Jean-Luc Nancy: Poetics, Politics & Erotics of Exscription

The genealogy of the concept of exscription dates back to Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1988 essay, ‘L’excrit’ [‘Exscription’], in which he presented a philosophical meditation on the oeuvre of Georges Bataille. Work that, as Nancy says, serves as a reminder of the impossibility of communication as the condition for any sense of community. Coming just two years after the seminar on Bataille that he taught and that would result in his most well-known essay, ‘The Inoperative Community’, along with the accompanying essay, ‘Literary Communism’, Nancy’s essay on exscription actually brings together two texts written eleven years apart: ‘Reasons to Write’ (April 1977) and ‘Reasons to Read’ (August 1988). While it is in the latter that the term exscription is introduced, by pairing it with the earlier text, Nancy makes clear that we are to understand exscription as the reason why there are reasons to read and to write. At the same time, with his neologism marking the opening and exposure of inscription to the Outside, Nancy argues that the spacing of community is in-appropriable and therefore impossible to fully inscribe (or circumscribe, prescribe, and perhaps even to describe). In other words, of community there remains something incommunicable, unemployable, and indeed unintelligible. It is this limit, suspension, and impossibility at the heart of community that is written and read as exscription.