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    The Pleasure in Drawing
    The Pleasure in Drawing
    The Pleasure in Drawing
    Ebook135 pages1 hour

    The Pleasure in Drawing

    By Jean-Luc Nancy and Philip Armstrong

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    The renowned philosopher contemplates the medium of drawing in “a book full of dazzling insights, imaginative curves and provocative renewals” (Sarah Clift, University of King’s College).
     
    In 2007, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy curated an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon. This book, originally written for that exhibition, explores the interplay between drawing and form—viewing the act of drawing as a formative force. Recalling that the terms ‘drawing’ and ‘design’ were once used interchangeably, Nancy notes that drawing designates a design that remains without project, plan, or intention. His argument offers a way of rethinking a number of historical terms (sketch, draft, outline, plan, mark, notation), which includes rethinking drawing in its graphic, filmic, choreographic, poetic, melodic, and rhythmic senses.
     
    For Nancy, drawing resists any kind of closure, and therefore never resolves a tension specific to itself. Drawing allows the gesture of a desire that remains in excess of all knowledge to come to appearance. Situating drawing in these terms, Nancy engages a number of texts in which Freud addresses the force of desire in the rapport between aesthetic and sexual pleasure, texts that also turn around questions concerning form in its formation.
     
    Between sections of his text, Nancy includes a series of “sketchbooks” on drawing, composed of quotations on art from different writers, artists, or philosophers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 16, 2013
    ISBN9780823252312
    The Pleasure in Drawing
    Author

    Jean-Luc Nancy

    Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg and one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century’s foremost thinkers of politics, art, and the body. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis.

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      Book preview

      The Pleasure in Drawing - Jean-Luc Nancy

      The Pleasure in Drawing

      The Pleasure in Drawing

      JEAN - LUC NANCY

      TRANSLATED BY PHILIP ARMSTRONG

      This work was originally published in French as Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Plaisir au dessin © 2009 Éditions Galilée, Paris.

      Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      This work has been published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture—National Center for the book.

      Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture—Centre National du Livre.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher.

      Printed in the United States of America

      15 14 13     5 4 3 2 1

      First edition

      Contents

      Translator’s Note

      Preface to the English-Language Edition

      Form

      Sketchbook 1

      Idea

      Sketchbook 2

      Formative Force

      Sketchbook 3

      The Pleasure of Drawing

      Sketchbook 4

      Forma Formans

      Sketchbook 5

      From Self Toward Self

      Sketchbook 6

      Consenting to Self

      Sketchbook 7

      Gestural Pleasure

      Sketchbook 8

      The Form-Pleasure

      Sketchbook 9

      The Drawing/Design of the Arts

      Sketchbook 10

      Mimesis

      Sketchbook 11

      Pleasure of Relation

      Sketchbook 12

      Death, Sex, Love of the Invisible

      Sketchbook 13

      Ambiguous Pleasure

      Sketchbook 14

      Purposiveness Without Purpose

      Sketchbook 15

      The Line’s Desire

      Sketchbook 16

      Notes

      Translator’s Note

      The Pleasure in Drawing is a translation of Le Plaisir au dessin, a text by Jean-Luc Nancy first published in French in 2007. The initial version of the text was published as the opening essay to the catalogue accompanying an exhibition on drawing that Nancy had been invited to curate with Sylvie Ramond and Eric Pagliano for the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon.¹ Under the same title but with a number of significant modifications, the text was reprinted in 2009 as a book published by Éditions Galilée, part of the Écritures/Figures series, edited by Michel Delorme. (The Galilée version includes a number of illustrations that were not included in the original catalogue or exhibition.²) The translation is based on the version published by Galilée.

      The text is composed of sixteen separately titled sections. Between each section of the text, Nancy has placed a Carnet de croquis, a Sketchbook of quotations from different writers, artists, or philosophers on art. He notes that these sketchbooks can be read in the order in which they appear or leafed through independently of the text. In the original, the quotations include the titles of books or essays from which they have been taken, but there are no footnotes provided for any of the quotations. The text itself also includes several quotations that have no source or footnote. As Nancy states in a note appended to the beginning of the text: it is not necessary here to become burdened by erudition. Translating the text has thus posed a number of problems, notably when Nancy cites English texts in translation or texts in French or from other languages in which English translations already exist. Whenever possible, I have tried to use these existing translations, even when no source or footnote is given in either the original or this translation. However, there are a few occasions where the existing translation for a quotation has not been found. And there are a number of occasions when existing translations have been modified in order to follow the emphasis Nancy places on certain terms.

      Translating the title of Nancy’s text has proved no less challenging, notably in light of Nancy’s insistence throughout his writings on the role that prepositions play in our thinking, in other words, in rethinking and rearticulating the relation between thought and the object of thought, as well as our relation to and with one another. The expression le plaisir au dessin is already unusual in French, since the more common expression and accompanying preposition would be le plaisir de, as in the pleasure one takes in doing something. A similar idiom with the preposition à exists, but usually this is a contraction of the pleasure one takes or one finds in doing something. At the same time, au dessin in the title evokes expressions like au travail (at work) or à l’œuvre (as in the phrase à l’œuvre on connaît l’artisan, you can tell an artist by his work). I hope that, translated as The Pleasure in Drawing, the title at least evokes the pleasure that might be taken in the act of drawing, the pleasure that draws, as well as the pleasure that exists in drawings, not as a theme but as a force or design. In this sense, certainly, another possibility for the title could be Drawing Pleasure.³

      The reference to dessin or drawing throughout the text also relates to Nancy’s references to dessein, usually translated as design, as in the design of an object or a project design, but which also refers to an intention—à dessein is to do something deliberately, by design, on purpose. When Nancy brings the two terms together by referring to dess(e)in (one of the section titles is Le dess[e]in des arts), thus evoking the frequent substitution between drawing and design that existed in texts up until the eighteenth century, I have found no other option for translating dess(e)in than drawing/design. However, it should also be recalled that dess(e)in suggests close proximity to the German Dasein, the familiar term for existence that Heidegger uses for being or being there, whose implications Nancy exploits throughout the text. Perhaps more tendentiously, dess(e)in suggests some proximity to des seins, which Nancy has explored further in his text La naissance des seins (translated into English as The Birth of Breasts)—again, this question of birth and its relation to (finite) being will appear with some frequency in the text that follows, one of the conditions for thinking the pleasure in drawing.⁴

      Finally, a word concerning Nancy’s frequent use of reflexive verbs in the text. While it is common to translate reflexive verbs into the passive form in English, the use of phrases such as se demande lui-même—where the additional itself or soi-même supplements the existing reflexive verb—offers a different set of challenges. Rather than translating this as its self each time—as in something that makes demands on its self—we have referred more simply to itself. However, we should recall that the terms of this reflexivity refer less to an interiority, self-enclosure, or self-identity than a condition in which the self—the itself—is defined by its own exteriority to its self, and hence (in Nancy’s terms) exposed. The self exposes itself to (or toward) its self (From Self Toward Self is one of the section titles), opening a gap or displacement within any self-reflexivity. This use of the reflexive verb form recurs with some frequency in the pages that follow.

      For their help in the translation, or for finding sources for quotations, I would especially like to thank Matthieu Branlat, Claire Farago, Lisa Florman, Laura Lisbon, Stephen Melville, and Ginette Michaud. Jennifer Branlat reviewed every word with a wonderfully scrupulous and careful eye—needless to say, any remaining errors are my own. Helen Tartar offered just the right advice and extraordinarily generous help in bringing the translation to completion. As ever, Jean-Luc Nancy was perfectly gracious in answering questions and suggesting solutions.

      Preface to the English-Language Edition

      Drawing: this word in English suggests drawing out, stretching, and extracting. One can draw a line and draw a lesson. In French, one can draw out [tirer] a line or a lesson, but it is impossible to draw [dessiner] a lesson. Or rather, dessiner a lesson in French means something entirely different from drawing it. It would be to give an illustration, a visual representation of its contents, as when Plato asks his reader to draw a line in the mind that he will then divide into proportional segments in order to better understand the relation between the sensible and intelligible.

      In French, dessiner a lesson is to make it be seen, to show and present it to an intuitive grasp. Tirer a lesson is to gather the lessons learned from a specific event that itself is not a lesson: for example—and again from Plato—to conclude from Socrates’ moral qualities that physical ugliness can harbor a wealth of ideas.

      To show, to conclude, ostension, inference: gestures that, indeed, come together by way of one or another fine point, whether it is the point of a stylus, a finger, or a mind. However, that does not mean that these terms and their translation into different languages end up by overlapping one another. On the contrary—it is well known that there is never any homothety between languages, and precisely this lack gives to the task of

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