Strange wonder: the closure of metaphysics and the opening of awe by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

Repetition

As Nancy tirelessly demonstrates, the community that unworks is the event of being itself: the originary singular plurality that resists the formation of self-enclosed communities, whether they be individual or collective. A wonder that wonders at this strange inessentiality thus wonders, much like the Wunder of Wittgenstein’s lectures or Heidegger’s What Is Metaphysics?116 at isness or thatness itself. What differentiates Nancy’s from these two formulations, however, is a certain double movement by virtue of which astonished thought cannot dissociate from the mundanity at which it wonders—a repetition announced in the out-and-back motion of being-toward-the-world that renders all flight a kind of diving down. It is likely that Nancy would hesitate to characterize his ontology in terms of a dynamic of repetition, especially considering the latter’s thematic proximity to—and frequent conflation with—one or another version of dialectical return. Nevertheless this proximity, which might turn out to be the greatest distance, must be risked in order to flesh out the sort of étonnement that haunts and propels Nancy’s thought.

For Nancy, wonder wonders at “the resistance and insistence of our strange community in sense.” Yet this sort of “sense,” we will recall, is only ever exposed insofar as thinking thinks through the loss of sense. And since, for example, the so-called substances of self and other ordinarily seem most familiar, most reliable, and most understandable of all, the sudden loss of these must each time be experienced as a surprise or shock. In The Gravity of Thought, Nancy describes the thinking self’s experience of its own inessentiality thus: “Thinking is presumably nothing other than the sensation of a ‘self’ that falls outside of itself even before having been a self. And what is then felt is neither a dizziness nor an intoxication but, indeed, a violent shock (no grandiloquence or melodrama here: a good shot that hits hard, that is all, yet that is quite enough). It is a calm and opaque hardness.”117 The “hardness” up against which thinking runs is both a weightiness that keeps drawing us back down into isness and a difficulty. Exposed to the abandonment of sense, thinking runs up against a hardness at the limits of thinking—an unthinkability—a resistance to thought. Yet this is precisely the way in which thinking makes sense; the self or community’s infinite exceeding of immanence is its ontological insistence. Such resistance, then, comes as a shock and gives rise to a kind of “new awe.”

Throughout both The Experience of Freedom and Being Singular Plural, being’s event as advent is characterized as essentially surprising. If every moment is the origin of existence as “just once, this time,” then coming-to-presence cannot be calculated in advance or precomprehended.118 Existence surprises us every time, so that, ultimately, there is no being at all without surprise: “What makes the event an event is not only that it happens, but that it surprises.”119 In order to let beings come, thinking must therefore learn how to be astonished: “Again, it is necessary to stay precisely within the element of wonder—that is, within what could never properly be made into an ‘element,’ but is instead an event.

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