Opening (within) an outside that it not beyond
I was reading Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-enclosure today and ran across this passage.
This affirmation that existence is experience: that it does nothing else, cut loose from the goal for the project of the will—does nothing else but expose itself to the unforeseeable, the unheard of of its own event. Experience simply—we should say—“events” [“s’evenir”] “comes forth of itself.” This evenir opens within the world an outside that is not beyond-the-world, but the truth of the world. (link)
Elsewhere Nancy refers to this opening up of the world to an other that is not beyond but within as “transimmanence.” This opening or disclosing from within is precisely the sort of movement required of an eschatology that is resolutely dissociated from teleology (as Derrida puts it in his text on Marx). Not only ateleological but also and especially anti-teleological in the classical — and flatfooted — Hegelian sense. (I quite agree, I should add, that the old reading of Hegel as that master of teleogy is, perhaps, a misunderstanding of his work, that is, that the dialectic “works,” so to speak, by not working at all, but instead revealing the tears in the fabric of reality. So there is thus a different between Hegel and Hegelianism on this point). But how, then, to think the impossible, i.e., the future, the unknown future as absolute mystery, risk, danger, and indeed surprise, from within such a space or opening?
