Inorganic Body of Sense (Nancy)

Nancy's name (Sense of the World 61–2) for the totality of material bodies articulated through their spacings, mutual exposures, and weighings — without organic unity or functional whole. "There are only material bodies, then, and they make up, through their articulations, the inorganic body of sense" (SW 61–2). The body of sense is inorganic because (a) sense is a function of spacing (or, in Derrida's vocabulary, the technical supplement) of each body within itself and amongst each other, rather than of the living unity and property of an organism; (b) the body of sense is not organised into a functional whole.

Key Points

  • Sense is at the limit, not in life: sense circulates between the singulars — not because something always already spans them (cf. MP's "spanned hiatus" at VI 148; see ecart) but because they remain separated and exposed on their edges. The body of sense has no organic life-principle; it is the assemblage of singularities articulated by their partes extra partes.
  • Not corporeal in the world of bodies: "There are only bodies but sense itself is not a body" (Morin Ch 6 §3). What is not corporeal in the world of bodies is the with of these bodies, their exposure to one another, their rapport. The relation is "of the order of what the Stoics called the incorporeal" (Nancy C II 6–7).
  • Distinct from organic body / Leib: phenomenology's Leib (living body) has a kind of unity (Husserlian touching-touched; MP's body schema). Nancy's inorganic body of sense refuses this — it has no functional whole, no organic life-principle, no centre.
  • Not death, either: Nancy at BP 169–70 (cited by Morin Ch 6 fn 22): "here at the heart of things, one must not seek the living beat of a universal animation. This is not death, either, but rather the immobile, impassive gravity of the 'there is' of things." The inorganic-ness is not opposed to life as its negation; it is neither life nor death but the gravity-of-existence.
  • Distinct from new materialism's vibrant matter: Bennett, Alaimo, Ingold all attribute life (in some thinner or thicker sense) to materials; Nancy refuses. The inorganic body of sense is Nancy's signature mark of distinction against the vitalist new materialisms.

Details

The structural argument

Per Morin Ch 6 §3, the inorganic body of sense follows from three more basic Nancean commitments:

  1. creation-ex-nihilo-materialist: the world has no ground, no growth principle, no transcendent unifier — so the body of sense has no organic whole-principle.
  2. whateverness-quelconque: bodies are quelconque (indeterminate-but-concrete); they have no essence determining what kind of unity they should form.
  3. Sense as touching at the limit: sense happens between singulars, in their contact-separation, not in their absorption into a higher unity.

The conjunction gives Nancy a body-of-sense that is all bodies together (because sense circulates between them) but not a body-with-organic-unity (because there is no transcendent principle constituting the whole).

Distinct from MP's flesh

Per Morin's central contrast (Ch 8), MP's flesh — even at its most generalised ("the flesh of the world is not self-sensing"; the flesh as "element," "general thing," "incarnate principle," VI 139) — retains a unifying function: it is "what ensures the adherence of the two sides to one another, their communication or, dare we say, communion" (Morin p. 190). Nancy's inorganic body of sense refuses this unifying function; the between circulates without gathering, without bridge, without connective tissue (BSP 5).

Why "inorganic" rather than "anorganic" or "mineral"

Nancy's choice of inorganic rather than anorganic (which would mean "without organs in some absolute sense") or mineral (which would still suggest a material register) preserves the body of sense as body (extended, articulated, partes extra partes) while removing the organic function (the living-unity, the organism, the Leib-structure). The inorganic body is still a body — just not a living one.

Connections

  • foundational concept of jean-luc-nancy's materialism — load-bearing for Nancy's contemporary reception.
  • contrasts with MP's flesh-as-element — MP's flesh is a unifying principle (per Morin's diagnosis); Nancy's body of sense is not.
  • contrasts with organic / vitalist new materialisms — Bennett, Ingold, Alaimo all retain a life-thread; Nancy does not.
  • foundational for sense-as-touching-at-the-limit — see also melee-nancy and the Nancean understanding of *écart*.
  • follows from creation-ex-nihilo-materialist + whateverness-quelconque + freedom-of-the-stone.
  • contrasts with Stoic pneuma / Aristotle's psyche-as-form-of-body — Nancy keeps the form-of-body but reverses it (the body draws the outline of the soul, not vice versa).

Open Questions

  • Is Nancy's inorganic body of sense compatible with the explicit attention to life in Sexistence and in some of Corpus II? Both texts engage jouissance, sex, the body's intensities; whether these are "organic" in any sense or only structural-orifices is open.
  • Does the inorganic body of sense include thought (per Nancy's "thinking is a material event" — see weight-of-thought)? Nancy says yes at BP 169–87; the inorganic body of sense includes that thing which thought is.
  • What politics or ethics follows from an inorganic body of sense? Nancy's Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural extend the singular-plural ontology to politics; whether the politics is also inorganic-of-sense is worth examining.

Sources

  • morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being — Ch 6 §3 (the foundational deployment + the contrast with vitalist new materialisms; cited at SW 61–2; BP 169–70; C II 6–8).