Cassils with Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract

This article thinks between two works by the transgender Canadian artist Cassils, Becoming an Image (2012–ongoing) and Inextinguishable Fire (2015), and French poet-philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on touch. Cassils’s work is profoundly empirical and estranges and illuminates the body by working with its extremes and limits. In Becoming an Image, the artist launches an athletic attack on a 2,000 lb lump of clay, in a darkness repeatedly shattered by the arrhythmic flash of a camera. Inextinguishable Fire sees them prepare for their body to be set on fire. Looking first to evoke something of a spectator’s experience of each performance, I propose that both works activate, depend on and open important questions of touch. I elaborate these questions in dialogue with Nancy. Nancy has been described as working at the limits of philosophy, worrying at the problem of philosophy’s relationship with existence, experience and the empirical world it bears on but can never quite touch (Hutchens 2005: 19). I draw from the account of touch he offers in Corpus (Nancy 2008) and beyond, to develop my claim for the affective power, aesthetic and political stakes of Cassils’ performances. I argue that the two performances invite and inspire something akin to Nancy’s ‘radicalized existentialism’ (Neyrat 2013: 26) – calling their audience to a re-sensitized and uncompromisingly embodied attitude, an attitude that entails a confrontation with being as being-exposed and being-in-touch from which no individualist fantasies of neat self-containment can protect us.