THE ARRIVAL OF MIMESIS AND METHEXIS IN THE ENQUIRIES OF JEAN-LUC NANCY NI

356 Pages·2014·1.57 MB·English

THE ARRIVAL OF MIMESIS AND
METHEXIS IN THE ENQUIRIES
OF JEAN-LUC NANCY

N I ALDRIDGE
PhD 2014

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THE ARRIVAL OF MIMESIS AND
METHEXIS IN THE ENQUIRIES
OF JEAN-LUC NANCY

NICHOLAS IAIN ALDRIDGE

A thesis submitted in partial
fulfilment of the requirements
of the
Manchester Metropolitan University
for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy

Department of Philosophy
the Manchester Metropolitan University
2014

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Acknowledgements
Without the love and support of Helen and my family this thesis would not exist.
But without Joanna’s inspiration, guidance, and fight, I would not even have
started it. And Keith, I will be forever grateful for your timely doses of sober
realism.

Furthermore, this thesis would not have taken the form it does without: Gary
Banham, Leda Channer, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Nicola Crosby, David Deamer,
Rosalyn Diprose, Terry Dooley, Tom Gibson, John Hutnyk, Ian James, Martin
Kratz, Duncan Large, Rob Lapsley, Eileen Pollard, Alison Ross, Berthold
Schoene, Adam Skevington, Henry Somers-Hall, Tanja Staehler, Richard Stamp,
Celine Surprenant, Fred Tremblay, and Robert Zaborowski.
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Abstract
This thesis advances from the conjecture that Jean-Luc Nancy's work demands to
be interpreted according to the logic it describes. For Nancy unity is irreducible
from exposure, because a distinct entity cannot be abstracted from its boundary
conditions. It is my contention, therefore, that Nancy's work must be treated
accordingly, as a syntactic unity that can only be understood in its exposure to
other syntactic unities. Two interrelated claims are therefore made. First: that the
current literature on Nancy’s work fails to identify that an inheritance from Plato
and from Greek philosophy more widely is a key to the specificity of Nancy’s
thinking, and second that only by retrieving this connection can Nancy’s
contribution to contemporary ontological debates be made out.

The thesis attempts to take a preliminary step in this direction by positioning
Nancy’s work within a contemporary philosophical scene definitively characterised
by its exposure to Ancient Greek philosophy. This investigation places a
conceptual focus on the Platonic terms μίμησις and μέθεξις, terms which bear a
rich history of implications in philosophies of immanence, transcendence,
production, and art. I argue that in showing that there is never μίμησις without
μέθεξις, and vice versa, Nancy shows that there is never immanence without
transcendence, and vice versa. Furthermore, I argue that this mutuality places
sensibility at the core of Nancy’s thought, and determines the artwork to be a
privileged site at which the reciprocity of immanence and transcendence is
presented. In this much, I suggest Nancy’s work offers an alternative to the
demand for some mutually exclusive decision between immanence and
transcendence.

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements.............................................................................................. 3
Abstract ............................................................................................................... 4
Table of Contents ................................................................................................ 5
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction ............................................................................................................. 7
1.1 Introduction: the arrival of μίμησις and μέθεξις ............................................... 9
1.2 A terminological background of μίμησις and μέθεξις .................................... 17
1.3 Immanence and transcendence as contemporary philosophical themes..... 32
1.4 Sense .......................................................................................................... 43
1.5 Themes in the critical reception of Nancy’s philosophy ............................... 54
1.5.1 Community, or the exposition of bodies .................................................... 58
1.5.2 Writing, or the exposition of sense ............................................................ 61
1.5.3 Exposition qua exposition: from art and ontology to methodology ............ 68
1.6 Thesis structure ........................................................................................... 76
CHAPTER TWO
Immanence with or without transcendence: the contemporary reception of an
ancient problematic ............................................................................................... 79
2.1 Introduction: The end of transcendence and the birth of philosophy ........... 81
2.2 Chapter Structure ........................................................................................ 94
2.3 Heidegger on the Greeks ............................................................................. 98
2.4 Heidegger’s rejection of μέθεξις ................................................................. 112
2.5 Heidegger’s affirmation of μίμησις ............................................................. 123
2.6 Deleuze on Heidegger ............................................................................... 128
2.7 The concept of univocity ............................................................................ 133
2.8 Deleuze’s “reversal” of Platonism .............................................................. 139
2.9 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 147
CHAPTER THREE
A hermeneutics of finitude .................................................................................. 151
3.1 Introduction: the interpretation of interpretation ......................................... 153
3.2 Chapter structure and outline of ‘Sharing Voices’ ...................................... 157
3.3 Gadamer’s affirmation of μέθεξις as a refutation of Hartmann’s critical
ontology ........................................................................................................... 162
3.4 Gadamer’s interpretation of μέθεξις as an ontological presupposition of
dialogue ........................................................................................................... 178
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3.5 Gadamer’s ontological interpretation of μέθεξις as the temporal and
communal structure of Dasein ......................................................................... 186
3.6 Nancy reading Gadamer reading Heidegger ............................................. 194
3.7 Nancy’s interpretation of Dasein as absolutely conditioned finitude .......... 202
3.8 Nancy’s interpretation of μίμησις and μέθεξις in Plato’s Ion ....................... 210
3.9 From μίμησις and μέθεξις to ecotechnics ................................................... 219
3.10 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 230
CHAPTER FOUR
An art of plural origins ......................................................................................... 233
4.1 Introduction: aesthetics as first-philosophy ................................................ 235
4.2 Chapter structure ....................................................................................... 243
4.3 Heidegger’s mimetic origin ........................................................................ 245
4.4 Gadamer and the end of μίμησις ............................................................... 256
4.5 Nancy on the myth of participation............................................................. 264
4.6 Adorno: negative μίμησις and catastrophic μέθεξις .................................... 275
4.7 Nancy on the presentation of presentation ................................................ 281
4.8 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 291
CHAPTER FIVE
Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 293
5.1 Summary ................................................................................................... 294
5.2 Ancient Greek themes ............................................................................... 298
5.3 Nancy’s position......................................................................................... 302
5.4 Paths for Future Exposition ....................................................................... 309
Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 315
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CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
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With regard to the μέθεξιν it was only the term that he changed; for
whereas the Pythagoreans say that things exist by μιμήσει of numbers,
Plato says that they exist by μεθέξει - merely a change of term. As to
what this μέθεξιν or μίμησιν may be, they left this an open question.1
ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics

That no mimesis occurs without methexis (under threat of being nothing
but a copy, a reproduction): here is the principle. Reciprocally, no doubt,
there is no methexis that does not imply mimesis, that is, precisely
production (not reproduction) in the form of a force communicated in
participation.2
NANCY, The Image: Mimesis and Methexis

1 Aristotle, Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes, XVII: The Metaphysics, trans. by
Hugh Tredennick (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1989) (Greek elements from:
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, ed. by William David Ross (Oxford: Clarendon
Press. 1924)), 987b.
2 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Image: Mimesis and Methexis’ (2007), trans. by Ron Estes
& Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in Theory@Bufallo, 11 (2007), 9-26 (pp. 10-11).
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1.1 Introduction: the arrival of μίμησις and μέθεξις
The concepts of μίμησις and μέθεξις3 first appear in combination in Nancy’s work
in 1980, in ‘Le mythe nazi’ [‘The Nazi Myth’], a paper co-authored with Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe4 and delivered at Schiltigheim that May, at a colloquium entitled
Les Mécanismes du fascisme.5 There the two thinkers state:

German tradition adds something to the classical, Greek theory of
mythic imitation, of mimesis - or develops, very insistently, something
that, in Plato for example, was really only nascent, that is, a theory of
fusion or mystical participation (of methexis, as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl will
say), of which the best example is the Dionysian experience, as
described by Nietzsche.6

The word μίμησις, literally “imitation” or “mimicking”, is already a loaded term at
this juncture, both for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, and for the wider conversation
in which they are working.7 In their co-authored 1978 work L'Absolu littéraire:
theorie de la litterature du romantisme allemand [The Literary Absolute: The

3 Due to the many different ways in which Greek terms are transliterated
throughout the literature, including in many of the quotes I have embedded within
this thesis, I have opted to write them in Greek wherever they appear in my own
prose to avoid confusion.
4 The concept of μίμησις is a central theme of Lacoue-Labarthe’s work, but what I
am pointing to here is the inflection it takes on when said alongside μέθεξις. See
for example: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics
(1979), ed. by Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
5 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe & Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’ (1980), trans. by
Brian Holmes, Critical Enquiry, 16.2 (Winter 1990), 291-312 (p. 291).
6 Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’, p. 302.
7 At least since its central place in 1972’s La dissemination, the word μίμησις
implicates a conversation with Derrida. Indeed in 1975, both Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy contributed essays to the collection Mimesis: des articulations, which
contains Derrida’s essay ‘Economimesis’. Nancy’s paper, ‘Le ventriloque (A mon
père, X.)’, sets the tone for his future interrogations by approaching the status of
the concept in the dialogues of Plato. See: Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (1972),
trans. by Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981); Various, Mimesis: des
articulations (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975); and the English translation:
Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’ (1975), trans. by Richard Klein, in Diacritics 11.2
(Summer 1981), 2-25.
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Theory of Literature in German Romanticism], for instance, Nancy and Lacoue-
Labarthe had already pursued what they refer to there as the mimetic
‘ambivalence’8 that problematises literature’s and philosophy’s mutual reliance
upon one another, an ambivalence that Nancy asserts, many years later, is given
rise to for the reason that in μίμησις ‘the non-given must be sought through the
given’.9 For ‘[a]s Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has repeated and articulated
throughout all his work’, Nancy goes on, ‘the true character of mimesis is to be
without model’,10 that is, a copy or a copying without an original.

The word μέθεξις, literally rendered “participation” or “sharing”, invokes a family of
problematics as old as philosophy, particularly when said in combination with
μίμησις. Two years after the 1980 seminar paper, in a rich text entitled Le Partage
des voix [‘Sharing Voices’], Nancy asserts of Plato’s dialogue Ion (a dialogue
which, in fact, never explicitly names μίμησις within its concerns11), that it
demonstrates the way in which μίμησις, copying, when bereft of a given original, is
revealed as ‘active, creative, or re-creative’,12 which is to say, it re-produces only
insofar as it produces both itself and an original, neither of which pre-exist the
operation, and this means that μίμησις ‘proceeds from methexis’, participation, or
conversely, that ‘mimesis is the condition of this participation’.13

8 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe & Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory
of Literature in German Romanticism (1978), trans. by Philip Barnard & Cheryl
Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 68.
9 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing (2007), trans. by Philip Armstrong
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 61.
10 Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, p. 61.
11 Plato, ‘Ion’, in Plato With an English Translation, III: Statesman, Philebus, Ion,
trans. by Walter Rangeley Maitland Lamb (London: Heinemann, 1962), pp. 407-47
(including parallel Greek text).
12 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Sharing Voices’ (1982), trans. by Gayle L. Ormiston, in
Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. by Gayle L.
Ormiston & Alan D. Schrift (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp.
211-60 (p. 238).
13 Nancy, ‘Sharing Voices’, p. 238.
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