Priceless presents

Posted on April 10, 2012 by tmlavenz

A subtle, little book by Jean-Luc Nancy came to me in the mail today, L’Équivalence des catastrophes (Après Fukushima), which condenses quite nicely Nancy’s “outlook” on the state of the world and the task of thinking today. Continue reading →

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An Experience At Heart (by Jean-Luc Nancy)

Posted on March 27, 2012 by tmlavenz

The following is my translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s text, “Une experience au cœur,” collected in his La Declosion (Déconstruction du christianisme, 1), pgs. 117-123. The practical reasons for translating this text are twofold: one, I wanted to share publicly a piece from this author who I am always talking about, and yet about whom I can rarely write “in my own words”; and second, because Bettina Bergo’s translation (see Nancy, Dis-Enclosure), while apt, didn’t quite suit me (perhaps for the simple fact that it was not mine: I had to learn the text by heart). While I haven’t departed from her translation too much, where I have, it is purposeful. Other than these rather incidental concerns of my own, I chose this text because it draws as close to the heart of Nancy’s thinking as any other, and because it covers such a huge swath of ideas in a relatively short space (although Nancy is always doing this; his discursive economy ceaselessly astounds me). Beginning from Nietzsche, he touches on the core ideas behind the deconstruction of Christianity and the overarching theme of all his later work, namely, that “the sense of the world is outside of the world.” For it is here that we find the truth of existence as such: in the absolutely-valuable that experience itself is. Continue reading →

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Graceful Erasure

Posted on March 15, 2012 by tmlavenz

Famous adventure of art: Robert Rauschenberg  knocks on Bill de Kooning’s apartment door and presents him with an idea, to erase one of his masterpieces. He had been experimenting with erasing his own drawings, but realized that it would never work as art that way. De Kooning said he understood but didn’t like the idea. But if he was going to give something away to erasure, he said, he wanted it to be something he cared about, something of his own that he liked. The project went through: it took Rauschenberg four months to scour away the charcoal, oil paints, and pencil scratches on the drawing de Kooning gave him. He titled it “Erased de Kooning Drawing,” — “traces of ink and crayon on paper.”

No surprise that after working on this post for an hour or so, the computer reboots and erases most of what I’ve written. What I had drafted was an attempt at describing Simone Weil’s notion of grace in light of this strange encounter. I’m left with the sinking feeling that, like Rauschenberg, all I can do is erase the spiritual masterwork she presents to me, erasing her and myself. After the loss, I’m left wondering, “Isn’t this a signal that sharing insight is not as simple as scratching out all its colors and re-presenting it as your own? Aren’t you making the key mistake Weil warns against: using your imagination to side-step the real ordeal in the void?” Consider me guilty. Continue reading →

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