Hurler avec les loups Vestiges of beastly writing in Nancy, Derrida, and Cixous

In ‘Le vestige de l’art’, Nancy rejects the traditional understanding of art as the sensible representation of the Idea to develop instead the notion of the vestige as the self-withdrawal and self-effacement of the sensible. In an explicit nod to Derrida’s thought of the trace, Nancy first describes the vestige as ‘fum ee sans feu [smoke without fire]’ recalling Derrida’s Feu la cendre. At the same time, now echoing Derrida’s preoccupation after Blanchot with the homonym pas, the vestige is treated more extensively by way of the figure of the ‘footprint’. Nancy, though, as will become clear, will depart from the Derridean pas in a number of ways, not least in his attraction to Christian motifs and especially that of touch. Nancy argues that, far from indicating an essence or presence, a footprint is ‘une touche a même le sol [just a touch right at the ground]’. This same figure of liminal touch – touch as the limit and exteriority of existence – is deployed in Corpus to describe the body’s being-inscribed outside itself as exscription. Writing, for Nancy, like the vestige, is a question of touching in withdrawing from touch – in short, a question of tact. To anticipate the argument developed in the pages ahead, the footprint allows one to take the measure of the gap between Nancy’s notion of exscription and Derrida’s ecriture. Having established the link between the vestige, in tangibility, and exscription in the first part, I turn in the second to Derrida’s argument in Le toucher whereby he credits Nancy’s exscription with thinking the spacing of touch more exactly than the phenomenological tradition while nonetheless ultimately succumbing to the temptations of a certain ‘humainisme’, in the final instance, like Heidegger, still continuing to privilege the hand as that which is proper to the human. As it transpires, the subtle distinction hinges once again upon the issue of infinite finitude that has been much debated between the two of them.