KEYNOTES

There is not ‘a thinking’ of freedom; there are only prolegomena to a freeing of thinking.

Nancy 1993, 1988 p. 206

1: Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021) wrote a doctoral thesis under the title ‘Experience of freedom’ in which he explored a wilderness, of nomadic existing, as always at risk from its own hatred of freedom, and suffering a state of precarious vulnerability. The epigraph cited above is taken from the Fragments added as a section fourteen to the thirteen sections of his text, underlining how for him such an enquiry does not permit of a conclusion or finality, but all the same makes use of Kantian terminologies, in this case, of ‘prolegomena’, Kant’s term for philosophical preparation. Nancy’s analyses invite an interrogation of sources and interlocutors, perhaps too numerable to be adduced, but among them are Levinas and Foucault, Blanchot and Derrida, Jacques Derrida indeed served on the examining committee for the award of the doctorate.

2: Three sources of inspiration stand out for attention: Kant, Heidegger and Georges Bataille. Nancy opens up a provocative reading of Heidegger’s account of freedom, as ecstasis and existence, between Kant on an experience in service to a pursuit of knowing; and a notion, derived from Bataille, of an excription on the edge of previously constituted corporealities, revealing their fragility and incompleteness: an excription on the edge of sense. Nancy insists on an experiential, or lived dimension, which goes missing or gets obscured in the ontological turn which Heidegger gives to the notion of freedom. Neither Heidegger nor Nancy locates freedom in terms of a self-relation, or characteristic of a subject. Nancy however is more closely aligned to a Heideggerian topos of thinking, in an opening freed from ontological commitments, than to the preceding analytic of Dasein, and its reliance on a silent voice of conscience to call it to its vocation.

3: For Nancy, there is a ceaseless multiple murmuring of voices, of those who have gone before, as a legacy, voices crying out in the wilderness, as Old Testament Prophets were supposed to do. For Nancy, Heidegger is such a thinker, who, insisting on Dasein as existing, pushes analysis beyond the temporarily comforting horizons of the threefold: subject, substance, sovereignty. Bataille, in Inner Experience (1954), the first part of his projected Atheological Treatise, explores how a Kantian conception of experience dissolves, under the cumulative shocks of those occurrences in life where temporal order and collectively constituted horizons of meaning and value are disrupted and fall away. The third part of that Treatise, On Nietzsche (1945), provides a series of responses to

Nietzsche, his life and writing, as an exemplary Behold the Man, which, far from showing a model or figure for imitation, reveals rather the dangers and risks of a passionately experienced life.

4: Nancy responds to Bataille and to Nietzsche, in a context where Foucault has noted the function of a conception of transgression, disrupting the normalisation at work in phenomenological descriptions, in which the recurrent and continuous in the series of appearances are selected for attention, rather than the singular and disruptive. Nancy responds to Derrida’s analyses of a difference for Bataille between a restricted economy, maintaining and affirming identities, and a general economy in which identities are as liable to dissolution. Nancy thematises his own precarious immune-compromised condition following on from heart surgery in 1991, in a brief text, L’Intrus (2002, 2000). He remarkably survived surgery for just on thirty years, dying, as he saw it, for a second time in August 2021.

5: Derrida’s response to Bataille on sovereignty and Foucault’s response to Bataille on transgression reveal a disruptive potential within the phenomenological inheritance of the concept of an Erlebnis, in which the bearer of that experience is indelibly marked, framed and formed. Wilhelm Dilthey in his inaugural analysis, Erlebnis und Dichtung (1907), Lived Experience and poetics, explores the manner in which a singular series of exposures generates the distinctive poetic voices of Lessing, and Goethe, Novalis and Hoelderlin. The mark which experience leaves on its bearer may be neither that of position, nor disposition, nor exposition, but that of a deposition: the transition of a body from alive and self-mobilising to inert and extinct. Nancy explores these processes through three invented terms, excription, expeausition, and sexistence, to be introduced in this contribution.

The task of exposition is to show linkages and discontinuities between a thinking of experience, of existence and of excription, as explored in Nancy’s writings, through which to locate a renewed appreciation and reception of Erlebnis, which as site of transformatory impacts may also be worthy of the description, ‘neither a word, nor a concept’ .

In The Natural Contract, Michel Serres calls for a renewal of our relation to the nonhuman world in the form of a ‘natural contract’. Such a contract will involve a changed relation between the sciences and politics: the politician, he writes, must learn to leave the city and the figure of the helmsman serves as a model for navigating the challenges we face today, most especially in the light of the climate emergency. I will consider the extent to which the communication for which Serres calls in The Natural Contract depends on a distinctive account of experience, and of the subject of that experience.

In Hermes II: L’Interference, knowledge is characterised by networks, interference, intersubjectivity, and a close relation between science and history. It’s an account consistent with Serres’s later description of the way the climate sciences combine their respective spheres of expertise to generate knowledge of an object – the climate – that strictly speaking exceeds each of them. A feature of Serres’s ‘new new scientific spirit’ is that Bachelard’s separation of science from everyday experience dissolves and therefore the collaboration of multiple sciences can be extended beyond the sciences. In order to know what leaves its mark on us we must communicate with others, even though strictly speaking we do not have an experience in common. Knowledge is intersubjective. Viewed in this way, knowledge has a political dimension not because it is seen to advance or impede particular interests, and not because it is ‘contested,’ but because we need to find ways to communicate in order to constitute an object that is global while remaining intensely local – not the same for all, even after experience and expertise has been shared. I’ll discuss this with particular reference to the climate emergency, drawing it back to the conditions for Serres’ notion of a natural contract.