The Art of the Encounter. A review of Zsuzsa Baross, Encounters: Gérard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis

The epigraph of Zsuzsa Baross’s outstanding study comes from Gilles Deleuze: “To encounter is to find, to capture, to steal, but there is no method for finding other than a long preparation.” What Baross puts on display is the art of the encounter—in the painting and 159 drawings of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s Suite Grünewald (1994-1996), in several films by Claire Denis, in texts on the cinema of Denis and on the body by Jean-Luc Nancy, and in Baross’s study itself. The art of the encounter, Baross shows, is a discipline of the contingent, a long preparation for the advent of the impersonal event, “an interruption, an irruption, opening (to) another future” (7). The artist or philosopher cannot will the event into existence. It is “[a]leatory, contingent, it arrives” (11). It impinges on art and thought as the force of an unforeseeable encounter. But the artist and philosopher can stage encounters, if not control them, by assembling images and concepts in experimental combinations, awaiting the arrival of an event, and then, should it arrive, composing paintings, films or texts that capture and amplify the force of that event.

Encounters has three chapters: “In Place of a Preface … ,”an introductory section on the concept of the encounter; “159 + 1 Variations or Painting Becoming Music,” a lengthy analysis of Titus-Carmel’s Suite Grünewald; and “Il y a du Rapport Sexuel: The Body in the Cinema of Claire Denis and the Writing of Jean-Luc Nancy,” an essay exploring the network of relations Denis and Nancy have forged in the creation of their respective works.

Baross opens with a reference to Jacques Derrida’s statement in Dissemination that “this (therefore) will not have been a book,” adding that not only will Encounters likewise not have been a book, but its preface will not have been a preface. This gesture toward Derrida is less a recognition of the problems of origins and closure in philosophical writing than an articulation of the necessities entailed in thinking the encounter. As Baross says of her non-book, “the movements the writing both tracks and sets into motion, pursues and itself generates in the texts abide by a different logic. Aleatory, contingent, fortuitous, its operations necessarily defy any pro- or pre-vision and announce its presence only after the fact” (2). The encounter’s effects may be shown but not predicted, and Baross’s aim is to make her non-book itself a “showing (a ‘monstration,’ to borrow the term of Jean-Luc Nancy, rather than a demonstration)” of the consequences of encounters: “resonances and echoes, montage and variation effects that from a distance join distant texts, texts and images, a writing and a painting, painting and drawing, thought and cinema, the cinema and the body” (2-3).

Baross initially approaches the artistic and philosophical encounter as “a relation by contact,” reviewing various “mediators, transporters, carriers that deliver the new by way of contact, without, however, the power of determining what passes in that contact” (4). She first considers the basic relation of touch and then moves to the relations of intrusion, adoption, appropriation, abduction, and theft. Nancy’s L’Intrus, a meditation on his heart-transplant surgery, provides a graphic figure of intrusion. Denis’s film L’Intrus, inspired by Nancy’s text, exemplifies adoption, in that the film is not a faithful adaptation of Nancy’s essay but a treatment that invents a relation: “The film adopts the book as one adopts a child, gives it a wholly other future, a future unthinkable/unimaginable from the place where it was found” (5-6). Denis’s adoption of Nancy is like the appropriation painters make of earlier artists’ work, such as Picasso’s repaintings of canvasses of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya, and Manet. And what Jean-Luc Godard calls abduction is the wholesale appropriation of visual and sonic materials he conducts in Histoire(s) du cinéma...