Feb 052017
 

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In this excerpt of Coming, his latest work in English translated by Charlotte Mandell, French Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy explores the elusive and titillating word jouissance. This section is the second of a five part interview between Nancy and Adèle Van Reeth, the producer and host of France Cultural Radio’s daily program on philosophy. Through Van Reeth’s astute questions, Nancy discusses and elaborates on whether or not jouissance can ever be considered a solitary act by exploring some of his most favored topics: the body, sexuality, community, psychology, and Plato. —Melissa Considine Beck

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Adèle Van Reeth (AVR): Jouissance as experience implies a dissolution of the subject as well as the impossibility of appropriating its object. How then can we define what makes us enjoy [jouir]? And above all, since the questions of object goes back to that of the subject: Who is it that enjoys [jouit]?

Jean-Luc Nancy (JLN): It is because, in jouissance, these two questions of object and subject are linked, that jouissance can be in such a proximity not only with joy, but also with réjouissance , exuberance in general. Exuberance is a word marked by femininity: It is the swelling of the breast (uber in Latin), the milk that gushes forth. We can also think of ecstasy, a word of Heidegger’s and Schelling’s that signifies “being outside of oneself,” or rather “élan, impetus, outside of oneself.” In this outside-of-self, appropriation is impossible, because in it the subject is not a thing, a substance, but a simple punctual “I,” which allows us to unify our representations. But this relationship no longer functions in jouissance, which implies rather that we abandon representation, and thus leave that “I” that can no longer accompany the experience of jouissance. I think that is really what we are talking about, that loss of a subject capable of saying “I.”

AVR: Yet jouissance, far from being abstract, is always an experience, which means that it holds meaning only for a particular person. For instance, if we confine ourselves to sexual jouissance, the one who is coming [jouit] can say, “I’m coming…” Who is this “I,” then, who comes?

JLN: This crucial question finds a privileged inscription in Sade, for whom the one who comes enters into a twofold relationship with destruction. First of all, the relationship of the one coming with the one with whom he or she comes is a relationship of possession pushed to the point of destruction; he is enjoying [jouit] the risk of opening a gaping chasm in the very place where what is causing him or her to come exists. But this relationship with destruction turns against the one coming himself, who can try to go as close as possible to his own death. In Sade, we find heroes who have themselves hanged in order to ejaculate, after asking their valets to cut the rope at just the right instant. It’s in these sorts of situations that, often, the Sadean hero says, I am coming [je jouis]. That is: I am being carried away by jouissance. The exclamation is torn from him. Often some sort of blasphemy is added: “Fucking God!”—which also testifies to his being carried away.

AVR: But does this mean that jouissance is inseparable from pain? Here, the person who says “I am coming” says it simultaneously with the experience of pain.

JLN: Pain is always present in jouissance, tangentially or asymptotically. The extreme intensity becomes unbearable, and perhaps one comes precisely from being at the limit: there where the height of excitation is exceeded and is beaten back, only finally to fail.

The Sadean hero intensifies the ambivalence of that instant when he cries out “fuck! [foutre],” which means baiser, and which he uses as a kind of condemnation or insult for what he is in the process of doing or undergoing. Today, we don’t say foutre much anymore, or else just to designate sperm (cum). The Sadean hero, though, says, “Fuck! In the name of God, I’m coming!”—It’s a proclamation. We can find these proclamations in a number of erotic poems, in Apollinaire’s Poems to Lou for instance, where they are addressed to the other: “You are coming!” We hear it, too, in the “come” [viens] of Deguy that we mentioned earlier. What’s more, in English, jouir is to come, venir.

AVR: …which we don’t hear in the French term of jouissance.

JLN: In fact, the term jouissance is difficult to translate in a certain number of languages. In English and German, there is no word that is in the same family. Either the register is sexual, or, more rarely, legalistic. In German, Genuss evokes more the idea of satisfaction. But being satisfied with something signifies having enough of it, which leads us to the opposite of jouissance. Of course, the possessive aspect of jouissance is also linked to the idea of satisfaction: I want to have enough of it. But what does “having enough of it” mean? That implies the idea of an objective measure, which can be that of my means: I possess so much money and I will be satisfied if I obtain everything this money allows me to possess. But can I have enough of something that has no measure? That makes no sense. If my desire is measureless, it will never have enough, it will never reach a threshold. That is what happens for jouissance: It occurs outside of any measure or any idea of a threshold. Which does not mean that it never terminates, but rather that it is very difficult to know that that stopping-point is made of.

I would even say that the property of jouissance is to be endlessly renewed. This is very striking in the case of aesthetic jouissance, which we find in works of art, and to which we will return. Why doesn’t art stop, why do people continue to create? Because in art as in sexual jouissance, we never say we’ve had “enough” of it. This idea makes no sense. If people continue to create and jouir, it’s because desire doesn’t stop when it takes one particular form. Because there is a constantly renewed desire, the desire to make new forms arise, that is, to make a new sensibility perceptible [sensible]. And this new sensibility is desired and created not because we lack something, or out of a compulsion for repetition, but because what is desired is the renewing of meaning as such. What art testifies to, then, is our desire to make sense infinitely.

AVR: Do you think that jouissance expresses a desire to meaning? If that is the case, this desire must emanate from someone, thus presupposing a subject of jouissance. But you have insisted on the dissolution of the subject in jouissance. Isn’t there a contradiction?

JLN: Unless we wonder if it’s desire itself that is the subject. In the same way that it’s language that speaks and makes us speak, it’s desire that is the subject of our desire. This desire has no relationship to self: It is impulse. When Freud says, “Impulses are our myths, and our doctrine of impulses is our mythology”—an extraordinarily bold, even provocative statement—he is expressing something very important. Here, we should understand “myth” in the sense of fiction, that is that space where explanation becomes useless; but we should understand it also as muthos, uttered speech. It is Plato who defines myth as a lying fable, whereas in Homer muthos refers to speech. There can be logos only because at a certain point, muthos opened the way to it, with Plato especially. What’s more, Plato set about fabricating his own myth, which is called philosophy.

Let’s return to Freud: What is an impulse? The term designates the fact of being unable to think of ourselves otherwise than as driven on by something, which you could call gods or material forces (you can choose your myth). Heidegger would say we are driven, set off by the very fact of being. Freud, however, does not tell us by what we are driven, but this movement is precisely what we find in jouissance.

AVR: Not only does jouissance have no precise subject, but might it be the sign of belonging to a community, something that surpasses the subject and makes us join with being? We are almost in the Kantian experience of the beautiful, which attests to a sense shared by everyone. Jouissance might be the locus for such a shared meaning, a common sensibility.

JLN: Exactly, because since I am not the owner of my jouissance, I still experience it in a way that I can actually be there where however I cannot find myself. It is not enough to say that the subject is lost in jouissance—rather it is as if the self is subjected to it, in the earlier sense of subject, the subject of a monarch. Jouissance is stronger than me, but this subjection I know comes from elsewhere. It comes to me from the other, from others. This is why there is no solitary jouissance. Already I can hear the objections pouring forth: “Of course there are solitary jouissances, everyone talks about solitary pleasure!” But precisely, the pleasure in question is not in fact solitary, because it cannot take place unless the subject places himself in exteriority in relation to himself—this can take several forms. First of all, this relationship is always imaginary, fantasy-based. Then, procuring pleasure by oneself implies a splitting in two [dédoublement] It’s a little like the famous chiasmus of Merleau-Ponty: When I touch my hand, I am both the hand that touches and that hand that is touched, I am both inside and outside. And when I touch myself, I experience this self as being outside of myself. I refer [rapporte] back to myself. This experience raises a classic question: Do I have a body or am I my body? To this very pertinent question we must reply: both. Because when I say I am my body, I cannot disregard the fact that I also possess it; and when I say I have a body, I am forced to note of this body that…I am it. Having a body refers to the object, being a body refers to the subject. But I myself am object as subject. At least so long as I regard my body not just as a tool. If I touch my body, and if my body touches itself to give itself pleasure, it is outside of itself. That said, masturbation is not exactly the same thing as the sexual relationship, since, precisely, in masturbation the other is reduced to the state of a fantasy. Whereas in the sexual relationship the other is not based on fantasy—although a certain kind of psychoanalysis says there is no sexual relationship without fantasy…

—Jean-Luc Nancy with Adèle Van Reeth
Translated by Charlotte Mandell

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Jean-Luc Nancy is a widely published French philosopher. His books in English include Inoperative Community, The Disavowed Community, Being Singular Plural, The Birth of Presence.

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Adèle Van Reeth is the producer and host of France Cultural Radio’s daily program on philosophy.

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Charlotte Mandell is an American literary translator. She has translated works by Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Jules Verne, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Antoine de Baecque, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jonathan Littell.

Feb 042017
 

Nancy, Jean-Luc

In this age of addiction and excessive consumption where massive modes of pleasure are readily available, have we completely fucked ourselves into oblivion? Do we give a fuck about fucking anymore? And now that we have come to the point of post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-privacy and post-truth, have we also arrived at the era of post-pleasure?     —Melissa Considine Beck

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Coming
Jean-Luc Nancy with Adele Van Reeth
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Fordham University Press, 2016
168 pages, $22.00

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In this age of addiction and excessive consumption where massive modes of pleasure are readily available, have we completely fucked ourselves into oblivion? Do we give a fuck about fucking anymore? And now that we have come to the point of post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-privacy and post-truth, have we also arrived at the era of post-pleasure? There are just a few of the provocative questions that French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy raises in his book Coming as he explores the tricky, elusive and titillating French word jouissance and its various associations with orgasm, sex, coming, pleasure, joy, property and consumption.

Coming, which is the English translation of the French title la jouissance, takes the form of an interview, divided into five part as Adèle Van Reeth, the producer and host of France Cultural Radio’s daily program on philosophy, asks Nancy a series of questions about the idea of jouissance.  Through the course of this dialogue, Nancy lays out the original meaning of jouissance, which was used solely as a legal term, and he takes us on a fascinating linguistic journey to discover how this word evolved to become associated with sexual pleasure and orgasm and from consummation is now associated with the modern idea of consumption. This book is an excellent introduction for those who are new to Nancy or for those who are familiar with his prolific writings as it contains some of his most favored topics: community, modern psychology, linguistics, Christianity, the body, sex and Platonism, just to name a few.

Nancy made the suggestion of using the infinitive, “To Come” for the English title of this book but Charlotte Mandell thought that the gerund “Coming” would be a better choice to capture the continual nature of movement associated with jouissance. Included in the edition published by Fordham University Press is a beginning note that Nancy writes himself in which he explains the problem with rendering jouissance into an appropriate English title:

In English, sexual orgasm is expressed by the verb “to come.” This has no corresponding noun. What is shared by both lexical registers is an idea of accomplishment. In French, we say venir (to come) for “reaching jouissance,” but the word is mostly used between sexual partners (“viens!” for example.) In choosing the gerund “coming,” Charlotte Mandell aptly brings out action or movement, something that is in the process of occurring, which, in fact, is attached to jouissance and to jouir; that is, precisely, what remains irreducible either to a state or to an acquisition, to an accomplishment or to an appropriation.

It is interesting to note that throughout the text of Coming, jouissance is simply translated in brackets as “pleasure” or is not translated at all, a constant reminder of the elusive nature of this word that has no equivalent translation in English.

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Defining Jouissance: What the fuck does this French word mean?

Nancy is a master at speaking about the nuances of language and uncovers, unpacks and explains specific French words, with their etymological roots in Latin, that are closely related to jouissance. He begins the discussion with an examination of the French verb Jouir, which means “to enjoy” and “to have an orgasm,” and is derived from the Latin verb gaudere, “to rejoice,” and therefore has no etymological relationship to sex or sexuality. At some point there is a shift in meaning of jouissance from property to sexual pleasure and orgasm. Nancy speculates that this shift begins with the middle French use of joie (joy) which denotes the sensual or sexual feelings of the troubadour poets; these poets have a joy of love that is sensual but jouissance, in the sense of reaching orgasm, is avoided. Nancy exclaims, “One of the ordeals of courtly love even consisted of the knight sleeping with his lady without making love!”

He further explores this shift in meaning by comparing the French words jouissance [pleasure] and joy [joie] and how they are different. Nancy argues that jouisssance corresponds to what Kant called pleasant—when something is pleasant it is something that is felt inside of me because something suits me. Joy, however, is outside of me and carries me towards something else. Nancy goes one step further in the etymological connections of various words to jouissance and explains réjouissance (rejoicing), whose root and meaning are very close to jouissance. Nancy points out that réjouissance is not used very often today and when it is used it describes something that is public such as popular festivities. Nancy concludes about the etymological connection between réjouissance and jouissance:

The idea of festivities, réjouissances, refers to festive excess, to a certain suspension of everyday activities, but also to obligation and finality. That is where we find jouissance, in the sense of joyful acclamations greeting the arrival of an important person, like the jouissance of the people at the arrival of the king.

We can say, then, that joy and réjouissance are like jouissance in that they all denote an excess. The idea of excess and its association with jouissance will be a topic brought repeated throughout Coming. Jouissance is an experience of excessive sexual pleasure in the form of orgasm which experience we seek over and over again.

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Jouissance as a shared experience: Is it possible to fuck alone?

The style of interview works exceptionally well for Coming because not only does Van Reeth adeptly sum up Nancy’s complicated thoughts, but she also asks him precise questions which elicit more of his ideas; Van Reeth is able to challenge Nancy to expound on his positions and she keeps the dialogue moving forward rather fluidly. In this part of the interview that deals with the subject and the object in the context of jouissance, Van Reeth begins:

Jouissance as experience implies a dissolution of the subject as well as the impossibility of appropriating its object. How then can we define what makes us enjoy [jouir]? And above all, since the question of object goes back to that of the subject: Who is it that enjoys [jouit]?

Nancy insists that jouissance has no specific subject because I am not the owner of my jouissance. How can it be possible for a person to own an orgasm if his or her sexual climax involves another person, another body. What I take pleasure from is just as much my pleasure as it is the pleasure of the other with whom I am engaging in a sexual relationship. Nancy brilliantly anticipates his critics who would argue that masturbation disproves the nonexistence of subject and takes his argument a step further by stating that when pleasuring oneself the other is still present in the form of a fantasy. So when we fuck, we are never fucking alone even if there isn’t another physical body in the room.

It during this part of the discussion that Nancy brings up Lacan and his exploration of jouissance in relation to the pleasure principal. Lacan believes that a subject attempts to go beyond, to transgress the pleasure principal and this brings about pain. It is with this excess, with this reaching of pleasure beyond a limit that Lacan defines jouissance. Although Nancy has been critical of modern psychology throughout his career, he credits Lacan with his effort “to try to find the meaning of jouissance, beyond the fulfillment of satisfaction, into a sortie, outside oneself, into exuberance, ecstasy….”

Van Reeth’s importance in this philosophical exchange is underscored in this section as she further presses Nancy on Lacan’s examination of jouissance:

How do you understand Lacan’s phrase asserting there is no sexual relationship? If there is no sexual relationship, there is no sexual jouissance. But wouldn’t it be truer to understand not that jouissance is impossible, but that it is inconceivable? Just as the fact that there is no sexual relationship would signify that there is no thinkable relationship. It would be a way to preserve the space unique to jouissance as experience.

Nancy’s insight into Lacan is a starting point for his thoughts on jouissance as a shared experience and it will also serve as a prompt from which to discuss the links between aesthetic and sexual jouissance in the next section of the interview:

That is probably what Lacan means. ‘There is no sexual relationship’ can be understood in several ways: There is no proportion, no commensurability, no conclusion either. The sexual relationship cannot be written down. The implication is: there is no account of it, no ‘report’ [rapport, which also means ‘relationship]’ But it is precisely to that extent that there is a real rapport, which demands incommensurability and a form of non-conclusion. A relationship is maintained [s’entretient]. It is not completed. A completed, accomplishment is either a breakup, or a fusion. And in fusion there is no longer any relationship. It would be truer to say, then, that jouissance is inconceivable, not impossible.

In sum, pleasure comes down to a matter of shared meaning whether there is a sexual partner or not. At the end of this section dealing with subject and shared pleasure, Nancy makes one of the simplest, yet thought-provoking statements in this entire volume: Where does sexuality begin and where does it stop? He concludes, “Perhaps it begins very, very far from the sexual act itself.”

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Aesthetic and Sexual Jouissance: Fucking in motion

Even though Nancy argues that jouissance is never a solitary experience, he also explains that pleasure is unshareable, much in the same way that aesthetic pleasure is a singular experience, unique to each individual.  As he opens thoughts on the link between sexual jouissance and aesthetic jouissance, Nancy points out that it is Freud who first establishes the transfer of aesthetic jouissance to sexual jouissance. Nancy’s criticism of psychology becomes apparent as he disagrees with Freud on his speculation that there is a specific order in which seduction happens—gazing, hearing, touching, must happen first, Freud argues, and only at the end of this progression does Freud finally come to the genitalia through which the tension in the form of orgasm is released.

This part of the discussion in which Nancy brings his reader to understand the connection between sexual and aesthetic jouissance is typical of his very dense, erudite, and multifaceted writing. He references various texts of Freud, he dissects more Latin words via Spinoza, he mentions the young Chilean philosopher Juan Manuel Garrido, he quotes David Hume, and he reaches all the way back to the ancient texts of Plato to make a point about pleasure. As I carefully read his text which is thick with history, philosophy and literature, I take notes, I read or reread authors whose books are sitting on my shelf to whom Nancy has referenced, I search the Internet for authors unknown to me, which laborious activities sometimes feel like a feeble attempt to absorb the full scope of his genius. But all of a sudden, at the end of a complicated series of thoughts, Nancy composes a short, simple, beautiful, concise paragraph that grabs me so forcefully that I pause my frenzy of research:

What we enjoy in an aesthetic form is the movement of this form, even though it ends up being completed. What’s more, an aesthetic form is probably never exhausted and, on the contrary, does not stop enjoying itself (jouir d’elle-meme).

And a bit further on in the same discussion:

In jouissance, they [bodies] become almost formless. Which is radically opposed to that call to eroticism, in advertising or movies, always summoning beautiful, perfected forms. Whereas in eroticism, in eros, these forms become undone.

Nancy reveals in these two simple yet erudite statements that in art there is no formula for what is considered beautiful. Furthermore, we can carry this over to jouissance in which there is no formula to be followed; each person experiences beauty, art and sexual jouissance in his or her own unique way this experience is impossible to share. In a relationship there are no accepted forms or defined forms of beauty, these forms are uniquely decided by the persons within a relationship.

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The Creative Power of Jouissance: Is There an Art to Fucking?

Nancy’s discussion of the link between sexual and aesthetic jouissance, with a particular emphasis on the art of writing, is the most accessible and interesting piece of this interview. Nancy argues that even when an artist produces a jouissance in his or her viewers, there is always a constantly renewed dissatisfaction that keeps the artist working again and again. “The artist,” he argues, “is in action in his work, and he also takes pleasure [jouit] from being in the process of working. He suffers too, it’s always laborious.”

Nancy is a prominent and well-known contributor to the studies of art and his cultural writings have covered the topics of literature, poetry, theater, music and film. Nancy has written books on the subject of art and has also written pieces for international art journals and art catalogs. He has a text from a lecture given 1992 at the Louvre displayed with the painting ‘The death of the virgin’ by the Italian painter Caravaggio. It is fitting that Fordham University Press has used a Caravaggio painting for this edition of Coming thereby reminding us of Nancy’s interest in the Italian painter.

In order to lead Nancy into elaborating on the similarities between the pleasure of art, specifically the art of writing, and sex, Van Reeth reads a passage from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in which the author asserts that writing and sexuality bring about the same pleasure. In a letter dated April 13, 1903 from Viarregio, near Pisa, Rilke writes:

And in fact artistic experiences lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight.

Nancy picks up on the idea that Rilke is speaking of writing as working toward the unknown, without a goal, which is also true for artists who work with music or paint. The art passes through the artist to the spectator who experiences the work of art through a plethora of senses. In the end the artist has no real understanding of how his or her work is received, of the various ways in which someone experiences pleasure through his or her art. The pleasure that is experienced by the spectator as a result of interacting with his work is unshareable just as the experience of sexual jouissance. When we speak about sexual pleasure and orgasm, is there really a word or phrase that captures a good fuck? How can we truly and accurately describe the best fuck we’ve ever had? The experience is unshareable when we make any attempt to put it in words.

The true brilliance of Nancy’s dissection of language comes with his elaboration on the verbal similarities of art and sex. Artistic media such as color and rhythm are used to describe both art and sex. Rhythm, for instance, is present in an art’s use of color and can also be applied to the lover’s caress of the body. The best sex is enjoyed when lovers find a rhythm and Rhythm is a coming-and-going, a constant movement a repetition. Nancy concludes about rhythm:

Rhythm in general is born from what is never definitively there, from what does not stay in place and causes us to return, what leads to jouissance. Rhythm is fundamental for humans, bur for nature as well; think of the rhythm of the stars.

Art and sex cannot exist without movement. It is the seduction, the process, the rhythm that leads to artistic and sexual jouissance

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Suffering and Fucking—Christianity’s Influence on jouissance

The fourth part of the book, dealing with Christianity and its influence on jouissance is the shortest and the least stimulating part of the dialogue. Nancy has been interested in and critical of Christianity throughout his career and we get a cursory survey of his thoughts in this section. Throughout their dialogue on pleasure, Nancy and Van Reeth both tangentially bring up the close relationship between pleasure and suffering. Nancy sites the works of de Sade as an example of jouisssance being the result of pain inflicted on another or on oneself. Pain and pleasure have an intensity in common and in the moments before orgasm the tension that one experiences can be painful. Van Reeth uses the example of Proust’s narrator who, in the beginning of Sodome et Gomorrhe, describes the very noisy sexual encounter between Baron de Charlus and Julien as akin to the sound of a man having his throat split. The narrator concludes, “if there is one thing as loud as suffering, it’s pleasure.”

Nancy begins the section by arguing that Christianity was the calming solution to the disintegration of the theocratic regimes, the loss of which political system caused great anxiety and unrest. Christianity brings to mankind the idea that life is simply a passage to another spiritual side, a passage that is marked by suffering. It is the Passion of Christ that provides us with a redemptive kind of suffering and suffering is specifically attached to life on earth. One must pass through suffering in this life in order to attain salvation. As a result there is a definitive break and distinction between heavenly joy and human joy. Because of Christianity’s condemnation of the flesh, earthly pleasures such as human joy and jouissance become evil and separate from heavenly joy and jubilation. It is fitting that their discussion on Christianity and suffering, even in relation to jouissance, is the most somber part of Van Reeth and Nancy’s dialogue.

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From Consummation to Consumption: Do we give a fuck about anything anymore?

Nancy explains that Christianity was an attempt to organize people into one community, but the appearance of a modern state served to divide individuals until the invention of capitalism. “which would insert the individual subject into the circuit of a new jouissance: no longer the jouissance of excess, but that of accumulation and investment. It’s a jouissance that can no longer bear that name.” Van Reeth asks Nancy what, exactly, has changed to cause the meaning of jouissance to shift once again.

It was Communism, Nancy argues, that provided the connection between jouissance and profit, which political theory believed that everyone’s hard work will produce profits that can be equally shared by all –this sharing of profits would be a source of jouissance. But nowadays, people are working harder than ever and the profits are accumulated by a very small percentage of the upper classes. Nancy argues that jouissance has now come full circle to be associated with its legal meaning which is that of possession and acquisition.

Today, jouissance has become confused with and associated with profit as well as property.   Excess has now taken on a quantitative definition in that we must possess the greatest possible number of things that we can. Nancy concludes: “It has left heaven, joy, to land again on earth.” With the ubiquity of things that we consume that push us to the brink of addition—little blue pills, a plethora of opiates, internet pornography—jouissance today has evolved into a kind of greedy consumption in which excess has become the norm. With the disappearance of excess what is left that gives us pleasure? Have we landed in an epoch of post-pleasure?

In this final part of the dialogue when Nancy brings up modern ideas of consumption and their relation to jouissance he shows that he has continued to think about philosophical topics and how they can be applied to current social and political situations. Orgasm, masturbation, sexual pleasure, addiction, and jouissance itself are topics that seem more fitting for the field of psychology and have not been explored by philosophers. Despite his years of suffering through grave illnesses and his advanced age, Nancy proves in the publication of Coming that he is as relevant and progressive as ever in his field.

Although Coming is a short book, some might be intimidated by the breadth and depth of Nancy’s thought. It is, however, an excellent and thorough introduction to the wide range of ideas on which Nancy has expertly written and a scintillating discussion of pleasure, sex, orgasm, fucking, desire, pain, and how we experience these things with our bodies. The interview style of the text in which Van Reeth summarizes Nancy’s main points and propels the conversation forward with her questions makes Coming one of his most accessible and fucking enjoyable books.

—Melissa Considine Beck

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Melissa Beck has a B.A. and an M.A. in Classics. She also completed most of a Ph.D. in Classics for which her specialty was Seneca, Stoicism and Roman Tragedy. But she stopped writing her dissertation after the first chapter so she could live the life of wealth and prestige by teaching Latin and Ancient Greek to students at Woodstock Academy in Northeastern Connecticut. She now uses the copious amounts of money that she has earned as a teacher over the course of the past eighteen years to buy books for which she writes reviews on her website The Book Binder’s Daughter. Her reviews have also appeared in World Literature Today and The Portland Book Review. She has an essay on the nature of the soul forthcoming in the 2017 Seagull Books catalog and has contributed an essay about Epicureanism to the anthology Rush and Philosophy..

May 082011
 

Enard

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The following excerpt is from the seventh chapter of Mathias Énard’s novel, Zone—his first novel translated into English from the French by Charlotte Mandell. Before Zone’s publication by Open Letter Books in December 2010, it won multiple literary awards including Prix du Livre Inter, Prix Décembre, and Prix Initiales. The excerpt finds Zone’s narrator, Francis Servain Mirkovic, amid a journey from Milan to Rome to sell the Vatican information he acquired as a spy for French intelligence. Indicative of the novel in its entirety (you can read an NC book review of Zone here), Mirkovic drifts between stories—stories of his past as a soldier for the Croatian army, stories of former comrades, stories spanning mythological epochs, and stories of lovers. Mirkovic crosses the boundaries between his present reality and the prismatic chaos of his traumatized mind, hoping this trip to sell information from the zone will be his last.

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VII

everything is harder once you reach man’s estate, living shut up inside yourself harried destitute full of memories I’m not taking this trip for nothing, I’m not curling up like a dog on this seat for nothing, I’m going to save something I’m going to save myself despite the world that persists in going forward laboriously at the speed of a handcar operated by a man with one arm, blindly a train at night in a tunnel the dark even denser I had to sleep for a bit, if only I had a watch, I just have a telephone, it’s in my jacket hanging on the hook, but if I take it out I’ll be tempted to see if I have any messages and to send one, always this passion for writing into the distance, sending signs into the ether like smoke signals gestures with no object arms hands stretching out to nothingness, to whom could I send a message, from this prepaid phone that I took care to get a tramp to purchase for me in return for a big tip, as luck would have it he had an identity card and wasn’t too wasted, the seller didn’t cause any trouble, I left my apartment dropped off a few things at my mother’s sold my books in bulk to a bookseller at the Porte de Clignancourt took three or four things, as I was sorting through things I of course came across some photos, I saw Andrija again in his over-sized uniform, Marianne in Venice, Sashka at twenty in Leningrad, La Risiera camp in Trieste, the square chin of Globocnik, Gerbens’s mustache, I took everything, and I can say that everything I own is above me in a slightly scaled-down bag, next to the little briefcase that’s going to the Vatican and that I plan to hand over as soon as I reach Rome, then tonight in my room at the Plaza on the Via del Corso I’ll go drink at the hotel bar until it closes and tomorrow morning I’ll take a bath buy myself a new suit I’ll be another man I’ll call Sashka or I’ll go straight to her place I’ll ring at her door and God knows what will happen, Zeus will decide the fate that’s suitable to allot me the Moirae will bustle about for me in their cave and what will happen will happen we’ll see if war will catch up with me again or if I’ll live to be old watching my children grow up the children of my children hidden away somewhere on an island or a suburban condo what could I possibly be living on, what, like Eduardo Rózsa I could tell the story of my life write books and screenplays for autobiographical films—Rózsa born in Santa

Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia of a communist Jewish father a resistant in Budapest was the special correspondent for a Spanish paper in Zagreb before he became a commander in the Croatian army, I met him once or twice on the front and later in Iraq, an admirer of Che Guevara and war who founded our international brigade, a group of volunteers who spoke English among themselves Warriors of the Great Free and Independent Croatia who all arrived like me after the first images of the Yugoslav madness, Eduardo was already there, he landed in Croatia in August 1991 one month before me during Osijek and the first clashes, he came from Albania and before that from Budapest and Russia where he trained for espionage for guerilla warfare for comparative literature and philosophy, a poet—today he writes books collections of poems and plays himself in films, maybe Che Guevara would have ended up the same if he hadn’t made Achilles’s choice, if he had been given life he too might have become—weapons put away, life over—an actor, he was so good-looking: like Hemingway Eduardo Rózsa wrote fast, I picture him on an August night on the terrace of the Hotel Intercontinental in Zagreb where all the foreign press stayed, the Vanguardia from Barcelona re­­proached him for describing the fighting too much and for not talking enough about politics, he downed shots as he described the first battles, the Yugoslav tanks against the shabby Croats, his hotel room was transformed into a real War Museum, pieces of shrapnel ammunition the tail-ends of rockets maps relics of all kinds, Eduardo a funny character idealist warrior converted to Islam after having fought for the Catholic crucifix, vice president of the Muslim community of Hungary, formerly press secretary for the first free Iraqi government, men want causes, gods that inspire them, and in that scorching August of 1991 in front of the Intercontinental’s pool his R5 riddled with bullets in the garage his pen in hand he thought about the Bolivian sierra about socialism about Che and his old hole-filled uniform, he had just been shot at by Serbs on the highway from Belgrade, he writes his article, it was the first time he was under fire, the half-open window shattered to pieces, the passenger seat opened up suddenly spitting out its stuffing with hisses and metal clangor, with the speed and distance he probably didn’t hear the explosions, he swerved turned off the headlights instinctively and kept going straight ahead his hands damp clutching the steering wheel sweat in his eyes up to the suburbs of Zagreb, up to the hotel, up to the foreign colleagues the two French photographers who were sharing his room, they see Eduardo arriving dripping with sweat beside himself those two twenty-five-year-old journalists also came to Croatia to get shot at and to run around the countryside with Yugoslav tanks on their tail, to them Eduardo is a master, a man of experience and now he’s arriving trembling and sweating, he says nothing, he takes out his notebook and quietly goes to get drunk on plum brandy by the pool watching the American reporters laughing in the water at their cameraman’s jokes, that’s where it happens, touched by Zeus Eduardo Che Rózsa chose his camp, the next day in Osijek he’ll go see the Croatian officers, he’ll enlist, join the Achaean ranks in a fine rage, a rage against the Serbs: the journalists saw him one fine day in a khaki uniform, a rifle on his shoulder and when I arrived at the end of September he had abandoned the pen to devote himself to war, he would come back decorated medaled honorary citizen of the new Croatia, a hero, godfather of I don’t know how many children, and he would write his exploits himself, play his own role in the film—the first time I saw him it wasn’t on the screen, he was sitting in the middle of the trench in which I was crawling in Osijek, I was scared stiff, absolutely clueless, the shells were raining down in front of us there was the Yugoslav army its tanks and its elite troops, I didn’t know where I was going I climbed up the trench my nose in the autumn smell, in the humus, to escape, to go home, to find again the attic room and Marianne’s caresses, I couldn’t hear anything and I couldn’t see much I had glimpsed my first wounded man fired my first cartridges at a hedge, the uniform of the national guard was just a hunting jacket that didn’t protect much I was shivering trembling like a tree under the explosions Rózsa was sitting there I crawled right onto him he looked at me and smiled, he gently moved the muzzle of my gun away with his foot, had me sit down, he must have said something to me of which I have no memory and when our people began firing he’s the one who propped me up against the parapet with a pat on the back so I’d start shooting too, before he disappeared, Athena comes to breathe courage and ardor into mortals in battle, and I fired calmly, I fired well before jumping out of the trench with the others, fear evaporated, flew away with the shells towards the enemy and the farm we were supposed to take, far from Zagreb, far from the Hotel Intercontinental from its covered pool its terrace and its sauna that I had never seen, far from Paris, Che Rózsa would continue his career, I heard his name many times during the war, heroic and other more mysterious deeds, like the murder of a Swiss journalist accused of espionage for I don’t know whom, some people thought he had come to infiltrate the brigade: he was found dead by strangulation during a patrol, a dozen days before the British photographer Paul Jenks was shot in the back of the head as he was investigating the previous man’s death, heroes are often wreathed in shadows, marked by Hades great eater of warriors, Eduardo as well as others, even though in those days journalists were falling like flies, in Croatia at least, or later on around besieged Sarajevo—in central Bosnia, between Vitez and Travnik, they made themselves much scarcer, aside from a few reporters from the television channel owned by the HDZ, the Croatian party in Bosnia, who had the strange habit of emerging from nowhere, like a jack-in-the-box, of appearing at the unlikeliest times and some British reporters clinging to the white tanks of the nuisances from BRITFOR—those photographers and journalists were plying a strange trade indeed, public spies in a way, professional informers for public opinion, for the majority, we saw them that way, high-end informers who hated us as much as Her Majesty’s soldiers scorned us, frustrated by inaction their hands on the triggers of their 30-millimeter guns, perched on top of their Warriors painted white, ice-cream trucks they were called in Croatia, what possible use could they serve, they collected the corpses and negotiated cease-fires so they could go on leave to Split, where they swam, danced, drank whisky before returning to count the shots in Travnik, through binoculars at their windows, or to jog around the stadium—Eduardo Che Rózsa ex-secret agent ex-journalist ex-commander of one of the best-organized brigades in eastern Slavonia writer poet screenwriter turned Muslim and activist for Iraq and Palestine, in Budapest in his suburban house, is he thinking about the Chetniks he killed, about his first two dead, torn to pieces by a grenade in a barn by the Drava River, about his comrades fallen like mine, is he still thinking about the war, about Croatia, he a Catholic by his mother a communist by his father, a murderer by the grace of God, does he remember the freezing rain of the winter of 1991 in the outskirts of Osijek, Eduardo who grew up in Chile until the coup against Allende, deported to Budapest on a chartered flight of foreign “Reds” who couldn’t be sent to the firing squad or tortured, Eduardo going in the opposite direction from me began in intelligence before he became a journalist, then a volunteer to fight with the Croats, by our side, and re­­turned, enriched with wisdom’s store, to live in Hungary through his remaining years, in poetry screenplays books strange missions, plus everything I don’t know about him probably, Eduardo Che Rózsa who didn’t recognize me when we met in Baghdad by the Tigris not long after the invasion, between a cheap restaurant and a peanut-vendor, during the fleeting euphoria of victory, of dictatorship overthrown, justice restored—the treasures of Troy were still burning, manuscripts, works of art, old men, children, while already the coalition forces were congratulating each other on the river’s shores, not worrying about the first attacks, the signs of a catastrophe of the same caliber as the one in the 1920s, or even worse, Eduardo Rózsa was strolling in the company of a few officials by the eternal Tigris, I was eating a corncob from a street vendor with a guy from the embassy, I had just met Sashka and I didn’t want war or peace or the Zone or to remember Croatia or Bosnia I wanted to go back to Rome even for just twenty-four hours to be with her, and then Commander Rózsa walks by without seeing me, a ghost, was I the ghost or him, I had already begun to disappear I was burying myself little by little in the contents of the suitcase, in Sashka whom I thought I’d seen for the first time in Jerusalem years before, in Iraq the heat was incredible, a damp vapor rising from the slow Tigris bordered with reeds where from time to time corpses and decaying carcasses ran aground like the Sava River in 1942 without perturbing the American patrols who were still strolling about like Thomson and Thompson in Tintin a blissful look on their faces as they observed around them the country they had just conquered which they didn’t know what to do with, Baghdad was drifting, ungovernable like Jerusalem or Algiers, it was de­­composing, an atom bombarded by neutrons, hunger, sickness, ignorance, mourning, pain, despair without really un­derstanding why the gods were persecuting it so, destroyed, sent back into limbo, into prehistory the way the Mongols did in 1258, libraries, museums, universities, ministries, hospitals ravaged, Rózsa and I the ex-warriors come to share the spoils or inhale its re­­mains, as specialists of defeat, of victory, of the New World Order, of the peace of the brave, of weapons of mass destruction that gave the soldiers a good laugh, they slapped each other on the back as they drank their Budweisers like after a good joke, in Basra the British were the same as in Bosnia, very sportsmanlike, professional and indifferent, they unloaded hu­­manitarian aid trucks as I’d seen them do in Travnik, as Rózsa had seen them in Osijek, except this time they were authorized to use their weapons, which they weren’t shy about using: they hunted former Ba’athists the way others hunt deer or rather wild boar in the Ardennes, the English soldiers were returning to Basra, to the same place where their grandfathers had been stationed in 1919, after the Dardanelles, after the Hejaz and Syria, the ex­­hausted Tommies rested their legs in the country of palm trees and dried lemons, by the edge of the swamps and meanderings of the Shatt al-Arab, they stuffed their faces with dates and lambs stolen from native shepherds, wondering how much longer the war would last, it lasts forever, almost a century after Gavrilo Princip’s Balkan gunshot, the referee’s pistol shot in a long-distance race, all the participants are already at the starting line, ready to dash forward into the world of Ares great eater of warriors, hoping to return loaded with treasure and glory: Che Rózsa commander covered in medals from the great patriotic Croatian war, Vlaho or me decorated with the order of the grateful nation, Andrija with a fine black marble tombstone with no corpse, To our brother the Hero, he no longer has a body, Andrija, no bones beneath his slab, no gold pin on his jacket he’s a name a phrase a brother and a hero, I was thinking of him in Baghdad conquered humiliated subjected and pillaged as I passed Rózsa the Hungarian from Bolivia a convert to Islam and to international aid, president of the Muslim community of Budapest, or something like that, after having been a fervent defender of Opus Dei, was he informing for the Hungarians, or the Russians, or the English, were we still colleagues, colleagues of the shadows—in the night of war, of the Zone, of memories of the dead, we were living together, without seeing each other, we were sharing the same life, passing each other by the edge of the Tigris, that Styx like the Tiber like the Jordan the Nile or the Danube like all those deadly rivers running into the sea

—Mathias Énard translated by Charlotte Mandell

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May 082011
 

This Ancient World
A Review of Mathias Énard’s Zone
by Mary Stein

Zone
By Mathias Énard
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Open Letter Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-9

I am lucky enough to have experienced the horrors of war only indirectly in the form of newspaper articles and television newscasts. I remember small blue-on-black explosions of sparkling shards arching through Iraq’s sky, ticker tape reeling across the bottom of the screen attempting to quantify casualties like stock market quotes. But in 1991 during the First Gulf War, a series of wars began tearing Yugoslavia apart—a nation splitting at cultural and political seams—and in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro, people were faced with an entirely different wartime experience: Instead of watching dim explosions on the television, they found war erupting in their cities, backyards, homes and bodies.

Translator, Charlotte Mandell

Zone, Mathias Énard’s fourth novel (of five), his first novel translated into English is an attempt to articulate the experience of the Balkan wars from the inside. Charlotte Mandell’s deft translation from French highlights Zone’s lyric quality, conveying the retroactive point of view of a narrator who condenses the personal and cultural impact of the Yugoslav wars along with historical war crimes, genocides and ethnic cleansings dating back to Troy.

Zone’s narrator, Francis Servain Mirkovic, is a French-born Croat, a former soldier who fought “…for a free and independent Croatia, a free and independent Herzegovina and finally for a free and independent Croatian Bosnia…,” thus, in his own mind, straddling the boundary between victim and perpetrator. In the present story of the novel, Mirkovic is a spy for French intelligence collecting stories of war crimes “…like someone who becomes a referee having been a boxer and himself no longer touches the faces that explode beneath fists, he counts the blows…”

Under the influence of alcohol and amphetamines, Mirkovic has just boarded a train from Milan to Rome intending to sell the Vatican another “sad piece of the past in an entirely ordinary plastic suitcase wherein is written the fate of hundreds of men who are dead or on the point of disappearing…” Using the identity of a childhood friend, Yvan Deroy, as a cover, Mirkovic finds himself “lost now with an assumed name between Milan and Rome, in the company of living ghosts.” A bizarre interaction with a stranger further unhinges Mirkovic, inciting a state of post-traumatic stress. As Mirkovic’s train crosses city boundaries, his erratic mind wanders, and he finds himself unable to separate his own trauma-tainted memories from the stories and names of the dead that fill his suitcase.

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