Sexistence by Nancy Jean-Luc;Miller Steven;

Author:Nancy, Jean-Luc;Miller, Steven;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

Too Much, Too Little

It is not any less impenetrable. Penetration itself remains impenetrable. Penetration is the first thing one resists; it is what constitutes the stakes and the game of a necessary re sistance, even if reduced to almost nothing, because one knows, in turn, that it will persist in resisting. It will be neither properly “lived” nor properly “known.” When it comes to penetration, life and knowledge steal away at their limits. Penetration escapes. One might say of it, in a particularly emphatic manner, what Hegel says of the body in general as the “expression of the inner”—that is, of the “individual” of “being for itself” (relating to itself). This “expression” should be taken literally as the pressing of self outside—that is, as a revelation of self by self. In a general manner, action constitutes the being of the individual and the body is the manifestation of the spirit—that is, not the external apparition of what would otherwise remain inward but rather Being manifesting itself and doing so in such a way that its physical manifestation is—ontologically—its spiritual being.

Now, in a general manner, in action, “the individual on his own no longer retains and possesses himself; rather, he lets the inner move wholly outside of him and he thus abandons it to the other.”80 Hegel presents this manifestation both in the form of language and that of work (also designated as “speech and action”). He then specifies that we can just as well say that these manifestations “express the inner too much as we can say that they express it too little.” Double defect, excess and lack conjoined, which, it will have to be grasped, constitute the essence of spirit manifesting itself—in other words, its existence.

If Hegel does not count sex among the acts whereby the individual manifests itself,81 it is because, for him, sex is the manifestation of the species through the individual (which implies a subordination of pleasure, but I won’t linger on this point82). But if the manifestation of spirit is envisaged in terms of the effectivity of its existence—each time distinct, individuated, and in constant individuation—sex, language, and transformation would constitute a triad in which general coexistence (the singular plural of speaking beings and through them all beings) occurs in three modes: logexis-tence, technexistence, sexistence.83

Reprising the analysis of “abandonment to the other” as though it was about sex, one could say: this manifestation is too much “because the inner self breaks out in these expressions, no opposition remains between them and the inner; they do not only provide an expression of the inner, they immediately provide the inner self”; and, at the same time, it is too little “because in speech and action the inner makes itself into an other and thereby abandons itself to the mercy of the element of transformation.”84 There are thus two risks: breaking out or alienation. If we leave aside the dialectical perspective that would require deference to the final sublation of the whole of spirit in its comprehensive manifestation,

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