This compact book, this intense salient, must not pass out of circulation if we are to find our way to "art." Is this book difficult, yes; does it demand constant attention and activity that is capable of changing one's orientation to art, yes. And is this made doubly challenging because the notion of "art" itself is in such turmoil? Most definitely.
These four essays do not "help" us. They affect us, as a passing through us as we pass through our notions of art, and so relocate our work on art, as we choose to do this work.
The first essay sets the tone: there are multiple arts because the act of "ars" -- articulating - arises prior to anything being rendered sensate; arts take up the ineluctable multiplicity of our estrangement (once we have experienced ourselves in strangeness), right at that estrangement itself. From here there is no going back.
And the fifth essay speaks to the "work" itself as what, thus rendered, it can only be: the gens, the generativity of what comes forth, leaves its trace, its footprint, and has gone onward. Smoke without fire.
The fourth essay takes us to the impetus toward art at its (speculated) inception: in the cave (in Cosquer and in the "Republic") an opening up of a human space that occurs out of the flux of perception, out of sight of activity, and takes up its forming act, what I call "imagating," not the making of an image, but the rendering of appearance in its passing as we pass through, the slightly glimpsed trace always already passed by (that from Plato through the agonies of Christianity to Hegel are held fast in ontotheological splendor as the Idea, eidos) . The image is left below, covered over, furtively among us, but the artist has already moved on. A vestige has been left, but we too pass it by (it is, after all, art, not law).
The second and third essays speak to us about our personal relationship to art. First as an intimacy of its giving of a picked and arranged fruit, borne to us by a longing for innocence in which we ourselves consent to living amid what has been thusly offered; and the third, the experience of being on the threshold of letting go of our habituation to deadened sight that forms. Beyond the threshold, "not touching, touched."
There are others who explore this, "another task," (p. 93), Blanchot comes to mind (see my review of "The Infinite Conversation"), but no one makes this "invisible passage of a living soul" (p. 98) more alive than Nancy.
