Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices by Francis Halsall Julia Jansen & Sinead Murphy

Author:Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen & Sinead Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

9.3 Withdrawal and Donation

The question of the sublime is tightly linked in some way to what Heidegger calls the withdrawal of Being, the withdrawal of donation. The welcome paid to the sensible, that is, to sense embodied in the here-and-now before any concept would no longer have place and moment. This withdrawal would signify our current destiny.17

Lyotard follows Heidegger up to the withdrawal in donation: any phrase is a withdrawal even when it is also a communication of meaning and the basis for an exchange. Even a phrase as simple as a command such as “Do your duty” is a withdrawal. In setting out an exchange of rights and responsibilities, of relations of belonging to a community and exclusion, of acts sanctioned and forbidden, of rewards and punishments, the phrase also invites questions about the justice of these rights, rewards and punishments, of the limits of community; the clashes occurring at those limits; and within any given community (which is never homogeneous.) These questions and our desire to answer them have no intrinsic limits and there are no rules as to their propriety or for determining the number or value of any questions. Questioning comes after a donation and can never determine it; on the contrary, that the questions remain undetermined depends on the donation defined as a withdrawal rather than a giving of any well-determined thing. For Lyotard the phrase can never simply command obedience and to give or receive it as such is to ignore what withdraws in the phrase as it is uttered and received. This ambiguity and openness of the phrase in all its linguistic relations (reference, meaning, manifestation and sense) is however not a fate for Lyotard, and this is where he departs from Heidegger. It is instead a political problem and state of affairs. We have to respond to the tension between what we can understand in the phrase, but also to what is beyond knowledge and understanding and therefore calling for new responses – ones that neither pretend that withdrawal is an inevitable fate, nor an eliminable passing phase.

Withdrawal is a translation of the French word retrait, or retreat. It can seem that if we think of donation as retreat we are ceding too much to ideas of abandonment and cessation, when action is called for and failure to act is a betrayal of life, desire and community. A joint reading of Lyotard and Deleuze’s versions of donation allows the idea to move away from any association with retreat. Withdrawal becomes part of a creative and affirmative process. For Deleuze donation is dual: a withdrawal of sense and a donation of sense according to a division in structures between a placeless occupant signified by our questions and the intensities that fire them, and an empty space signified by our efforts to identify novel solutions to recurrent problems.18 The occupant and the space run back and forward along parallel but separate series; each series is incomplete without the other, but whenever one is referred to the other it commences a disjunction within it.

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