Subject: Sense - World - End
From: Samantha Longoni (samlong@club-internet.fr)
Date: Wed Mar 22 2000 - 14:49:08 CST
Initial thoughts on Jean-Luc Nancy's "The Sense of the World"
(I apologize for jumping ahead but I yet have to receive the Haraway book.)
Sense - World - End
Why continue on declaring the end of the world?
The "end" has been declared since hundreds of years. Philosophers of this past century in modern and post-modern theories did so in different ways. The Dolcinians (Frati Dolciniani) in medieval times as well, simply by having a more realistic vision of the world and of human interaction and for this reason were considered heretics and burnt alive.
Passing from one discovery to the other, from an historical, social, psychological, sexual phase to the other we can obviously speak of an "end" but why don't we talk about "beginning" instead? About a constant beginning, a constant potency / potentiality, re-evaluation of values, of life, of nature, a beginning that has been lasting since the beginning of all times and that is potentially infinite.
".existence precedes and succeeds itself. ." writes Nancy.
"Sense" and "truth" of the world have evolved with the world itself and with humanity; since Darwin, Hobbs with his "homo homini lupus", and so on. We are in constant transition, in "transitivity of being" as Nancy calls it, which translates into difference, differentiation, mutations, and variations.
". no longer a sense of history but a history of sense."
Nancy: ". we are at the confines of our space, we don't occupy anymore the 'original point of perspective such as the 'focal point' but we touch our limits on all sides. ." Can we speak of finitude of the universe or of man? I hope not!
"Confines" presuppose limits, and limits can be 'pushed' and 'overcome' if there is the necessity of doing so. Evolution itself is a necessity and a 'naturality' as well: of perception, of space, of sensing. (Let's think of New Technologies..)
There are neither limits nor confines if we think of a perpetual motion towards the coming - becoming - happening and we do have "proof" of a philosophy of "non-closure", waiting for the infinite opening of the finite, and giving the world the possibility of beginning over and over again in itself.
Is it too easy? No, it is rather difficult to sustain and live up to evolution and passage rather then declaring the end justified by the "void" or "death" that lays upon us. This void is precisely the trap of an absolute dualistic thinking: death Vs birth.
Why not stop "interpreting" the world and start "acting" in the world, what Nancy calls "being -towards-the world" (Heidegger spoke of "being-in-the-world" and Deleuze of "being-for-the-world".). An activity of transformation, of bringing into presence, of making appear and appearing as objects of the world, and sensing as subjects of the world.
"Desire, gift and Agathon", Agathon representing a certain "realization". The desire of the subject is projected on the object of the gift that is to be included in a bigger picture of potency of realization. A potency of sense, of satisfaction, of ex-istence, of a "being-towards".
"Sense" as the encounter of desire and gift - subject and object - coming / being towards one another, not in an "appropriation" mode but in an "activity" mode such as "ex-istence". Existence is factual and this factuality is part of the world, as "a possibility of". Matter itself is not a closed, finite element. ". matter is the reality of the difference", similar to Deleuze's interpretation of Heterogeneity, the conditio-sine-qua-non for communication.
Great are the words of Piet Mondrian in an article written in 1927 Jazz and Neo-Plasticism "They appear simultaneously with movement in various spheres that are trying to break with the individual form and subjective emotion: they appear no longer as 'beauty' but as 'life' realized through pure rhythm, which expresses unity because it is not closed."
More ". Culture will progressively free life from the oppression of matter, until it matures into a new culture."
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