Natality and Finitude

5. On the Threshold of Finitude: Nancy

five 5 On the Threshold of Finitude: Nancy God is not the limit of man but the limit of man is divine. In other words, man is divine in the experience of his limits. —Georges Bataille All union of the sexes is a sign of death; and we could not know love were we to live indefinitely. —Anatole France We stumble into the world on the offbeat. Natality has its own syncopated temporality according to which birth happens without our knowing and every one of us is here for years before we realize it, before we come to find ourselves in the midst of things. Since we are before we know and are known before we know, the gap between coming to be and coming to know is a time crammed with experience that is not quite mine and not even quite experience at all, falling as it does beyond the reach of memory. This is the place of the immemorial , and it is a matter of syncopation not just in the sense of rhythm and its offbeat but also in the sense of the syncope as a moment of unconsciousness and, as the Greek root of the word says, in the sense of syn-cope or cutting together. We have seen that Arendt,troubled by the threats of racist biological determinism, could not give the material world its due and did not effectively engage the material manifestations of natality. For Nancy, by contrast, material being and embodiment are central and unavoidable . In his signature concerns with plurality, sense and meaning, creation , and in-finitude, he takes up the Heideggerian task of thinking OBYRNE_final_pages.indd 107 7/28/10 2:39:26 PM  s Natality and Finitude what it is to be a finite being, but in doing so he never loses sight of the question posed to us by the world that is materially but that does not offer an account of why it is. It is the same question posed by our existence as inescapably embodied beings. As Nancy writes, body has the same structure as spirit without presupposing itself as the reason for the structure.1 We can no longer rely on a transcendent creator to give the meaning of the world, and in this chapter I propose, on the basis of Nancy’s renovation of the thought of the creatio ex nihilo, that it is now a matter of relying on our own creativity, not in the mode of the artistic genius, but in the mode of an ability to create together (section 2). In the same way, we can no longer rely on spirit to give or presuppose the meaning of life. Instead we are thrown back on our embodied selves, and in section 3 I show how Nancy responds to this by providing a new materialist ontology in whose terms we renew our understanding of what it is to be here. The red thread that runs through this chapter is Nancy’s thought of nothing, and section 1 picks up that thread by dealing with the immemorial. As a gap or hiatus, the immemorial is nothing, one of several nothings Nancy attends to as they shape our being as natal being: the nothing of the creatio ex nihilo, the nothing of our being together, the nothing of the sexual relation in particular, the nothing of meaning. Yet, despite the proliferation of nothings, Nancy’s philosophy is neither nihilism nor a traditional existentialist account of the free, self-creating individual. Meaning is no longer provided to us, but neither do we exactly make our own meaning. Rather, meaning becomes an ontological category—the singular plural category of sense—and in Nancy’s ontology, we are sense. 1. The Immemorial I noted in the introductory chapter that liminal concepts mark what a philosophical practice can recognize but cannot think.2 Heidegger writes in What Is Called Thinking that the very thing we must think, the very thing that most desires to be thought, is what we cannot remember. We have a sense of it, we are curious about its loss, but it remains inaccessible to us. He writes: “We have still not come OBYRNE_final_pages.indd 108 7/28/10 2:39:26 PM On the Threshold of Finitude s  face to face, have not yet come under the sway of what intrinsically desires to be thought about in an essential sense.” He goes on...