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Souls at the Limits of the HumanFiona Jenkins aa School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences CoombsBuilding Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200,Australia

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To cite this article: Fiona Jenkins (2011): Souls at the Limits of the Human, Angelaki: Journal ofthe Theoretical Humanities, 16:4, 159-172

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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 16 number 4 December 2011

I eventful life

Barely hours old, photos of a newborn infantare published. Uploaded onto a Facebookpage, the physical features of the face, if unique,

are as yet but minutely differentiated from foetal

anonymity; nonetheless, we have come to mark

the entry of a life with an image, available to an

infinite set of points of access and download,

circling the globe. The circulation of the new-

borns image, as important as a name, as

imperative as a sex, establishes a presence

through its trace.

This essay concerns the question of how to

read or understand such an event as the

marking of a life; and in what way it might

invite us to think again about the processes of

humanisation and dehumanisation that are

increasingly considered to be wrought through

the global circulation of images. The capacity of

the photographic image to bring a once distant

world close, and realist interpretation of such

images as tracing presence in a sense given by

what Roland Barthes called the emanation of the

referent (80) conjoin to suggest a process of

mediation by which the humanity of subjects

finds a global impress. The global circulation of

images of distant lives, their fate and suffering

has for many contemporary theorists seemed to

foster a moral cosmopolitan outlook, giving force

to the claim that all human beings hold equal

status as the fundamental units of moral concern

and should thus be extended respect by all other

human beings. Ulrich Beck in his Cosmopolitan

Vision (2006), for instance, argues that people

throughout the world have now all become

cosmopolitans by default, due to an inescapably

global form of exposure and witnessing. The

presumptive relation between a global connectiv-

ity of the image and responses to those images as

generative of belief in equality thus operates as a

powerful aspect of faith in contemporary pro-

gressive humanism. That this impress often fails

to bring about a response (as in the phenomenon

labelled compassion fatigue), or that it is often

distorted or divisive (as in what Judith Butler

terms the differentiation of grievable and

ungrievable lives in media reporting), does

little to damage a conviction regarding the ethical

importance of such connectivity. The key ques-

tion for many moral cosmopolitans becomes how

distant others may be rendered in their humanity,

such that their suffering invites a responsiveness

that promises action on their behalf

(Chouliaraki). It as though the claim of the

image conjoins with the discourse of human

rights to render a kind of representational

fiona jenkins

SOULS AT THE LIMITSOF THE HUMANbeyond cosmopolitanvision

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/11/040159^14 2011Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.641353

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egalitarianism, the right of all human lives to

appear, to be marked, within an ethically

compelling space of visibility.

But must such marking or such responsiveness

be configured in cosmopolitan form? A funda-

mentally different perspective on the character

and import of the circulation of images is

suggested by the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, who

concerns himself with what, in the showing or

presenting that is the world, surpasses an older

understanding of the world as cosmos, a

world of distributed places, given by and to, the

gods (Corpus 39; Creation 47). What Nancy

resists here is the representational framing of the

world that seems inherent to cosmopolitan vision,

and within this a tacit understanding of how the

circulation of images conveys information from

afar about lives that are thus made familiar to us

and bear equal moral claims by virtue of the

humanity they signify. There are many layers to

this resistance, but central to them all is the

attempt to do justice (in terms that find some

summation in Nancys project of a decon-

struction of Christianity) to the sense of an

existence that is given in the world, and exceeds

and overflows all reference to a Subject (even

such a subject as humanity) standing outside

it.1 Thus, for Nancy, our being one world is

first of all not a question of how we represent

ourselves as belonging in common to one globe

but rather of how making sense arises as a

being in the world that gives ontological

responsibility, prior to moral or juridical

responsibility.

In this essay I propose to explore what

marking a life might mean on such terms,

and how it may shift understanding not only of

what is done through the circulation of images

of suffering human life, or of life exposed to

violence, but also as the evidence of life that is

given in the simple act of posting the image of a

newborn to a Facebook page. This is not to

displace from consideration the emphasis placed

by cosmopolitan vision on images of suffering

human life, or life exposed to violence; rather, it

is to make the ontological question of how the

image presents existence prior to the issue of

what images present. Photographic media, film

particularly, are read by Nancy as giving

evidence of existence, marking it in this

sense.2 In his treatment of cinema, for instance,

the image becomes a matter of evidence, a force

of evidence that imposes and carries away

something more than a truth: [that is,] an

existence (Evidence 44). Ontologically speaking,

the image does not belong to the subject as its

representation or projection; rather, it is this

outside of the world where the gaze loses itself to

find itself as gaze (regard), that is, first and

foremost as respect (egard) for what is there, for

what takes place and continues to take place

(64). Although the images of concern to moral

cosmopolitanism most often take for their

content human suffering or exposure to violence,

these are not the only sorts of images we should

consider, supposing it might matter to raise

fundamental questions about how existence may

be marked in and through the image. Thus the

photo of a newborn, or a cinema that, as Nancy

claims, continues life, will be important in

approaching a way of thinking images that, I shall

suggest here, we might read productively as a de-

centring of the locus of the human subject from

what gives meaning to the image.

Indeed, in view particularly of the marking of

new life, a comment Nancy makes in an essay

On the Soul will also prove to warrant

consideration: for when a baby is born it is not,

as he puts it, that a soul comes down into the

body from on high (and it is not that man is made

in the image of God, the creator). Rather, with

the event of birth there is simply a new there,

space, extension in general, is extended and

opened (Corpus 132).3 Regarded thus, the

newborn infants lack of truly distinctive features,

a face that would allow one without hesitation

to pick this individual out, indeed does not affect

the force of an image that is given as respect for

what takes place. What matters is the event of

birth, as a beginning without further ground, a

coming out of nothing, which can only avoid a

metaphysical construal through being rendered in

the tense of the future anterior: as Nancy puts it,

the subject in its first moment will always

already have been born (Birth 13).

There is, certainly, another way of construing

what the image of a newborn marks, one that

would lay emphasis on the person now

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revealed before us, an individual soul whose

time of existence readily appears to precede birth

and to exceed death; and it is perhaps this way of

reading that makes our images of foetal life so

powerful in debates on the right to life, images

through which a face appears, and the foetus

takes on the human form that would confer

protection. Nancys resistance to such a picture,

however, is precisely based in a thinking of birth

and death as taking place without being

subtended by the ground of identity that the

name soul would suggest. The childs existence

does not precede birth, it has its birth as the

past of its differentiation. It is not born, it is not

. . . Rather it was born (Birth 13). Another way

to put this is that soul is not a name, not some

thing, but the fact that there is a body, a coming-

to-presence, the emergence of distinctness, self-

difference (Corpus 63). More than the beginnings

of a face, we could say the image marks existence

as the opening that is the birth-event (and thus

perhaps gives face as facing, or exposure, more

than as a distinctive property of a given

individual).4

Rather than conveying information, or even

bespeaking humanity, the image that would mark

a life as coming-to-presence might be thought as a

non-representational image, or imaging; as an

exposure that is shared out, given place, in its

circulation; or as that which continues life, as

lifes very continuation. It is such an interpreta-

tion of the images that circulate amongst us that

shapes Nancys reading of an Abbas Kiarostami

film, titled And Life Goes On; a film that tracks a

quest through the landscape of post-earthquake

Iran, finding everywhere survivors who conduct

their mourning while continuing to watch and be

riveted by the World Cup an event which is

being screened in public, in the open, on the edge

of devastated villages. It is a scene that might well

lend itself to reflections on global spectatorship.

What proves critical to Nancys reading of the

film, however, as it explores the interweaving of

image and life, is the sense he seeks in film of

giving evidence of existence: life presented or

offered in its evidence (Evidence 58). It is this

that Nancy calls justice. Thus a body, writes

Nancy,

first of all is displayed as its photo-graphy (the

spacing of clarity [lespacement dune clarte]).

Only this, to begin with, does justice to the

body: to its evidence . . . Bodies are evident

and thats why all justice and justness start and

end with these. Injustice is the mixing,

breaking, crushing and stifling of bodies,

making them indistinct (gathered up in a

dark corner, piled up to eliminate the space

between them, within them, assassinating even

the space of their just death). (Corpus 47)

In ways that might undo the cosmopolitan

discourse on generic and general humanity

(93), and as I explore in more detail in section III

below, Nancy reaches toward a thinking of

images as a writing of existence in light

(a photo-graphy); as a distinction that is non-

representational, not subordinated to the task of

signifying a referent but rather tasked with

exposing the singularity of a body, as its

being-there or Da-sein.5

II grievable and ungrievable life

Alongside Nancy, I also want to set another

approach to thinking the marking of life and

death. Although this may seem to evoke a

different set of terms, I want rather to argue for

the usefulness of seeing the proximity of the two

accounts. In Frames of War, Judith Butler

specifies her project as a response to the

conditions of contemporary war that is enabled

by a selective and differential framing of

violence (1). War becomes easier to wage when

its violence is targeted against lives that fail to

appear as such, and the exclusion from visibility

that takes place is fundamental: for lives cannot

be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not

first apprehended as living (1). There are

profound global differences in the way in which

lives and deaths are marked with or without a

media image, an obituary, a memorial that

Butler tracks as evidence of the differentiation of

grievable and ungrievable life which so

smoothes the path to global violence.6 Read as

marking life as being of value, this distinction

seems to bear a perhaps too obvious ethical and

political salience and to be readily assimilated

into the cosmopolitan concern to find an

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adequately expansive representation of the

human, that no life be overlooked or go

unmarked. This way of presenting the political

division of worlds is indeed most readily under-

stood as if it ethically posed an issue of

recognition, as the mode whereby a body is

invested with a protective significance. For within

human rights-based cosmopolitan thinking it is

taken for granted that such recognition confers

some level of protection against violence; that to

bring a body within the borders of sanctity is to

see that it is like one of us, enjoying the moral

status of humanity. This construction makes the

process of humanisation and dehumanisation that

is worked through the image, the capacity of

media stories to give face to victims of

violence, or to efface them, an urgent site

of intervention.

Yet although the visual conditions of con-

temporary mediation under which a face is

given and those in which effacement takes

place are without doubt amongst Butlers con-

cerns, she is chary of invoking recognition of

humanity as the ground of protection. For the

human is itself a norm that works to give face

and to efface, a norm that deserves to be

regarded as separating us from awareness of

conditions of existence as often as it directs our

attention to them; thus a norm that demands

critical reading rather than embodiment and a

strategic appropriation or deployment rather than

faith (77). To be recognisable, to have a face, may

indeed confer protections. But this having a

face is not something originary; it is the result of

a social crafting that not only delimits or

frames the sphere of the visible (77) but also

narrows and controls the terms of mutual

exposure in social space, as if the face might

as well be a kind of mask. The human face is what

is socially acceptable, and functions normatively;

in part through the requirement of a conformity

that individualises responsibility for being what

we are; in part through a social and political

violence that is licensed against the unrecogni-

sable or inhuman. The body is invested with

significance through norms of gender, race, or

position in a global hierarchy, in ways that

constantly intersect with discourse on the

human, rendering humanity a site of the

differential distribution of protection of life

and exposure to its precarity.

As such, however, normative framing of the

human necessarily lacks coherence or consis-

tency. Butlers intervention in this field does not

seek to secure expansion of membership in the

category of the human but to do justice to what

troubles such a project. This demands a loosening

of the grip of the idea that recognisability is

indexed to a referent, and that its trajectory is

clear, rather than being a process of invention

and becoming within a field of meaning that is

not only conflicted but also makes demands in

excess of recognition:

How then is recognizability to be understood?

In the first instance, it is not a quality or

potential of individual humans . . . If we claim

that recognizability is a human potential and

that it belongs to all persons as persons, then,

in a way the problem before us is already

solved. We have decided that some particular

notion of personhood will determine the

scope and meaning of recognizability . . . [W]e

have in effect already recognized everything

we need to know about recognition. (Frames 6)

Recognition, Butler suggests, must become open

to un-knowing. Not only must the frames of

recognition be acknowledged to be partial and

incoherent but there must also be attentiveness to

what escapes or troubles them.

The term Butler turns to here is appre-

hension, a mode of knowing that is not yet

recognition, or may remain irreducible to

recognition (6). This should not be read as if

it were a capacity to reach behind existing norms

to discern some kind of truth beyond the

existing distribution of human identity. Although

a way of knowing, apprehension has to do with

a sensing that leaves the body exposed to alterity,

to whatever comes to disturb the norms of

recognisability, lacking the defences of a subject

viewing the world. Apprehension is itself

exposure, being-beyond protection, being

exposed; it registers the profound disturbance

that is given by the spectral character of what is

not already recognised as a life, a sense attentive

to what disturbs the given understanding of what

is real (12). It is at this ontological level of

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awareness that Butler suggests a critique of the

differential norm of humanity must begin, or at

least in which it must be rooted. Although, she

argues, there is no life and death without a

relation to some frame, nonetheless when life

and death take place between, outside, or across

the frames by which they are for the most part

organized, they still take place, though in ways

that call into question the necessity of the

mechanisms by which norms are organized (7;

my emphasis). What I shall seek to find in

Nancys reflections is a fuller rendering than

Butler gives us of how ontology and ethics grow

together here; and thus what this taking place

between, outside and across frames might lead us

to think not only concerning spectral life but

within this, the haunting life of images. In

Butlers reflections, however, there is an impor-

tant focus on how violence comes to inhabit the

structure of moral recognition, through the

occlusion of existence in ungrievable life, life

which is not recognized as life (12) because,

prior to this, it is not apprehended as such.

What emerges from Butlers discussion is the

inadequacy of supposing the frames which

determine the recognisability of the human

to be more or less adequate forms of representa-

tion through which the world is seen. The

conception of framing, instead, is of a reiterative

process, to be thought as the temporalising and

spacing operation of norms. Rather than simply

securing the relationship of representation to a

referent (as in the visual presentation of a face

indexed to the human person) the norms of

framing can be considered as constituting a

practice of management of context, a separation

of inside from outside, before and after, that is

never wholly successfully determined; indeed,

which entails that the sense of the inside is

forever haunted by what is outside (Frames 9).

The operation of the norm, one might say, is

inherently open, not because it can apply to all

future proper instances (for instance, of the

human) but conversely because its re-iteration

resists fusion into a continuum.7 This is both the

condition of functioning of the frame and the

condition of the impossibility of its determining

meaning. The global circulation of the image is

thus one crucial locus at which this excess over

the already-recognisable (this taking place

beyond an original context or framing intention)

may be registered. Images, such as those of

torture at Abu Ghraib, are caught up in this work

of normative framing; nonetheless, they repeat-

edly fracture the stability of any determined

context. Not only do the images find unforeseen

contexts of reception but also the images in

circulating generate new contexts beyond

any intention by which they were made or

published (77).

The point of a critique that begins ontologi-

cally, then, will not simply be to establish the

functioning of media images as aspects of a

normativity that circulates in space and time,

differentially marking the human and inhuman

according to narratives that justify or condemn

violence; but more fundamentally, to draw

attention to the exposure of the image as an

opening to sense, as what is always already out of

context, or as the force of the spectral. It is for

this reason, I suggest, that Butler resists the idea

of compassion fatigue as an effect of exposure

to global mediation, alongside the idea that this

circulation can successfully determine any

response, whether to give human faces or to

efface distant lives. For although real enough in

their immediate effects, both the numbing

exposure to images and their way of functioning

to reproduce normative framings of the human

do not exhaust what an image is, nor how it

continues to give evidence of what was. Thus,

considered ontologically,

the Abu Ghraib photographs neither numb

our senses nor determine a particular

response. This has to do with the fact that

they occupy no single time and no specific

space. (78)

The photographs, shown and circulated, consti-

tute a public condition, in excess of the

original context, and one under which outrage

has the chance to find a voice (78). But the image

generates this opening only on condition of

rupturing the continuum of meaning; and it is

an opening incited less by the quest to recognise

the human than by the necessity of discerning the

remnants of the recognisable a mark [of

humanity] . . . not registered through a norm, but

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by the fragments that follow in the wake of the

abrogation of the normatively human (94).

Apprehension would be the aspect of sense

attuned to this spectral life, and attested to in

the capacity of the image to bear witness to what

took place, but only in so far as the immediacy

of presence is ruptured by separation, distance, a

circulation that creates discontinuity. The impos-

sibility of giving a determined meaning to the

event here gives way to the necessity of

responding to the disturbance it presents.

The image presents a challenge to the success-

ful re-instatement of the normatively human (94

95); it gives evidence against it by exposing

what the norm forecloses, what it must push to

the outside in order to function (9). Butler calls

ungrievable life, this specter that gnaws at the

norms of recognition, an intensified figure

vacillating at its inside and its outside (12).

Yet we should be careful not to redeem this figure

by giving the spectre a face or human name; for

ungrievable life, read ontologically (or perhaps

better, and as Derrida put it, hauntologically) is

what testifies to a break with the name and the

order of representation. To read the figure of

ungrievable life as an element in hauntology, and

as a place of challenge mobilised by the opening

of the image, differs fundamentally from a

reading that would render the term as one

posing a problem of recognition, and ethically

presenting the task that falls upon spectators of

bringing a hitherto exposed body within the

protective fold of human community. Butler cites

Sontag exclaiming Let the atrocious images

haunt us! (Sontag 65 cited in Frames 96); and it

is in the domain of haunting that grievability

emerges.8 Paradoxically, Butler argues, it is what

haunts us that gives us access to the evidence the

photographic image is. Drawing on Barthess

reading of the photograph in the tense of the

future anterior, and as I shall explore more fully

in section IV below, it is the photographs

anticipation of the past (98), its rupture of a

space-time continuum, that establishes the prior-

ity of sense over knowledge, making grievability

the condition of a knowable human life (98). To

affirm a life as existing is to be haunted by its

presentation in the image; to refuse to be

haunted, even in the presence of the image, is

to render life ungrievable; if we are not haunted,

there is no loss, there has been no life that is lost

(97). Conversely, to confirm that a life was, even

within the life itself, is to underscore that a life is

a grievable life (Frames 97).

What is established here is a fundamental

relation between apprehension and the being

of the image. Apprehension of life can be

foreclosed and refused; but the image insists (or

haunts) as the mark of a potential for re-opening.

Conversely, the image gives itself to apprehen-

sion, as the demand for sense. We might in this

way conceive grievability as the precondition of

life, one that is discovered retrospectively

through the temporality instituted by the photo-

graph itself (98), or as life that is accomplished

in being given to sense:

The apprehension of grievability precedes and

makes possible the apprehension of precarious

life. Grievability precedes and makes possible

the apprehension of the living being as living,

exposed to non-life from the start. (15)

Here I am deliberately weaving together the

terms Butler uses with terms derived from

Nancys ontology of the non-representational

image, as, to cite again, the outside of the

world where the gaze loses itself to find itself as

gaze (regard), that is, first and foremost as respect

(egard) for what is there, for what takes place and

continues to take place (Evidence 64). The

apprehension of precarious life, regard for

existence in its being born and dying, demands

thinking in terms of the image that goes beyond

the name (paradoxical as that might seem when

we think of the obituary or memorial as recording

names). This is, at several levels, a fundamental

break with any view of the moral work of images

that consists in bringing what is distant close, or

making what is strange familiar. It is also a break

with the quest for all members of humanity to

find equality in being equally represented.

On Butlers terms, precariousness, as apprehen-

sion of lifes sheer exposure, as the condition of

being conditioned, exceeds the individual,

exceeds, indeed, the human and the very terms

of recognition (Frames 13); yet the irrefutable

generalizability of this condition (23) is for

Butler the basis of egalitarian considerations, in

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so far as these may be conceived as an obligation

to the living that arises not through sovereign

decision about what lives are worth living and

which deserve to be destroyed, nor by super-

seding this arbitrariness in the name of an

expansive and inclusive humanism, but as

ontological responsibility, precisely to (re)gener-

ating the conditions of lifes liveability (23).

This responsibility, as I have been following

Butler in arguing, turns on sense engaging the

haunting work of images. Further, it resists the

terms of a representational egalitarianism that

arises from certain cosmopolitan precepts, nota-

bly the conception of the cosmos as a single

representational universe and the sympathetic

imagination as the means to expand its territorial

reach. But to further articulate the kind of claim

that might be at work in thinking the terms of

justice and equality ontologically, it is worth

returning to consider Nancys reflections on this

theme.

III mundus corpus

If moral cosmopolitanism concerns itself with the

relay of distant suffering (Boltanski) and with

extending the inclusiveness of representation in

universal humanity, what is the significance of an

ontological project that insists, as Nancy does, on

taking a distance from globalisation by setting in

motion a world-forming or mondialisation,

a making sense (Creation 29)? Certainly,

Nancy speaks of justice; but might such justice,

indexed as it is to the work of the image, prove

merely to be an aesthetic category, one indifferent

to properly ethical concerns?

An answer to these questions would need to

pass through several vectors, including reflection

on how far the moral cosmopolitan project,

bound as it is to globalisation, proves insensitive

to the problematic of place, remaining thor-

oughly centred on the priority of First World

forms of consciousness and understanding of

global relationships.9 First and foremost, how-

ever, what I want to consider here is how a

deconstruction of cosmopolitan precepts is set in

motion by conjoining a thinking of the image

with a thinking of how life is marked; how a

body comes to matter, without this signalling that

human life is invested with a significance that

comes from above (as the immaterial soul

enters the body, or as reason connects the human

with a higher realm); a bestowal of significance

which would, no doubt, find its law in the truth of

human form. To deconstruct this attribution of

soul to humanity, in the present context, will

be to follow Nancy in elaborating instead the

presentation of a body as itself the stake of

justice; the soul given in extension, a name for

the experience that the body is (Corpus 134).

By asking what it is for a life to be marked, as the

event of birth or death is marked, I am also

asking after the mode of distinction that Nancy is

thinking as the giving-to-be-sensed of the sensing

body (another name for which might be

apprehension).

Nancy treats equality as a giving distinction

that is irreducible to signification, or the

determination of meaning (value). This is directly

set against what he takes to be the production by

Capital of the absolute value of the human

(pricelessness, dignity in Kants sense). The

dignity of man toward which moral cosmopoli-

tanism reaches represents the absolute value

that capitalism exchanges for itself, and indicates

one vital aspect of the concomitance between the

globalization of the market and that of human

rights (Being Singular Plural 74). In effect,

Nancy deconstructs the very idea of value in

itself or dignity on the basis of the exchange

or sharing it presupposes, so that its absolute

becomes that of singular-plural existence:

There is a common measure, which is not

some one unique standard applied to everyone

and everything. It is the commensurability of

incommensurable singularities, the equality of

all the origins-of-the-world, which, as origins,

are strictly unexchangable. (Being 75)

Nancy does not seek to mystify us with these

terms. He is saying that equality, the common

measure, is not given by the incommensurable

value of a human dignity which a being might

possess or of which it falls short. Rather, what is

common is the singularity of existence, which

shares out equality as distinction without further

ground. Here, the most common (banal) is

common for each as such (Corpus 93) just as

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birth is common, and yet extraordinary.

Moreover, it is worth noting that this does not

intend to be an anthropocentric principle. The

formulation resists the idea of there being on the

one side an originary singularity and on the

other a simple being there of things, more or

less given for our use; rather, a singularity is a

body, and all bodies are singularities (Being 18).

Or, as he also phrases it, humanity is the

exposing of the world; it is neither the end nor

the ground of the world; the world is the

exposure of humanity; it is neither the environ-

ment nor the representation of humanity (18).

To maintain a concern for equality is to be

interested by the fundamental alterity that is each

origin of the world, whether an other is

another person, animal, plant, or star, it is above

all the glaring presence of a place and moment of

absolute origin, irrefutable, offered as such and

vanishing in its passing (21). It is not a matter of

making all these curious presences equal, but

rather of a concern for the renewal of alterity as

such, that is, concern for the condition of equality

as dis-position and co-appearance. That concern

is destroyed in the desire to appropriate the

origin, to look for the unique and exclusive

origin, in order either to accept or reject it (21)

which can also be put in terms of the annihilation

of being in place, seeking a position outside

the world, that would fix the origin as a

metaphysical ground of being. Such a gesture also

refuses the exposure that co-appearance, or

being-with constitutes.

It is for all these reasons that the recourse to an

absolute value of humanity is said by Nancy to

refuse existence and become mutilation, the loss

of distinction, the annihilation of the plurality of

bodies. Affirming that the translation of all

bodies into a mass, or indistinction, can be

opposed even from within an existence that is

suffering, and without recourse to the idea that

these bodies all represent individual members of

humanity, Nancy writes:

The exceptionality of a body is common as

such: substitutable for every other as

unsubstitutable.

This is what makes the idea that images

banalize more or less false or ideological.

Of the thousands of corroded, suffering,

reduced bodies that television can show, it

also shows that each one, each and every time

again, an each one is suffering.

But this is visible only in the space of bodies,

to an eye attentive to bodies not to a

discourse about generic and general humanity.

(Corpus 93)

What is an eye attentive to bodies? No longer a

cosmopolitan vision, it is an eye attuned to

whatever comes. The each one that Nancy

refers to is a singularity; however, singularity

rests in the generalised contingency of ex-isting,

being ex-posed, that is, existing as a body without

ground. The each one is each one, just this

time (Being 97), so that one might say it is

eventuality rather than the unique subjectivity

of a bearer of human life that is at stake for

Nancy in the way the image resists the banality

that it is, inevitably, also given over to. To

present suffering is to give the demand that

arises as ontological concern for singular-plural

existence.

In a sense what is to be marked here is

precisely lifes exposure to its own contingency,

and the problem and question become how that

does not, on the one hand, collapse into

indifference, the banality of utter substitutability

that also renders all suffering that belongs to the

mass of bodies, to be of no account; or on the

other, be countered with the desire to redeem all

suffering, to make it meaningful in a way that is

indexed to humanity. There are many forms

that sheer being-without-reason can take; for

instance, it can take the form of capital

(Creation 110). Yet Nancy also maintains that

that the world happens is the law of its justice,

justice to birth and death.

The question then is how to take up con-

tingency as the without ultimate reason for being

so. The without reason of the world is not just

the absence of necessity (not just what Nancy

terms the absentheism of a disappearing God).

Rather, it is the ex nihilo from nothing that is

the opening or birth of sense. The originary

ethics called for in this context by Nancy

is engaged on the basis of nihilism as the

general dissolution of sense but as the exact

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reverse of nihilism: as the bringing-to-light of

making sense as action requested in the

essence of being. (Finite Thinking 180)

Although the remark is made in exposition of

Heidegger, it may stand to explicate what is most

fundamentally at issue for Nancy in thinking the

contingency that exposes bodies: the question to

each gesture . . . How do you engage the world?

How do you involve yourself with the enjoyment

of the world as such and not with the appropria-

tion of a quantity of equivalence? (Creation 53).

The demand of making-sense is not to find a

rationalisation of existence as it is but calls for

the creation of meaning, as the touching of

material limits (something Nancy contrasts with

the capitalist production of value). Sense here

is at once responsiveness and agency, the sense by

which we touch the world and by which it touches

us. This, indeed, is a passage toward a different

world, an access access itself; and art is

privileged as a way of remaining within the

coming world by remaining within the passage,

towards the coming world, by beginning ex

nihilo (Birth 44).

But this is not only a matter for art to address,

although the images generated by aesthetic

practices will prove exemplary. It is also on the

basis of this thinking that, as bodies are presented

in ever more insistent ways through the media of

the worlds interconnectivity, Nancy seeks to

figure the condition of plurality, as the non-

generic nature of an existence comprising more

than five billion human bodies (Corpus 83). This

crowd of bodies will seem to press toward a banal

and indifferent mass if the differentiation or

distinctness of the body, its place or extension, its

mattering in this sense, is levelled as equiva-

lent value (124). The problem or opportunity that

Nancy poses as arising from the circulation of

images is thus one of making sense, or of

rendering worlding as distinctness, without

appeal to any higher end or principle of

comparability, that is, to render soul as the

form of a body:

Our billions of images show billions of

bodies as bodies have never been seen

before. Crowds, piles, melees, bundles, col-

umns, troops, swarms, armies, bands,

stampedes, panics, tiers, processions, colli-

sions, massacres, mass graves, communions,

dispersions, a sur-plus, always an overflowing

of bodies . . . the world taking place as a

prodigious press of bodies. (3941)

The impetus of moral cosmopolitanism is to

retrieve from this threatened massification the

humanised individual subject of a general

humanity; and its privileged form of the image

would therefore aim to certify the truth of an

identity, a face. The body it depicts is

humanised if it represents the interiority of

subjectivity, the human soul to which moral

value can be attached. If the equal consideration

that here inflects the marking of human lives,

near or far, might also be said to concern the

distinctness of an image, this is in the sense of a

representation, distinctly rendering the condi-

tions or appearance that secure membership

within the category of the human and thus

confer rights.

In Nancys thinking, however, the image itself

is freed from this end; mundus corpus, his

name for a world given to its singular bodies, is

neither cosmos, nor pure immanence, nor

spectacle, but rather whatever images show

us (39). This shift of focus not only breaks with

the idea of the cosmos as the representation of a

universe, a cosmos that presupposes a perspective

outside the world it surveys, a globe

(Creation 42); in addition, the image itself is

being thought in terms that break with the logic

of representation, as Nancy seeks to elaborate the

being distinct of an image, its standing out

against a ground, not as an appearance behind

which a reality lies but as a being-there wholly

other than the availability of objects (Ground 2).

Whatever images show us should be read with

stress on a whatever that is a question, a

passion, a regard for the distinct posed as a

welcome to whatever comes.

In terms that might be contrasted wholesale

with the idea of the media image as an element of

transport that represents the lives of one side of

the globe to the other, Nancy insists that the

image should be thought in terms of being

distinct, being a thing that is not a thing,

without this proving secondary to the identity of

the referent. The image is that which tears being

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from itself simply because the image is that

within which what is presents itself. The image in

withdrawing from the thing gives the thing

itself distinguished in its sameness (Ground 11)

that is, precedes it, even as the thing thereby

comes to resemble itself (24). Here, images and

the evidence they give participate in a movement,

in the without ground of creation, or world-

making. Such is the demand of distinction, or of

being brought to distinction. The image is

whatever distinguishes itself from the thing, to

give place to the thing; and as such it implies a

rupture with the continuity and homogeneity

proper to the order of things. The distinct is the

heterogeneous and what it transports to us . . . is

its very unbinding, which no proximity can pacify

and which thus remains at a distance (34). This

coming to distinction is being-singular-plural,

and it posits a continual creation which is the

equality of all origins, as arising without

reason, as birth itself. Giving place and taking

place configure the generosity of existence, the

sharing out of distinction prior to the possession

of any property. Worldhood (mondialisation),

which contrasts globalisation, then demands to be

created, a demand given by existence beyond all

ends (beyond the ends of man or God) (Creation

52). Nancy also calls mundus corpus the world

that is coming (Corpus 39) and we might think of

this as a futurity exceeding representation,

including the representation of ends, or read as

the prescience, the futural thrust of the tearing

away that is presentation as such.

IV from ontology to hauntology

In Butlers reflections on what it is to mark a

life, that is, to apprehend it, I have suggested that

we also find such a deconstruction at work, and

that it is again one that not only calls for

invention beyond what is recognisable but also

does so out of a concern for existence in common

that goes beyond the human.

A new life, according to Butler, is attended by

anticipation of its mortality; it is regarded as a

life only in so far as its death would matter

(Frames 15). This might seem to make each one

of us dependent on recognition in a sense that

gives us over entirely to the values and concerns

of others. It is just such contingent vulnerability,

one would think, that the idea of inherent human

dignity (a dignity that transcends local context)

resists. On such grounds, too, one might give

welcome to the global circulation of images that

break with the locality of place and time precisely

as the means to transcendence of whatever is

arbitrary and cruel in the context a being is born

to. It is important, then, to note that Butler has

distinguished this order of regard for life

grievability from recognition; and that the

dependency posited does not ultimately rest on

the sheer contingency of local social valuations,

although it will sometimes seem to do so.

Although we could read the claim of newborn

life to care, in terms simply of the vulnerability of

the infant, its human need for a social network

of hands (14) to guarantee survival, it is the

necessity of caring for this life, the obligation to

do so, that has prior conditions and demands an

account. If that depends solely on human

valuation and decision then the issue would

indeed seem to be one that calls for an invocation

of universal humanity as the highest order of

concern for individual life. The question that I

have in an indirect way been exploring here,

however, is how otherwise to phrase the nature of

a demand that exceeds an immediate or given

context. It is this demand, I am suggesting,

that is given in the non-representational image,

the presentation of precarious life; and its force is

the force of evidence, conjoining the imme-

diacy and the distance through which the image

gives distinction. This is captured, I suggest,

when Butler binds the apprehension of lifes

mattering to a grievability that precedes and

conditions knowing, and that finds its model in

the treatment of photographic portraiture given

by Barthes and, after him, Derrida and Nancy.10

In evoking precisely the haunting nature of

photography, the particular suspension of

normal temporal and spatial relations that

cast the photographic image of a person as the

mark of a life, Butler links the apprehension

that rests on grievability to the temporality of the

future anterior this will have been a life. It is as

such an apprehension (and apprehension is

precisely the mood of the future anterior, bearing

an element of anxiety) that grievability is a

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condition of lifes emergence and sustenance;

for, Butler writes, there can be no celebration

[of new life] without an implicit understanding

that the life is grievable, that it would be grieved

if it were lost, and that this future anterior is

installed as the condition of its life (Frames 15).

The photographic image, characterised by the

mood of the future anterior, figures as the

privileged site of the apprehension of existence,

not because it represents a human subject, but

due to its expression of a tense that presents the

fact of the body as without further ground than

its taking place.

The tense of the future anterior inscribes the

life of the image with a meaning that defeats

linear time and looks from the ungroundedness of

all being to touch on what is real: This will be a

life that will have been lived signals the

eventfulness of an existence that has always

already begun and whose transcendence is not

that of a soul hovering before or after

incarnation but of the taking place that the

birth-to-presence is. This reflection leads us to

another conception of how the image in claiming

us might lend distinction to the life. Rather than

being a gift or discretion of the human, mattering

haunts the image of the living, and inhabits the

very tense of existence, registered in exposure to

loss. Apprehension does not concern what or

who a being is, so much as respond to what

Barthes describes as a vertiginous experience of

the image as a defeat of Time (Barthes 96). It is

facing, not face, which is presented by exposure

within the image itself; and this bespeaks an

opening which cannot be contained by the frame

and resists the assumption that what concerns us

most is the content of the image, the face it

depicts. Rather, the image anticipates a whole (a

life) that is touched by mortality, yet cannot

close that whole, as if by representing a life

from the outside. The photograph, as exposure,

as facing, thus always presages a death. In

Barthess words I observe with horror an

anterior future of which death is the stake (96);

in Butlers:

The photograph relays less the present

moment than the perspective, the pathos, of

a time in which this will have been . . . But

every photographic portrait speaks in at least

two temporal modes, both a chronicle of what

has been and a protentive certainty about what

will have been. (Frames 97)

The photograph in this temporal mode gives

evidence or marks a life. It is worth noting,

indeed, that although the photograph as portrait

is certainly a privileged instance here, there need

be no face as such in this sort of image, but only

some trace of facing. This is implied by one of

Barthess illustrations of the punctum of the

image (that in it which exceeds any frame or

determination of content):

In 1850 August Salzmann photographed, near

Jerusalem, the road to Beith-leham (as it was

spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground,

olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my con-

sciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and

that of the photographer, all this under the

instance of reality and no longer through

the elaborations of the text, whether fictional

or poetic, which itself is never credible down

to the root. (97)

Jacques Rancie`re, reading Barthes, criticises

what he believes the latter accords to the

privilege of photographic or pictorial silence

(Rancie`re 125), that is, the capacity of the image

to register a mortal presence in excess of all

contextualising explanations; and views the

attention paid to the punctum of the image in

Barthes as an extension of the ethical regime of

images whereby a portrait or statue is always

an image of someone, and derives its legitimacy

from its relationship with the being or god it

represents (113). Yet this seems to miss the

profound experience of apprehension that regis-

ters in Barthess account, and in a sense that

exceeds the idea of the transcendence inherent in

individual life. For Barthess image presents

existence at a limit of the very availability of

language, as landscape, without any visual

appearances of faces as such. The presentation

of the image, whose force displaces text and its

credibility, collapses the representational

regimes frame of space and time. That is not

because the auratic face, or soul inhabits the

image; rather, the image is a marker of eventful-

ness; that it happened, certainly, but, further,

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and more fundamentally, that it will have

happened, thus, the affirmation of the happen-

ing of the event, its being, which is its

presentation in the image beyond all immediate

context.

Nor does Butler think of the image as breaking

with context in the sense of transcendence. The

breaking with context is, rather, an aspect of

circulation; put quite formally, it concerns a

rupture in the continuum of space-time that is

other than individual transcendence. Likewise, I

suggest that the nature of exposure that Butler

renders here as the condition of being condi-

tioned goes wider than that given by the

sociality of humanity, whether given locally or

universally. As the locus of the human subject is

displaced from its position of privilege as what

gives meaning to the image, so too the locus of

universal humanity proves inept for registering

the demand arising from the image. The image

gives evidence of the living as exposure; its

demand is for the invention of forms of

liveability, such that the differentiation and

distinctness of the body, its taking place or

mattering becomes a place of existence upon

which we might touch. This, I suggest, is how to

read the egalitarian condition of grievable life, or

of concern for the fundamental alterity that is

each origin of the world; the welcome to

whatever comes, the event of birth, the

repeated advent of the strange, as a demand of

world-creation.

For a life to be marked might mean to be

remarked, or represented in a way that suggests

at least the possibility for concern, care or

compassion. There is, however, another dimen-

sion that deconstruction opens up within the

mark. If we suspend the priority of a life over

what pictures or represents it to a distant

audience, we might enter thinking about the

marking of life instead on the terms in which

Jacques Derrida frames his hauntology; as a

ghost-work, exceeding ontology and reworking it

from the inside, or as the re-mark of performa-

tivity that is the opening of a time-out-of joint, or

the to come (Specters of Marx). The mark in

this sense does not come after the life, as

representation refers to presence; rather, the

mark inhabits life, bespeaking the death that

de-centres it and the temporality of the trace.

This might not only invite a thinking of the work

of images on terms that again break with their

special status as representations that bring close

distant lives, but also challenge the progressive

understanding of the movement of time char-

acteristic of moral cosmopolitanism. By linking

the problematic of the marking of a life to the

general structure of the mark as haunted by

the mechanical repetition of what happened once,

the pure reproducibility of a pure event

(Margins 194), we might evoke at once certain

characteristics of photographic portraiture and

the movement of the to come as a repetition

and inauguration that turns experience toward

the question of how to welcome the other or

the strange. Derridas treatment of this ques-

tion inspires his sense that an absolute law of

hospitality in excess of cosmopolitanism would

welcome the spectral, the soul at the limit of the

human, remaining open to

what is coming, that is, to the event that

cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in

advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner

itself, to her or him for whom one must leave

an empty place [. . .] the very place of

spectrality. (Specters 65)

So, too, we might read Butlers reflections as

moving beyond a cosmopolitan vision when she

writes that over and against an existential

concept of finitude that singularizes our relation

to death and to life, precariousness underscores

our radical substitutability and anonymity in

relation to death and to life (Frames 14). For it

is only on the basis of anonymity and substitut-

ability that, she argues, a bond of obligation can

be formed among strangers, constituting a

collectivity on another basis than identity or

intimacy (3435). It is not the presence of a

face that secures obligation, except on terms

that extend the intimacy of a human family whose

members are already known to one another,

already recognisable. Rather, the demand to

which the photographic image attests claims us

on the basis of the opening or facing of a

futural and unknowable transcendence. Butlers

reasoning, I have argued here, is thus proximate

to that presented by Nancy in terms of a way of

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thinking community without ground, the being-

singular-plural or being-with; a we that is given

as a common exposure, not a property of

beings (the property of vulnerability, say) but

occurring as the dis-posing of being, giving place

to whatever comes.

Here the response to and obligation to the

strange, even to that strange alterity of the

newborn, issues from a precariousness that is, as

Butler puts it, co-extensive with birth itself

(14) and is given in the future anterior tense of

the body-as-image, the body that matters. To

affirm the existence of such a body is to affirm

life as exposure; and to offer hospitality to such a

life is a hospitality to whatever

comes, to the advent of singu-

lar-plural existence beyond

all given ends, or to a

mondialisation.

notes1

Aworld viewed, a represented world, is aworld dependent on the gaze of a subject oftheworld. A subject of theworld . . . cannotitself be within the world. Even without areligious representation, such a subject,implicit or explicit, perpetuates the positionof the creating, organizing, and addressingGod (if not the addressee) of the world.(Nancy,Creation 40)

2 See James for an excellent discussion ofevidence in Nancy.

3 The crucial point is that whereas on thePlatonic-Christian understanding of human beingit is as though soul animates the body, in such away that signification (or representation) givessense to the body, Nancy holds that to make abody a sign in this way is to refuse how a body ishere, at the here or there of a place.The termsoul is thus retrieved from the thinkingof the philosophical tradition as nothingother than the experience of the body or asthe extension or expanse of the body(Corpus134).

4 To be born, Nancy writes, is the name ofbeing, and absolutely in excess of representation(Birth 2).

5 For further discussion of this point in Nancy,see both Armstrong and Balfour.

6 See also Butlers Precarious Life.

7 This argument depends, of course, on the treat-ment of context in Derridas Signature, Event,Context (Margins).

8 It should be noted that Butler takes Sontag tomake a less ambitious claim, treating the photo-graphic image as an invitation to reflection,rather than engaging photography at the level ofsense proposed here. See Frames 98^99.

9 The problem of worlding is ignored when theself-designated First World purports to stand ina spectatorial relation to distant others, whilethoroughly integrating a global market economyunder the rubric of human rights. Thus, forinstance, despite Becks nod to an inclusivity ofdifferent perspectives in constructing a post-colonial cosmopolitanism (Beck and Sznaider2006), it remains the case that, as Martell argues,the ideologyof a co-operative humanitarian globalpolitics relies on a moral optimism that fails totake sufficient account of how world politics isstructured by conflict and power, rather than bycommon consciousness and collaboration andfails, for structural reasons, to move smoothlyalong ideal progressive lines. My specific sugges-tion here, however, is that if moral cosmopolitan-ism typically glosses over conflicts, inequalitiesand injustices in world society and harmonises[. . .] contradictions within a benign and optimisticview of international relations (Martell 254) thishas a lot to do with the account given of how thecontemporary global world is rendered in imagesand the kinds of claim these imagesmake.

10 See Barthes; Derrida,Work of Mourning. Seealso bothWike and Kaplan for an excellent discus-sion of howNancy takes up and extends Barthessand Derridas insights.

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Rancie' re, Jacques.TheEmancipatedSpectator.Trans.Gregory Elliott. London:Verso, 2009. Print.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others.NewYork: Picador, 2003. Print.

Wike, Lori. Photographs and Signatures:Absence, Presence and Temporality in Barthesand Derrida. Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journalfor Visual Studies 3. 2000.Web. 5 June 2011.

Fiona Jenkins

School of Philosophy

Research School of Social Sciences

Coombs Building

Australian National University

Canberra, ACT 0200

Australia

E-mail: fiona.jenkins@anu.edu.au

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