comparative & continental philosophy, Vol. 5 No.

1, May, 2013, 19–35

Art and the Heideggerian Repression:

Rancière, Nancy, and a Communism of
the Image
Michael Eng
John Carroll University

This essay conducts a reading of Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Jacques Rancière’s

respective theorizations of the image. Using Nancy’s notion of literary
communism, I first show how he and Rancière conceive the image as a site
of community’s open writing and contestation. My reading then demon-
strates how this ‘‘communism of the image’’ exposes Rancière’s repetition of
an ontological gesture that he has attempted to dismiss as Heideggerian.

keywords image, distribution of the sensible, sense, partage, sharing, literary

communism, community, finitude, being-with

‘‘A return to the aesthetic,’’ ‘‘a return to the senses’’—such pronouncements have
accompanied the recent ascendance of Jacques Rancière in contemporary
continental thought (Robson 2005; Panagia and Richard 2010). Implicit in such
pronouncements, however, is the claim that the various trajectories of post-
Heideggerian thought that formed much of the landscape of twentieth-century
continental philosophy were a detour from any concern with either the aesthetic or
the senses. Now that Derrida really is dead, so might the reasoning go, maybe the
critical attention Rancière now receives (along with Alain Badiou and the
‘‘speculative realism’’ inspired by Badiou’s student Quentin Meillassoux) is
evidence that we are finally breaking free of the so-called postmodern notion that
there is nothing outside the text and that, at last, we can get ‘‘back to the things
themselves’’ through a return to the sensible.
However, a puzzle emerges when we try to maintain this narrative about
twentieth-century continental thought. There is the problem of how to accept the
characterization of post-Heideggerian engagements with art as non-aesthetic
concerns, but there is the more immediate question of how to think Rancière’s
conception of ‘‘the distribution of the sensible’’ (le partage du sensible) as distinct
from Jean-Luc Nancy’s inflection of partage as the sharing-division of the sense of
Being, which he has argued unfolds out of Heidegger’s thought. Nancy’s effort to
show how the sharing of sense exposes the relational foundation of ontology (as

ß W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 DOI 10.1179/1757063813Z.0000000002

20 MICHAEL ENG

always-already presupposing the existence of the other human being) is mirrored

by Rancière’s thematization of a distribution of the sensible. Nancy’s subsequent
translation of this fact of sharing into the fact of community’s contingency, or
what he has called ‘‘unworking’’ (désoeuvrement), resonates strongly with
Rancière’s conceptions of community and politics as inherently open and
‘‘dissensual.’’ Furthermore, Nancy’s focus on the aesthetic and the image as
scenes of the partage of sense parallel Ranciere’s own in recent years (Nancy 1996;
2006; 2008; Rancière 2004; 2007).
Others have recognized the puzzle of a possible correspondence among
Rancière, Nancy, and other post-Heideggerian thinkers, such as Derrida and
Giorgio Agamben. In an interview from 2005, Rancière is asked specifically about
affinities between his conception of politics as ‘‘dissensus’’ and the theme of
‘‘community in-difference’’ in the writings of Derrida, Nancy, and Agamben. In
response, Rancière claims, ‘‘What they try to do… is to relate the thinking of the
political community to some prior form of anthropological or ontological ‘being-
together’ that would be tied to an ontological or anthropological structure, such as
the Heideggerian Dasein’’ (Blechman et al. 2005, 292). Expressing suspicion about
what he calls ‘‘this pre-political requirement of community,’’ Rancière states that
he does not believe politics ‘‘need[s] to be grounded in some ontological
configuration of ‘being-together’’’ (Blechman et al. 2005, 292). He particularly
identifies Agamben’s notion of the ‘‘state of exception’’ as resulting finally in ‘‘a
dismissal of politics’’ because it consigns politics to a condition ‘‘from which only
an ontological revolution can save us.’’ Rancière characterizes such a gesture as
‘‘already the Heideggerian idea’’ and ultimately ‘‘a kind of salvation [from which]
we should first be saved’’ (Blechman et al. 2005, 292).
Rancière’s subsequent description of Nancy in a 2008 interview supports
interpretations that link Rancière’s suspicion of ontology to his more general
rejection of anything that endorses what he has named the police order of
existence. In the interview, Rancière casts Nancy as someone who ‘‘remains
attached to the idea of a philosophy that endeavors to think, including in its
impossibility, a primary experience of major shared signifiers: meaning, the world,
the other, the common’’ (Baronian and Rosello 2008, 2). As Deranty (2003) and
Ieven (2009) have offered, ontology reflects a police order drive or desire to assign
and keep everything—and everyone—in their respective places. It is this drive that
Rancière opposes to the redistribution of the sensible that he calls ‘‘politics.’’
In this essay, I am less concerned with whether Rancière is correct in his
characterization of post-Heideggerian thought (he may very well be) than with his
success in making his concern with community qualitatively distinct from the
Heideggerian ‘‘assumption’’ of ‘‘being-together.’’ What Rancière leaves incomplete
in his portrayal of Nancy is the fact that Nancy’s reflection on the Heideggerian
Mitsein appears within a deconstructive reading of Heidegger’s text. Nancy’s
conception of community as désoeuvrée passes first through his recovery of the
partage of sense in Being and Time, which Heidegger makes visible in the casting
of Mitsein as constitutive of the being of Dasein. However, Heidegger then
represses the being-with of Dasein when he identifies Dasein’s ‘‘proper’’
(eigentlich) destiny with that of the Volk. Nancy’s insistent returns to partage
 ART AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN REPRESSION 21

are thus attempts to bring into focus Heidegger’s repression of the being-with and
to restore it in order to expose the relational ground of human existence.
By analyzing Rancière’s and Nancy’s respective theorizations of the image as
recent examples of their parallel concern with partage, I seek to elucidate their
shared commitment to an indefinite and open writing of community, which Nancy
describes with the notion of literary communism. At the same time, I also wish to
explore how Rancière’s version of a communism of the image exposes his
repetition of the Heideggerian gesture that he has attempted to discount as
ontological. By dismissing any alignment with (Heideggerian) ontology, Rancière
ends up repeating the Heideggerian repression of the being-with: the fact of ‘‘our’’
sharing of sense. My efforts in this essay are thus devoted to restoring ‘‘the with’’
in Rancière’s conception of partage.

I. Rancière and the Image: The Reality of the Aesthetic and the
Scandal of Community
As Nancy has remarked, one prominent attitude he and Rancière share is a
suspicion of consensus and homology (Nancy 2009, 85). For Rancière, this
suspicion extends to traditional conceptions of community that view it as a
product of consensual deliberation by a collectivity of political subjects. He also
deploys this suspicion against discourses that project consensus as a goal of
community. ‘‘Consensus’’ and ‘‘community,’’ Rancière contends, are objects that
we are encouraged to hold as given and self-evident so that an existing distribution
of the sensible may be maintained and remain unquestioned. From Disagreement,
which introduced the exigency of dissensus for a thought of politics, to The Politics
of Aesthetics, which theorized art’s potential to ‘‘intervene’’ in the distribution of
the sensible, Rancière has demonstrated that it is essential to disrupt the police
orders that keep in place and present as natural what are actually highly
orchestrated ways of seeing and speaking (‘‘what is seen and what can be said
about it’’ [Rancière 2004, 13]). It is imperative for any real thought of politics—
that is, for any real practice that would disrupt the existing police order of
perception, redistribute the sensible, and create new possibilities of experience—to
dismantle the discourses that appear to describe the existing police order of
perception but which are themselves accomplices to this police order, help
reproduce it, and benefit from its reproduction. Such discourses block access to the
fact of shared sensibility and consequently to a thought of politics as a
redistribution of the sensible.
In Disagreement, Rancière exposes political philosophy’s role in blocking access
to the fact of the sensible and its distribution. Though it ostensibly takes the
political as its concern, political philosophy from the ancients to the moderns has
failed to encounter the fundamental antagonism—or what Rancière calls ‘‘wrong’’
(tort)—that is the origin of the political. Political philosophy conceives the political
as a problem that concerns the equitable distribution of some value (liberty,
material resources) in order to realize a common good (justice, communal
harmony). From such a standpoint, politics is consequently nothing more than an
arithmetic problem that assumes as given the existence of community and the
22 MICHAEL ENG

equality of community members (Rancière 1999, 6). This assumption covers over
an inevitable, basic ‘‘wrong’’ that lies at the heart of any formation of community:
prior to any distribution of values, there is the initial valuation of who is eligible to
be recognized as a member of such a community. In a manner that evokes his
mentor Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation, Rancière argues that there must
first be a distribution of sensibility that recognizes who is equal within a
community. This prior distribution is the condition for the possibility of any other
distribution according to values and resources.
This fundamental act of designating not only ‘‘what is seen and what can be said
about it’’ but also ‘‘who is able to speak’’ and ‘‘know’’ the sensible means that
there will always be those who are interpellated as being outside the distribution of
the sensible; they are the paradoxical ‘‘part of those who have no part’’ in the
distribution (Rancière 1999, 9). This constitutive outside of the communal
distribution of the sensible has historically gone by many names—‘‘the poor of
ancient times, the third estate, the modern proletariat’’—but there is always an
‘‘outside’’ designated to exist within the inside of any communal formation
(Rancière 1999, 9). This is the wrong that all forms of community harbor within
themselves, which political philosophy, as well as such discourses as public policy
and the social sciences in general, treats as an accident or exception to community.
Casting the question of the political as a question involving community and
consensus therefore constitutes something like a shell game that distracts us from
the real task of politics, which Rancière argues is that of instituting dissensus as a
means to provoke a redistribution of the sensible.
In The Politics of Aesthetics, it is art history that Rancière targets as a police
discourse. With Disagreement, Rancière establishes the aesthetic as the basis of
politics. However, this immediately raises the question of whether art, by its nature
as an aesthetic practice, automatically reshapes the sensible. According to
Rancière, it does not, although, like any other form of cultural production, art
holds the potential to do so. In order to see this, however, we must overcome art
history’s periodizations and classifications of art forms, which prevent the real
question of art from appearing. Rather than cataloguing the evolution of artistic
forms and styles, the real issue concerning art’s history, Rancière says, is seeing
how the determination of ‘‘what art makes’’ has been contested (Rancière 2004,
25).
For example, modernist art history’s speculative—and mythic—assertion of the
medium specificity and respective autonomy of the various arts never places in
question ‘‘what art makes.’’ Instead, modernist art history ontologizes art in
general by theorizing the idea of an essence from technical and material modes of
production. Art history’s lifelong project of tracking and ‘‘policing’’ art’s forms
distracts from and takes for granted the fact of shared sensibility, the sensible’s
distribution, and especially art’s potential for redistributing the sensible in the
contestation of ‘‘what art makes.’’ At stake in such a contestation is the rewriting
of sensibility’s sharing and thus a rewriting of community. In a conception
reminiscent of the ‘‘epistemes’’ of Foucault’s early archaeology, The Politics of
Aesthetics presents the notion of ‘‘artistic regimes’’ to replace art history’s
periodizations of styles. In place of the classifications of ‘‘classical art,’’ ‘‘medieval
 ART AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN REPRESSION 23

art,’’ and ‘‘modern art,’’ Rancière offers respectively the ‘‘ethical,’’ ‘‘representa-
tive,’’ and ‘‘aesthetic’’ regimes of art as configurations of specific ‘‘communities of
sense’’ (Rancière 2004, 20230). These configurations, he says, are ‘‘fold[s] in the
distribution of ways of doing and making’’ (Rancière 2004, 22).
Rancière’s turn more recently to the image constitutes a complex and layered
elaboration of the general project he charts in Disagreement and The Politics of
Aesthetics. The Future of the Image deftly weaves together analyses of works by
contemporary artists, the films of Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard, and
museum exhibitions dedicated to the image to show how the image can be seen as
a site of the shared contestation and writing of community. At the same time,
Rancière follows the same tack he establishes in his previous works of dismantling
prevailing discourses that block access to a consideration of the distribution of the
sensible. In this case, Rancière holds that there are conceptions of the image in
contemporary cultural theory that prevent seeing the image as an artistic
intervention that undoes the economies of representation and mimesis and
establishes new conditions of sensibility.
In the eponymous opening chapter of The Future of the Image, Rancière begins
by wondering how a certain univocal idea of the image has been constructed as
part of ‘‘the apocalyptic discourses of today’s cultural climate’’ (Rancière 2007, 1).
The supposed univocity and ubiquity of the image, Rancière observes, provides the
motivation for two prominent pronouncements: either that 1) there is no reality
any longer, only images, or 2) there are no more images, only a reality ‘‘incessantly
representing itself to itself’’ (Rancière 2007, 1). Rancière points out that these
positions are ‘‘forever being converted into one another’’ (Rancière 2007, 1) and
are thus less representative of two separate attitudes toward the image than twin
expressions of a general technological determinism. Cinema’s mode of projecting
its images gives rise to the conviction that reality requires this projection in order
to appear. Television’s apparent ability to produce its images from within a self-
contained apparatus nurtures the belief that its images are sui generis, having no
need to refer to a reality it would re-present (Rancière 2007, 223).
What is most immediately striking, then, in Rancière’s confrontation with the
discourses on the image is his identification of a modernist residue at work in
them. He uncovers an updated version of modernism’s fixation with medium
specificity that has been transcribed onto conceptions of various imaging
technologies and ideas about their implications. The technological ontologization
that Rancière finds in modernism persists in contemporary discourses on the
image. Like the discourse of modernism itself, such discourses function as police
orders that define in advance what the image is and what it can do. The Future of
the Image will go on to dislodge the contemporary discourses on the image from
this modernist residue. The aim, however, will be less to correct a reading of
modernism than to reread modernism’s attention to medium specificity as a way to
regain the image’s potential to produce what Rancière calls ‘‘dissemblance,’’ the
image’s particular ability to furnish an experience of dissensus.
The core of Rancière’s effort to dislodge the image from the way it is cast within
contemporary cultural discourse can be located in his engagement with the
cinematic image. Rancière conducts a brief reading of the opening sequence of
24 MICHAEL ENG

Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) as a counter-example to the way film

is characterized by the prevailing discourses on the image. Rather than refer to a
reality outside itself that only appears through the cinematic image, Bresson’s film
behaves in a manner that is considered more characteristic of the television image:
its ‘‘images refer to nothing else’’ other than themselves (Rancière 2007, 3). ‘‘The
images of Au hasard Balthazar,’’ writes Rancière, ‘‘are not primarily manifesta-
tions of the properties of a certain technical medium, but operations: relations
between a whole and parts; between a visibility and a power of signification and
affect associated with it; between expectations and what happens to meet them’’
(Rancière 2007, 3). Rancière’s shot analysis highlights Bresson’s minimalism
and fragmentation—the separation of voice and image, the de-linkage between
utterances and narrative progression, the obscuring of narrative clarity and vision
in the framing of shots, the use of dissolve to strengthen narrative progression
instead of interrupting it (Rancière 2007, 324).
Rancière’s claim is that Bresson’s ability to craft such relations among images
has nothing to do with the so-called inherent ‘‘properties of the cinematic
medium’’ (Rancière 2007, 5). To speak of such properties is to miss what is both at
work and at stake in Bresson’s cinema, which is not so much a type of
technological manipulation or mastery of medium but rather a pragmatics of the
image. Bresson, Rancière holds, does not realize any ‘‘essence of the cinema’’
(Rancière 2007, 5); instead, his ‘‘‘images’ are … operations that couple and
uncouple the visible and its signification or speech and its effect, which create and
frustrate expectations’’ (Rancière 2007, 425). Au hasard Balthazar constitutes a
reconfiguration of the sayable, the visible, and their relation.
For Rancière, it does not matter whether Au hasard Balthazar is projected onto
a screen in a theatre or from a video cassette through a television’s cathode ray
tube. The mode of appearance does not affect what Bresson accomplishes with the
image. It is on the basis of this ‘‘medium non-specificity’’ that Rancière proceeds to
argue that, in fact, Au hasard Balthazar extends a pragmatics of the image that has
more in common with the literary tradition inaugurated by Flaubert than with
cinema (Rancière 2007, 5). Both Madame Bovary and Au hasard Balthazar share
‘‘an ambivalence in which the same procedures create and retract meaning, ensure
and undo the link between perceptions, actions and affects’’ (Rancière 2007, 5).
Bresson continues a practice of ‘‘imageness’’ exemplified by Flaubert. Bresson’s
practice frames images and constructs the relations among them in a way that
disrupts the expected connection between the sayable and the visible and thereby
plays with the temporality of cause and effect (Rancière 2007, 526). The
dissemblance of the image in Rancière’s conception means that the image exceeds
the merely visible and touches on the conditions of sense and sensibility (Rancière
2007, 7).
However, in defining images as ‘‘relations between a visibility and a
signification’’ (Rancière 2007, 33), Rancière also uncovers a paradox: the image
serves as ‘‘an operation of communalization’’ by ‘‘dissembling’’ the conditions
of sense and sensibility (Rancière 2007, 33234). Incommensurability of the
image gives rise to the commensurability of a common sensibility (Rancière
2007, 34). The common, that is to say, cannot be assumed as given, and yet
 ART AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN REPRESSION 25

it is also necessary to assume a common sensibility that the image dissembles and
reconfigures.
The resolution of this paradox cannot be found through a reification of
community, for that would undermine the operation Rancière assigns the image.
Nor can it be resolved by valorizing the image’s incommensurability. That would
imply an absence of any common sensibility and mark off a space of inaccessibility
that reproduces what Rancière considers some of the most blatant offenses of
postmodern thought. Examples of such offenses can be found, Rancière claims, in
the celebrations of aporia and ‘‘impossibility’’ by critical discourse and specifically
in what Rancière believes is the mystification of the sublime in Lyotard’s work. In
order to think a way outside this paradox, Rancière posits the possibility that there
may be many senses of incommensurability, each one presupposing or designating
‘‘a certain form of community’’ (Rancière 2007, 35).
Twentieth-century French cinema once again serves as a resource for Rancière as
he attempts to resolve the paradox of the image. In particular, Jean-Luc Godard’s
eight chapter Histoire(s) du cinéma (1987298) functions as an exemplary
articulation of the paradox insofar as it features what is largely considered by
now Godard’s trademark layered and interruptive experimentations incorporating
film, video, still-images, sound, voice, and text. At the same time, these
experimentations are designed to coalesce and render a shared history (or, to
honor Godard’s play in the series’ title, both a shared history/story as well as
shared histories/stories). However, Rancière approaches Historire(s) as more than
a presentation of the paradox of the image. For Rancière, Histoire(s) is not simply
a fragmented, discontinuous documentary of cinema’s history. It tells the history/
story—or histories/stories—that cinema tells of itself. Godard’s series is thus a
history/story of modernity, according to Rancière, and, furthermore, of the mythic
origin of the concept of incommensurability itself.
What distinguishes modernity, or what Rancière renames ‘‘the aesthetic regime
of art,’’ from the classical period (the representative regime of art) is the apparent
loss of a common measure with which to think the unity of the arts. The
representative regime of art, exemplified conceptually by Aristotle, formed a
community of images that obeyed ‘‘a schema of ideal causality’’ for which history
was the common measure (Rancière 2007, 38). History, and the relation of cause
and effect harbored within the conception of history, provided the measure of
‘‘intelligibility’’ among images and between images and ‘‘use’’ (Rancière 2007, 39).
Under the representative regime of art, a hierarchy that subsumed images to text
was also obeyed (Rancière 2007, 39).
With the aesthetic regime of art, the causal logic linking images and the
hierarchical ordering of images in relation to text and language became uncoupled;
the ‘‘common measure’’ evaporated (Rancière 2007, 39). According to Rancière,
discourses of modernism and modernity mistakenly account for the decoupling of
image and text and the evaporation of a common measure among them by
constructing a narrative of the autonomy of art and the relative autonomy
(medium specificity) of the different art forms with respect to one another.
Rancière cites Winckelmann and Lessing’s debate over the Laocoön, in which
Lessing counters Winckelmann’s interpretation of the marble as depicting nobility
26 MICHAEL ENG

in suffering with an argument for the limits of translatability between the literary
and the visual. For Rancière, the Winckelmann-Lessing debate serves as a
foundational, almost mythic, moment that reified medium specificity to the level of
autonomous artistic spheres and made them incommensurable with one another
(Rancière 2007, 39).
Rancière suggests a radical reversal: Rather than assume that artistic autonomy
follows from the loss of a common measure, we should view the fact of the
multiple arts as testifying to ‘‘the measurelessness of the mélange’’ and to the
multiplicity of the aesthetic (Rancière 2007, 42). Rancière also enlists Hegel in this
reversal, arguing that for Hegel ‘‘the separation between spheres of rationality
entailed not the glorious autonomy of art and the arts, but the loss of the power of
thinking in common, of thinking, of producing or expressing something common’’
(Rancière 2007, 43). The aesthetic regime of art engages the loss of the common; it
makes the common its project.
What the aesthetic regime of art maps out is an alternative between chaos (the
absence of anything common, absolute incommensurability) and a false image of
an intact, preformed community that registers the effects, as well as affects, of the
redistribution of the sensible. It is within this mapping that Rancière situates
Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema. The interruptive and discontinuous montage of
Godard’s Histoire(s) continues the practice of the image in the aesthetic regime of
art that Rancière calls ‘‘the phrase-image.’’ The phrase-image undoes the mimetic
and hierarchical relationship between text and image and replaces this relationship
with new linkages and significations. The phrase-image provides a relation of
commensurability against the chaos or schizophrenia of signs, but it also disrupts
simple representative concatenations of signs. Rancière writes: ‘‘As phrase, it
accommodates paratactic power by repelling the schizophrenic explosion. As
image, with its disruptive force it repels the big sleep of indifferent triteness [le
grand sommeil du ressassement indifférent] or the great communal intoxication of
bodies [la grande ivresse communielle des corps]’’ (Rancière 2007, 46; 2003,
56257). For Rancière, Histoire(s) demonstrates how ‘‘the history of cinema is the
history of a power of making history’’ (Rancière 2007, 55). Once history as a
common measure dissipates with the displacement of the representative regime of
art, the aesthetic regime deploys the phrase-image to construct history through a
common measure of the ‘‘clash of heterogeneous elements’’ (Rancière 2007, 55).
Rancière identifies two types of phrase-images in which ‘‘the heterogeneous
creates a common measure: the dialectical and the symbolic’’ (Rancière 2007,
55256). The dialectical ‘‘[organizes] a clash, presenting the strangeness of the
familiar, in order to reveal a different order of measurement that is only uncovered
by the violence of a conflict’’ (Rancière 2007, 57). In order to emphasize that he is
speaking about an operation of the image that goes beyond any specific medium or
particular ‘‘school or doctrine’’ (such as Soviet montage), Rancière alludes briefly
to well-known works by Martha Rosler, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Hans Haacke
as examples of the dialectical way that artists work with the image. Rosler’s
Bringing the War Home series (1967272), Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection: A
Proposal for the City of New York (1986), and Haacke’s Seurat’s ‘‘Les Poseuses’’
(Small Version), 1888–1975 (1975) all arrange a clash of images—the Vietnam
 ART AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN REPRESSION 27

War with domesticity in Rosler’s series, the homeless with public monuments in
Wodiczko’s proposal, and the financial history of ownership behind one of Seurat’s
studies in Haacke’s intervention—to make felt an antagonism that existing
police forces work to keep invisible. Rancière contends that in so doing, the
dialectical mode perpetually reveals the existence of ‘‘one world behind another,’’
i.e., those parts of the sensible’s distribution that are consigned to invisibility
(Rancière 2007, 56).
The symbolist phrase-image takes an opposite tack to that of the dialectical.
Rather than produce strangeness from familiarity, the symbolist phrase-image
brings together foreign elements to establish or suggest a form of familiarity that
‘‘[attests] to a more fundamental relationship of co-belonging’’ (Rancière 2007,
57). The heterogeneous—difference as such—composes ‘‘the same essential fabric’’
of such co-belonging (Rancière 2007, 57). This is the phrase-image of Mallarmé
and Godard, Rancière claims. Each creates ‘‘little machines’’ of difference with his
work, and it is from this perspective that one should understand what Godard is
doing in his Histoire(s) du cinéma (Rancière 2007, 57, 67).
Though different, both the dialectical and symbolist phrase-image ‘‘[strive] for
continuous phrasing’’ (Rancière 2007, 58). Both perpetuate a drive to establish
ever-new common measures while at the same time attempting to discover ‘‘traces
of community’’ in images and signs (Rancière 2007, 67). As we will see, this
recasting of the image will be one of several points of correspondence between
Rancière and Nancy. Like Rancière, Nancy also proposes a revision of the image
as that which breaks with the economies of representation and mimesis and
projects it as a poietic site of community’s open production.

II. Nancy and the Recovery of the Being-with

Those familiar with Nancy’s writings will notice the ways Rancière’s notions of
‘‘the measurelessness of the mélange’’ and the revelation of ‘‘one world behind
another’’ resonate with Nancy’s meditations on what he describes in his work as
the singularity of existence and the plurality of worlds. Like Rancière, Nancy is
suspicious of those police forces (which he refers to with the term la politique) that
invoke community but do so only as a cynical means of accruing power within the
public sphere and therefore refuse to really pose the question of community as a
question. What counts as ‘‘community’’ in these instances is really a failure to
think community and the political (le politique) (Nancy 1991, xxxvi2xli). For
Nancy, ‘‘community’’ is not the result of individual human beings deciding to
assemble themselves into a group. Nor is it an object that presents itself for
readymade reference and inspection. Rather, Nancy thinks ‘‘community’’ as the
communitarian communication of the shared division of sense and as such posits
community as the condition of human finitude. It is the condition of any thinking
and any experience whatsoever and therefore cannot be the object of thought or
experience. Without community, human finitude would not be possible, which is
to say that without community, ‘‘world’’ would not be possible.
To the extent that Nancy takes Heidegger’s conceptions of sense, world, and
finitude as the basis from which he theorizes community, Rancière is correct when
28 MICHAEL ENG

he characterizes Nancy’s reflections on community as grounded in Heideggerian

ontology. Unlike Rancière, however, Nancy does not find the concept of being-
with in Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology prescriptively constraining,
mystifying, or utopic (Blechman et al. 2005, 292). With the being-with, Nancy
finds in Heidegger a fundamental instability at the heart of human finitude that
he then extrapolates to interrupt the reifying drives of la politique. Rather than
being a constraint or a police order determining in advance the possibilities
of the political and community, Nancy’s conception of community directs
us toward possibility as such, which is why he conceives community as a
destabilizing movement of désoeuvrement (unworking) that is never finished or
closed. To translate Nancy’s conception in Rancière’s terms, community is
dissensual; it is Nancy’s name for dissensus. Nancy differs slightly yet significantly
from Rancière insofar he conceives community and dissensus as inseparable,
whereas Rancière will conceive politics as the dissensual intervention in
community. While Rancière pinpoints the image as a mode through which a
redistribution of the sensible may be achieved, Nancy’s attendance to the question
of the image furthers his efforts to recover the fact of the being-with and the
sharing of sense to which this fact testifies.
Though a detailed overview of Nancy’s reading of Heidegger is beyond the
scope of the present essay,1 a brief rehearsal of Nancy’s intervention in Heidegger’s
text will nevertheless be useful as a way to understand how Nancy engages art and
the image as questions of community.
Nancy observes that Mitsein (‘‘being-with’’) and Mitdasein (‘‘being-there-with’’)
together form a contradictory moment in the project of fundamental ontology. In
Being and Time, Heidegger asserts that Mitsein and Mitdasein are ‘‘equiprimor-
dial’’ (gleich ursprünglich) with Dasein’s being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1962,
149; 1993, 114). When Dasein is in the world (which is always, since Dasein’s
being is to be projected ahead of itself in a concern with its being from out of a
sense of Being), Dasein ‘‘encounters’’ (begegnet) the being of other Daseins who,
by definition, are also in-the-world (Heidegger 1993, 118, 126). As being-thrown
ahead in the world depends on an understanding of Being, this means that Dasein’s
understanding of Being is shared with the other Daseins it encounters. At the same
time, since to ‘‘have a world’’ means encountering other Daseins, Dasein’s being-
in-the-world is constituted by both Mitsein and Mitdasein.
Nancy claims that Heidegger’s argument fails to rise higher than an assertion,
however. Despite being ‘‘co-essential to Dasein’s essence’’ (Nancy 2008, 2),
Mitsein and Mitdasein do not receive the relentless critical exegesis for which
Heidegger is known. Instead, Heidegger quickly directs the being-with of Dasein
into two possible directions: an inauthentic (uneigentlich) mode in which Dasein
falls prey to the whims and demands of an anonymous ‘‘Anyone’’ (Nancy’s
translation of das Man, which most English readers of Heidegger will know more
readily as ‘‘the they’’) and an authentic (eigentlich) mode in which Dasein’s being is
realized through alignment with the destiny of ‘‘the people’’ (das Volk). Captured
by the Anyone, Dasein is lost to itself, giving itself over to such devices as rumor

1
For an excellent overview of Nancy’s work that already exists, see Fynsk 1991.
 ART AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN REPRESSION 29

and idle talk (die Gerede) (Heidegger 1962, 135). This is a Dasein who has
relinquished its being to others, a Dasein who has abdicated its claim to its
ownmost possibility, especially that ultimate possibility that is Dasein’s alone,
namely its death (Heidegger 1962, 127).
Dasein recovers from being lost in the Anyone and becomes a Self by becoming
resolute in its being as possibility. Becoming resolute means that Dasein chooses its
fate as a being who is thrown ‘‘futurally’’ toward death as its ownmost possibility.
Dasein no longer lets its existence be determined by the Anyone, but embraces its
existence as thrown and therefore as temporal. As temporality, Dasein is also
historical, and in becoming resolute, Dasein ‘‘historizes’’ its existence. However,
because Dasein’s being-in-the-world means being with other Daseins, Dasein can
only historize itself and thereby exist authentically when it aligns its futurity with
the destiny of a people (Heidegger 1962, 173274). In its authentic relation to
Mitsein, Dasein aligns its being with the destiny of das Volk through an act
Heidegger characterizes with the term Aufgeben, which prevailing English
translations of Being and Time render as a ‘‘giving up’’ (Heidegger 1962, 443;
1993, 391).
To Nancy’s ears, however, Aufgeben implies more than a simple giving up; it
carries the imperative of a ‘‘self-sacrifice’’ (Nancy 2008, 11n10). Thus, in Nancy’s
view, as soon as Heidegger introduces the radical dimension of Mitsein and
Mitdasein as co-essential to Dasein’s existence, a dimension that upsets the
isolation of the metaphysical subject that forms the basis of the modern Western
philosophical tradition, Heidegger excludes this dimension from having any
further purchase on the project of fundamental ontology (Nancy 2008, 5). In place
of a real thought of ‘‘the with’’ and its implications for the thrown existence of
Dasein, Heidegger presents two possibilities for Dasein’s relation to ‘‘the with’’
that are equally impoverished: on the one hand, the ‘‘pure exteriority’’ of the
Anyone, in which Dasein is simply a ‘‘person’’ alongside other people (Nancy
2008, 4); on the other hand, the ‘‘pure interiority’’ of ‘‘the people,’’ in which
Dasein’s singular existence (and any thought of singularity, which, as Nancy
defines it, is Dasein’s exposure to the other Dasein in their shared finitude) is
assimilated to a ‘‘single communal Dasein’’ (Nancy 2008, 4). While the Anyone is
a metaphysical notion that works within the logic of ‘‘the simple contiguity of
things,’’ ‘‘the people’’ is just as metaphysical insofar as it exchanges the subjectivity
of ‘‘the person’’ for a group subject. Nancy writes:
[B]etween two subjects, the first being ‘‘the person’’ and the second ‘‘the community,’’
there is no place left for the ‘‘with,’’ nor in a more general way for that which would
neither be a ‘‘subject’’ (in the sense of self-constitution) nor a simple thing (in the sense
of the things put simply beside one another, or a sense of the with which Heidegger
precisely wants to dismiss). (Nancy 2008, 5)

It is between these two subjects that Nancy says ‘‘the with has been hidden, lost
or suppressed in the economy of Being and Time’’ (Nancy 2008, 5).
Two of Nancy’s earlier works mark his thought as both an elaboration and
deconstruction of Heidegger’s text. The essay ‘‘Sharing Voices’’ and the more well-
known The Inoperative Community elucidate further the shared finitude of
30 MICHAEL ENG

existence to which the structure of Mitsein and Mitdasein attests. However, in so

doing, they also expose Heidegger’s thought to the otherness it names yet proceeds
to repress. ‘‘Sharing Voices’’ engages the condition of Dasein’s facticity—the fact
that Dasein’s understanding of Being propels Dasein forward ahead of itself in the
world and also the fact that this projection is at once a self-understanding and a
self-interpretation (Selbstauslegung). If Mitsein and Mitdasein are constitutive of
Dasein’s thrownness, then whenever Dasein interprets itself, it shares this
interpretation—always-already—with the other Dasein. Dasein, as Dasein, is that
being for whom its being is a question, as Heidegger says, but in holding its being
as a question, Dasein addresses its existence to the other Dasein (while Dasein’s
world is composed also of the address of the other Dasein’s existence to Dasein).
The ‘‘voices’’ that Nancy understands as being shared include the division
(partage) of the sense of Being that Heidegger identifies as logos and the self-
interpretations Daseins communicate to one another as part of their facticity
(Nancy 1989). This is the structure of human finitude Nancy famously calls ‘‘being
singular plural’’ (Nancy 2000).
In The Inoperative Community, Nancy bolsters the notion of the sharing-
division of voices through a reading of Bataille’s concept of communication.
Bataille helps Nancy restore to Heidegger’s text the sense of human finitude as a
fundamental exposure to the other human being. The character of this exposure,
as Bataille conceives it, is one in which human finitude is at its basis a ‘‘being-
communication’’ (Nancy 1991, 24). It is not a communication of information or a
specific meaning between individuals. That would follow the metaphysics of
subjectivity—that is, the structure of a ‘‘subject-representing’’ (Nancy 1991, 24)—
that views human existence as a collection of self-contained individuals with
mastery over their representations. In Bataillean communication, what is
communicated is instead nothing other than the fact of the communication of
shared-divided finitude. ‘‘Community’’ is the name for the fundamental exposure
of human finitude and the exposure that human finitude above all is. Nancy writes:
Perhaps we should not seek a word or a concept for it, but rather recognize in the
thought of community a theoretical excess (or more precisely, an excess in relation to
the theoretical) that would oblige us to adopt another praxis of discourse and
community. But we should at least try to say this, because [here Nancy quotes Bataille]
‘‘language alone indicates, at the limit, the sovereign moment where it is no longer
current.’’ Which means here that only a discourse of community, exhausting itself, can
indicate to the community the sovereignty of its sharing…. An ethics and a politics of
discourse and writing are evidently implied here. (Nancy 1991, 26)

What Nancy then calls ‘‘literary communism’’ is a thought of community as an

open writing (he calls it an ‘‘inscription’’) of ‘‘unworking’’ (désoeuvrement)
(Nancy 1991, 39). What is unworked is any conception of community as an
accomplishment of individuals coming together to form some ‘‘super-subject’’
(such as a Volk). Since community is the name for a shared exposure that is prior
to any formation of subjectivity, community can never ‘‘be’’ anything. ‘‘Literary
 ART AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN REPRESSION 31

communism’’ is the destabilizing writing of ‘‘community.’’2 Where Rancière views

community as a perpetual reconstitution of the sensible, Nancy conceives the
inevitability of the sensible’s sharing as undoing in advance any determined
subjectivity, whether individual or group, for there is always an exposure to
otherness that the sharing of sense presupposes.
It is against this context that Nancy then turns to Heidegger’s reflections on
facticity and the work of art, first to develop a view of the plurality of arts as an
index of the singular plurality of worlds and then to argue for the image’s
destabilizing force. This will serve as the basis for Nancy’s conception of what I
have been calling the communism of the image. Like Rancière, Nancy sees art as
testifying to a shared sensibility, but while Rancière sees works of art as expressing
a communal sensibility and having the potential to ‘‘intervene’’ in the
redistribution of the sensible, Nancy proposes a notion of the artwork (and the
image) as framing the fact of sense, as making visible—sensible—the fact of sense.
By framing sense, the work of art, Nancy will argue, recovers the destabilizing
relation that is the singular plurality of sense’s sharing.

III. The Sense of Worlds and a Communism of the Image

In ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’’ Heidegger specifies the role art plays in the
structure of facticity: the work of art presents the presentation of Being to human
being by serving as a figure (Gestalt) for the setting-forth (Herstellung) of world
against earth. Heidegger writes:
This strife which is brought into the rift-design [(the drawing together of world and
earth)], and so set back into the earth and fixed in place, is the figure [Gestalt]. The
createdness of the work means: the fixing in place of truth in the figure. Figure is the
structure of the rift in its self-establishment. The structured rift is the jointure [Fuge] of
the shining of truth. What we here call ‘‘figure’’ is always to be thought out of that
particular placing [stellen] and placement [Ge-stell] as which the work comes to
presence when it sets itself up and sets itself forth. (Heidegger 2002, 38)

Art, as the figuration of world against the brute, material limit of existence that
is earth, is not only the presentation of Being’s presentation to the human Dasein.
Art—above all, the fact that there is art—also testifies to facticity. For Heidegger,
art is the figuration of the self-interpretation that characterizes human finitude.
Two of Nancy’s primary texts on art, The Muses and The Ground of the Image,
elaborate different moments of the artwork essay.
In The Muses, Nancy expands Heidegger’s reflections on facticity and the work
of art to argue that the existence of multiple arts points to the fact of the singular
plurality of worlds. Though Heidegger brings the creation of art and existential
worlding together in the artwork essay by provoking us to reflect on the fact that
there is art, he tends to treat the different artistic media as interchangeable. (One

2
Nancy 1991, 39. Here Nancy’s conception of literature appears to echo that of Blanchot’s, even though his
invocation of Blanchot’s notion of désoeuvrement is decidedly different. On this point, see Christopher Fynsk’s note in
The Inoperative Community (Nancy 1991, 154 n. 23).
32 MICHAEL ENG

recalls Heidegger’s inattention to medium specificity when he talks about the

Greek temple and van Gogh’s peasant shoes in similar terms.) Nancy goes beyond
Heidegger in this regard first by pausing over the fact that there are multiple arts
and then by arguing that the existence of the multiple arts implies the irreducible,
yet shared, multiplicity of worlds. If every work of art is a figuration of facticity—a
presentation of the self-interpretation of human existence in its address to others—
then the existence of the multiple arts suggests an open multiplicity of modes
through which human beings give facticity to presentation. With The Ground of
the Image, Nancy builds on the notion of art as presentation. He extends
Heidegger’s description of the work as an event of truth (álǵheia) by recasting the
image (and with it, the notion of mimesis in general) as that which exceeds the
economy of representation. Rather than represent beings, the image gives sense to
the fact of shared sensibility. Through the image, we ‘‘touch’’ upon the sharing of
Being’s sense.
In terms of Nancy’s linking the multiple arts to the plurality of worlds, it is
worth noting that this link is based on a revision of modernist aesthetics that is not
unlike the one Rancière undertakes. Nancy views modernism as essentially an
attempt to subsume the multiple arts under the univocal concept of art in general
(Kant, Schiller, and Hegel are the principals of this tradition). For Nancy,
modernism reduces the multiplicity of the arts in two ways: first, by subsuming the
arts under a general concept of art, and secondly, by viewing the multiple arts as
representative expressions of each of the bodily senses. In turn, this double
reduction ignores the fact that an absolute separation between the senses is
ultimately untenable; and, it also ignores the possibility that the very idea of the
five distinct senses stems from the existence of the multiple arts and not the other
way around. The difficulty one experiences within this modernist problematic is
what Nancy calls the ‘‘aisthetic circle’’ (Nancy 1996, 10211). By failing to
recognize this circle, Nancy suggests that we miss the most fundamental fact that
there is sense.
According to Nancy, the work of art makes sensible the ‘‘force’’ of sense; it
communicates this force. The image that is the work of art is not a mimetic
representation, but a presentation of the presentation of Being’s sense, ‘‘a little
sense in a pure state,’’ Nancy says (with a slight wink to Deleuze) (Nancy 2005,
13). Just as there is a division of the sense of Being and our understanding of this
sense in and through multiple worlds, there are multiple arts. If they meet together
in ‘‘art,’’ it is because all the arts ‘‘touch’’ on the sensibility of sense (Nancy 1996,
17). In The Ground of the Image, Nancy writes:
If it is possible for the same line, the same distinction, to separate and to communicate
or connect (communicating also separation itself…), that is because the traits and lines
of the image (its outline, its form) are themselves (something from) its intimate force:
for this intimate force is not ‘‘represented’’ by the image, but the image is it, the image
activates it, draws it and withdraws it, extracts it by withholding it, and it is with this
force that the image touches us. (Nancy 2005, 5)

The image is ‘‘distinct’’ insofar as it brings out ‘‘the dissimilarity that inhabits
resemblance, that agitates it and troubles it with the presence of spacing and of
 ART AND THE HEIDEGGERIAN REPRESSION 33

passion’’ (Nancy 2005, 9). As part of his conception of the image, Nancy provides
a reading of Hans von Aachen’s Joking Couple (1596), which presents a man
standing behind and to the side of a woman. She stands at a slight angle to the
viewer, her left breast exposed. Her right arm is draped across his right arm, and
he is holding a mirror up to her face. The mirror presents a reflection of the
woman’s smiling face, so that it appears that her reflection is looking at the viewer.
The reflection within the image seems to support Nancy’s contention that
‘‘[r]esemblance gathers together in force and gathers itself as a force of the same—
the same differing in itself from itself: hence the enjoyment [jouissance] we take in
it’’ (Nancy 2005, 9). The image connotes a self-relation and a relation to the other
at the same time: ‘‘I am indeed what I am, and I am this well beyond or well on this
side of what I am for you, for your aims and your manipulations’’ (Nancy 2005,
9). The image touches on an appearance that exceeds the relation to self, as well as
a relation to the other, but is also addressed to the self and the other. In this double
address, von Aachen’s piece figures facticity.3
Art, for Nancy, is consequently a site of excess or remainder that cannot be
recuperated fully by either representation or the rationalization of the senses. His
understanding of art is not so much that it actively divides sense but that it further
shares the shared division of sense. Thus, the fact of the plurality of art points not
only to the fact of the plurality of worlds but also to the fact of sense’s excess. For
Nancy, art is, we might say, the désoeuvrement—and therefore inscription—of
community par excellence. Art is désoeuvrement. The image, as a result,
introduces alterity into the heart of resemblance. Much as it is with Rancière,
the image, for Nancy, is ‘‘dissemblance.’’

IV. The Stakes of a Communism of the Image

From our overview of Rancière’s and Nancy’s respective theorizations of the
image, we can appreciate how for both the image names a site of community’s
contestation. Both Nancy and Rancière pursue the question of the image in order
to submit to critical thought a consideration of the writing of community from
sense. Still, Rancière’s dismissal of what he describes as Nancy’s metaphysical
investments is not altogether unwarranted. Indeed there is reason to interrogate
further the power that Nancy assigns to the image. For instance, his reading of the
artistic image as something that undermines (perhaps, deconstructs) the
metaphysics of representation is provocative but hardly convincing. Nancy’s
claim does not ever go beyond an assertion and is reminiscent not only of the
power Heidegger extracts from van Gogh’s shoes but also of the modernist
attraction to mirrors that one finds repeated from Foucault’s treatment of Las
Meninas to the cinematic experiments of the French New Wave. (We could go

3
Nancy does not pursue the implications of the fact that it is the female body in von Aachen’s piece that performs the
non-mimetic labor of the image. In this respect, one can see a need for an important feminist intervention at this
moment in Nancy’s text. It is worth considering whether or not the role Nancy assigns the female body breaks at all
with what Luce Irigaray has shown is philosophy’s historical tendency to make use of the feminine as the material
ground for the reproduction of speculative thought.
34 MICHAEL ENG

back further and situate these tendencies within the German speculative tradition
following Kant.)
Despite these possible metaphysical reinscriptions in his own approach to the
image, Nancy is nevertheless able to discern a metaphysics of art in Rancière,
particularly in Rancière’s vague, quasi-mystical claim that art is able to
‘‘intervene’’ in the distribution of the sensible (Nancy 2009, 90). Intervene how?
Intervene where, exactly? Rancière’s appeal, furthermore, to ‘‘the images exhibited
by our museums and galleries today’’ as indices of art’s aesthetic intervention and
the revision of aesthetic regimes is curious in this respect, for it treats the museum
as a neutral institution, unformed by prevailing ‘‘police’’ configurations of power
(Rancière 2007, 22). It is a wildly ahistorical gesture that is quite uncharacteristic
of Rancière.
It is certainly worth critiquing the metaphysics of art in both Rancière and
Nancy and the way that this metaphysical ambition places their work within a long
tradition of philosophical thought that first projects a kind of excess upon artistic
production only in order subsequently to harness this excess as the speculative’s
constitutive outside. However, this repetition in Rancière comes at another
metaphysical cost: first, a failure, or perhaps refusal, to reflect on the simple fact
that there is sense; and secondly, an assumption that the sensible is communal.
Where Nancy sees the image in terms of the sensibility of human finitude
touching itself, Rancière understands it as part of the sensible’s redistribution and
of community’s consequent rewriting. As a result, Rancière gives us a historical
survey of the different regimes of art and argues that each shift from one artistic
regime to another, from one distribution of the sensible to another, indicates a
social reconfiguration. Each reconfiguration results in a new determination of
what can be sensed and as a result what can be experienced. It remains a question,
however, on what grounds Rancière is confident that there will be sensibility. What
authorizes Rancière to say, other than assuming it, that the sensible is an inevitable
collective experience? How, exactly, does Rancière account for both the fact of
sense as well as sense’s sharing? As much as Rancière might wish to avoid having
to resort to a ‘‘pre-political’’ or ontological theorization of community, he
nevertheless does so by presupposing being-with as a condition of the sensible’s
redistribution. If he did not make such a presupposition, then the redistribution of
the sensible would itself have no sense. Thus, the ontological can be found
returning in Rancière’s text despite—or perhaps because of—his attempts to keep
it repressed. To this extent, Rancière’s text undergoes an experience of the closure
of metaphysics in a manner similar to that of Heidegger’s. Heidegger’s text,
however, did exhibit distress at times regarding the persistence of metaphysics,
distress that Nancy pursues but which Rancière does not share.

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Notes on contributor
Correspondence to: Michael Eng, meng@jcu.edu.
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