedia, of their images and their seeming.Which is to saythat the veritable myth, if here isone, the one towhichthere isadhesion and identification, holds itself ack inamore subtle retreat, fromwhere itdirects, perhaps, thewhole scene (ifnecessary, as themyth of the denunciation ofmyths.10

Mythic language and itsDoppelganger, myth-unmasked-as-truthrevealed, have both become powerless, uncreative, and repetitivelanguages. The myths and countermyths of literatureand the self aretoday unbelievable. They may be enough tomotivate revolutionaries, identity-politicians, or fund-giving university bureaucrats, butphilosophically they are unsatisfying.With great patience one couldshow that the modern critical attempt to force the literature/worldrelationship to parallel themyth/world relationship (as those relations have been constructed by theorists) has resulted infailure. Theinevitable failure will continue not only for the reason MauriceBlanchot has given-literature has never worked very hard or verywell at politics,norhas it roducedmuch effectivection inthe

world-but also for the reason that Bataille has given: now is thetime f the bsence ofmyth. This sthe aradoxicalmeaningofthe"the realmyth"mentioned inthepassage quoted from heNazi



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Myth.) Bataille's analysis ofmodernity as the epoch of "the absenceofmyth" has been articulated innumerous and perhaps irreconcilable ways: as the interruption fmyth (Nancy), the advent of nihilism(Nietzsche), the 'Enframing' of representation in the age of technology (Heidegger), the failure ofmaster narratives (Lyotard), the loss oftranscendental signifiers (Derrida), the unreliability of the linguisticartifact (de Man). Yet no matter how it is put, itannounces itselfwhenever we use the negative power of the word myth, when wedismiss a truth laim or a storyon the grounds that it isa myth.

Following Bataille, Nancy asks us to accept that today we canhaveno faith n hemythic roject fworking obuilda communityof shared essence, a projected and realized concept of being-together, a spirit-work,a fusion of individuals, a fusion inwhich, amongother things,death isfulfillment, sublation, salvation, transcendence,immanence-anything but unmasterable excess and unworking negativity. "By now," he writes,... we have nothing more than the bitter consciousnessof the increasing remoteness of such a community, be itthe people, the nation, or the society of producers....Millions of deaths, of course, are justified by the revoltofthose who die: they are justified as a rejoinder to the intolerable, as insurrections against social, political,technical, military, religious oppression. But these deathsare not sublated: no dialectic, no salvation leads these

deaths to any other immanence than that of. .. death.(IC, 13)ForNancy, death, literature nd community must be thought together;and in the time of interruptedmyth, this task of integrative thoughtentails rethinking what has been known to philosophers sinceDescartes as "the subject." This has always been an importantproblern forNancy. When he was given the chance in 1988 toguest editan issueof thephilosophical journal,Topoi,he asked seventeenFrench hilosophers he uestion,"WhO omesafter he ubject?""'Explaining iseditorial rocedure, e flashednger t thinkershotreated thisgrand postmodern problem as a mere "scholastic quar



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20 JED DEPPMANrel": "With one exception Idid not send my question ('Who comesafter the subject?') to thosewho would findno validity in it, o thoseforwhom it ison the contrary more important to denounce itspresuppositions and to return, as though nothing had happened, to astyle of thinking thatwe might simply call humanist" (3). (The "oneexception" ispresumably Vincent Descombes, whose contributionto the volume infact treats the "problem of the subject" as preciselya scholastic quarrel. Profoundly uninterested inHeideggerian ontological destruction, Descombes elucidates the quarrel through a

Wittgensteinian interpretationof Kant.)Unsurprisingly, then, Nancy often begins his essays with the

Heideggerian gesture of rejecting the Cartesian-Kantian model ofthe subject as an active, synthesizing individual (the subject presentto itself in self-representation, the site of its wn certitude, and soforth).He goes on to demonstrate thatonce this self-destruction hastaken place, traditional forms of community and community-building become impossible. Two things are crucial to note. First, thisprocess of self-destruction takes place always anew, forwe are constantly reminded-by, ifnothing else, the sheer volume and varietyof options-of the failure ofmyths of the self. (More and more optimism or irony is required towrite books with such titles as A SimpleTheory of the Self.12) The second, more difficult point is that thesereminders are not simultaneous creations of new myths of the nonself, just as denying the equation of myth with literature is nottantamount to creating a "new myth."Today we cannot build or hope to build a model of communityon the foundation provided by a metaphysics of the subject, even ifthis iswhat somany theories of the postmodern subject tryto do byisolating and combining attributes of the selves inquestion: race,class, nationality, colonialism, gender, age, height, sexual orientation. No matter how complex or nuanced one's model of the subjectmay be, no matter how much it rotests against essentialism, or howmany factors it takes into account, it annot found any thinking ofcommunity.he humanistmyth hatne can builda communityycombining subjects, however complexly construed, has been interrupted,ndwe can no longer ope tobeginwith conceptsof the



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individual and "add up" to a "higherWe," or a communion of sharedessence. As Nancy argues, community is neither a lostessence ofhumanity to be produced again nor a new essence "yet to come"it is inno sense awork tobe produced. Our being-together isnothingbroken needing fixing, nothing lost needing finding, and thuswecannot set concepts out infront f us to organize it. e cannot better

approacha concept of community byworking on our selves or

by transformingour self-transforming selves intocommunity. Thesepoints can perhaps be rendered in visceral way: ifyou stop readingthis essay and ponder themany ways you are with other peoplesome of these, arguably, unmediated by language or thought-youwill perhaps agree thatyour being-with isnot and never will be anillustrationof a general concept of community or of the self. Ifyoudo not agree, perhaps it isbecause you represent yourself to yourselfas an individual. Yet as Nancy is fond of pointing out, "individual,"with its onnotations of indivisibilityand separation froma previouscollective, isontologically an inadequate term forwhat we are-asbad, infact, as "identity."Debates over myths, literature and community are largelycaused by, and founded on, our recurring attempts to understand therelationship of these forms to individuals or groups of individuals.Postmodern Nancy, for his part, having done away with individuals-as atoms released or broken away fromcommunity-proposesthat there are, or we are, singularities, thrown beings whose being isfinite and always already being-with. He writes:

[t]he singular being, which is not the individual, is thefinitebeing. What the thematic of individuation lacked,as itpassed froma certain Romanticism to Schopenhauerand to Nietzsche, was a consideration of singularity, towhich itnonetheless came quite close. Individuationdetaches closed off ntitiesfrom formless roundwhereas only communication, contagion, or communion onstitutehe eing f individuals.ut ingularityoesnot proceed from such a detaching of clear formsor figures. ingularity perhaps does not proceed from anything. It isnot awork resulting froman operation. (IC, 27)



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22 JED DEPPMAN

As this passage suggests, what we are-singular beings-is graspedmuch better by Heidegger when he names itDasein, or being-inthe-world, a primordial component ofwhich isbeing with others.But Nancy does not follow Heidegger all theway in redirectingHusserlian questions of thephenomenology of experience and epistemology to questions of ontology and existence. Nor, most of all,does he accept the heavy weight Heidegger gives in the existentialanalytic tobeing-towards-death. ForNancy our relation todeath isastructureof existence, though not thedefinitive one, and it isspecifically literaryin way thatHeidegger does not explicate. Community,being-with, all being as already being-with-these play a role indicated by but not integrated into the analytic ofDasein, a rolewhichmight be phrased as: the relation of death to each of us and to community is a relation of presentation. As Nancy comments, "Sharingcomes down to this:what the community reveals tome, inpresenting tome my birth and my death, ismy existence outside myself... .Community does not sublate the finitude itexposes. Community itself, in sum, is nothing but this exposition" (IC, 26). Just s it ismycommunity which shows me my birth, and shows me the death ofothers, so too does my community show me my death (see IC, 1415). Today this showing is notmythic but literary.

Why is this the case? ForNancy the presentation belonging toek-stasis, the revealing of the state of being-outside-oneself (inone'sown birth, one's own death, and the death of theother), isan activeofferingwhich initiates the formsof communicative and contagiousbeing which "are" community itself.Embedded in this formulationis the criticism thatHeidegger's existential analytic never fully integrated being-towards-death and being-with.While this isan ongoingand complex problem forNancy aswell-besides using an expository neo-Kantian analysis of sublime 'presentation withoutpresentation,' he also attempts to read Bataille's anthropologicalmaterialism into it-what is important here is that the difficulty ofthis integration occurs in literature and is literature.This isbecausean essential truth f being-with is literature's truth f representation,a truthfulhowing f two impossibilities:he 'impossibilityf anyand all knowing' which death's unworkability entails, and the 'im



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possibilityfbeingat all' (felts anguish) hat hethoughtfdeathcauses by exceeding knowledge. Nancy writes:Community iscalibrated on death as on that ofwhich itisprecisely impossible tomake awork (other than aworkof death, as soon as one tries tomake awork of it).Community occurs in rder to acknowledge this impossibility,or more exactly-for there isneither function nor finalityhere-the impossibility ofmaking awork out of death isinscribed and acknowledged as "community." Community is revealed inthe death of others.... Community isthe presentation to itsmembers of theirmortal truth.... Itis the presentation of the finitude and the irredeemableexcess thatmake up finitebeing: itsdeath, but also itsbirth, and only the community can present me my birth,and alongwith it he impossibilityfmy reliving t, swell as the impossibilityofmy crossing over intomy death.(IC, 15)

In thispassage Nancy decisively modulates theHeideggerian problematic of Dasein's being-towards-death-its "possibility of animpossibility"-and its ttendant rhetoric of authenticity, and he instead presents death as one privileged site of community'spresentation to itself f unpresentability (notof 'the unpresentable').Again, since theway community "shows" impossibilities is largelyby imagining, or fictioning, limitexperiences and the passage intoimpossibility and non-knowledge, literaturebetter thanmyth or philosophy "shows" that there is a sharing (partage) of limitswhichcharacterizes our being-with. Itmust be stressed that this sharing isnot a communion or a joining of essence; it sa sharing of the tactile,emotional, intellectual and other limitsbetween us. Again, only literature speaks this being-with. Myth does not do so, formyth sayswhat is, nd inso doing it peaks thepresenceof all that sandhierarchicallyistributeseing; itrganizes ndexemplifieshatnessandwhoness, transcendinghe onnections nd the limits etweenand among singular, finitebeings: "you" and "me" and others. Yetthe limits between us cannot be transcended, reified,or spoken for.



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We can imagine them, signal them, feel them, ignore them, and soforth,butwe cannot transcend them.Occasionally Nancy incorporates the physical aspects of liter

ary presentation into his thinking. One of his writings, "Corpus"(1990), examines the bodily aspects of being-with and ends with alist f forty-onewords. Offering neither a mystical nor a philosophical transcendence of the body, he interruptingly "shows" that thephysical stratumof literarypresentation defies discursive thought:The parts of the corpus do not combine intoawhole,are notmeans to it r ends of it.Each part can suddenlytake over thewhole, can spread out over it, anbecome it, whole-that never takes place. There isnowhole, no totalityof the body-but its bsolute separation and sharing out [partagel. There isno such thing asthe body. There isno body.

Instead, there are patient and fervent recitations ofnumerous corpuses. Ribs, skulls, pelvises, irritations,shells, diamonds, drops, foams, mosses, excavations,fingernailmoons, minerals, acids, feathers, thoughts,claws, slates, pollens, sweat, shoulders, domes, suns,anuses, eyelashes, dribbles, liqueurs, slits, blocks,slicing, squeezing, removing, bellowing, smashing,burrowing, spoiling, piling up, sliding, exhaling,leaving, flowing-3

This passage is less remarkable for its literary chievement than foritsphilosophical commitment to the significance of style. Inthe lastphrase several body-parts (nouns) gradually give way to activities(verbs), but there are no linksof grammar, thought, or logic. Nancyoffersus synesthetic, paratactic, active and resolutely finitebeing. Inthe final ickinsoniandash-that unrepresenting,nfinishedypographical inscriptionof "with" and "without"-being-with as partagecan be felt,seen, moved, even sensed inevery sense of sense, but itdoes not give way (and this iswhat literature re-marks) to a transcendence or a shared essence.



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One can always say to someone else: we share a commonlimit f experience, but I an experience neither the experience youhave of yourself nor the experience you have of our shared limit.Moreover one can say: a fusion of our experience is impossible.These simple truths nd others like them are surface indications thatthe experiential "limits" between beings are simultaneously too immediate and too distant to be intelligible either to a theory of "theself"or of "selves." Following Bataille, Nancy senses perhaps, thoughhe does not thematize it, n even more difficultproblem: we simplydo not understand our own "inner experience" much less its linktocorporeality. From the heavily written traditions of mysticism andthe sublime to the less-analyzed problematic ofmoods, the problemof innerexperience has in ll itsformsa disruptive potential forthinkingabout community. If, s Heidegger suggests,moods are ontically"available" to and inevitably part of us, they are also, ontologicallyspeaking, perpetually obscure. Whether or not one accepts the clarifyingproject of fundamental ontology, one can broadly agree withHeidegger that little dvance has been made since Aristotle inunderstanding either the "communal" or the "singular" onset ofmoods.14Perhaps with such considerations inmind, Nancy consistently associates the activity along the limit etween beings with the active anddistracted to-and-fro literature: "'literature' inscribes the sharing: thelimitmarks the advent of singularity, and its ithdrawal" (IC, 78). Sowhile your experience of yourself isdenied tome inprinciple, therunning frontier f contact between us, the clinamen inNancy's lexicon, the leaning-toward-each-other thateach of us has and which isgoverned to a certain extent by chance, this shared limit,the "with"inbeing-with (which can never be grasped by concepts or reproduced symbolically), isforNancy scriptuary and specifically literary.At bottom, then, Nancy is seeking to reinterpretMitsein andother structures of Dasein and to integrate them with Bataille's formulation f themoderncommunitys the ommunityfthe bsenceofmyth,a community hose truthfulxpressionNancy finds nDerridean 6criture. How, one might ask, does one move back andforthromeideggerian itseintothis dea f literature?etusplainlystate the theses to be connected: 1)Human being is always being



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with, and Dasein (or the finite singular being) comes primordially toan awareness ofmortality through the deaths of others. 2) Literatureisthe only truthfulexpression of a community not held together (anylonger)ymyth.Nancy, through a reading of Bataille's evolving thought sincethe 1930s, learns to analyze the very private experience of the

absencing ofmyth: thewithdrawal ofmyth and itspower both as theexperience of the overturning of a nostalgia for a lost communityand as the overturning of a faith in the possibility of transcendenceor fusion. Nancy finds inBataille the critical point thatmodernity'sexperience of these "overturnings" has consequences on the level ofinnerexperience, an experience, Nancy writes, "whose content, truth,or ultimate lesson is articulated thus: 'Sovereignty is NOTHING.'Which is to say that sovereignty is the sovereign exposure to.an excess (to a transcendence) that does not present itself nd does not letitself e

appropriated (or simulated),thatdoes not even give itselfbut rather towhich being is bandoned" (IC, 18).We can start to seehow this description of Bataille's thought,which turns sovereigntyinto an experience of the sublime (being's exposure to an offered

presence whose process of presencing never gives full presence15)can allow for the passage inNancy's own work frommyth to literature.Myth appears here as the possibility of transcendence andliteratureas the inscription of the experience of an exposure to theoffered but absent possibility of transcendence. However, we canalso see that inorder to register thisparticular exposure,the experience that singular beings have of community during the absence of

myth, Nancy needs an understanding of literaturewhich will allowfor the specificity, both epochal and personal, of the reader's experience.

This necessity may be what causes Nancy to claim that theontological structure of singular beings is literary:"A singular being('you' or 'me') has the precise structure and nature of a being ofwriting, of a 'literary'being: itresides only in the communicationwhich does not commune-of itsadvance and its retreat. Itoffersitself,tholds itselfn uspense"(IC, 8).One mightsay that eingwith, or community, can never be characterized by a language ofpresence and that literature isprecisely not a language of presence



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but of offered, proposed presence. Myth appears then as the possibility of transcendence and literature as the inscription of moderncommunal experience: the experience of being exposed to the offered possibility of transcendence.Itnow appears thatNancy's understanding of literature reliesupon phenomenology to equate the being of community with specifically literary inscription. His metaphors for the interruption ofmyth, forexample, relyprimarily upon phenomenological thought.He uses figuresof voice, sight and consciousness to 'show' how, inthe time of the absence ofmyth, myths are stillpresent and broughtintopresence ina specific way. For just as the "death ofGod" nevermeant toNietzsche that the churches were empty, the phrase "absence ofmyth" does not designate any lack ofmythic speech. Todayeverything pertaining tomythic speech-its situations, itsheroism,itsepic stage, itstones-has not only not disappeared but has flourished; for the interruptionofmyth is not a 'silencing' but a 'changeinvoice.' Nancy's metaphors for this change constitute "literature"

materially inhis work and found his exposition of literarycommunism: "in the interruption fmyth isheard the voice of the interruptedcommunity, thevoice of the incomplete, exposed community speaking as myth without being inany respect mythic speech" (IC, 62).We hear voices on all sides which seem "to play back the declarations ofmyth, for inthe interruptionthere isnothing new tobe heard,there isno new myth breaking through; it is the old storyone seemsto hear" (IC, 62). This seeming-hearing, which ison the order of anepoch, ison one occasion concentrated by Nancy into two muchmore immediate, phenomenal figures:music and a voice breakingoffor interrupted:

[lIn some way the interrupted voice or music imprintsthe schema of itsretreat in themurmur or the rustling towhich the interruption gives rise. . . .The interruptionhas a voice, and its chema imprintstselfntherustlingof the ommunityxposed to its wn dispersion. henmyth topsplaying, hecommunityhatresistsompletion and fusion, the community that propagates andexposes itself,makes itselfheard ina certain way. It oes



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not speak, of course, nor does itmake music.... But theinterruption itselfhas a singular voice, a voice or a retiringmusic that is taken up, held, and at the same timeexposed in n echo that isnot a repetition.... Thus thereisa silence which isnot total; there isa hearing (present)and a remembering, a confusion, an echo which doesnot 'repeat that ofwhich it is the reverberation.' . . . [I]tavows without avowing, stateswithout declaring, moreprecisely itpresents, without enunciating, themythlesstruthof endless being-in-common. (IC, 62)

If ver we were tempted to see the importantdescriptive gesture inNancy's work as a "new myth," a hypocritical designation of a social totality, r a "higherWe" and another storyof society as a greatersubject endowed with structures of consciousness, then thewrittenness and themetaphoricity of this self-reflexive passage suggest rather that his analysis isanother (non)example of interruptivepresence. Nancy is neither demythologizing nor remythologizing,for in his termswe have "no real relation" tomyth anymore. Thepoint is that even in themidst of so much mythic speech, community stillmakes itselfheard somehow: it"does not speak, of course,nor does itmake music .. . it isan echo which isnot a repetition."The unique speech of an epochality whose truthfulself-signifyingspeech ismythless is literature: "A name has been given to thisvoiceof interruption: literature (orwriting, if e adopt the acceptation ofthisword that coincides with literature)" (IC, 63).What may seem hardest to accept in this 'account' is its reliance on literatureas the kind of being which both continues mythicpresentation and interrupts it.Yet Nancy's argument can be understood as an extension of a familiar phenomenological view ofliterature.One of Derrida's descriptions of literarity isperhaps theclearest and most relevant, since itbrings literature and communitytogetherhroughhenomenology:

Moreover, there is no textwhich is literary in itself.Literarity isnot a natural essence, an intrinsicproperty ofthe text. It is the correlative of an intentional relation to



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the text,an intentional relation which integrates in itself,as a component or an intentional layer, themore or lessimplicit consciousness of rules which are conventionalor institutional-social, inany case. Of course, this doesnot mean that literarity ismerely projective or subjective-in the sense of the empirical subjectivity or caprice

of each reader. The literarycharacter of the text is inscribed on the side of the intentional object, in itsnoematic structure, one could say, and not only on thesubjective side of the noetic act. There are "in" the textfeatures which call for the literary reading and recall theconvention, institution,or history of literature. This noematic structure is included (as "nonreal," inHusserl'sterms) in subjectivity, but a subjectivity which is nonempirical and linked to an intersubjective andtranscendental community. Ibelieve thisphenomenological-type language to be necessary, even if t a certainpoint itmust yield towhat, in the situation ofwriting orreading, and inparticular literary riting or reading, putsphenomenology incrisis.... There is therefore a literaryfunctioning and a literary intentionality, an experiencerather than an essence of literature.16

Derrida moves briskly to abolish the idea of literary ssence and toplace literarity nstead intothe complex intentional structureof reading. Instead of stressing the aesthetics of texts A la Bloom, or thesociopolitical situatedness of readers and writers A laBaker, Derrida,in gesture reminiscent ofCaillois' treatmentofmyth, locates literarityinboth the subjective and the objective poles of intentionality. Literature thereby becomes intelligible both as a singular experienceand as a noematic structurebelonging to a transcendental community.What isof particular interest isthatDerrida's analysis of literarityrelies on the Husserlian concept of a transcendental, intersubjectivecommunity hich hisphilosophicalwork, following eidegger's,has generally thrown into doubt. Nancy's "literature," as the proposed, near-future, imminent-yet-deferred arrival of presence has,



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as we've seen, the somewhat modified character of a Heideggerianexistential structure (such as angst).What Derrida's discussion showsis that for literature to perform this existential role itmust be rootedinitially inHusserlian phenomenology of consciousness.Where the theoretical linkbetween literature and a given (experience of) community ismade through a phenomenology ofwithdrawal, the conclusion can be drawn that:

in the end, what corresponds in thework towriting aswell as to community is that by means ofwhich such atracing exemplifies ... the limit, the suspense, and theinterruptionof its wn exemplarity.What thework givesus to understand (to read) is thewithdrawal of itssingularity, nd what itcommunicates is the following: thatsingular beings are never founding, originary figures forone another, never places or powers of remainderlessidentification. (IC, 79)

While myth relies on exemplarity and identification, literature exemplifies the failure of examples. Nancy's problem isthat ifne givesexamples of this dynamic in theway that one gives examples ofliteraryeffect (for instance, "this is the incomplete hero," or "herewe see myth being interrupted by itsown ecriture"), then he willconfirm phenomenology without inscribing its limit nd fall prey tothe mindless (de)mythifying gestures he is at such pains to reject.Perhaps his keen sense of this trap even explains his failure to provide detailed readings of the literarytexts he mentions.However thismay be, it is noteworthy that Nancy followsDerrida very closely inusing a phenomenological language to giveinitial access to a literary xperience which cannot be fullygraspedby that language. It isas ifphenomenology were forboth thinkersthe best language-perhaps because of itsvery insufficiency so patientlydocumented by Derrida-in which to registerthe incompleteness, withdrawal, or interruptionof transcendence thatoccurs inallreading. Yet, while Derrida expressly avoids historical patterns andepochs, affirmingthat "one must cross typologywith history,"17 ancy



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demonstrates more fidelitytoHeidegger and Bataille by looking andlistening intentlyforthemetaphysical underpinnings of his community and his age. That he should turn to literature as the properlyepochal expression of our mythless community signals both thatourbeing-with isnow coming to presence "after the subject," and thatour language forbeing-with has become more material and interruptive than our theories and our myths had ever shown.

1 Nancy Fraser, "The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction orDeconstructinghe olitical?" ew GermanCritique 3 (Fall 1984): 127-54; reprinted inUnruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender inContemporary SocialTheory,Minneapolis:innesotaUniversityress, 989), 9-92.David Ingram,"TheRetreatf the oliticalin heModernAge: Jean-LucancyonTotalitarianismndCommunity"esearch nPhenomenologyVoi.VIII 1988): 3-124. Dennis A. Foster, "Pleasure and Community inCultural Criticism" American LiteraryHistory, vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 371-82. Todd May, Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, L?vinas, and Deleuze (University Park, Pa.: PennsylvaniaState University Press, 1997).2 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis:Minnesota University Press, 1991), xi. Hereafter cited as /C.All quotations fromthis volume have been taken from Peter Connor's translations of the first threeessays: "The Inoperative Community," 1-42; "Myth Interrupted," 43-70; "LiteraryCommunism," 71-81. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French textsare my own.3 Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Lemythe nazi (Marseille: Editionsde l'aube, 1991), 15.4 See Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 1937-39, trans. BetsyWing(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988).5 Roger aillois,LeMytheet l'hommeParis: allimard,1938),17.Hereafteritedas .6 Michael Holquist,"ANew Tower fBabel: Recent rendsLinkingomparativeLiterature Departments, Foreign Language Departments, and Area Studies Programs," Profession (New York: Publications of theModern Language Association,1997),111.7 William Cain, F.O. Matthiessen and the Politics ofCriticism (Madison: UniversityofWisconsin Press, 1988), 207.8 Ibid., 211.

9 Houston A. Baker, Jr., fro-American Poetics: Revisions ofHarlem and the BlackAesthetic (Madison: The University ofWisconsin Press, 1988), 6.10 Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, Le mythe nazi, 20-21.



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11 See Eduardo Cadava/Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes AftertheSubject? NewYork:Routledge, 991).12 DavidMann,A SimpleTheoryf the elf NewYork:Norton,1994).13 Jean-Luc Nancy, "Corpus," in The Birth to Presence, trans. Claudette Sartiliot(Stanford:tanfordUniversityress,1993),207.14 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. JohnMacquarrie and Edward Robinson(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 138ff.15 See Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. GeoffreyBenningtonndRachelBowlby Stanford:tanfordUniversityress,1991).Nancypursues the same neo-Kantian line of thought inhis "L'offrande sublime," inDuSublime, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Belin, 1988), 37-75.16 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, trans.Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby(NewYork:Routledge, 992), 4-45.17 Ibid., 45.

nancy, myth, literature

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