Just published: Nancy and Visual Culture. Here is the abstract for my chapter, entitled “Dancing Equality: Image, Imitation and Participation”.
‘We are facing a very new demand in terms of art’ remarks Nancy in Allitérations, ‘the demand that art be “made by everyone”’. And yet we also know very well that the arts require individuality, singularity and difference. How can art satisfy both of these two demands: that it issue from the collective or the common and that it also satisfy the requirement for isolation and secrecy? The question becomes broader and more pressing with Nancy’s conclusion: ‘We have here an aspect of our general difficulty with equality and democracy’.
Taking Nancy’s remark as a provocation, this chapter probes how dance in particular, and visual culture more broadly, not only perform or reflect but also develop and advance Nancy’s thinking and writing on equality. Throughout Allitérations, Nancy is careful not to reduce thought to dance or movement to description, nor simply to translate between the two, but to give each its singular and untranslatable sense. Though dance is visual, Nancy repeatedly distances it from the image, which he associates with a mimetic paradigm, in order to develop an understanding of dance as a visual methexis that is neither object nor image.
The performance recorded in Allitérations seeks to work at the limit between movement and text, with exscription and bodily sense sitting at the threshold of thought and dance, but Nancy’s own movements as recorded in Allitérations – both physical and philosophical – not only resist being reduced to signifying thought but also place themselves at the foremost limit of his thinking of equality as it is elaborated in Être singulier pluriel and elsewhere. This, then, is the pattern for our investigation of equality: how can the visual methexis of dance and art more broadly ‘speak’ and ‘think’ about equality without being immediately reduced to thought, and beyond the customary limits of thought? How can thought and dance together elaborate and, in so doing, move beyond the terms of an equality that marries the demand for the ‘by everyone’ with the requirement of secret individuality?