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Excess of the measure. Commentary on ‘The measure of the with’
by: daniele
“…it is the category of the “other” that crosses through much contemporary thinking. It would be necessary to show how this category, and the obsession that it ends up constituting for a good portion of our thinking, both represents the incommensurability of Being as being-with-one-another and runs the risk of covering over or deferring this Being’s realm, insofar as it is the realm of the with, that is, insofar as it is the measure of this incommensurability” (J-L Nancy, ‘The measure of the with’ in Being Singular Plural, p.76)
It is even banal to say that here it is all a matter of measure. What is at stake is this measure, which appears, since the beginning, at its very origin, to be incommensurable. But what is incommensurable about it? What does this measure appraise and what do we measure with it?
Before replying these questions, we must try to bring back the argument, back to us, back to its measure,
The argument wants philosophy to reconstitutes a topic that crosses it, or that even constitutes the very moment of its crossing, a topic always present, but – Nancy would say – never measured. The argument wants to revive the cum, with, at the very heart of Being. Saying ‘never measured’ would here point to the fact that the order of philosophical exposition has never put the cum by Being, but always next to it, a next that is always too far. At the same time one can’t avoid to observe that in fact a cum of some sort has always been there, taken into consideration, into great consideration, if it is true, as Nancy says, that Descartes couldn’t say ‘ego sum’ without presupposing an ‘ego cum’. Well before him Plato puts in Aristophanes’ mouth the myth of the cum as the lost measure of love. The cum has been thought then, always at the beginning, at the origin of every philosophy, and the wrong exposition ‘doesn’t prevent the deeply set order of reasons from being regulated by a co-originarity’ (J-L Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p.31). What then remains un-measured, out of all proportions, incommensurable? What remains, has remained, outside philosophy has been to think Being-with has the own most problem of Being. Measuring would not be here a putting everything under a common unity, but do justice to the measure as a way to do justice to the with, as a way to let the with appear as the closest, the own most of Being.
What is incommensurable about the measure?
It is clear that if we intend to respond to the problem of the measure, and do justice to it, we’ll need to cross a border, we need to cross that limit, where philosophy has the with without doing justice to it. A measuring here would then be first of all a radicalization. In apparent contrast with the meaning of the word, the measure we are looking for will not bring us back to a supposed right dimension, but will deliver us to that which is out of all proportions, that which is never alone, that which knows no solidity and no solitude. One can move from this first remark and try to distinguish the origin of this discourse; from a measure that wrecks every measure, that let itself be free from every measuring, calculations, but that at the same time gives the problem (the with) its just dimension and just a dimension.
Nancy starts with the origin, as one should never forget to do. Because the origin is not a commencement and has no moment proper to it, it allows sense to flow into this argument, it allows it to make sense, and us to make sense of it. The origin in this case is a gesture of substitution (not as Levinas wants it), substituting one for each one, me for a spacing, in other words an individual for a fracture. The fracture is the one running in the origin (or as origin), the singular origin that takes over the individual. The singular is then the local distance, that which takes a distance from perfection. The origin which sets the discourse here is, for as banal as this formula might sound, the taking the distance from perfection. Perfection being that of the individual, that which is itself with no further need. This is the origin as the gesture of substitution, substituting origin for perfection, singularity for the completed. One could even say, and should say, that the singular is the origin, that they’re in fact synonymous, there’s no reason for intending them as separate concepts, for the singular is not an appearance from the backstage of Being, or the witness that there’s something, because the singular is this something, is the fact that there’s no solertiam at the heart of Being. In Nancy’s words: ‘a singularity does not stand out against the background of Being; it is, when it is, Being itself or its origin’ (J-L Nancy, ‘Of Being Singular Plural’ in Being Singular Plural, p.32).
Questioning the origin then would mean to question the nature of this singularity, its plural nature. The plural nature of the singular amounts at posing the self as a problem and just as a problem, the just measure of the self is to be a problem (“The most proper constitution of the cum-, exposes itself as indeterminateness and as a problem” J-L Nancy, ‘Of Being Singular Plural’ in Being Singular Plural, p.81). This is exactly what the tradition hasn’t spoken out. The tradition has posed the self as a return to itself, in a way as perfect. The singular is imperfect, or better said traversed, originarily so. If we retain the self as perfection, we will never get to the with, or to its just measure. The self as the singular happens as traversed, if the singular is the each one, then it is at the same time also the with and the among. ‘The self has its originarity in the loss of self […] In and of itself transcendent, the subject is born into its intimacy and its intimacy wanders away from it in statu nascendi’ (J-L Nancy, ‘The measure of the with’ in Being Singular Plural, p.78).
Identity is then always a tremor, a traversing, there’s no identity that comes without an exile, as this exile. My proximity to myself is the proximity with each one that alters me. As an origin I am already altered. The more I retreat into myself the more I retreat towards an other to myself.
This is what hasn’t been thought in the tradition. The tremor hasn’t been thought and as a consequence one had to think the with as coming next to Being, but in a way that next meant always after, as when one opens the door to let the other pass and says: “After you, please”.
Is one saying that there’s no proper self? Not at all, just that its properness comes from the improper. Is one proposing that there’s no self at all? No, but that a self happens as cum, as an originary distance.
Some consequences arise from this. Heidegger, who had thought the Mitsein as a condition for Dasein, has still missed to measure the with. Although the discourse Nancy brings about could be in the end read as an extreme extension of Heidegger’s one, still with Heidegger we are locked on two positions. Although this is not the site for a complete investigation of Heidegger’s motifs, a couple of remarks from within Nancy’s text can be attempted. Heidegger seems to place the measure on the with on two poles, the impersonal ‘one’ and the destiny of a population. As Nancy points out what remains out here is the cum, which is somehow pressed between impersonality, mere juxtaposition and dominion, direction and faith.
The with can’t be the mere play of juxtaposed origins, indifferences, as this would amount at reducing them to mere positions within Being and Being itself to the mere dispersion of this positions, thus one would subtract again the with from Being or make a property out of it. At the same time an understanding of the with as destined, as a towards, would mean to think it in terms of a common cause would make of it some kind of opera, some kind of operative concept, again removing from the with its coessentiality with Being. In this case Being-with would be a property delivered to an activity.
The measure of the with lies somehow in between Heidegger’s conclusion. It springs from the play of origins as always open to, or traversed by.
Thinking the origin has always already traversed, constituted by this traversing, in other words thinking the singularity as always already affected, amounts also at refusing the idea of the other as distance one needs to shorten. In fact rather than apprehending the other by shortening the distance, we will always have it in the play of contact and gap, a play that starts in the self and with the self. I am constituted already as a play of gap and contact, a play where contact is always constituted and constituting a gap (here the body could allow us to form an example: “there where corpus calls itself «ego», ego enters in contrariness” JL Nancy, Corpus, p.25). This is the model I experience on myself and which makes the other happen. I love in the other what I love in myself, namely what I love is this fracture by means of which I see myself always already open. As Nancy says is not then that I privilege, egoistically, a part of myself in the other or my own perfection reflected in the other, but the same fracture that constitutes me, that’s what I love in the other.
One would say now that in fact Levinas is among those philosophers who have paid justice to the other by treating him with incommensurable gentleness. Still, even in Levinas, where I substitute myself for the Other, one has to stop in front of a perfect self, which tries his best, by way of gentleness, to overcome the distance, to break its perfection. As Derrida had already envisaged Levinas can’t overcome a certain hard subjectivism. ‘the passage from Ego to other as an Ego is the passage to the essential, non-empirical egoity of subjective existence in general’ (J.Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, p.110). Unless then we consider the proper measure of the self as a fracture we will never be able to measure the with or to understand its coessentiality with Being. The other will always become the Other, where this capital letter stands for the desire of the self to reach it, to shorten the distance. If we would not know that his thinking and his conclusions lie elsewhere and almost in contrast with the way we are treating the topic here, we could quote Martin Buber’s saying: “In the beginning is relation” (M.Buber, I and Thou, p.22).
What is incommensurable then about the with is the inability to control my exposure to myself, the inability then to constitute the other moving from myself. I am always already with means that I am, first of all, as origin, incommensurable with myself, I never return to myself, my privacy is the privacy of a withdrawal from perfection. The measure of the with is an incommensurable one, it is the imbalance I experience with regard to myself, my falling outside myself as the just and proper measure of myself. I am always already exposed as an other to myself. The incommensurability is then this impossibility of moving back to myself, an incontinence with regard to myself, that which opens up Bergson’s opening : “The existence of which we are most assured and which we know best is unquestionably our own” . This is what is just about the with and also what makes the with just what it is, an incommensurable measure. The other of the with is an other that never returns on its own steps, an other always already falling outside, crossing the limit with no way back. The cum is not a play of juxtapositions, but the incommensurable measure of an insurgence always already present, well before I encounter the other or its face. That Being is with then means that Being is always a singularity inevitably incontinent, unable to be content with itself. We (and not me and the other) always bring with us a fracture, a negation of perfection, which is what the incommensurable means, the impossibility of turning us towards an our, which is proper to all of us (and which would tend in the end to exclude a large number of us).
With is always with the self. This amounts at saying that the self is always already with. Being as the insurgence of singularities always already with each other is then not solid, not solitary, or solertem, but Being is itself alterity, the alterity is the reciprocity each singularity brings with itself without being able to contain it. The measure of the with is an incommensurable measure of the other, my impossibility of measuring my exposure to the other, and also the inevitability of this exposure, as that which constitutes me, as that which belongs to Being not in an appraisal but as its happening.
The only just measure of the with then its not having a measure, but being as origin the out of all measures.
Posted on: Monday December 10 2007 ______________________________________
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