Jean Luc Nancy’s Fragment

In The Literary Absolute, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write that “each fragment stands for itself and for that from which it has been detached” (44). They also explicate that the fragment is both sub-work and super-work. The former terms refers to the fragment’s partial constitution. As it stands, it always discloses its necessary belonging to an already existing or potentially emerging Whole work.

The latter reference points to, paradoxically, the idea that the fragment is always already a complete, self-sustaining work. It is from this absolute sense of completion that the fragment evokes and invokes the plural potentiality of the work. 

It is too early to state with certainty, but part of my search here is to articulate what, if anything at all, the form of the fragment, the fragmentary self, does, exercises, executes. I am less interested in its meaning  than in naming its work. 

A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

Published in 1977, this is the title of a book by Barthes. “These fragments of discourse can be called figures. The word is to be understood, not in its rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreographic acceptation; in short, in the Greek meaning: …. is not the ‘schema,’ but, in a much livelier way, the body’s gesture caught in action and not contemplated in response…” (3-4). Figures, according to Barthes, “take shape insofar as we can reocgnize, in passing discourse, something that has been read, heard, flet. The figure is outlines (like a sign) and memorable (like an image or a tale)” (4).   

In the foreword, Wayne Koestenbaum says, “Barthes never dissertates. Barthes never stops to explain. He is happy to make the lightest of allusions–a lodestone such as ‘Nietzsche’ or ‘Descartes’ in the margins–but to leave the reference unplumbed. Among theory mavericks, Barthes most resembles Walter Benjamin, although Benjamin composed no great book on love. […] Barthes and Benjamin worked in aphoristic fragments and assembled the pieces according to schemes nearly aleatory; both sought maximum condensation and intensification–an essentially poetic procedure” (xiii-xiv). 

“Barthes frees nuance from its manacles. He argues us: don’t subjugate nuance to the greater vehicles wherein it dwells. Many unpopular or vanguard positions have their spokespersons, tabernacles, and pilgrimage sites. Nuance, however, has too few partisans” (xix).

Fragments

The next few posts will be dedicated to thinking broadly and narrowly about fragments, in every dimension possible. I am referring to fragments as units of prose composition, parts and wholes of an image, as cut out pieces of cinema, and so forth. The list is long but, of course, not endless. I do not want to spiral down into pure relativism and say that every can be a a fragment. No, clearly not. But, can anything become a fragment? That seems a different question, one that I do not attempt to answer here, for this piece is just a fragment of all that is to come on the subject.