Nancy (2007:40-42) – “mundo”

A world “viewed,” a represented world, is a world dependent on the gaze of a subject of the world (sujet du monde). A subject of the world (that is to say as well a subject of history) cannot itself be within the world (être dans le monde). Even without a religious representation, such a subject, implicit or explicit, perpetuates the position of the creating, organizing, and addressing God (if not the addressee) of the world.

And yet, remarkably, there is no need of a prolonged study to notice that, already in the most classical metaphysical representations of that God, nothing else was at stake, in the end, than the world itself, in itself and for itself. In more than one respect, it is legitimate to say that the great transcendent accounts of rationalism elaborated nothing else than the immanent relation of the world to itself: they questioned the being-world of the world. I only ask, in passing, that one reflect on the sense of “continual creation” in Descartes, on that of Spinoza’s Deus sive natura, on the “vision in God” in Malebranche or on the “monad of monads” with Leibniz. It would not be inaccurate to say that the question of the world—that is to say, the question of the necessity and meaning of the world— will have formed the self-deconstruction that undermines from within onto-theology. 14 It is such a movement that made possible, after Kant who was the first to explicitly confront the world as such (and, in sum, did nothing else), not only the entry of the world into thought (as an object of vision), but its emergence as the place, the dimension and actuality, of thought: the space-time of meaning and truth. In this respect, Marx’s insistence on the world—an insistence that emphasizes both the “worldwide” (coexistence) and the “worldly” (immanence)—is itself a decisive advance of the self-deconstructive gesture. (In this respect, and however paradoxical it may seem, it is indeed in Husserl and Heidegger that it continued, and as well as, albeit differently, in Bergson and Wittgenstein.)

In any case, the decisive feature of the becoming-world of the world, as it were—or else, of the becoming-world of the whole that was formerly articulated and divided as the nature-world-God triad—is the feature through which the world resolutely and absolutely distances itself from any status as object in order to tend toward being itself the “subject” of its own “worldhood”—or “world-forming.” But being a subject in general means having to become oneself…

In order to grasp once more what is at stake in the question of the world as it presents itself to us in this way, let us consider the question of the concept in its simplest form: What is a world? Or what does “world” mean?

Briefly, I would say first: a world is a totality of meaning. If I speak of “Debussy’s world,” of “the hospital world,” or of the “fourth world,” one grasps immediately that one is speaking of a totality, to which a certain meaningful content or a certain value system properly belongs in the order of knowledge or thought as well as in that of affectivity and participation. Belonging to such a totality consists in sharing this content and this tonality in the sense of“being familiar with it,” as one says; that is to say, of apprehending its codes and texts, precisely when their reference points, signs, codes, and texts are neither explicit nor exposed as such. A world: one finds oneself in it [s’y trouve] and one is familiar with it [s’y retrouve]; one can be in it with “everyone” [“tout le monde”], as we say in French. A world is precisely that in which there is room for everyone: hut a genuine place, one in which things can genuinely take place (in this world). Otherwise, this is not a “world”: it is a “globe” or a “glome,” it is a “land of exile” and a “vale of tears.”

From this brief characterization a few implications follow.

First, a world is not a unity of the objective or external order: a world is never in front of me, or else it is not my world. But if it is absolutely other, I would not even know, or barely, that it is a world. (For instance, for me, a few fragments of Hittite art do not even suggest the world of that art.) As soon as a world appears to me as a world, I already share something of it: I share a part of its inner resonances. Perhaps this term resonance is capable of suggesting the issue at hand: a world is a space in which a certain tonality resonates. But that tonality is nothing other than the totality of resonances that the elements, the moments, and the places of this world echo, modulate, and modalize. This is how I can recognize a short passage from Bach or from Varese—-but also a fragment from Proust, a drawing from Matisse, or a Chinese landscape.

(It can be noted, provisionally, that it is no accident that art provides the most telling examples: a world perhaps always, at least potentially, shares the unity proper to the work of art. That is, unless it is the opposite, or rather, unless the reciprocity between “world” and “art” is constitutive of both.This also concerns the Marxist’s “enjoyment” of universal humanity.)

It follows from this that a world is a world only for those who inhabit it. To inhabit is necessarily to inhabit a world, that is to say, to have there much more than a place of sojourn: its place, in the strong sense of the term, as that which allows something to properly take place. To take place is to properly arrive and happen (arriver); it is not to “almost” arrive and happen and it is not only “an ordinary occurrence.” It is to arrive and happen as proper and to properly arrive and happen to a subject. What takes place takes place in a world and by way of that world. A world is the common place of a totality of places: of presences and dispositions for possible events.