Nancy and visual culture

237 Pages·2017·5.049 MB·English

by  Giunta, Carrie, Nancy, Jean-Luc

Nancy and Visual Culture
Critical Connections
A series of edited collections forging new connections between
contemporary critical theorists and a wide range of research areas,
such as critical and cultural theory, gender studies, film, literature,
music, philosophy and politics.
Series Editors
Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong
James Williams, Deakin University
Editorial Advisory Board
Nick Hewlett
Gregg Lambert
Todd May
John Mullarkey
Paul Patton
Marc Rölli
Alison Ross
Kathrin Thiele
Frédéric Worms
Titles available in the series
Badiou and Philosophy, edited by Sean Bowden and Simon Duffy
Agamben and Colonialism, edited by Marcelo Svirsky and Simone
Bignall
Laruelle and Non-P hilosophy, edited by John Mullarkey and Anthony
Paul Smith
Virilio and Visual Culture, edited by John Armitage and Ryan Bishop
Rancière and Film, edited by Paul Bowman
Stiegler and Technics, edited by Christina Howells and Gerald Moore
Badiou and the Political Condition, edited by Marios Constantinou
Nancy and the Political, edited by Sanja Dejanovic
Butler and Ethics, edited by Moya Lloyd
Latour and the Passage of Law, edited by Kyle McGee
Nancy and Visual Culture, edited by Carrie Giunta and Adrienne
Janus
Rancière and Literature, edited by Julian Murphet and Grace Hellyer
Forthcoming titles
Agamben and Radical Politics, edited by Daniel McLoughlin
Balibar and the Citizen/Subject, edited by Warren Montag and Hanan
Elsayed
Visit the Critical Connections website at
www.euppublishing.com/series/crcs
Nancy and Visual Culture
Edited by Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject
areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge
scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic
works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© editorial matter and organisation Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus, 2016
© the chapters their several authors, 2016
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun − Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 0749 6 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0750 2 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0751 9 (epub)
The right of Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus to be identified as the editors
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI
No. 2498).
Contents
List of illustrations vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Image of
Visual Culture 1
Adrienne Janus
1. Cutting and Letting-Be 21
Martin Crowley
2. Dancing Equality: Image, Imitation and
Participation 39
Christopher Watkin
3. A Question of Listening: Nancean Resonance,
Return and Relation in Charlie Chaplin 55
Carrie Giunta
4. The Image: Mimesis and Methexis 73
Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Adrienne Janus
5. On the Threshold: Visual Culture, Invisible Nature 93
Adrienne Janus
6. Pornosophy: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Pornographic
Image 109
Peter Banki
7. Presentation and Disappearance: Dialogue between
Soun-Gui Kim and Jean-Luc Nancy 129
Translated by Adrienne Janus
8. Writing in the Place of the Animal 144
Phillip Warnell
vi Contents
9. Together at the Limit: Jean-Luc Nancy, Art and
Community 164
Lorna Collins
10. Turning Around the Written Mark, Opening from a
Weight of Thought 181
Robert Luzar
11. Uncanny Landscapes of Photography: The Partage
of Double-Exposure after Jean-Luc Nancy 199
Chris Heppell
Contributors 215
Bibliography 218
Index 224
Illustrations
1.1 Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’, 1960
© Tate, London 2015. 29
3.1 The Gold Rush © Roy Export S.A.S. Scan Courtesy
Cineteca di Bologna. 59
4.1 Paul Cézanne, Young Man and Skull, Image © 2015
The Barnes Foundation. 84
5.1 John Wood and Paul Harrison, The only other
point, 2005/13’44”/HDV/Courtesy the artists and
Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, London. 98
6.1 Amber is a film about the push-pull of erotic
edgeplay and the curious brutality of love. Directed
and performed by Gala Vanting and Frank Ly.
© sensate films 2012. 122
8.1 Ming of Harlem film still © Big Other Films, 2014. 154
9.1 Lorna Collins, 2014, still from Flashback (4.24mins
8mm film and VHS video transferred to DVD, and
mixed media installation). 172
10.1 Photograph by Ollie Harrop. 190
11.1 Time Out of Joint series i) Photograph by Chris
Heppell. 204
11.2 Time Out of Joint series ii) Photograph by Chris
Heppell. 207
Acknowledgements
Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus would like to thank: Carol
MacDonald, our editor at EUP, for encouraging us to frame the
volume around Nancy and Visual Culture; James Williams, for
prompting the initial discussion; and the whole editorial team at
EUP for their support. We are grateful to Jean-Michel Rabaté for
giving us permission to retranslate and reproduce the dialogue
between Jean-Luc Nancy and Soun-Gui Kim from the Slought
edition. We extend our sincere appreciation to Jean-Luc Nancy
for his support and generosity in allowing us to translate his essay,
‘The Image: Mimesis and Methexis’, and to the seven other con-
tributors to the volume, with special thanks to Robert Luzar for
the cover image.
Carrie Giunta is especially grateful to: Chris Kul-Want and the
Art and Philosophy Research Group at Central Saint Martins;
Janet McDonnell and CSM Research; and Robert Luzar for his
participation in the pre-stages of this project.
Introduction: Jean-Luc Nancy and the
Image of Visual Culture
Adrienne Janus
Whether we are artists, scholars, curators, collectors, casual
admirers or a combination of each, our encounter with images
is rarely innocent. The proliferation of images in contemporary
culture − of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, of pictures, painting, photog-
raphy, cinema, television, video and internet − has been accom-
panied by an extraordinary increase in the number of discourses
on what images are or do, what we should or should not do with
images, what they mean, represent, what they show or tell, what
value they have, and how we should or should not look. If these
discourses set the general terms of debate in the study of visual
culture,1 it is a debate often framed at its (post)modernist and
historicist poles by the question of whether the proliferation of
images in contemporary culture marks a new epoch in the West
(the oft-proclaimed hegemony of the image over the book, the
visual over the textual),2 or is merely a culminating moment
in a history of ‘visual turns’ as old as the biblical or Byzantine
battles between iconoclasts and iconophiles that have emerged
throughout Western history at times of competing world views
and socio-political uncertainty.3 In one characteristically pro-
vocative response to this question, delivered with a dose of playful
self-irony, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that either way, this doubled
proliferation of images in contemporary culture and of contempo-
rary discourses on the image often makes us ‘look cross-eyed’. We
have one eye on the image, ‘the other on discourse [. . .] One eye
empirical, the other theoretical. One eye on the exhibition wall,
the other on the text of the catalogue.’4 How then do we resist the
strabismus Nancy describes here?
For Nancy, as for this critical appraisal of Nancy’s immense
contribution to the arts of what we call ‘visual culture’5 (a conten-
tious term in itself, and one that Nancy does not use, preferring