"L'Art et les gens": Jean-Luc Nancy's Genealogical Aesthetics

It is an ancient, immemorial scene, and it does not take place just once, but repeats itself indefinitely, with regularity, at every gathering of the hordes, who come to learn of their tribal origins, of their origins in brotherhoods, in peoples, or in cities--gathered around fires burning everywhere in the mists of time.

(Jean-Luc Nancy, "Of Divine Places")

Jean-Luc Nancy's treatise on aesthetics, The Muses, begins with a journey into the field of etymology, into the roots and origins of the name of the Muses. Rather than following the Greek etymology--in which "Muse" relates to music, the arts, and through manthanein to the process of learning as well--Nancy pursues the Latin roots and imagines the Muses as more encompassing manifestations of the spirit: "The Muses get their name from a root that indicates ardor, the quick-tempered tension that leaps out in impatience, desire, or anger, the sort of tension that aches to know and to do. In a milder version, one speaks of the 'movements of the spirit'" (1996, 1).

In preferring this route through the Latin mens (spirit or soul), however, Nancy skips over another connection implicit in his own language. This "movement of the spirit" that yields such ardor and tumult can be seen as the mental correlative of the menses, the movement of the blood in the female bodily cycle. I am suggesting that the excitement, arousal, and force associated with the mens--let us say, with the movement of the poetic spirit--might operate here as a metonymic displacement of the menses, which mark and interrupt the internal movements of the female body, thus inscribing on it the passage of time. This image of time's traces on the female body becomes all the more exegetically poignant, since the principal function of the Muses in Nancy's text consists in delineating the temporality of art by marking the rise and fall of artistic movements and epochs, as well as of aesthetic philosophies.

Embodiments of the divine force that visited the poet in the Homeric times, the Muses gradually disappeared until they were reduced in modernity to a single muse. The modern muse, however, is less of a divinity and more of a ceremonial evocation of her predecessors. She is a figure of speech, an ornamental apostrophe to an external being that ironically exposes the absence of any such genuine externality in a solipsistically self-reflexive age. This is why in his study of the great modernist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, Yves Delègue speaks of the poet's "muse moderne de l'Impuissance" (1997, 58), namely, a muse denuded of her divine omnipotence, who is now only a faint index of the vigor of her ancient precursors.

Earlier on, Theodor Adorno also commented on the disappearance of the Muses as a modernist motif in Eduard Mörike's poem "On a Walking Tour." Entering a small town at sunset, where "On the streets lies the red evening light," Mörike completes this melancholy image of the bygone day with an invocation to the muse, equally now a figure of the past, enveloped in the glow of the dusk and emptied of her divine fervor, though still capable of a rousing sentimentality: "I am as if drunken, led astray-- / Oh muse, you have touched my heart, / With a breath of love!" (Mörike qtd. in Adorno 1991, 47-48). "It is as if this word [muse]," writes Adorno, "one of the most overused in German classicism, gleamed once again, truly as if in the light of the setting sun, . . . and as though even in the process of disappearing it were possessed of all the power to enrapture which an invocation of the muse in the modern idiom, comically inept, usually fails to capture" (48). In part, we can say that a lonely muse is possible only in her disappearance and that she moves us...