If the term “book-testament” is often overused, it fits perfectly to the last work of Jean-Luc Nancy, the posthumous Blood (Galileo, 2021). First because it was shortly after putting the finishing touches on it that he died, on August 23, and secondly because this book will not be effectively followed by any other. The philosopher thinks about it in parallel what he calls “Between-the-bodies” and a certain form of cruelty or crudeness peculiar to our time, which endangers the possibility of a human community. A book as beautiful as it is confusing.
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021) is the author of an abundant work, which also affects the metaphysical than aesthetics or semiotics and politics – without forgetting the stake of Christianity. In all its dimensions, its philosophy is attached to rethinking the human condition in a secularized West in loss of meaning, by crossing multiple questions and in particular those of the body and the common. However, it is at the crossroads of all these themes that his posthumous work is located, Blood. A raucous title for a meditation which is not less so, around a word which is qualified as « terrible » in the few lines highlighted at the beginning of the book and which are taken from a little-known piece by Guillaume Apollinaire titled Color of time (1917) :
“And this time wants for nickname
Ce terrible mot latin blood
Which means shed blood ”
Body-to-body
Blood is first and foremost the result of a long personal reflection that Jean-Luc Nancy places expressly in the extension of a previous work, Corpus, published for the first time in 1992. However, he analyzed then in the last pages of the work, written almost 30 years ago today, the body is always an expanse or an extension, that is, that is to say a ex-position, an exposed being that offers itself externally : the body is “Open to the outside”. “Have you ever known yourself as pure spirit?” he asked, with his characteristic malice. No. This means that you like me, we only access ourselves from the outside. I am an outside myself ”. And it is this question of the outside and the inside, of the inter-body, which rests again Blood.
Blood, between interiority and exteriority
What does the term mean “blood” himself? Rarely used in everyday French, it designates in anatomical vocabulary the blood which flows and which coagulates, or even the clot of blood spilled outside the body, as opposed to “blood”, the blood which circulates in the veins in a closed circuit and thanks to which life is possible, because it sustains it. Blood is to the body what rhythm is to the drum, says Nancy, that is, its pulsation. But the blood that nourishes life can also leave it: the blood who pulsates can become the blood which springs up and spreads – for example in the bloody sacrifice – to be drunk by the one who wishes to become the other and to feel his blood pulsing in him. Until accomplishing the impossible, namely that blood become again blood like a new life which begins… In a readily elliptical style, with its writing close to that of Derrida, who was his friend, Nancy then utters some flashes like this: “Blood is the very first material of fiction: father, brother, half-bloods – while milk spills another fiction, mother, sister and children. The two drink each other, that is to say, pass by the ways of speech that they trace back to silence. “
Raw, raw, cruel
Book on sharing between bodies, Blood is therefore also a book on cruelty, on tortured and suffering humanity. It is the meditation of a wise man on our world and its pangs, and on our time which Jean-Luc Nancy considers to be “In the process of removing all mediations between humans”. History, he laments, has ruled out what was the sensitivity of what could have been another way of living among humans, in a true community he calls “Communism” and which he deplores that it is today sadly reduced to “Political schemes when it was a question of much more …”, that is to say of sharing and a co-presence in the world. So, of course, “Statistics show that the duration of life increased, that the violence has diminished over the centuries, but what cannot be measured is pain everywhere and dismay ”. Hence the vintage fashion in art or cooking, and a certain crudeness that spreads in words and even in thoughts. What “Until now seemed relegated to a (repulsive) margin of civilization” now composes what Nancy sees as a “General distress table”. Like a life in its twilight.
Blood, by Jean-Luc Nancy, has just been published by Éditions Galilée. 144 p. € 18, available here.
–
