o this is a tour of (some of) Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on bodies. My aim in this tour is to find ways of writing about bodies and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). I’m hoping that the tangibilities Nancy describes - his own disintegrating body; the impenetrability of bodies, the intercorporeality of touch and his projected eight billion human bodies - might provide a way of thinking together the techniques of reproduction and the techniques of normal incarnation.

The first guide on this tour is Diane Perpich, the relevant essay is sitting locally on shelf.

	Corpus Meum: Disintegrating Bodies and the Ideal of Integrity [PDF] Diane Perpich Hypatia 20(3) 2005

Corpus Meum (CM) is focused on on evaluating the usefulness of Nancy’s ontology of bodies to feminist theory. Most of Perpich’s essay works its way through three of Nancy’s texts, and then she makes some preliminary passes regarding its integratability. She starts with the fairly recent and very conglomerate:

	Being Singular Plural [BSP] Jean-Luc Nancy Translated by Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne 2000

Perpich starts with BSP in order to emphasise the connective nature of Nancy’s work, the way it is open and sensitive to ‘ the possibility of new modes of connection and community even as it records the fault lines within current historical configurations’ (CM 89). But the account she gives of BSP is of a modified Heideggerian ontology that seems more preoccupied with performing a corrective to the minutae of Being and Time’s existential analytic than in disposing of inhibitions to new forms of social relation. Nancy’s preoccupation with Heidegger in BSP sends me warning bells about Perpich’s hope to integrate his corpus with the bodies of feminism.

Later I will slowly work my way through Perpich’s essay and each of Nancy’s texts that she deals with. Here having introduced the initial cast I am going to attempt to make cogent these reservations about Nancy and his work in Being Singular Plural (BSP).

Nancy seems to write and rewrite a conservative canon of philosophy - Descartes, Kant, Heidegger:

The existenital analytic of Being and Time is the project from which all subsequent thinking follows, whether this is Heidegger’s own latter thinking or our various ways of thinking against or beyond Heidegger himself. This affirmation is in no way an admission of “Heideggerianism”; it completely escapes the impoverished proclamations of “schools.” It does not signify that this analytic is definitive, only that it is responsible for registering the seismic tremor of a more decisve rupture in the constitution or consideratoin of meaning (analoguous, for example, to those of the “cogito” or “Critique”). This is why we continue to feel its shock waves (BSP 93).

There is no denying the importance that the Descartes-Kant canon has had for a Western tradition of philosophy, nor the role Heidegger’s work has played in-forming the work of (men I admire more) Derrida and Levinas. Nor am I impugning the importance of unsettling the terms and grammar of the canon using only itself, exposing its own instability. Well no, that is precisely what I am impugning. To write in 1996 (Être Singulier Pluriel) of the inherent being-with of Being, of the history of Being ‘and our relation to this history [as] necessarily that of its Destruktion, or deconstruction’ (BSP 22), and yet to set that history of Being as masculine thought is not just to set deconstruction in auto mode - to let Heidegger and his tradition (”first philosophy”) open themselves to other emphasises and relations. It is also to erase other histories precisely so that this history in undoing itself can redeem itself.

There is a protocol of referencing in BSP. I want to say a politics, but Nancy makes me nervous about that word. A protocol is more accurate, reflective of the stage management of privilege within the event of the text - the way invites to “gala” events can be timed so that the press knows when to show up to photograph a party (already happening) and the arrival of the celebrities-protagonists. Firstly, a great chain of thought/tradition runs
(Aristotle-Descartes-Rousseau-Kant-Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Husserl-Heidegger-Bataille) through, each point of the chain marked by the singular name that is cited like a tombstone in the body of Nancy’s the text. Then, there is the world populated by the styles of those with whom Nancy dialogues (Derrida, Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille (again)), but whose names usually lie ciphered under their agile turns of phrase or terms. And lastly there are the footnotes that lead to specific works of the dead and the present, but also to more obscure names, secondary commentators, and stars not yet risen at least not in English (Negri, Rancière, Agamben, Balibar, Badiou). And then in the footnotes in the English version is the mark of the translators. There are the notes about difficulties and decisions of translation. Then there are the names of translators who have translated the works that are listed, little guarantees of bibliographic linguistic fidelity, but also like a graffiti memorial to the stage hands and technicians whose labour sets the scene. Among these tags are, for instance, Peggy Kamuf, Amy Jacobs, Kathleen Blamey.

In a work on the fundamental being-with written in 1996, there is only the trace of the labour of women, as effort not work. In a work primarily on Heidegger’s work that re-emphasises it to co-presence and plurality, I have not found mention of Arendt. In an account that seems to be turning on philosophy’s inadequate assumption of self-sufficiency of the subject, being and every otherwise, I have seen no mention of any wave or writer of feminism.

I know that Nancy engages Arendt elsewhere and that the history of first philosophy is the provenance of a certain white western masculinity. It is the writing of this history now that troubles me. The contemporaneity of 1996 unsettles me in ways that Foucault’s histories and historical occlusions never do. In these works that tell history as disruption or de(con)struction across centuries or millennia, twelve years at this end break my reading. It enters a span of time I think of as mine, where I am aware of my world - as political (Howard’s election) as plural (as made of possible futures that were-are unset with different allegiances to the past)…

And it makes we wonder if precisely the thinking of being-with is the end of first philosophy and it ended before I was born, before my body and world. These are my reservations stripped of joy, which hopefully will come.