Coming by Jean-Luc Nancy (review)

Jean-Luc Nancy’s reputation is an impressive one. He has published works on philosophy, deconstruction, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, yet his work also frequently displays an interest in the social and the political. The small book being reviewed here, Coming (La jouissance in the original publication from 2014), has orgasm as its central concern, and so it is being reviewed in this journal.

After an introduction, the book features as its most important piece (it comprises over half the volume) a transcription of a conversation, “Coming,” between Nancy and Adèle van Reeth, who is a media personality in France. Nancy and van Reeth shoot the breeze for nearly ninety pages, with Nancy doing most of the talking, on what the semantics of coming are. What is orgasm? How might we like to think of it? Philosophers such as Kant (5–6), Spinoza (6–7), and Plato (16, 62–63) appear briefly now and again, as do examples from popular culture, such as the film Trouble Every Day (23), and high culture in a discussion of the composer Messiaen (24). Nancy’s knowledge about bodies and about culture in all its variety is on display throughout the book. In revealing the significance of orgasm, he at first makes it appear as if orgasm is to be thought of as a singular thing: “We could say that the subject of jouissance is one that only signifies itself. Or even that it’s jouissance that signifies itself, hence is a sort of pure form” (31). Later, Nancy asserts in a discussion of Rilke that “writing and sexuality are the same pleasure [jouissance]” (50, brackets in the original). In the later parts of the discussion, a sort of duality develops, playing off the notion of enjoyment to see in orgasm both joyous abandon and acquisitiveness (73). The conversation concludes by noting that the alienation of modern society has made the thrill we should be getting from our bodies (if I have understood the conversation correctly) into one that has been misdirected into intoxicants and antisocial, acquisitive behaviors such as trading in stocks (81).

The rest of the book consists of four short essays that develop in a non-systematic way some of the themes addressed in “Coming.” These pieces are poetic and free. In the first, “Body of Pleasure,” Nancy contemplates how we relate to the body during sex, how it is and is not us. “Rühren, Berühren, Aufruhr (Moving, Touching, Uprising)” is a loose set of reflections on the relation between touching and being touched and the resulting mental states. The third essay, “Neither Seeing nor Having (Ni le voir ni l’avoir),” takes its inspiration from an unfinished text by the poet Gérard Granel that reflects upon the scene in Canto V of Inferno where Dante faints dead away after he hears the story of Francesca and Paolo. Surveying politics, desire, identity, form, and consciousness, with the addition of undefined terminology such as archai (128) and caesura (126), this essay is poetically intense and vatic. The final essay, “Nude Enumerated,” is a short but searching appreciation of the nude body in prose.

Coming does keep the promise of its title to the extent that the moment of abandon that characterizes orgasm is consistently approached. I also appreciated that it was not heterosexist. Lesbian, gay, bi, queer, or straight readers will find a way into this text.

I have some reservations. There are small errors here and there. For example, the definition offered for the Latin term virtus (6) is not correct. Ramini (121)—Rimini is surely what is wanted—is another. The ruminations on the fall of the Roman Republic, changes to subjectivity, and the coming of Christianity are superficial and distracting because of their undisciplined nature (57–58). This brings me to my ultimately negative appraisal of this little book. I approached it as a scholar interested in “sexuality” in history. Orgasm, coming, is most assuredly part...