Question

There appear to be three ways in which art today is contemporary for Jean-Luc Nancy: conceptual non-identity with itself, being in tune with its own questioning, above all a political signification: ‘The contemporary question may well be that of the conceptual nonidentity of art, which gives rise to (or manifests itself as) the difficultto- identify identity of “art in general”.’

‘The most manifest sense of this expression, “contemporary art”, is to designate an art constantly in tune with its own debate, contemporary with its own questioning or its own suspension; in short, contemporary with this distancing from itself.’

‘The idea of art as directly, immediately, as such, political, is truly an entirely contemporary idea, it's an idea that is even remote from the idea of the engagement of the artist.’

Nancy is in agreement with the first two; the third he disclaims. Art's conceptual non-identity is consonant with its self-questioning, for the question which art unfolds is the ontological one of what it is; a question which makes art different from itself in itself. According to this twofold conception, art is before anything else the exposition of the question ‘What is art?’ This is established in ‘Art Today’, the most recent of the above texts, a lecture at the Accademia di Brera in which is also discussed the third way in which art is contemporary– namely its being political. But that art be political is at odds with its being a question as to what it is. Art today, then, for Nancy, is riven by two basic but contradictory ideas: the ‘contemporary idea’ that art can and should be political, and the idea that art is contemporary in virtue of being a question as to what it is. While the first states that art is the production of political signification, the second implies that art goes beyond any signification whatsoever. ‘Beyond signification’ is the point of departure for Nancy's conception of art: