Squeeze Me \'Til I Pop: Derrida, Nancy, Ascesis

Squeeze Me ‘Til I Pop! David Steinrueck

Introduction This paper briefly outlines the nascent vision for an understanding of agency as ascesis in the affirmative sense; withdrawal through participation with the strangeness of the Other, a being-with that implodes the Subject through an opening to the contingent plurality of the Self. As stated by Jean-Luc Nancy, it is the intimate relation, the being-with, that creates the possibility – that is the possibility – of self (plural) presence through a spatial distancing: “All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation.”1 Above all, this paper is a call to utilize a new metric of relational aliveness to define meaning itself through a withdrawal into a shared process of consumption. The conception of participation as withdrawal pointed to in this paper marks an important turn from the increasingly popular affirmation of ascesis as action in contemporary continental philosophy, epitomized in the work of Peter Sloterdijk, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, and (the later work of) Michel Foucault, as well as many feminist philosophers within science and technology studies and critical animal studies such as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad.2 In many of these cases, power is analyzed not as an





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imposition onto the Subject, but as a repetition of the Subject itself: the Subject exists only within (and as) the repetition of power and, therefore, the only positive move becomes withdrawal from the Self; escape as cultivation of the Self. As Sloterdijk states: “It is time to reveal humans as beings that result from repetition.”3 The task within this repetition of the Self, the repetition of power, becomes learning how to develop a practice – a training routine – that exploits the never-complete circularity of Subject formation through a removal that opens new possibilities of power: a process, as stated by Donna Haraway, with the aim of “disengaging from the semiotics and technologies of compulsory reproductive biopolitics.”4 The examples within contemporary theory are endless: from Zizek’s famous t-shirt that reads “I would prefer not to”, to negative empowerment of the multitude through the dissolution of Spinoza’s attributes in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.5 Due to the brevity of this paper, the analysis will not rehash the details of negative forms of agency, but will rather jump straight into how and why this line of thinking must be turned upside down. The paper will employ Jacques Derrida’s concept of eating well and Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of presence to understand the ethical encounter and the contingency inherent in the repetition of the Self. The conclusion will then attempt to bridge these two arguments – subjective destitution as self-practice/agency and the encounter as ethical possibility – in order to propose an affirmation of plurality through an offering of the Self, not as escape but as celebration. Celebration in this context is to be taken in both the performative (ie. religious) and enjoyment sense of the word. The purpose of this paper, in this way, is to set the stage for an embrace of enjoyment (jouissance) as the possibility of contingent action, not as a turn towards the drive within the self, but, rather, as the turn towards the relational drive of Being-with.





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Being-With In Being Singular Plural, Nancy explores the relationship of Being, presence, and meaning in relation to the Other. In fact, these three notions are demonstrated to be nothing but different names for the same process: “Being itself is given to us as meaning. Being does not have meaning. Being itself, the phenomenon of Being, is meaning that is, in turn, its own circulation – and we are this circulation.”6 This section dives deeper into what it means to exist as a circulation and how this relationship can be ethically engaged. As described above, the first move that Nancy makes is to abandon any conception of Being that allows for retreat or withdrawal into the intimacy of the Self. Nancy, while making some important revisions, draws heavily on Heidegger in the conception of Being as a construction rather than as essence. As Heidegger describes in Building Dwelling Thinking, Being is presenced through a gathering; a singular location is enacted through a construction, a process of building that is itself dwelling and folds back on itself to structure the space, subsequently masking the process itself: “everything that already belongs to the gathering nature of this thing does, of course, appear as something that is afterward read into it.”7 Being, set into motion, cannot be revealed; it is the very process of concealment/unconcealment through which the world is continuously structured and located. Meaning is not something belonging to being that can be revealed through a deconstruction of the building process. Instead, as the process of building itself, meaning is the act of gathering, of Being-with (and so “deconstruction” must always be viewed as con-struction or struction). This conception of being-with, for Nancy, means that Being is always performed within a relationship: “Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.”8 Existence itself is an enactment, a relationship that is continuously negotiated. This conception of Being as being-with most





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importantly points towards the open possibilities of the individual, the potential for difference at the heart of the Subject. As Nancy explains: “Our being-with, as a being-many, is not at all accidental, and it is in no way the secondary and random dispersion of a primordial essence. It forms the proper and necessary status and consistency of originary alterity as such.”9 To return to Heidegger, it is the singular gathering within the potential plurality of a space allows for a site to emerge, for meaning to emerge. Heidegger uses the example of a bridge to demonstrate this point: “The bridge is a thing of its own kind; for it gathers the fourfold in such a way that it allows a site for it. But only something that is itself a location can make space for a site. The location is not already there before the bridge is. Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a location, and does so because of the bridge.”10 It is the singular bridge that paradoxically both allows for a site to emerge and closes of the possibilities of the location through delineation. Furthermore, it is only through relation, the gathering of the fourfold in a particular way for the purpose of a further relation (ie. to allow people to walk across the bridge) that the singular exists. For Nancy, speaking within the context of the Subject, presence similarly emerges through a relation that allows for the site of the Subject to emerge from original alterity. In other words, the very existence of the individual, of the meaning and presence of the Subject, is codetermined, arising as a relationship that folds back onto the structure of the originary space: “The co-implication of existing [l'exister] is the sharing of the world.”11 Given the severe implications of co-existence, what is the responsibility of individuals to each other, and how can ethical relationships be developed that acknowledge the open possibility and alterity that “grounds” presence?





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A Good Celebration The question of ethical boundary formation is taken up by Derrida in an exploration of consumption; the process of “eating well.”12 For Derrida, the assimilation, communication with and consumption (eating) of the Other is what allows for the demarcation of the Subject: “since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the good [du bien], how for goodness’ sake should one eat well [bien manger]?”13 As pointed to above, not only is the act of eating required (“vegetarians, too, partake of animals, even of men”14), it is the very possibility for morality, for the good. Assimilation, furthermore, is the process of meaning making, the “becoming subject of substance.”15 Within this context, eating well becomes the ethical imperative to acknowledge the communal formation of the subject, the act of eating as a shared process, a relationship. As Derrida states, eating is not a dialectic negotiation of power, but, rather, it is the act of learning how to give the Self, to offer hospitality for co-consumption: “‘One must eat well’ does not mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat.”16 The Subject, in this way, is able to consume through an invitation – an offering that is simultaneously a becoming. In this way, eating well can, perhaps, be viewed as both a celebration – a sacrificial invitation of being-with – as well as a consecration: the bridge (to return to Heidegger) between making-into-flesh and becoming-divine. As Derrida states, it is precisely within this bridging out of (and as) which meaning emerges: “the questions that I am raising here concern not only metaphysics, onto-theologies, and certain claims to go beyond them, but also the ethnology of religious domains in which these thinkings ‘present’ themselves.”17 However, as a presencing, what access does the emerging Subject have to a self-reworking and offering with the Other?





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How can the Subject intentionally practice consumption through which the plurality of existence is consistently affirmed without falling victim to the great lethargic post-meal hangover?

Conclusion: “Squeeze Me ‘Til I Pop!” For Lacan, and the many theorist influenced by this line of thought mentioned in the introduction, access to the plurality of the origin is possible only through a withdrawal towards the symptom, a process that, if completed, marks the death Subject: “It is thus clearly [in the turn towards the drive] that the analysis of the ego finds its ideal terminus: that in which the subject, having refound the origins of his ego in an imaginary regression, comes, by the progression of remembering, to its end in analysis—namely, the subjectification of his death.”18 The process of ascesis, of suspension of “all objective knowledge,”19 is a withdrawal from the collectively structured symbolic order; the relational order or meaning itself. In this way, the Subject emerges only through participation – a being-with. Subjective destitution, while unraveling the Subject, is the very possibility for exposure to a different future, to open possibilities outside the repetitive forces of singular power (the Self always-already as these relationships of power). For Lacan, therefore, exposure to the “truth” of the plural (and paradoxical) Real is achieved through a disengagement: the free and final act of the Subject. As outlined above, Jean-Luc Nancy, on the other hand, makes the opposite claim: “We have access to the truth of the origin as many times as we are in one another's presence and in the presence of the rest of beings.”20 While these positions may seem like irreconcilable strategies, this paper suggests that, bridged by Derrida’s concept of learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat, Lacanian-inspired subjective destitution is possible within, and is, perhaps, impossible without, the process of invitation and engagement with the Other demonstrated by Nancy. After all, within the symbolic order, if Lacanian thought is to





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fully refute the ability to follow desire into the Earth (as outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari21), must not the drive itself be relocated as relation? It is here that Nancy (and Derrida) could prove to be helpful allies to the process of subjective destitution, demonstrating that to really follow the hunger of the Subject, to face the drive, requires a celebration together. It is through the encounter that alterity is exposed; it is the singular that allows for the multiple to exist, together. As Nancy states: “There is proximity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasizes the distancing it opens up.”22 In other words, plurality is opened through touch, and touch, as an offering of the Self, is the being-eaten through which the Subject is continually able to become reborn, to create and become contingent meaning in the world. The ethical imperative, then, is to fully offer the Self, to yell out loud, “Sqeeze me ‘til I pop!” And, like a giant piñata, to take joy in the colorful explosion of our own Being-with.





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Notes 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 5. 2 See, for example, Judith Butler (The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), and Michel Foucault, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). 3 Peter Sloterdijk and Wieland Hoban, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013), 5. 4 Donna Jeanne Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 222. 5 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004. 6 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 2. 7 Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," In Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 152. 8 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 3. 9 Ibid., 11. 10 Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," 152. 11 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 29. 12 Jacques Derrida, Daniel Birnbaum, and Anders Olssen, "An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion," (E-flux 02, January 2009). 13 Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Weber, Points ...: Interviews (1974-1994. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 282. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 280 16 Ibid., 282 17 Ibid., 284. 18 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1966), 321. 19 Ibid. 20 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 13. 21 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 22 Ibid., 5.





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Bibliography Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Derrida, Jacques, and Elisabeth Weber. Points ...: Interviews, 1974-1994. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques, Daniel Birnbaum, and Anders Olssen. "An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion." E-flux 02 (January 2009). Foucault, Michel, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Heidegger, Martin. "Building Dwelling Thinking." In Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1966. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Sloterdijk, Peter, and Wieland Hoban. You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013.