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The Intimacy of
Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’Intrus
PHILIP M. ADAMEK
State University of New York at Buffalo

      ’    ,   

find universal consensus for my claim? If I described the book as a personal
account of a traumatic experience, would anyone find this description
strange?
Beyond the obvious, perhaps completely misleading, impression that
L’Intrus seems to be mixing ‘genres’ or ‘modes of discourse’ such as those of
philosophy (including ethics, epistemology, philosophy of language) and
autobiography, one confronts a voice that unrelentingly questions itself, its
unity, location, and legitimacy. The ‘narrative identity’ at times detaches
itself from the body whose experience it recounts. (The “body” [le corps] is
spoken of where one would normally say “me” or “I,” and so the narrator
seems to abandon the narrator’s privilege of pronoun and veer towards the
role of an exterior observer.)1 The “I” is assumed as often as it is shirked or
discussed as being split, abandoned, or dispersed. This elusive narration,
coupled with the dislocated, anachronized, and pluralized expropriated
body [corps] or heart that it describes, is reason enough for resisting
recourse to the category of the autobiographical. If L’Intrus exemplifies the

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writing of one’s life, or an event of one’s life, it does so by explicitly compro-

mising the notions of both oneness or the self and life (as self-sufficient and
self-legitimizing), as well as the privilege of the bios (as life-defining).2 Thus,
if autobiographical, it attains this status only by way of practicing the impos-
sibility of autobiography.
If L’Intrus is clearly not exactly autobiographical in any conventional or
etymological sense of the word, what would give the impression that it is an
intimate work? What are the signs by which one recognizes intimacy? If one
senses an ‘intimacy of tone’ (but this would hardly be a sufficient reply), it is
nonetheless true that intimacy, while neither exactly thematic nor operative,
is named repeatedly and lends itself to analysis (that is, you’ve guessed,
where I’m headed). A surface reading alone reveals that intimacy is in trou-
ble (notwithstanding the universal consensus that I hoped to have achieved
from the outset).
Perhaps the troubled state of intimacy that is marked in several places
in Nancy’s text can itself be taken as an expression of intimacy, or in a dif-
ferent way, as an invitation to offer intimate responses or readings, such as
anecdotes relating personal experiences with the author. But anecdotes that
would speak of him, Jean-Luc Nancy, and of personal encounters that would
appear to aspire to reach behind the complex multiplicity of strangeness that
marks his identity and to discover him, Jean-Luc Nancy, standing apart from
his narrative, untouched, intact, would carry a certain risk. Such anecdotes
alone would risk making L’Intrus appear as a conceptual exercise bearing lit-
tle relationship to its author’s experience of undergoing a heart transplant,
since they would seem to imply that the emphasis on the estrangement and
expropriation of the author’s identity (rather than its loss or dissolution) can
be neutralized by insight gained through the reader’s intimate (personal,
close) relation to the author. Or conversely, the anecdotes alone would make
the work appear to be something less than a work and more a simple update
on the author’s life, destined to interest no more than a circle of friends. One
wonders, in short, how to address a voice that gives an account of its own
disarray.
“Intimacy” [l’intimité] touches, as does so much in Nancy’s text, on ques-
tions of the intruder [l’intrus] or foreigner/stranger/strangeness [l’étranger/
 Philip M. Adamek ● 191

l’étrangeté], and of what is proper. Intimacy has always, in one of its senses,
related to the proper, where this implies something’s essential or intrinsic,
inmost nature. But intimacy traditionally refers, ambiguously or alternately,
both to a type of exclusive self-relation and to a close or private relation to
another or others. In each case, it denotes a sort of superlative relation, one
that is inmost, or in some sense deepest or most exclusive. The intrus plays
off of or plays out this same type of ambiguity, but with entirely different
stakes; as Nancy conceives it, the intrus never stops intruding, and remains
strange or foreign even when one has recognized it, received it, taken it in
or welcomed it. This situation provokes a disturbance in intimacy, one that,
contrary to any common or traditional understanding of the word, would be
of the order of a category of experience—that is, one which is not necessar-
ily dependent upon a single event (say, the one-time arrival of the foreigner
or the foreign, or for that matter, the one-time replacement of one’s heart).
“[The intruder] continues to come and its coming never stops being in some
way an intrusion: that is, having no right, no familiarity, no accustomedness,
and being, on the contrary, a disorder, a disturbance in intimacy [trouble
dans l’intimité]” (L’Intrus, ). Thus, it cannot be a question for Nancy of pro-
tecting intimacy from this disturbance or of rediscovering intimacy by
excluding the intrus, nor, for reasons mentioned, of assuming the suppos-
edly intimate mode of discourse called autobiography. This is equally true of
the reciprocal sense of intimacy, as Nancy makes manifest in the passage
where he casts doubt upon a “secretive intimacy” that is thought to hold (or
at least is so advertised) between organ donors and those who receive their
organs (). In titling his work L’Intrus, and in formalizing aspects of both
the intruder and the troubled intimacy for which the intruder is at once the
event and the persistent condition, Nancy is far from simply bemoaning his
medical condition or its consequences, including his heart transplant.
Assuming a mode of discourse that is neither entirely confessional nor plain-
tive, Nancy writes of his needing a heart transplant that “revolt and accept-
ance are equally inappropriate [étrangères] to the situation” (). We can
begin to see, as a consequence, that the unsettling task that Nancy sets out
for himself—as well as for thought in general—is to account for the intru-
sion at the heart of intimacy.
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The fact that Nancy recounts the removal from his body of the organ
whose “symbolic reputation” is that of a traditionally conceived place of invi-
olable intimacy, of what is innermost and originary in one’s thoughts or
mind, is a remarkable contingency: “Organ transplant imposes the image of
passing through nothingness, of emerging in a space emptied of all property
[de toute propriété] or of all intimacy; or, on the contrary, of the intrusion
into myself of this space: tubes, clamps, sutures, and probes” ().
The space emptied of all intimacy is, in several different senses, Nancy’s
gaping chest. Though “gaping” refers in one case to the state of Nancy’s chest,
to the fact that it is held together with bits of wire, and so discontinuous with
itself and permanently exposed to intruders, a non-literal sense of the opened
or gaping chest is the only one that holds up to analysis throughout the text.
To be opened or exposed would deprive the chest of its capacity to incorpo-
rate or secure what is ‘inmost’, that is, intimacy. For this reason, contrary to
what one might expect from a narration of the experience of undergoing a
heart transplant, the gaping open chest, though it is clearly linked to and
dependent on the actual wrenching apart of his sternum, both prepares or
predates the operation and outlasts it. It becomes, in fact, the space wherein
figurative and literal senses of opening and exposure become inextricable.

Once I was told that I needed a transplant, all familiar signs were rendered
unstable, every marker could mean something new: without thinking about
it [sans réflexion], of course, and even without identifying the slightest action
or permutation. There was simply the physical sensation of a void already
opening in my chest, along with a kind of apnea wherein nothing, strictly
nothing, even today, would allow me to disentangle the organic, the sym-
bolic, and the imaginary, or the continuous from the interrupted—the sen-
sation was something like one breath, now pushed across a cavern,
imperceptibly half-open and strange; and, as though within a single repre-
sentation, the sensation of passing over a bridge, while still remaining on it.
(L’Intrus, ‒)

The continuous and the interrupted become as one, as do the suspension of

breathing and the successful, if difficult, passing of a single breath. All occur
 Philip M. Adamek ● 193

as though in the same representation/sensation (which here appear indis-

tinguishable). Nancy’s reaction to the news that transplant will be necessary
is thus primarily a disturbance in representation or reflection itself.
Representation is called to represent as though within a single representation
mutually incompatible elements—intrusions. Representing the representa-
tion as one becomes impossible. “What can it mean to replace a heart? The
thing exceeds my capacity to represent it” (). Nancy is saying something
more here than does the lax truism according to which certain experiences,
because too painful or extraordinary or even joyous, are “beyond words.”
What is the relation between disturbed intimacy and the incapacity to rep-
resent? Is representation, of the self or of the other, an intimate act? The dis-
turbance within thought occurs without reflection—of course, adds Nancy.
This seems to imply that that which disturbs reflection occurs outside of
reflection, properly speaking. Neither is there any action taken that would
serve as the impetus to reflection. The physical sensation of a void opening
is thus something other than a physical sensation in the everyday sense of
the expression, just as the void is not necessarily that of an actual opening
in Nancy’s chest.
Questioning how one comes to represent oneself, Nancy returns to the
sudden opening in his chest—which is something other than his chest—and
makes the relation to a disturbance in thought more explicit: “A void sud-
denly opened in my chest or my soul—it’s the same thing—when it was said
to me: ‘A heart transplant will be necessary. . . .’ Here the mind runs into a
non-existent object: there is nothing to know, nothing to understand, noth-
ing to feel. The intrusion of a body foreign to thought. This blank will stay
with me as thought itself and at the same time its contrary” (). This co-
habitation of thought and its contrary prefigures what Nancy says later
about suffering—namely, that suffering is the relation of the intrus and its
rejection. But there is nothing to know or understand or feel; and so, appar-
ently, neither thought nor suffering can have dominion. No object of knowl-
edge is appropriated by the subject. Nothing is represented other than,
perhaps, the disruption of representation. The intrusion marks the arrival of
thought’s contrary, the unwelcome “presence” of its absence. There is no
Christian valorization of suffering as purification or as a means to achieving
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salvation, but rather, a disturbance of intimacy that is a disturbance of cer-

tain habitual categories of thought, some of which have often been, as one
could say, intimately linked to intimacy: interior/exterior, life/death,
open/closed. That is the context in which I understand Nancy’s statement
that “it’s not that they opened me, gaping [béant], in order to change my
heart. It’s that this gaping open [béance] cannot be closed again. . . . I am
closed open” (). The béance in question disrupts intimacy as proximity. It
not only creates a fissure, a discontinuity, it also prevents the intimate con-
tact of simple nearness.
Disturbed intimacy marks the impossibility of direct, assured access to
one’s interiority (to one’s body, to one’s heart, one’s self). What is disturbed is
not only what is innermost or ownmost (one’s heart, body, or soul), but
equally one’s presumed self-defining singleness, and the capacity to repre-
sent to oneself or appropriate for oneself this singleness. The “disturbance”
of intimacy suggests a displacement, division, or replacement, rather than
pure annihilation or evacuation. The conventional intimacy of interiority is
refigured as an intimacy that is “more profound.” The always already superla-
tive intimacy is thus contrasted with intimacy that is “more profoundly
superlative.”

In a single movement, the most absolutely proper “I” withdraws at an infinite

distance (where does it go? to what fleeting point from which I could still
claim that this is my body?), and sinks into an intimacy more profound than
any interiority (the unassailable recess from which I say “I,” but that I know
to be as gaping [béant] as a chest opened upon emptiness, or as the slipping
into morphinic unconsciousness of pain and fear mingled in abandonment).
(L’Intrus, )

Nancy returns to the gaping chest, this time as an analogy for the exposition
which has always marked the subject of Christianity or the West. In fact, he
writes “a chest opened upon emptiness,” not “my” chest, not the exact chest
connected with bits of wire, not his, Jean-Luc Nancy’s, but a single chest
opened upon emptiness (one among the countless chests opened upon
emptiness, equally serviceable as analogies). Indeed, it is as if intimacy, in
 Philip M. Adamek ● 195

the common sense of the word, escapes through the gaping chest, and with
it my capacity to represent my body as “mine.” “I” can no longer be assured
of its own intimacy, neither with respect to itself nor with respect to “its”
heart or body.
L’Intrus recounts nothing other than the movement by which the body
and interiority are equally expropriated, and thus no longer defined in con-
tradistinction to an exterior. This marks less the violation and obliteration
of intimacy than its exteriorization and dispersion. On the one hand, the
exteriorization is easily identifiable in what Nancy calls the strange ensem-
ble that intervenes in his “me” [moi]: the example of medical instruments
that invade the space of his body, the measurements that serve to exterior-
ize the functioning of his system, the doctors’ decisions and the decisions of
those near to him on which his life depends, etc. These examples confirm
Nancy’s statement that the intrus is always multiple. The intrus is always to
be understood as les intrus, as what Nancy would call a singular plural. On
the other hand, this exteriorization is said to take place in a movement, and
it appears that the word “movement,” rather than being simply an habitual
or convenient turn of speech, indicates that, at this culminating point in the
text, the image of the gaping chest can be tied to the movement of what
Nancy calls the “infinite exposition” of Christianity itself. The lines that
directly follow make explicit the reference to Christianity. “Corpus meum
and interior intimo meo, the two together say very exactly, in a complete
configuration of the death of god, that the truth of the subject is its exteri-
ority and its excessiveness: its infinite exposition” ().
In “The Deconstruction of Christianity,”3 Nancy speaks of self-overcom-
ing [autodépassement] as that which perhaps is most proper to Christianity
and most profoundly marks its tradition. He asks whether Christianity is not
“the very movement of its distension, of its opening, and of its dissolution”
(Études, ). This overcoming or self-overcoming would not entail the dis-
appearance of Christianity or of its influence (as the hasty appraisal of the
expression “death of God” has led many to believe), but a transformation of
Christianity in the order of sense. Specifically, in extending itself to the point
where it has become not common sense, but sense that is common—gener-
ally taken for granted and neither championed nor contested as a guiding,
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foundational principle—Christianity participates in “the end of ideologies.”

For Nancy, this phrase would point to, at least, “the end of the promise of
meaning as an aim, end and accomplishment” (). So, it is clear that
Nancy’s investigation in this article concerns at once (and nothing less than)
Christianity, the West, and meaning. Placing L’Intrus within the scope of this
article would thus be to inquire about the status of sense or meaning (and
not, therefore, simply to bring forth an analogy on the basis of a certain res-
onance of vocabulary between L’Intrus and the project of the deconstruction
of Christianity). The expulsion of intimacy, rather than being an accident
occasioned by, for instance, a series of medical or ethical decisions taken in
response to a life-threatening condition, would be a necessary condition of
meaning, would be meaning at work. The infinite exposition that the “I” of
Nancy’s text undergoes is the exposition of sense. Christianity is like a heart
transplant.
Given the references or allusions to Christianity that appear in L’Intrus
and in Nancy’s other writings, it would be interesting to contrast Nancy’s
formulation of suffering with that of, for example, Pascal, another thinker of
the “heart.” In his “Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies,”
Pascal treats suffering, predictably enough, as a welcome preparation for sal-
vation, a “type of death” [une espèce de mort] (Œuvres complètes, :) that,
as long as it promises consolation, would allow him to examine himself and
so better prepare himself for final death.4 Perhaps less predictable, however,
is Pascal’s request that God destroy his heart’s vigor [“anéantissez cette
vigueur pour mon salut”] (), and his repeated calling for the conversion of
his heart. It may seem arbitrary to emphasize the role of the heart in both
Nancy and Pascal, since in the case of Pascal, one could argue, the converted
heart is simply a metaphor for Pascal’s desire for salvation, whereas Nancy
had an actual heart imposed upon him. Or, one could argue that what Pascal
desires through conversion is a purification of his heart, whereas Nancy is
far from aspiring to any sort of purity, and in fact goes to great lengths to
establish the originary expropriation or otherness of the heart. Pascal’s is an
adventure of intimacy (whereby faith or salvation, as in Schleiermacher and
countless others, is largely a private matter), whereas Nancy’s is a testimony
to intimacy’s exteriorization and expropriation, to the non-intimate within
 Philip M. Adamek ● 197

intimacy. These arguments, however sound, ignore what is nonetheless com-

mon to both: the structure of exchangeability, the possibility (metaphoric,
metonymic, or medical, it matters little) of converting, transforming, or sub-
stituting the heart. Has not Christianity always sought a grafting or trans-
plant of the heart? Has it not always based the possibility of a good heart on
the equally possible existence of (if not simply on the assumption of one’s
being born with) a corrupted heart?5 It seems, at least, that replaceable
hearts have their place within the Christian heritage, and that those parts of
the body that appear (at least up to now) impervious to technical prosthesis
and incapable of regeneration—the brain, the spinal chord—are left outside
Christianity’s massive symbolic investment. As if one could imagine Pascal
praying for the conversion of his spinal chord. . . .
If it is possible to extend the expropriation of (self-)identity in L’Intrus
into the context of Nancy’s work on the deconstruction of Christianity, it is
still true that L’Intrus responds to a remarkably singular event, or events.
With this event in mind, Nancy describes the crossing of two contingencies:
one of his heart condition, and the other of technological advancements.

Here personal contingency crosses with contingency in the history of tech-

nology [histoire des techniques]. Had I lived earlier, I would be dead; later, I
would be surviving in a different manner. But “I” always finds itself caught in
the intervals of technical possibilities. This is why I found to be useless the
debate I saw unfolding between those who felt that this was a metaphysical
experience and those who held it to be a technical performance: it is a mat-
ter of both, one in the other. (L’Intrus, )

Nancy’s emphasizing the contingent nature by which he came to have a

heart transplant is in itself less significant than the statement that “I” always
finds itself caught up in a series of technical possibilities. In other words, the
contingent crossing of these two contingencies in no way alters the condi-
tion of a certain technical intrusion that has always been possible, and
whose possibility in fact defines both the relations between personal and
technological contingences and, in a different manner, “I” and “I” (one’s self-
relation). This (possibility of) technical intrusion invites the non-proper into
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one’s proper heart. That is what Nancy means by indicating that the techni-
cal performance occurs within the metaphysical experience, and vice versa.
Focusing on all that Nancy says in L’Intrus about specific medical procedures
and techniques that were applied to his body [le corps] may lead to the nar-
row and inaccurate assumption that, in his reference to the technical con-
tingency, Nancy is concerned primarily if not exclusively about recent
advancements in medical procedures, and with his benefiting from their life-
prolonging effects. But the contingency in the history of technology [des
techniques] should be understood in the largest possible sense, that is, as
that which is non-proper to, in this case, the heart (which is to say, the
proper!). For the same reason, this passage and others like it, though they
emphasize the singular event to which, remarkably, a thinker of the non-
proper was subjected, should nonetheless be understood equally as playing
out what Derrida, in commenting on Nancy’s philosophy of touch, calls “the
ageless intrusion of technology [l’intrusion sans âge de la technique]”
(Derrida, ). In Derrida’s Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy, which, among many
other things, offers insightful readings of L’Intrus, one finds a very useful dis-
tinction that can be applied to L’Intrus (even if Derrida does not do so explic-
itly himself). What Derrida formalizes with respect to touch (or contact/
non-contact) can be reactivated with respect to our emphasis on intimacy
(interior intimacy/expulsed intimacy) as a way of accounting for the singu-
larity/repeatability of Nancy’s adventure/performance:

This necessary taking into account of plasticity and technicity “at the heart”
of the “body proper” seems prescribed by an irreducible spacing [espace-
ment], that is to say by that which spaces apart [espace] touch itself, namely
con-tact. In thus opening the interval [l’écart], giving rise to the hiatus of
non-contact at the heart of contact, this spacing out puts to test non-con-
tact as the very condition or experience of contact, the very [même] experi-
ence of the always open—and by the other spaced apart—same [même]. This
type of experience is affected, always, by the singularity of that which, by rea-
son of its spacing, takes place [a lieu]: thus by the event of an arrival [d’une
venue]. Takes place [a lieu] and substitutes [tient lieu], I would add, in order
to inscribe the possibility of metonymy and substitution, or of the technical
 Philip M. Adamek ● 199

prosthesis, into the very singularity of the event [à même la singularité de

l’événement]. (Le Toucher, )

In Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida argues that Nancy’s entire corpus

offers an innovative philosophy of touch whose importance in the history of
philosophy can be rivaled only by the seminal and still-relevant philosophy
of touch that one finds in Aristotle, particularly, in Peri Psyche–s. In formu-
lating the nature of Nancy’s tangential relation to traditional philosophies of
touch, Derrida presents the hypothesis that gives rise to his lengthy study.
According to this hypothesis (to which I do the injustice of summarizing),
the innovation in Nancy’s thought of touch needs to be conceived in terms
of its two-fold stance with respect to the body [le corps]: this body [corps] is
originarily and essentially open to a techné (grafts, transplants, prostheses,
etc.) at the same time that it is exported beyond the Christian body or flesh
[la chair chrétienne] (Derrida, ‒). It would require a lengthy detour to
explicate Derrida’s account of these two distinct aspects of the body [corps]
as understood by Nancy, but one can note that, in a manner that would
understandably appear serendipitous to Derrida himself, the hypothesis and
its attendant analyses turn out to be an excellent means by which to read
L’Intrus (which apparently Derrida had read only towards the final stages of
his composing Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy). Derrida’s two-fold hypothesis in
fact anticipates or echoes (with respect to these two friends, the precise dat-
ing or chronology of their cross-readings is a difficult matter) the configura-
tion that Nancy offers at the end of L’Intrus, and which I take to summarize
the movement of L’Intrus/the intrus by giving equal weight to the body (my
body) and interiority (my intimate interior):

Corpus meum and interior intimo meo, the two together say very exactly, in
a complete configuration of the death of god, that the truth of the subject is
its exteriority and its excessiveness: its infinite exposition. The intruder
[L’intrus] exposes me infinitely. It extrudes, exports, and expropriates me. I
am the sickness and the medicine; I am the cancerous cell and the trans-
planted organ . . . (L’Intrus, )
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This quote is perhaps best left dangling, in so far as the ellipses (my edito-
rial ellipses) would imply the infinite exposure whose adventure can be per-
formed again, by others, with a different listing of details.
Should only those who have known or currently experience illness feel
personally implicated by what Nancy says concerning l’intrus and infinite
exposition? Is it legitimate for all readers of L’Intrus to relate the movement
of exteriorization to themselves? Can we, should we, take this discourse to
heart? When Nancy describes the numerous ways in which he is intruded
upon through medical supervision, of the many decisions that are decisive
for his survival, and concludes that “my survival is inscribed in a complex
process woven of strangers and strange things [d’étrangers et d’étrangetés]”
(), one is presented with an “I” whose extension appears infinite.
With this very thing in mind, I thought of L’Intrus while watching a tel-
evision advertisement for pharmaceutical companies in the United States as
discussed on Bill Moyer’s Now. The advertisement was intended to convince
me that my supporting legislation that would prevent capping the prices of
prescription drugs would enable the companies to discover breakthrough
cures and treatments that would eventually prolong my life. In short, I was
given to understand that my life depends on these companies’ well-being.
Unaware of whether one day I will need major surgery or a regular diet of
prescription drugs, I must make their present profits a priority. I must under-
stand that a part of my identity melds with theirs. Even if this situation (or
threat) is applied to healthy, youthful voters, it appears to repeat the formula
of “that which hurts me preserves my life” that Nancy puts forth as a distin-
guishing mark of intrusion.
Moreover, the injunction that I must insure pharmaceutical-company
profits clearly fits the logic that in so many instances was offered to Nancy
as justification for his undergoing numerous procedures: “it’s better than
nothing.” It is a logic that Nancy recognizes in the “quasi-necessity” of always
opting, in prevention or cure, for that which would prolong life and so, in
principle, keep death in abeyance (). It is a principle that Nancy challenges
by pointing out that, in constantly pushing death away, one only underscores
and further exhibits it ().
 Philip M. Adamek ● 201

Of course, for certain others, there appears to be a real advantage to

underscoring and exhibiting my death. Can intimacy be pushed to the point
of unscrupulous exploitation and still be known by the name “intimacy”? It
appears that the strangeness of the intruder invests it with the potential for
calculated or hidden hostilities and, for that reason, a certain marketability.

NOTES

1. Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000). See, for instance, 37. All further refer-
ences are made parenthetically and all translations are mine, though for certain pas-
sages I have benefited from consulting an early version of Susan Hanson’s translation
and here express my gratitude.
2. Cf. the reference to Agamben in the author’s footnote (43).
3. Les Études philosophiques, no. 4 (1998): 503–19.
4. Blaise Pascal, Œuvres complètes, II (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2000), 183–93.
5. Derrida analyzes the possibility of the corrupted heart [le mauvais coeur], as well as the
heart’s essential otherness, in chapter 12 of Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée,
2000). See, especially, 308, 319–20. All further references are made parenthetically and
all translations are mine.