Armstrong, P. - From Appearance To Exposure

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DOI: 10.1177/1470412909354253
2010 9: 11 Journal of Visual Culture
Philip Armstrong
From Appearance to Exposure
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Vol 9(1): 1127 DOI 10.1177/1470412909354253
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
From Appearance to Exposure
Philip Armstrong
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
12 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 13
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 Tran-
Duc-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 spectacular-
democratic-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
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
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-in-
common 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:
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 being-
between: 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
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.
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,
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
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
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-geistig-
zu-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
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 self-
given. 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
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
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
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 Garca-
Dttmann (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
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
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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:
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University Press.
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Luc 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.
Lvinas, E. (1998) Discovering Existence with Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
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Martis, J. (2005) Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject.
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Nancy, J-L. (1982) La partage des voix. Paris: Galile.
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CA: Stanford University Press.
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Nancy, J-L. (2006) Multiple Arts: The Muses 11. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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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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