Published in the latest issue of the online, open-access journal World Picture, on the theme of abandon. You can read and download my essay and the others in the volume, here: World Picture 10: Abandon
THESE SCENES OF UNBECOMING
A conversation with John Paul Ricco, Nasrin Himada and Etienne Turpin
Tuesday, the 31st of March 2015
6-8PM
Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
To celebrate the release of our recent respective publications, I will join Nasrin Himada and Etienne Turpin in a discussion of the ethics and politics of unbecoming. Within this theoretical framework, and in relation to various scenes, topics for engagement will include: violence, sex, death, brutality, sharing, extinction, pleasure, animality, mourning, confinement, and bodies. Copies of the publications will be available for purchase.
Nasrin Himada currently holds a post-doctoral research fellowship in Communications at the Université de Montréal, and is a visiting scholar in the Aesthetics and Politics program at Cal Arts. She is co-editor (with Chris Lee) of issue number 7 (Fall/Winter 2014 of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy, on the theme of “Incarceration.”
Etienne Turpin is a philosopher living and working in Jakarta, Indonesia, where is the director of anexact office. He is the co-editor (with Anna-Sophie Springer) of the two-volume Intercalations: Volume 1 Fantasies of the Library; and Volume 2 Land & Animal & Nonanimal; both published by K. Verlag and Haus der Kulturen Welt, 2015.
In 2015-16 I will be a Faculty Research Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto. Released from all teaching and administrative duties, I will have the opportunity to devote the year to further research for one of my two current research projects on “the collective afterlife of things.” Here’s a brief description of the project.
Based upon the conjecture of the “collective afterlife” recently put forth by the philosopher Samuel Scheffler (Death and the Afterlife), in which he argues that our ability to lead value-laden lives is more dependent upon our confidence in the long-term survival or afterlife of humanity, than our concern with our own survival of death or that of our friends and loved ones, my project asks: what do things tell us about societies and the social dimension of valuing things as mattering, not only based upon their histories, but upon their futures? In other words, their collective afterlives. Based upon this “futurity thesis” of ethical decision, action and responsibility, my project is further motivated by the following question: in what ways are aesthetic forms and experiences, including art as a thing that matters, both in terms of artistic practice and as artistic object/work/thing dependent upon a shared confidence in the future survival of humanity? I explore these questions, by extending and developing upon work that I have recently published in my book The Decision Between Us, on forms of inoperative aesthetic praxis that consist in collectively partaking in the decision to participate in the withdrawal, retreat, and disappearance of the work of art, including in the work’s material manifestation and configuration of things. Out of this I have developed the notion of the already-unmade, as the deconstruction of Duchamp’s readymade work of art. With this current project, I want to identify and examine a number of artistic, literary, and filmic examples, beyond those that I focused on in my recently published work.
An emphasis on the “interpersonal” and interactive in contemporary art is often considered a riposte to what Bourriaud has termed “imposed” or institutionalized social relations. Ricco’s close investigation of the non-relational aspects of relationality—the manner in which we do not come together—is, therefore, a crucial intervention into the aesthetic and ethical impasse that is ever-present in discussions of art after the participatory turn…In substituting the act of decision for a more common art historical/critical activity like “evaluation,” Ricco shows that the promise of a truly relational practice lies in maintaining a shared space that we do not stand apart from or in judgment of.
From: Christa Noel Robbins, “Together Apart,” Art in America, January 2014.
I am re-reading some of Maurice Blanchot’s essays on Marx, Marxism and communism; partly prompted by Derrida’s own reading of these texts in Specters of Marx, but also as part of my ongoing thinking about the work of Georges Bataille and the forms of sociality and being-together that find their structure in what I refer to as “the intimacy of the outside.”
At the very end of “Slow Obsequies” (Friendship), Blanchot’s review essay of Henri Lefebvre’s La Somme et la reste (1959), M.B. says something about “measurelessness” that immediately brought me back to a blog post of mine from last summer, around the question of fraternity in and for Derrida and Nancy, prompted by my engaging with some recent work by my friend Philip Armstrong. Specifically, my having taken issue with Derrida’s inability (in his book Rogues) to understand how Nancy can argue that the incommensurable is the only measure that we share in common.
For Blanchot, philosophy’s claim of the end, including the end of philosophy (as by Lefebvre, but so many others in France in the 1950s), is always a claim for a measureless end. As he goes on to say, it is through this claim that philosophy reintroduces “the exigency in it for a new measure beyond all measure. In this way, measurelessness [his emphasis] would be the last word of a philosophy ready to be silent but still continuing to say to us: Measurelessness is the measure of all philosophical wisdom.”
What is all the more remarkable however, is that as I might want to rush back with this in order to further indict Derrida, Blanchot’s very last sentence, quoted above, carries a footnote which reads: “It must be said here, even in a very brief note, that in his writings Jacques Derrida poses the question of the ‘end of philosophy’ in a new—different (posing it without exposing it)—way.” This in and around 1959!
Derrida was of course completely aware of this text, especially at the time that he was writing about Nancy in Rogues (2003), a book that follows Specters by ten years (1993). So it is curious that Derrida does not draw upon this passage from Blanchot on the measureless, when he grapples with this concept in his reading of—and friendship with–Nancy. Is the measureless what Derrida will refer to (in Specters) as the “undeconstructible”? And as I tried to suggest awhile back, is Nancy’s assertion of this measurelessness (or incommensurabilty) as that which we share in common, the way in which we might say that he deconstructs deconstruction AND radically re-thinks friendship?For as Blanchot asserts in the quoted passage above, measurelessness is the measure of all philosophical wisdom, but it may also be the wisdom that is experienced as friendship.
U of T’s John Ricco is an associate professor of contemporary art, media theory, and criticism. His work focuses on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophies of politics, among other things, as discussed in his latest monograph, The Decision Between Us. His latest work is billed as an “exploration of the spaces between us”, including “scenes of passionate, erotic pleasure as well as deep loss and mourning”. Ricco took some time to talk to The Medium about his new monograph and his inspiration to write it, and provided a preview of his current project.
The Medium: What inspired this desire to conceptualize the staging of the space of decision in 20th-century art?
John Ricco: I have always been interested in thinking about social relations, and the spaces and forms of being together. In my first book, The Logic of the Lure, I focused on scenes of social sexual attraction. In the new book, I was interested in moving from questions of attraction and what lures one out toward other places and people, to the spaces that are shared between us in our social relations and encounters—spaces that are ones of separation. I argue that the extent to which we partake in the social pleasures is the extent to which we sustain this separated spacing. “Decision” is one name for how we participate in this space of shared separation. In the six chapters of my book, I look at works by various late-20th-century artists, writers, and theorists as examples of such scenes of decision in drawing, photography, and installation art, amongst other art forms and genres. One might argue that such staging of the scene of decision is present in art across the centuries, but my study is limited to examples from 1953 to the present, in part because this is the art historical period that I specialize in, but also because many of the works from this period foreground the participatory role of the audience or reader in his or her encounter with works of art, texts, etc. To decide to partake in the work, and thus immediately to be confronted with questions as to how and why to partake, is another way in which I think of these as scenes of aesthetic and ethical decisions.
TM: What was it about Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories specifically that drew you to his works more than anyone else’s?
JR: There are so many things about Nancy’s work that I find compelling and useful for my own. First and foremost is the way in which he is committed to conceiving such essential philosophical questions of existence and being, not in terms of the individual subject or ego, but as always shared. For Nancy, being is always “being with”. If that is so—and I completely think it is—then obviously the ethical is inseparable from the ontological because the ethical is the question of how to be and coexist with others.
TM: How long did this book take to complete considering your busy academic schedule?
JR: A book like this is almost always a long time in the making. It requires several years of reading, research, and conceptualization, along with many stages of writing and rewriting. Along the way, I presented parts of it at academic conferences, workshops, and public lectures, and/or as articles in journals. I finished the first draft of the complete manuscript and submitted it to the press right around the end of 2011. It then took a little more than two years for it to be proofread and edited, and for it to go from manuscript to a fully designed, formatted, indexed, and printed book. This entire process from conception to publication took about five years to complete and many hands were involved in addition to my own.
In terms of my academic work, essentially whatever time is not allocated for my teaching or administrative duties is devoted to my research and writing. I try to strike a balance between all three aspects of my job, and to set aside time nearly every day to work on whatever research or writing projects I am currently engaged in. It is easier during the summer, when I am not teaching, to make significant progress on my own work—and, of course, sabbaticals, such as the one I am on right now, provide incredibly valuable uninterrupted time to focus on a long-term project.
TM: Tim Dean called you “one of our most brilliant philosophers of visuality”. Does praise like that influence how you write?
JR: Well, I can easily return the compliment and say, unequivocally, that Tim Dean is one of our most brilliant philosophers of sexuality. Everyone should read his book Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, which is hands-down the best book on sex and sexuality out there. So when someone whose work you admire and have learned so much from says something like that about you, you cannot help but be completely honored and deeply humbled at once. As far as influencing the way I write… well, it certainly raises the stakes, doesn’t it!
TM: Can you tell me a little more about Non-Consensual Futures? How do you feel the use of violence has altered neo-liberalism?
JR: You are referring to my current research and book project, which I had been calling Non-Consensual Futures, but which now carries the title The Outside Not Beyond: Pornographic Faith and the Economy of the Eve. It is the third book in a trilogy, following upon The Logic of the Lure and The Decision Between Us. As I mentioned earlier, the first book was about attraction and the second was about decision, and now the third is about departure and abandonment. It grows out of two areas of research: one on the images of bodies falling from the World Trade Centre towers on 9/11, and the other on various instances of excess and the overflowing of corporeal limits. What ties them together are the ways in which bodies come to be defined in terms of their exposure to the outside, a spacing that does not lie in some abstract or transcendent realm “beyond”, but rather is right there in such ordinary and everyday instances as the step of a foot, or the partial opening of the mouth. “Pornographic faith” is my way of naming the thoroughly corporeal comportment and exposure to this radical uncertainty, the pleasure, and of abandoning the sense of one possessing a secure ground from which to act, or a definite end toward which one will eventually reach. I argue that another name for this is “freedom”.
Much of my work on neo-liberalism’s use of violence originally emerged from two undergraduate visual culture seminars that I regularly teach in the Department of Visual Studies at UTM, one called “Capital, Spectacle, War” and the other “Architectures of Vision”. In my classes, we are interested in the ways in which images and visual spectacle are deployed by the militarized neo-liberal state to shock its subjects into states of fear and anxiety, as evidenced, for example, in the Bush administration’s use of such images of violence as part of its “war on terror”.
This interview has been edited for length.
Published: Monday, September 29th, 2014
A seminar (panel) for the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference. Seattle, Washington, March 26-29, 2015.
Co-organized with Etienne Turpin
After Acéphale: Politics & Poetics of Assemblage in the Decapitated Economy
Human life is exhausted from serving as the head of, or the reason for,
the universe. To the extent that it becomes this head and this reason,
to the extent that it becomes necessary to the universe, it accepts servitude.
— Georges Bataille
With Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, the early-21st-century species of “indebted man” as outlined by Maurizio Lazzarato, and the severed heads that are the iconic and accursed remnants in Julia Kirsteva’s meditation on “capital visions,” leading theorists of political economy have articulated the inextricable relations between language and capital, sovereignty and guilt, representation and instrumental reason, insurrection and occupation.
In light of these developments, and in the city where the anti-globalization movement was launched into public consciousness fifteen years ago, this seminar seeks to draw upon lessons that we might still take from one of the major philosophical and literary precursors: Georges Bataille’s general economy of excess expenditure and waste, and his phantasmology of sovereignty without debt or servitude, as presented in La Part Maudite (1967, The Accursed Share), and in such literary works as Madame Edwarda (1956), Le Coupable (1944; Guilty), and La Tombe de Louis XXX (various dates).
In doing so, this panel explores the links that Bataille made between non-knowledge and rebellion (as in his eponymous lecture from 1952), and draws out from close readings of Bataille, the image of an acéphalic body of the general intellect, and its political and poetic assemblage. To acquit ourselves of the rational servitude that Bataille correctly identified as endemic to capitalist economies, we may need, finally, to lose our heads and pursue what might be properly called “acephalic reason” in pleasure, literature, philosophy, and politics.
“You cannot deconstruct something that belongs to someone else. If I deconstruct something of someone else’s, I simply break it.”
(from an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, published in, Retreating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy. Fordham University Press, 2012, 316).
We recall what was perhaps the most pervasive and frustrated accusation waged against the Occupy Wall Street movement: that it operated without an articulated political agenda, program, manifesto, and set of specific goals and objectives. But while in certain respects this is inarguable, at the same time OSW represented, or better, demonstrated—in the very form of its particular spatial presentation (occupation)—how it is that “to occupy” can mean to come together and to be occupied with belonging (being-with and -together), in public, amongst other anonymous strangers and passersby, while at the same time “not being preoccupied with ends.” It is the latter phrasing, which I take from Jean-Luc Nancy, that can begin to serve as one definition of the political in its praxis and spacing. It is through this non-destinal and inoperative praxis (when it comes to the imperative for “ends”) that a group is capable of being formed, and in such a way that the group and its formation (assemblage, occupation) together can be defined as political. The contention (which this blog is an attempt to affirm) is that perhaps before we speak of a “coming community” we might need to give ourselves over to the idea of an “unbecoming community.” OSW was one of its more recent manifestations.
When it comes to theory, friendship, and the conversation that can ensue between and through the two, the question(s) of what we wish to hold on to (terms, words, concepts), which we want to abandon, is always fundamental to their shared sustaining. In particular, words of and from the other, including and perhaps especially when that other is for you, someone like a brother. This is what we might refer to as a “fraternization (or not) of terms.”
These thoughts occurred to me recently, as I was reading a draft of a current essay by my friend Philip Armstrong, on fraternity and friendship in the work of (and between) Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. (Philip’s piece is forthcoming in an issue of the journal Diacritics; it is outstanding, so be sure to track it down).
As a partial response to the question as to which words or terms we wish to hold on to, to retain, to willingly inherit, or to distinguish oneself from, we might say that it is always a matter of “more than one” and “less than one” which, as Derrida curiously suggests, at the opening of his lecture and what was to become the first part of his important late book Rogues, is a relation that is more elliptical than aporetic. For Derrida, the ellipsis is a figure for “minus one” and “more than one”—excess and withdrawal, at once.
This is something like the rhythm of originary abandonment and perhaps also of friendship, fraternity, or love. Not only an abandonment “from” identity, the proper, and self-same (or, conversely, abandonment by or of the other, in alterity), but as Philip so strongly argues, an abandonment “to”…the elliptical sense of shared existence in its sustaining (e.g. decision) of the spacing of separation (e.g. decision).
“Love” would be one of those “technical measures of equality” that Nancy speaks of in The Experience of Freedom, and that leaves Derrida—in the text cited above—so perplexed. Such measures are, for Nancy, forms of praxis that are “affirmations of the political.” Meaning, affirmations of the spacing of incommensurable sharing and sharing of the incommensurable, that is opened up and given access to, by the political. Each time, measured against nothing (this is “freedom” as Nancy defines it). It is this freedom, measured against nothing and not returning to itself, that renders this rhythm syncopated and overflowing (and hence perhaps something other than “aporetic”).
In Rogues, what Derrida says he cannot understand, is the way in which the incommensurable can be thought of as a measure, and a common measure at that. This also means that he cannot understand why Nancy would want to have retained the notion of fraternity, in his thinking of freedom, and as the name for partaking in this measure. Which is to say that for Nancy, what commonly goes by the name of “common measure” is the incommensurable, to the extent that sharing or being-in-common is always a sharing in that which is in excess of any general measure or equivalence (again, this, for Nancy, is “freedom”). It is as though the measure is not, nor can never be shared in common, since as measurable it will deny or appropriate the separated spacing that must remain incommensurable in order to be shared in its sense, and not say, simply exchanged in its value (according to a measure of general equivalence). Therefore, being-in-common is sharing, and sharing is partaking in the incommensurable, which is, in turn, the only measure of being-in-common.
Nancy gives the name “fraternity” to the gathering of those who partake in common in this incommensurable measure, as in the Christian and Freudian figures of brothers without fathers. Hence this emptying out (or dismembering) of the Father into the body, is part of what Nancy has called the deconstruction of Christianity. Yet we might ask whether this fraternity is a partaking/sharing in deconstruction, as well. That is, to the extent that the latter may be understood as a partaking in the dismembered body of the father, the law, the logos, and any other common substance and measure. It is in this regard that Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity may also be a way of thinking about partaking in (by deconstructing) deconstruction. If Derrida was the first (and last?) deconstructionist, is Nancy the first to deconstruct deconstruction?
unbecoming community 