Journal of Visual Culture

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From Appearance to Exposure

Philip Armstrong Journal of Visual Culture 2010 9: 11 DOI: 10.1177/1470412909354253 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/9/1/11
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journal of visual culture
From Appearance to Exposure Philip Armstrong
Abstract
Moving between references to appearance, co-appearance and exposure in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, this article turns on the ways in which Nancy rethinks a number of key phenomenological concepts and so touches on the limits of the phenomenological tradition. Foregrounding Nancys frequent appeal to questions of evidence, and situating the term in light of Husserls writings as well as those writing in his wake, the article offers a reading of Nancys photo-essay Georges and of his book on Abbas Kiarostami, The Evidence of Film.
Keywords
cinema Edmund Husserl evidence exposure Jean-Luc Nancy phenomenology photography
A common condition exposes itself to us, stripped bare, and exposes us to itself. (Jean-Luc Nancy) At once discrete and discrepant in its movement, the title is traversed by a double reading. At rst glance, it registers a transition or displacement from appearance to exposure in which the initial emphasis on appearance withdraws or effaces itself in order that an emphasis on exposure now comes into conceptual focus. The schema underlying this sense of displacement is more linear than recursive, more an emphasis on the theme and substance of what appears or exposes itself, and so also subject to any number of dialectical or speculative turns of argument in which exposure comes to occupy or sublate (as dialectical relve) the place formerly assigned to appearance. On the other hand, this same transition or
journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com] SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) Copyright The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav Vol 9(1): 1127 DOI 10.1177/1470412909354253
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journal of visual culture 9(1)
displacement can be read as touching and traversing the very limits of what comes into appearance as it comes into appearance, and so opens a transitivity that marks all appearance less in terms of its self-presence than in terms of its own exteriority to itself, its coming into presence. The positing of what comes into appearance is now remarked not by its substance or self-identity but in and as its exposition and exposure, or in and as a sense of exposure. What I want to do from the outset is underscore both possible readings of the title, moving within and between a sense of displacement that marks the rst reading and a displacement of sense a displacement in sense that traverses the second. Before turning more directly to Nancys writings, the emphasis on appearance demands some initial clarication, for it emerges in light of a number of related contexts that must be taken into account if we are to begin to measure the force and stakes of this sense of displacement and displacement in sense punctuating Nancys writings. First, appearance is understood less in more recognizably Platonic terms or in terms of an ideological appearance masquerading a hidden truth or underlying reason than in the wake of Nietzsches attempt to overturn Platonism, at least insofar as this twisting away from Platonism also reopens a fundamental rethinking of established philosophical distinctions between the sensible and intelligible, sense impressions and ideas, phenomena and noumena, appearances and essences, and so on. It is in the wake of Nietzsches afrmation of life based on semblance and the existence of the world justied as an aesthetic phenomenon or rather, it is in the wake of Heideggers reading of Nietzsche that we also encounter again the simultaneous reopening and repetition of a philosophical trajectory inaugurated by Kants distinction between a presentation of the subject a question, then, of Darstellung and its representation or Vorstellung. If we then remark that this same trajectory also passes through Hegel, and the Hegel for whom the essence of an object lies in its appearance, then we begin to recognize the primary reference points that inform the singularity of Nancys rearticulation of this trajectory in terms of sense.1 The schematic outline of these references also serves to recontextualize their decisive conceptual reorientation in Husserls phenomenology, foregrounding an insistence on our experience of things themselves as they appear to us in the world. No doubt the concept of appearance that comes into focus here resists all fully identiable as well as historical articulation, and so works at the limits of its own conceptual (in Husserls case, scientic or apodictic) promise. Perhaps the most useful and succinct afrmation here would be to insist on what ties essences to existence, experience and judgement, so that questions of appearance cannot be detached from the ways in which our shared experience and existence in the world comes to matter to us, and then to insist that Nancy renews this afrmation by rethinking, beyond Husserls gestures toward intersubjectivity, the grammatical articulation of this us in terms of a compearance [comparution] or appearing-with (Nancy, 1992), further rearticulated in Of Being Singular Plural in terms of the exposure of singular pluralities and plural singularities (Nancy, 2000).
Philip Armstrong From Appearance to Exposure
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Second, the emphasis on appearance in the title should be understood in light of a non-dialectical relation to questions of materiality and thus understood beyond or prior to an idealist/materialist divide. What comes into appearance emerges less as the management and ordering of signications than in and as the worlds facticity, what Husserl once termed a universal ontology of the concrete, and thus a refusal of any disengagement or withdrawal from the world (a phenomenology, as Lvinas (1998) states, to recover the lost world of our concrete life, p. 36). Here we would want to insist on a material if not fully materialist strand within the French reception of phenomenology (Sartre to TranDuc-Thao, Wahl to Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze to Henry), a strand that also marks its entanglement with Marxist traditions, and a strand that Nancys writings at once address and simultaneously rethink (something that Derridas Le Toucher (Derrida, 2005) also makes explicit in its emphases and larger argument). Third, in terms that we are apt to describe as more cultural than philosophical, the reference to appearance in the title draws us to marked features of our purported modernity, and thus an emphasis on surfaces, simulacra and screens, on skin, membranes and esh, on faces, interfaces and gestures, topoi where surface appearances are not ideologically or hierarchically opposed to deep ideas and timeless truths and values but register our more affective or corporeal relations, both with others whose lives we share as well as the world we inhabit. In Nancys terms, the question of appearance delineated here, something that closely approximates while reguring the esh of the world, is refocused as a question of touch and contact. Finally, questions of appearance have emerged in much recent political theory. In the writings of Deleuze and Foucault, Badiou and Rancire, Agamben and Hardt and Negri (to name only some of the most well-known), references to appearance inform a more pervasive questioning of the presuppositions informing established concepts and institutions of political representation. This is notably the case for those forms of representation that secure the subject in the pure immanence of its auto-affection and self-presence, in the sense of a subject who re-presents by placing the object before himself and for himself and then derives a politics or political position from this very presupposition. Working and unworking the limits of representation rather than its critique, resisting any impulse toward a totalizing accountability (including those forms of representation complicit with the integrated spectacle of the spectaculardemocratic-state as well as the will-to-consensus of liberal and representative governments), and so opening toward questions of alterity rather than identity, appearance becomes coextensive with the emergence of a constituently plural and antagonistic force in short, a rethinking of the political informed less by concepts of identity and representation than by singularities and multiplicities understood now as a question precisely of appearance. I want to take up this emphasis on appearance at a decisive point Arendts The Human Condition (1958).2 For it is in Arendts text that the space of appearance becomes a critical dimension in which to think the effaced place of speech and action in our modernity. As Arendt insists, action and speech constitute the modes in which human beings appear to one another, where
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I appear to others as others appear to me, where people exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance. In light of this afrmation of appearance, the polis to which Arendt famously appeals in The Human Condition is not the city-state in its physical location, for the space of appearance exists prior to all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, prior to the various forms in which the public realm can be organized (p. 199). Indeed, the true space of the polis is an absolutely contingent and precarious space between people; it lies between people living together. The polis is thus constituted through a permanent displacement of itself, not in the sense of a displacement in which individuals move from one place to another, nor simply hold their ground and inhabit a place, but a displacement that marks an interval, a ssure, or an interruption, a scansion in-between that is neither strictly here nor there. More pointedly, Arendt claims that this space does not always exist, few people live in it, and no one can live in it all the time (in this sense, politics is rare) the space of appearance does not survive the actuality of the moment which brought it into being. The difculty in which to characterize the topological and mimetic instability of the polis continually punctuates Arendts argument, as when she has to resort to the image of a sance. Rethinking what constitutes the public realm as a common world, Arendt argues that the difculty in accounting for mass society is not simply the number of people or their multiple identities and differences but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them, going on to suggest that the weirdness of the situation resembles a spiritualistic sance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible. (p. 53) Arendts turn to the image of a sance opens the paradox of how to think appearance in terms of this relation-between, or in terms of a contact (neither fully material nor immaterial, tangible or intangible) marked by a simultaneous attachment and detachment, a gathering and separation or proximity and distance a simultaneous relation and non-relation that nowhere characterizes Arendts presumed nostalgia for the Greek polis and the political attachments it presupposes but rather opens onto and simultaneously congures the singular spacing the relation-between that is our shared or common space. Jacques Rancires Disagreement (Rancire,1999) offers us one of the most resonant attempts to rethink the terms of Arendts argument, for it is in Disagreement that afrmations of appearance become a decisive aspect of Rancires larger argument concerning our contemporary forms of postdemocracy and their fundamentally nihilistic if utopian tendency toward consensus. As Rancire argues: The principle of postdemocracy is to make the troubled and troubling appearance of the people and its always false count disappear behind procedures exhaustively presenting the people and its parts and bringing
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the count of those parts in line with the image of the whole. The utopia of postdemocracy is that of an uninterrupted count that presents the total of public opinion as identical to the body of the people. What in actual fact is this identication of democratic opinion with the system of polls and simulations? It is the absolute removal of the sphere of appearance of the people. In it the community is continually presented to itself. In it the people are never again uneven, uncountable, or unpresentable. They are always both totally present and totally absent at once. They are entirely caught in the structure of the visible where everything is on show and where there is thus no longer any place for appearance. (p. 103) More pointedly, if the appearance of the people is coextensive with Rancires afrmation of a part of those who have no part, those oating subjects that deregulate all representation of places and portions (p. 100) in short, the people as supplement that disconnects the population from itself then the people articulating and articulated by this sphere of appearance is a people of a singular kind, one not denable in terms of ethnic properties or a sociologically determinable, identiable, or representable part of a population or community. Responding to what Guy Debord (1995 [1967]) once described as police methods to transform perception (p. 74), and thus opposing the ways in which the police order distributes and coordinates the distribution of the sensible into accountable, identiable and representable parts, appearance in this sense ssures any logic that prescribes in advance what counts as visible and invisible, sayable and unsayable, heard or unheard. Offered as an antagonistic confrontation with the regimes of perception and partitioning of the sensible that dene different modes indeed, the very essence of policing, and thus commensurate with what Rancire articulates in terms of acts of political subjectication, appearance is not an illusion that is opposed to the real or a simulacrum that subsumes the real; it is the introduction of a visible into the eld of experience, which then modies the regime of the visible (p. 99). In short, appearance is not opposed to reality; it splits reality and recongures it as double, and it is precisely through this doubling of the visible into the eld of experience and this clash in partitions of the sensible in short, it is through this very partage (distribution, partitioning, or sharing out) of the sensible that the force of a disagreement, dissension (msentente) or dispute (litige) emerges. If Rancires text works here to recongure the writings of both Claude Lefort and Alain Badiou, it also rewrites Arendts principal argument in The Human Condition (1958) concerning the articulation of a common world. For if politics for Rancire is not the consensual community of interests that combine, and a form of consensus that obliterates politics even as it conditions the upsurge of myriad forms of identity politics, then nor is politics dened in terms of the community of some kind of being-between [inter-tre], in the sense of an interesse that would impose its originarity on it, the originarity of a being-incommon based on the esse (being) of the inter (between) or the inter proper to the esse (p. 137). Rather, Rancire proposes to think the inter of a political interesse in terms of an interruption or interval that is radically inappropriate and inappropriable:
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The political community is a community of interruptions, fractures, irregular and local, through which egalitarian logic comes and divides the police community from itself. It is a community of worlds in community that are intervals of subjectication: intervals constructed between identities, between spaces and places. Political being-together is a beingbetween: between identities, between worlds. (p. 137) In other words, behind the more antagonistic force of Rancires afrmation of disagreement and dispute, and beyond his related claim that Arendt ultimately fails to rupture the logic of the political arche, the different topological descriptions both Arendt and Rancire turn to throughout their respective texts are inscribed by the attempt to think this political being-together in terms of an interval, a simultaneous relation and separation a hyphenation or, more literally, a trait dunion that, as in the structuring of relations informing Arendts image of the sance, inaugurates the permanently interrupted or suspended grammar of the in-between. Or, as Rancire (2001) phrases this obscure topology and the reguring of space it necessarily implies, what remains at stake in the distribution or partitioning of the sensible and the related afrmation of the space of appearance is the construction of a paradoxical world that relates two separate worlds, and it is for precisely this reason that politics, as for Arendt, has no a priori or proper place. In short, if political difference for Rancire is always on the edge or shore of its own disappearance [au bord de sa disparition] the people close to being engulfed in the population or in terms of race, the proletariat close to being confused with the workers defending their interests, the space of the peoples public demonstration confused with the merchants agora then politics (as Arendts turn to the image of a sance acknowledges) is structured around a permanent, supplemental, and precarious play of appearances and disappearances, contact and separation, relation and non-relation a politics, we might say, of appearing disappearing, of appearing while disappearing, of appearance as disappearance, in disappearance itself. Nancy has acknowledged the importance of Arendts writings on several occasions, whether in his collaborative work with Lacoue-Labarthe on the retrait or retreat of the political or in the afrmation of plurality in the opening lines of his essay Of Being Singular Plural (Nancy, 2000). More pertinent for the following argument, however, Nancys Of Being Singular Plural also acknowledges the critical importance of Rancires Disagreement. Indeed, if the passage cited from Disagreement on the inter of a political interesse footnotes Nancys own earlier text on compearance as an important reference for thinking this question of political being-together as being-between, then sections of Nancys Of Being Singular Plural are framed, in turn, as a response to Rancires text.3 No doubt, a long and intricate reading is called for here, a reading that would necessarily turn on the ways in which Rancire appears to take up Nancys La partage des voix (Nancy, 1982) in order to rethink the very partage (distribution, partitioning, partaking, or sharing out) of the sensible, as well as Nancys own related afrmation, in and as the unworking or dsoeuvrement of the community, of the common or in-common the common as that which (as Blanchot acknowledges of communism) excludes (and is itself excluded from) any already constituted
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community (cited in Nancy, 1992: 377). At the risk of reducing the intricacy of such a reading, I want to argue that it is not only questions of appearance and exposure that remain central to this exchange but their rearticulation in terms of their spatial or topological implications. We might begin to characterize Nancys argument in Of Being Singular Plural by suggesting that he rethinks Arendt and Rancires respective texts by rethinking the len de lentre or being-between that punctuates all being-together in two ways. First, addressing Heideggers problematic and marginalized discussion of being-with (Mitsein, Mitdasein) in Being and Time, Husserls equally problematic assumptions concerning intersubjectivity, and Lvinas and Blanchots respective afrmations of the relation without relation, Nancy delimits being-together more rigorously in terms of the nitude of existence, at least insofar as all existence must be thought in terms of its own exteriority to itself (as ek-istence), and thus partag or partitioned and shared out. Reworking the concept of community through which his writings are perhaps most well known, Nancy thus thinks the exteriority of all existence in terms of our shared out and (in)nite exposure being-in-relation as being-exposed. Secondly, and indissociably, Nancys text may be read as acknowledging more fully the phenomenological provenance subtending Arendt and Rancires respective references to appearance, a phenomenological tradition that appears to inform their arguments (what Rancire denes as the nemen that founds any communal nomos) but a tradition which remains more or less presupposed than engaged. Or rather and here we should acknowledge Ian Jamess astute comment in The Fragmentary Demand (2006) that Nancys decisive break from phenomenology ... occurs, perhaps, at a moment of greatest proximity or closeness to the phenomenological account (p. 96) Nancys afrmation of exposure in his writings becomes most resonant when dealing with descriptions of phenomenological appearance. In a footnote in The Sense of the World, appending the section of the text in which he engages the question and limits of phenomenology quite directly, Nancy (1997) argues that we should think sense without origin and without end, or without subject, and thus afrm the coming [venue] of sense and to sense (p. 176). This coming, he cautions, is not reducible to or synonymous with the surprise of the event or a call (at least as outlined in the writings of Jean-Luc Marion). Nor is this coming of sense and to sense to be congured or represented as a beyond-phenomenality (or a phenomenality of the beyond) and thus motivated either by a form of transcendence or by the mode of a pure exposed or displayed [tale] immanence. For Nancy asserts that the world invites us to think no longer on the level of the phenomenon, however it may be understood (as surging forth, appearing, becoming visible, brilliance, occurrence, event), but on the level ... of the dis-position (spacing, touching, contact, crossing) (p. 176), terms, of course, which Nancys writings turn toward and through with some frequency. Rearticulating this disposition in terms of its phenomenological implications, Nancy further argues in Of Being Singular Plural (2000): As a concept of being-together [tre-ensemble], co-appearance consists in its appearing, that is, in its appearance to itself and to one another, all at once.
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There is no appearing to oneself except as appearing to one another. If this were put in classical terms, terms that presuppose a sphere of the proper and isolated individuality as the starting point, then it would be rendered in the following way: one appears to oneself insofar as one is already an other for oneself. But it is immediately clear that one could not even begin to be an other for oneself if one had not already started from alterity with or of the with others in general. Others in general are neither other mes (since there is no me and you except on the basis of alterity in general), nor the non-me (for the same reason). Others in general are neither the Same nor the Other. They are one-another, or of-one-another, a primordial plurality that co-appears.Therefore,appearing, and appearing to oneself as well as to one another, is not on the order of appearance, manifestation, phenomena, revealing, or some other concept of becoming-visible. This is because of what that order inevitably entails regarding the relation of appearance to this origin as either an expression or an illusion, as resemblance or semblance. So co-appearing is not appearing; it is not a question of coming out from a being-in-itself in order to approach others, nor is it a question of coming into the world. It is to be in the simultaneity of being-with, where there is no in itself that is not already immediately with. But immediately with does not refer to an immediacy in the sense of an absence of exteriority. On the contrary, it is the instantaneous exteriority of space-time (the instant itself as exteriority: the simultaneous). (pp. 678)4 Nancys argument appears in part to recapitulate the distinction that frames our initial proposal and animates the assumed passage from questions of appearance to afrmations of co-appearance, disposition, or exposure. The question of exteriority implied by the dis- and ex- of all (subject) position, posture and stance now nds itself rearticulated through a number of related terms spacing, touching, contact, crossing where such terms represent less a movement toward an origin (phenomenology as a question of the origin of the world according to Finks celebrated formulation), nor a beyond-phenomenality, than a way of touching on or at the very limits of the phenomenological tradition. In this sense, the question of appearance is not simply what comes to view or to sight but what comes into view or into sight, in the sense of the passage or transitivity such terms might imply, and insofar as such terms reinforce Nancys appeal to the instantaneous exteriority of space-time or the instant itself as exteriority (a phrasing to which we will have occasion to return). Or again, if appearance is that which shows itself (ad-parere), then the displacement occurs between that which shows itself by having a self, thus presupposing a form of interiority, and that self only existing in and as its exteriority to itself, and thus in its exposure. Rather than rehearse Nancys more explicit statements regarding the phenomeno logical tradition, what he also refers to in The Sense of the World as the need to touch on the being or sense of appearing or to touch that (sense) which exceeds the phenomenon in the phenomenon itself (p. 17), we can approach Nancys rethinking of the phenomenological tradition by taking another,
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less thematic and more modest point of departure his photo-essay,Georges.5 In the opening caption, situated above the rst photo, Nancy (2006) writes:
Photography shows something, or someone, and shows, too, the reality of what it shows: it shows this or that something, this or that someone, actually existed, at a particular time, at a particular place, sometime, somewhere. Photography passionately shows the real, its fragility, its grace, its transience. Somewhere, at a particular moment in time, something or someone appeared [est apparu]. Photography shows us that this took place, and does so on in a way that resists our doubts, our forgetting, our interpretations. It offers us an evidence. (p. 131) The phrasing is disarmingly simple, almost nave in its claim for the photographs apparent evidence or self-evidence, its showing of something real, or hopelessly idealist in its failure to acknowledge what we have learned to call the semiotic, indexical, or discursive contest of photographic meaning. If we ght past this initial response, we might also note the presence of Barthes Camera Lucida hovering around Nancys description, from the ways in which photography is situated in terms of its temporal condition or tense translated literally, the way in which Georges is appeared photographically to Barthes own acknowledgment that it is the photograph that offers itself as an evidence (Barthes, 1981). The
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reference to Barthes here is probably not mistaken. But it tends to dissimulate a more complex set of references to which Camera Lucida might also be read as responding. For the reference to evidence here also points to one of the key terms in the phenomenological tradition and so brings us back again by a slightly different path to the question of appearance and exposure that opens our initial discussion. An abbreviated survey of the term would rst include its pivotal role in the writings of Husserl, where evidence, structurally related to all experience (Erlebnis), is considered the primary methodological principle for phenomenology and a key term in Husserls foregrounding the noeticnoematic relation, of seeing (noein) as access to phenomenological knowledge and truth. Drawing from the earlier writings of Franz Brentano (see Brentano, 1966, and Moran, 2000: 25) and cutting across the methodological distinctions and displacement from the epistemological and logical to the transcendental to the concept of the life-world that mark the different stages of Husserls career, the turn to evidence not only allows Husserl to distinguish phenomenology from all psychologism, idealism, or idle speculation; it simultaneously constitutes a methodological, epistemological, as well as ontological condition (as demonstration, exhibition, uncovering) of Husserls more widely known afrmation of the eidetic reduction or bracketing or suspension of the natural attitude (see Strker, 1982). Drawing back to all prepredicative experience and causal explanations, and thus from all forms of positivism, empiricism, or rationalism that presuppose subjectobject relations, Evidenz is the enabling condition for the ways in which the world comes into appearance.To offer one key reference, in which the distinction is made between varying levels of self-evidence in order to found a primal self-evidence, Husserl writes in the Crisis (1970): The life-world (Lebenswelt) is a realm of original self-evidences. That which is self-evidently given is, in perception, experienced as the thing itself, in immediate presence, or, in memory, remembered as the thing itself; and every other manner of intuition is a presentication of the thing itself. Every mediate cognition belonging in this sphere broadly speaking, every manner of induction has the sense of an induction of something intuitable, something possibly perceivable as the thing itself or rememberable as having-been-perceived, etc. All conceivable verication leads back to these modes of self-evidence because the thing itself (in the particular mode) lies in these intuitions themselves as that which is actually, intersubjectively experiencable and veriable and is not a substruction of thought; whereas such a substruction, insofar as it makes a claim to truth, can have actual truth only by being related back to such self-evidence. It is of course itself a highly important task, for the scientic opening-up of the life-world, to bring to recognition the primal validity of these self-evidences and indeed their higher dignity in the grounding of knowledge compared to that of the objective-logical self-evidences. One must fully clarify, i.e., bring to ultimate self-evidence, how all the self-evidence of objective-logical
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accomplishments, through which objective theory (thus mathematical and natural scientic theory) is grounded in respect of form and content, has its hidden source of grounding in the ultimately accomplishing life, the life in which the self-evident givenness of the life-world forever has, has attained, and attains anew its prescientic ontic meaning. From objective-logical self-evidence (mathematical insight, natural-scientic, positive-scientic insight, as it is being accomplished by the inquiring and grounding mathematician, etc.), the path leads back, here, to the primal self-evidence in which the life-world is forever pregiven. (pp. 1278)6 If Husserls Evidenz is invariably translated into English as self-evidence, thus avoiding in part the merely juridical connotations of the term, then this translation suggests that evidence for Husserl is not directly a question of epistemology (a way of knowing things that presupposes our abstraction from the world), or a way of testifying to the existence of something else (i.e. as evidence or proof in a trial). Nor is it reducible to the logic of mathematics and science, in the sense of a self-contained, logical identity that exists prior to its disclosure in intentional structures of consciousness, or on the ways or modes in which phenomena appear to consciousness. Rather, Evidenz registers more effectively the sense of originary self-givenness [Gegebenheit] of the intentional object in its intuitive fullness or the self-evidently given in acts of perception Evidenz, as Husserl states in Cartesian Meditations (1960), is an experiencing of something that is and is thus; it is precisely a mental seeing of something itself [ein Es-selbst-geistigzu-Gesicht-Bekommen] (p. 12). To be sure, the question of evidence is also taken up in different ways by those writing in Husserls wake.Thus (and again I offer only the most schematic survey) Heidegger takes up Husserls term in 7 of Being and Time (1996) at the point in which,dealing with something self-evident which we want to get closer to, and so expressing the principle of all scientic knowledge (p. 24), Heidegger seeks to delimit appearance and self-showing within the phenomenological tradition. When Lvinas (1998) comes to think the relation between Heidegger and his former teacher, he argues that it is precisely their respective references to evidence of that evidence that is operative or at work (leistende Evidenz) that allows us to distinguish their very thinking. Indeed, it is this same afrmation of the phenomenological self-evidence of reection (as least as distinguished from nave self-evidence) that informs Husserls liberal inspiration; as Lvinas concludes: the light of self-evidence is the sole tie with being that posits us as an origin of being, that is, as freedom (p. 61). Prolonging the complex reception of phenomenology in France, Tran-Truc-Dao (1986) insists on the question of evidence as the primordial mode of all phenomenological intentionality, thus constituting a crucial part of Tran-Truc-Daos larger ambition to rethink phenomenology in light of dialectical materialism (and we note already that the translation of Tran-Truc-Daos term into English as (self-) evident with the self now bracketed and hyphenated, as if the very act of translation and its inscription in the text resonates here with the eidetic reduction or bracketing of the natural attitude registers a continued ambivalence in thinking what binds and unbinds the evident from the self-evident). In other words, Barthes reference
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to evidence in Camera Lucida (1981) begins to nd its relevance within this larger, critical context. We will argue in turn that much of the reception of Husserl in light of Derridas earliest writings (whether in the early thesis on the problem of genesis in Husserls philosophy, the translation and introduction to The Origin of Geometry, or Speech and Phenomena) consists in the refusal to fold evidence into self-evidence or showing into self-showing, just as Derrida insists on the irreducibility of what is given, as gift, to the pre-given or selfgiven. Or rather, this reception consists less in the turn to the non-evident (the term that Derrida takes up from Husserl in insisting on the distinction between indication and expression in Husserls phenomenology) than in rendering the self-evident a little too self-evident, a term that Derrida occasionally uses in his later writings (including, we note, his essay on Barthes). It is in this sense that the self-evident is not an intensication of the evident, in the direction of its apodictic certainty or infallible truth, and thus part of a search for securer foundations and stable grounds of knowledge (a movement primarily suggested in the writings of Frege and analytic philosophy (see Jeshion, 2005). The self that binds the evident to itself is not an immediate self-presence predicated on the self-evident as originary in the life-world but always inscribed by or exposed to an irreducible excess, thereby opening all self-evidence to its own exteriority and alterity, or its spacing in Derridas terms.7 With Nancy, in turn, what the photograph demonstrates or attests to in its sense rather than its truth, what makes this photo of Georges an offer or gift of evidence what folds all appearance into exposure or compearance and not mere intersubjectivity is precisely the irreducibility of photographic evidence to the self-evident. Or again, Nancys gesture lies precisely in demonstrating what the evident exposes as irreducibly e-vident (and so open to co-appearance and exposure) rather than in reducing the evident to the autotelic closure, stable signication, and apodictic certainty or truth that the self-evident presupposes.8 In his book on the Iranian lm-maker Abbas Kiarostami, The Evidence of Film (Nancy, 2001), and taking his point of departure from the evidence that one of Kiarostamis lms had impressed on him or rather, starting out from an axiomatic of looking [du regard], which is paraphrased as the evidence and certainty of the cinematic gaze as regard for the world and its truth (p. 14) Nancy argues that the evidence that cinema presents or shares [partage] (communicates) is the intensity of a look upon a world of which it is itself an integral part; cinema is part of the world precisely in the sense that it has contributed to its structure as it is now: as a world where looking at what is real is resolutely substituting for every kind of visionary seeing, foreseeing, and clairvoyant gazing (p. 20). The evidence of cinema is not then a representation of the world but an preuve, a test or proof of sense that is never mastered, while the lm screen is less that space in which fables unfold or where a demonstration that takes place than an evidement or hollowed out passage where images slip through (p. 42) a passe-partout in framing as Nancy suggests (recalling Derridas image in The Truth in Painting): Cinema its screen, its sensitive membrane stretches and hangs between a world in which representation was in charge of the signs of truth, of
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the heralding of a new meaning, or of the warrant of a presence to come, and another world that opens onto its own presence through a voiding where thoughtful evidence realizes itself [un videment o se ralise son vidence pensive]. (p. 56) If this evidence is at once realized in the sense of an achievement or a fulllment (Erfllung in Husserls terms) as well as simultaneously produced (raliser also translating here as producing or making a lm), Nancy thus proposes to think the evidence of cinema as a new pregnancy of the world, in the literal (and topological) sense of a reconguration of experience as something with a shape [forme] and force that precedes and develops a coming into the world [fait mrir une mise au monde], the pushing of a scheme of experience acquiring its very contours (p. 20). The metaphor of fecundity (which recalls Nancys more well-known afrmation of the birth to presence) does not suggest that such reconguration takes place once and for all, at least as the metaphor of pregnancy seems to intimate. As Nancy also suggests: if one day I happen to look at my street on which I walk up and down ten times a day, I construct for an instant a new evidence of my street (p. 68). There is thus an enchanement (p. 79) or linking of evidence rather than a nite fulllment in Husserls terms, or a structured seriality of the instance the indenite sliding of presentation along itself that does not presuppose a nished and achieved form nor moves toward some epiphany of meaning or presence but hinges on the singularity of each instance exposed to its (in)nite displacement. Recalling a number of other recent lms (by Claire Denis and Edward Yang), Nancy further suggests that: in each instance one deals with a cinema opening onto its own image as onto something real or meaningful [sur un sens] that can only be taken by images, aiming [vise] from somewhere beyond any point of view, with a look devoid of subjectivity, with a lens that would aim [viserait] for life from the vantage of the secret of death as the secret of something evident. (p. 52) Reworking the language and limits of the phenomenological tradition he simultaneously inherits, Nancy argues that: evidence in its obvious sense is not what falls to sense but what strikes, and whose blow opens a chance for sense. Its truth is something that grips and does not have to correspond to any given criteria. Nor is evidence an unconcealing for it always keeps a secret or essential reserve: the very reserve of light itself, which is its provenance [do elle provient]. (p. 42) In short, cinema is not about making evidence visible but to make visible that there is [quil y a] this evidence (p. 74), and it is precisely in this giving and gift of evidence that the possibility of justice for Nancy emerges.9 Two etymological references are of interest in this context. First, Nancy recalls that evidentia
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is the character of what is seen from afar (giving a passive turn to the active meaning of video,I see).The distance implied by evidence gives both the measure of its spatial removal and the measure of its power. Something distinguishes itself from far away because it detaches itself, it separates ... Something strikes with distinction: always, an image is also that which subtracts itself [se retranche] from a context and stands out, clear-cut [qui tranche], against a background. Always, there is a cut [dcoupe], a framing. (p. 42) Second, Nancy notes that evidentia came to Latin as a translation of the Greek term enargeia, which speaks of the powerful and instantaneous whiteness of lightning: argos speed in a ash. It touches in an instant and prevents any grasp. As an instant it is to be kept, in its passage: both a suspension and a succession (p. 42).10 Thought together, these two etymological references work to unfound and displace the guiding presuppositions informing the phenomenon in its phenomenological sense the truth for Husserl that the phenomenon appears, or, as Derrida argues, that phenomenology presupposes a form that governs the phenomenons meaning (only a form is evident, Derrida (1973) italicizes, only a form has or is an essence, only a form presents itself as such, p. 108). In other words, Nancys turn to the implications of these etymological references reinforces his thought of exposure as the simultaneous suspension and succession of what comes into appearance as it comes into appearance, a coming-into-presence or birth to presence in short, exposure parsed out as the diffrance or originary spacing of all being-present (Nancy, 1997: 1215). The question of evidence in play here is not for Nancy about the fascination of images, nor is it about a reexivity or speculation: It is about images insofar as they open onto what is real and insofar as they alone open onto it. The reality of images is the access to the real itself, with the consistency and the resistance of death, for instance, or life, for instance ... We are dealing neither with formalistic (let us say, tentatively, symbolic) nor with narcissistic (let us say imaginary) vision. We are not dealing with sight [de la vision] seeing or voyeuristic, fantasizing or hallucinating, ideative or intuitive but solely with looking [du regard]: it is a matter of opening a seeing [un voir] to something real, toward which the look carries itself and which, in turn, the look allows to be carried back to itself. This is about such a carrying and carrying itself, and about its carrying distance [sa porte]: to carry and take a look [porter un regard] upon the intensity of an evidence and its aptness [justice] probably not what is evident in what is simply given (plainly or empirically, providing something like that is ever possible), but what is evident in what shows up when one does take a look [se montrer pour peu que lon regarde]. Cinemas proposition here is quite far from a vision that is merely sighting [visionne] (that looks in order merely to see): what is evident imposes itself as the setting up of a look [la mise en puissance dun regard]. If this look regards that upon which it cast itself and cares for it, it will have taken
25
care of the real: of that which resists, precisely, being absorbed in any vision (visions of the world, representations, imaginations). (pp. 1618).11 If evidence refers to what is obvious, to what gives to sense in its simultaneous distinction and suspended passage, then the question of exposure to which Nancy draws us begins to show a measure (itself immeasurable) of the images force and justice, of that which resists in and as the opening of a world a common photograph of Georges, exposed, as that which makes evident a form of the world, a form or a sense (p. 12). Acknowledgements
This article elaborates on a paper rst read as part of a panel on Jean-Luc Nancy and the Sense of the Visual at the 2009 College Art Association meeting in Los Angeles. I am especially grateful to Louis Kaplan and John Paul Ricco for organizing the panel and to John Paul Ricco for a number of questions and comments that have helped shape the revisions.
Notes
1. For critical readings of this same trajectory, see Ross (2007), Heikkil (2008), Martis (2005) and Giovannangeli (2002). 2. We take up a reading here rst outlined in Armstrong (2009). 3. See also Nancys references to this exchange in Around the Notion of Literary Communism in Nancy (2006). 4. The quotation cited here fails to note the ways in which Nancy extends the commentary to a reading of Debord and the Situationists concept of spectacle. 5. First published in Furor in 1985 and reprinted in the 1991 and 2008 editions of Le Poids dune pense, the essay is omitted from The Gravity of Thought but included in Nancy (2006: 13142).The English translation thus loses the references to photography in the preceding essay (Espace contre temps) included in the two Le Poids editions, where Nancy refers to the instantaneity of the photograph as a space of spread out or displayed [tal] time. 6. Recalling our reading of Arendt earlier, this same section from the Crisis concerns the life-world self-evidence of straight table-edges (Husserl, 1970: 129), though Arendt could also be reworking a frequent, platonic example from Heidegger. 7. For another reading of Derridas references to the (self-)evident in his reading of Husserl, see White (1995). For a brilliant reading of the supplement and contiguity that contaminates the origin (of the world) that evidence presupposes, see GarcaDttmann (2004). 8. Nancys rethinking of phenomenological evidence might be usefully read across Giovannangelis references to Sartre in his Finitude et reprsentation, notably Giovannangelis positing of the innite and the nite in terms of a seriality of appearing, which he also presents as a trans-phenomenality a way of thinking sense in order to pass beyond (dpasser) sense (p. 113). 9. John Paul Ricco asks me:exposure unto what? Or as Nancy (2001) asks rhetorically, in the indenite sliding of presentation along itself,where does it slide to indenitely?To which he responds: In a certain way, toward insignicance (there where the other arts appeal to an excess of signiance). Toward the insignicance of life that offers itself
26
journal of visual culture 9(1) these images, always in movement, going toward no mystery, no revelation, only this sliding along on itself by means of which it leads from one image to another (exemplary, subliminal, banal, grotesque, nave, tampered with, sketchy or overloaded). Life that invents its own cinema. What a strange story, this story of a civilization that has made this gift to itself, that has tied itself [enchane] to it ... An extreme giddiness, truly, a feverish intertwining of unveiling and of special effects, as far as the eye can see [ perte de vue], truly, an overload of effects and of semblance, all that is true. Cinema is marked by the heaviest and the most ambiguous of signs myth, mass, power, money, vulgarity, circus games, exhibitionism, voyeurism. But all that is carried off in an endless movement [dlement] to such an extent that evidence becomes that of a passage rather than some epiphany of meaning or presence. (p. 78). 10. We note the proximity of both etymologies to Eduardo Cadavas careful reading of Walter Benjamin in Words of Light (1997). 11. As John Paul Ricco suggests to me, Nancys argument might offer the initial step for a critical reading of Michael Frieds (2008) recent writings on photography.
References
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Armstrong, P. (2009) Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reections on Photography. New York: Hill & Wang. Brentano, F. (1966) The True and the Evident. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Cadava, E. (1997) Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Debord, G. (1995 [1967]) The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Derrida, J. (1973) Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language, in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, pp. 10728. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (2005) On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fried, Michael (2008) Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. London: Yale University Press. Garca-Duttmann, A. (2004) Lvidence mme, in Francis Guibol and Jean-Clet Martin (eds) Sens en tous sens: Autour des travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy, pp. 14352. Paris: Galile. Giovannangeli, D. (2002) Finitude et representation. Six leons sur lapparitre: De Descartes a lontologie phnomnologique. Brussels: ditions Ousia. Heidegger, M. (1996) Being and Time. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Heikkil, M. (2008) At the Limits of Presentation: Coming-into-Presence and its Aesthetic Relevance in Jean-Luc Nancys Philosophy. Bern: Peter Lang. Husserl, E. (1960) Cartesian Meditations.The Hague: Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. James, I. (2006) The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of JeanLuc Nancy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jeshion, R. (2005) Freges Notions of Self-Evidence, in Michael Beaney and Erich Reck (eds) Gottlob Frege: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Vol. 2, pp. 358 417. London: Routledge.
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Lvinas, E. (1998) Discovering Existence with Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Martis, J. (2005) Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press. Moran, D. (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Nancy, J-L. (1982) La partage des voix. Paris: Galile. Nancy, J-L. (1992) La Comparution/The Compearance: From the Existence of Communism to the Community of Existence, Political Theory 20: 3, August: 37198. Nancy, J-L. (1997) The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J-L. (2000) Of Being Singular Plural, in Being Singular Plural, pp. 199. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nancy, J-L. (2001) The Evidence of Film. Brussels:Yves Gevaert. Nancy, J-L. (2006) Multiple Arts: The Muses 11. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rancire, J. (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Rancire, J. (2001) The Theses on Politics, Theory & Event 5(3). URL (consulted 1 Dec. 2009): http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere. html Ross, A. (2007) The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Strker, E. (1982) Husserls Principle of Evidenz: The Signicance and Limitations of a Methodological Norm of Phenomenology of Science, in D. Christensen et al. (eds.) Contemporary German Philosophy, Vol. 1, pp. 11138. State College: Penn State University Press. Tran-Duc-Thao (1986) Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. White, A. (1995) Of Grammatology: Deconstruction as Rigorous Phenomenology, in William R. McKenna and J. Claude Evans (eds) Derrida and Phenomenology, pp. 10319. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Philip Armstrong is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. He has published in the elds of contemporary political theory as well as the visual arts. Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (2009) has been recently published by University of Minnesota Press. Address: Department of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, 451 Hagerty Hall, 1775 College Road, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. [email: armstrong.202@osu.edu]

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From Appearance to Exposure

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