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Introduction: Time in Nancy

Irving Goh and Verena Andermatt Conley

As with every great philosopher, there is something inexhaustible in Nancy's writings. In that respect, one can immediately refer to his prolificacy: indeed, publishing his major philosophical writings since the 1970s, for example, La Remarque spéculative (1973), Le Discours de la syncope (1976), and Ego sum (1979), followed by what Derrida considers to be Nancy's "most powerful works" - Corpus (1992), The Sense of the World (1993), The Muses (1994), and Being Singular Plural (1996)1 - Nancy shows no sign of stopping today, given the appearance of recent titles such as Tombe de sommeil (2007), Identité: fragments, franchises (2010), Dans quels mondes vivons-nous? (written with Aurélien Barreau, 2011), L'Équivalence des catastrophes (2012), and Ivresse (2013). This is not to mention the great breadth of his writings, which encompasses the history of philosophy (Hegel, Kant, Descartes), aesthetics, ontology, politics, literature, psychoanalysis, religion, and "deconstructive" engagements with philosophical topics such as subjectivity, community, sense, freedom, and the world. The inexhaustibility of Nancy's writings also pertains to the fact that there always remains something to be explicated or elucidated further in his philosophy, which proves critical not only in making sense of contemporary issues, but also in suggesting political and ethical implications for the future of the contemporary world.

This present collection of essays testifies to that inexhaustible force. At the same time, we would also like to think that a certain preoccupation with time forms an implicit backdrop to this collection, thus setting it apart from other collections on the work of Nancy. That preoccupation can be said to exist on at least two counts. Firstly, it is almost inevitable to think of the time of mortality when we think of Nancy, who underwent a heart transplant operation more than twenty years ago. In light of that, we have a greater appreciation of Nancy's prolificacy, reminding ourselves that the inexhaustibility of his writing is neither a given nor absolute: instead, it is always threatened by finitude and contingency. The second instance that gives us occasion to think about time is the collection's title itself - Nancy Now. With the "now" of the title, one cannot help but expect this collection to touch in one way or another on the topic of time, especially that of the present. In effect, time is very much at the back of most of our contributors' minds: most of them readily took the cue from the title, which they knew in advance, and evaluate the state of Nancy's philosophy now, taking stock of how far-reaching his thoughts are, and assessing the stakes for philosophy and the world today. Or else, they foreground the philosophical motifs mobilized by Nancy in his recent publications and explore their future theoretical and empirical potentialities.

We will speak more about the individual essays later in this introduction. First, we would like to concern ourselves with giving an explication of time in Nancy, which is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of his philosophy. Time, as a philosophical question, is already no doubt difficult in itself. The difficulty of speaking about time in Nancy becomes particularly striking when one takes into account his reservation in dealing with this topic in any explicit or extended manner in his writings, as compared to his sustained engagement with other topics such as community, sense, touch, corpus, and the world, not to mention that all of these apparently privilege the question of space. Symptomatic of this reservation before time is Nancy's "Finite History": there is indeed a discursion into the question of time there, but it is veiled by the question of history, which Nancy argues is still not really so much about time as about community or being-in-common. In that regard, one could say that the question of time constitutes some sort of limit in Nancy's writings, as if one were approaching the impossible in his philosophy. And yet, the limit, as Nancy would say in The Sense of the World for example, is not where everything ends. Instead, it is where everything has the chance to begin again, differently. In that case, one could argue that if the question of time is indeed the limit of Nancy's thought, it is perhaps also with the question of time that we could begin again, now, to look at Nancy's philosophy anew.2

Time for Nancy is not just any time. It is not time past that is of interest to him; neither is it future time, especially not that which is already programmed or calculated beforehand. Time past and time future, according to Nancy, are but "categories [.] relevant only to time already interpreted as social and historical."3 In other words, they are but anthropological constructions, barely touching on time itself, or else concealing its very dimensions. Against such constructions, Nancy is preoccupied with present time, or more specifically, the time of the present, now, which is not of the order of chronology. Identifying this present that is of specific interest to Nancy does not alleviate the difficulty of speaking about time in Nancy, however. This is because, while Nancy appears, as we will see, to speak more favorably of the present in more recent texts, it is not quite the case earlier on. This is rather evident in the essay "Espace contre temps" (1991), whose title only immediately reinforces the impression that Nancy seems to privilege the concept of space over time. To be precise, though, the essay will make clear that if there is a disenchantment with time, it is not with time itself but exactly with how it has come to be understood and schematized, i.e. time as chronology, or time in endless succession, calculated, accumulated, and ordered, such that each second or even nanosecond must always be followed by the next second or nanosecond. Chronology is not time, according to Nancy: as chronology, time cannot take time, or it cannot have time to exist since it must always move on to the next chronological unit without delay. Time cannot breathe here: chronology or chronometry is "without respiration" or "irrespirable."4 All this also means that the present in chronology has no real significance except as a step between the past and the future.5 The very singularity of the present then is always glossed over by an imposed chronometric operativity: it is subject to a passing from the past to the future, never allowed to dwell in itself and to see what happens to itself in that dwelling.6 It is this chronological present, which does not allow what arrives in the present as the present to take time to happen, that Nancy renounces, calling it even "a bad concept."7 This is also where Nancy turns his back on (chronological) time and turns toward space instead, especially "free space," where "free disposition of places, openings, circulations of perceptions, conceptions, affections, volitions, [and] imaginations" take place or happen.8

The reduction of the present to the "bad concept" of chronologic present does not mean that we should henceforth abandon all thoughts of time, especially not time of the present other than its chronological conceptualization. That other present must still be a subject of thought, except, in "Espace contre temps," it is still articulated in spatial terms. As Nancy argues there, if (non-chronological) present time concerns the instantaneous, then "time itself is space."9 This is because the instant, according to Nancy, is something spatial, circumstantial, contingent upon how things and beings gather themselves at a particular place: "The instant is not of time: but topical [topique], topography, circumstance, circumscription of a particular arrangement [agencement] of places, openings, passages."10 Given the association between the instant and the non-chronological present, the latter then must also be thought of spatially, as a gap or opening-up, or simply an opening, where its coming-to-presence can happen: "there is only this opening-up [écartement] of the present, of its extemporaneous coming."11 It is in that sense of space allowing the coming of time and the time of the present to take place that Nancy clarifies that "space is therefore against [contre] time only to free time," to "let it happen" as a "spacious welcome," while "refusing the duration, succession, the rule of causes, retentions, and propensities [propensions]" of "compact, unshakeable [inébranlable]" chronological time.12

But must the thought of non-chronological time, of non-chronological present time, be articulated in spatial terms, as if subordinated to the...