Jean-Luc Nancy

The Fragile Skin of the World


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Myths have made splendid use of this silence for a long time, as has physics. Many poets have also done so, like Octavio Paz, who speaks of . . .

      the other face of being,

      the empty one,

      the fixed featureless splendour.2

      What Clarice Lispector, in an astonishing ellipsis, names the creative unconscious of the world.

      Because the Real (or the Nothing) neither precedes nor follows the world: space-time isn’t plunged in another space-time. It’s the only one, however multiple it is and however abundant its aspects and stories. It is therefore not outside: there is no outside except inside, at the most intimate level, where emergence happens – folding, cracking, breaking, articulating.

      It is true that this seems very metaphysical, very exaggerated or emphatic. But in fact it is that which exceeds every metaphysics and every emphasis, every consideration and every discourse. And makes us open our eyes and speak.

      The paradox could not be more logical: it is when we experience the strongest tremor that we must take some distance, take a step back. Indeed, this is what tremors impose upon and propose to us. The history of progress is complete, another history has begun in this very completion. We can’t discern it at all. We must watch its invisibility, since it is within this invisibility that it comes towards us. Which means that it has already begun, unbeknownst to us, and will only become identifiable once it has already attained an advanced age.

      History never repeats. But the newness of a tremor or of a rupture entails at the very least a formal analogy to an eclipse and a shock (perhaps each time a brief exposition to ‘the fixed featureless splendour’). What I’m here calling ‘formal’ is in truth of the order of affect, upheaval, trauma. We are in the register of birth and death, bedazzlement and blinding, appearing and disappearing – a register that has no history, but rather drives history. In this sense there is no past or tradition to revive without tradition itself being subverted.

      We often believed ourselves capable of taking up other traditions – those of the Russian world, the Islamic world, or the world of the Orient – but each time, the access to other sources was hindered by, and indeed got tangled up within, the irrepressible contagion of the Occident. The entire world has sought to (or has had to) modernize – even as Western modernity came to doubt itself. Even Japan’s very successful equilibrium between tradition and modernity seems now to be tilting in an irreversible way towards a Western situation.

      Rome doesn’t only revive the Athenian concept of autonomy: it entirely detaches it from local and popular identity, and opens it to an enterprise that for the first time merits, on its own scale, the name ‘globalization’. (One could add, if one wanted to spend some time on this point, a comparison with the Chinese Empire, which, broadly speaking, in roughly the same period, unified a great expanse of territory according to a completely different dynamic, which one could refer to as a hoarding rather than an enterprise.)

      As we know, Rome collapsed. It is not by chance that Europe has kept alive the memory of this fall, which at the time seemed astonishing. Rome collapsed beneath its own weight: beneath the weight of its own incapacity to locate the sense of its enterprise. As we know, torment and dread (both philosophical and religious) were already stirring, starting two centuries before the Common Era. When Constantine sought to revive the Empire by devoting it to Christianity, it was already too late.

      Christianity is at once the product, the symptom, and the intensification of this mutation. It is the product because it merges within itself the great aspirations that had been at work for centuries in the disappearance of sacred worlds: the Greek autonomy of a logos, the