Cultures of Memory in South Asia by D. Venkat Rao

Author:D. Venkat Rao
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer India, New Delhi

6.1 Re-Treating Art

In his general account of art as monstration without precedence, Jean-Luc Nancy states that the concept of art is quintessentially a Western and Christian concept.1 Art as the sensible presentation of the Idea, “sensible visibility of the intelligible,” making visible the invisible, continues to circulate everywhere, Nancy argues. Such conceptions of art have pervaded and determined not just philosophical but even non-philosophical accounts of art (art as communication of hidden truth or emotion), points out Nancy. “No other definition”, he states, “escapes from this one sufficiently to oppose it in any fundamental way. It encloses, up until today the being or essence of art” (Nancy 1996, p. 88). Both idolatry and iconoclasm are haunted by this very onto-theological determination of art, Nancy concludes (1996, p. 99).

In a curiously historical account of the relation between art and theology Nancy claims that unlike Greek antiquity which monstrates, providing a vision of the gods, the “monologotheism” (Nancy’s word) of Christianity indicates the absence, the withdrawal or the retreat of the divine. “Every portrait plays out in the singular”, claims Nancy (2006a, p. 240), “the impossible portrait of God, his retreat and his attraction”. This is the double logic of deconstruction that practices the strategy of reading the same differently. But what is curious in Nancy’s account here (somewhat discrepantly developed between the The Muses and The Multiple Arts) is that he should undersign this strategy in the name of the West as Christian. Further, in an oddly Hegelian gesture, Nancy identifies non-Christian polytheisms as still caught in pre-deconstructive ontotheology, or lacking in deconstructive “armature”.

For Nancy, monologotheism lends itself to both an ontotheology and a self-deconstructive atheology of the subject. Every effort at subject-making, then, is an attempt either to repeat (and hope for a continuity of) the anterior presence or to dis-configure (and effect discontinuity of) the anterior absence. Hence, for Nancy, the history of “Western art has constantly been stretched by the (a)theology of an arche-artistic god” (Nancy 2006a, fn. 51, p. 268). This (a)theology constitutes the West’s self-deconstruction: “the armature of every theory of the subject and the easel of all portraiture” (Nancy 2006a: fn. 49, p. 268).

In this identification of the West as monotheism, “polytheism” remains the epistemic casualty of the metaphysics of presence. If monologotheism inherently possesses the potential for atheological self-deconstruction, then polytheism remains devoid of any such impulse. Nancy suggests a markedly historicizing gesture between Plato and Plotinus; for between them, Nancy argues, “[W]e are on the verge of a transition between a divinity that moves toward presence and the one that flies from it” (Nancy 2006a, fn. 50, p. 268). This looks like the veritable journey of deconstructive teleology from polytheistic presence to Christianity’s a-dieu; for, the teleology of absence seems to find its adequate representation in monotheistic Christianity. “The plurality of the gods”, Nancy declares, “constitutes their visibility, whether potential or actual, as well as their presence. The art of polytheism provides a vision of the gods, while that of monotheism recalls the indivisibility of God withdrawn into His unity”.

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