On Fragments: A Piece of Art and the “I” – or Not
philosopher JeanLuc Nancy (1940–2021) opens that question of art’s presentness, its “presentification,” in the awkward terminology of the German Romantics, or the concept of “liveness” in contemporary theater theory, and its relation to a broader totality, the notion that it fits comfortably into some broader biographical, political, theological, or philosophical system. “In short, this is Hegel’s thesis on the aesthetic religion of ancient Athens: the notion that particular art forms (notably tragedy and statuary in the Hellenic world) must be understood in the context of their roles in establishing and maintaining a civic religion,” but our contemporary culture has witnessed a breakdown of such metaphysical concerns and social systems as such generally unifying systems vanish. As critic John McKeane puts it, citing Nancy from The Sense of the World:
“Hegel delivers art for itself: he delivers it from service to transcendence in immanence, and he delivers it to detached, fragmentary truth. Hegel […] regis-ters and salutes in fact the birth of art.” […] But in freeing, liberating, or deliver-ing art from this role, Hegel is thought by Nancy to be enacting the deliveranceof art. We can understand this term as a liberation, but also as a delivery lack-ing any given end or destination, a destiny that is also an errancy […]. Its con-nection to a broader totality of aesthetic religion having been severed, and it therefore having become a fragment, art is not stripped of its role, but instead [is] set free, or indeed—like a baby—delivered. (McKeane 2023: 266).
So one question we can ask of art is what is the relationship between the piece, the fragment to the whole? That connection may be part of the traditional process of constructing meaning and understanding. But we now might ask, which whole – that may be what is at issue. The whole body? The whole landscape, much of which we cannot see? The world? The universe? But art does not explain and as such even verbal art is similar to painting in that it presents an image or images but without what Beckett calls “clarity,” without explanation or discourse from even its creator, because art always comprises or constitutes a gap, an absence. “Notice,” Nancy tells us, “that by drawing sense out of absence, by making absense [absence] a presense[presence], the image does not do away with the impalpable nature of absence.” And so, for Nancy, attempts at a solidification of identity (or presence), say, are an intrusion and so constitute an act of violence: “The unity of the thing [the artwork, say], of presence and of the subject, is itself violent” (Nancy 2005: 2). Art then has nothing to reveal, a point that Samuel Beckett has been making at least since the breakthrough success of Waiting for Godot. As he told Gabriel D’Aubarède in 1961, “There’s no key or problem.” In his plays, Beckett seems consistently to have urged us to take his characters and their situations at face value and this in isolation, unre-lated to larger systems that Hegel called “aesthetic religion,” or to systems of any