Cosa volante: Le désir des arts dans la pensée de Jean-Luc Nancy by Ginette Michaud (review)

Ginette Michaud offers us one of the most comprehensive series of essays devoted to Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on the arts. Composed of nine essays and three interviews with Nancy himself, a key feature of Michaud’s book is the numerous references to ‘occasional’ pieces by Nancy rather than to his more widely known works—the book is meticulously annotated in terms of citations from works that are either difficult to find or unpublished. These works include catalogue essays, interviews, and curated exhibitions, those seemingly endless ‘projects’ to which Nancy offers his boundless energy. As Michaud amply demonstrates, these occasional ‘distractions’ are not simply marginal to Nancy’s more mature work but play a constitutive role in his thinking. Indeed, what emerges from these more occasional texts is a persistent series of shared problematics that Michaud excavates and develops with remarkable care and precision.

Crucial to the argument is that Nancy’s writings on the arts are nowhere reducible to an interest in ‘aesthetics,’ as if his writings could be separated into works on ontology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and so on. Rather, Michaud places emphasis on singular topoi or motifs—the opening of the mouth, an appendix to the body, drawing a line, the saying of a prayer—acts that open onto the shared problematics decisive for Nancy’s thinking: the plurality of the arts; emphasis on questions of form or the forming of form and the creation of worlds; the relation of art to desire and pleasure; the relation between mimesis and methexis; and questions of presence, exposition, showing, and perception, which all turn around Nancy’s insistence on thinking the sense of the world.

This emphasis on occasional writings and on specific topoi would also mark a difference from other books on Nancy organized around key themes (community, religion, the body, etc.). Crucially, however, focusing on the arts engages the relation between the arts and the political (some of Nancy’s most illuminating remarks on politics appear in the interviews), as well as a remarkable closing essay on prayer, suggesting that it is precisely through the arts that Nancy’s writings might be approached in fundamentally new ways.

Cosa volante is composed of a singular weaving of writings, less commentaries than texts revealing Michaud’s tact of grafting onto Nancy’s texts and interviews. This grafting suggests something of the book’s intimacy with Nancy’s work and a simultaneous distancing, creating essays that are less expository than “trans-scriptions” of Nancy’s texts, all of which necessitate touching the limits of Nancy’s writings, in the sense of the extremities that they themselves address (part one of the book is framed around the “extremities” of the “Nancyean body”). This grafting can be rephrased in terms of the book’s strong emphasis on questions of ekphrasis, the term that organizes Michaud’s larger project on the role of ekphrasis in the writings of Cixous and Derrida as well as Nancy, of which Cosa volante forms an integral part.

A remarkably rigorous contribution to our readings of Nancy, let us hope the book appears in English very soon.