(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In 1999, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy was asked if he would contribute a text on foreignness. The occasion was the many newly arrived refugees at Europe's borders. To the surprise of many, he chose The uninvited (Danish 2025, The Intruder, French edition, 2000) to write about the strangeness that had taken up residence in his own body. In 1991, Nancy's heart by stopping beating. As one of the first in France, he received a heart transplant. Complications and new illnesses followed, including lymphoma. “The uninvited guest,” the foreign heart, sent him down for the count in more ways than one. The intruding heart was a daily reminder of the acute fragility of life, but it was also a philosophical and poetic heart.
Intimacy and experience
For now it was as if something was happening to Nancy's own experience: "If my own heart let me go, how long would I be able to continue to call the organ 'mine' and 'my own'?" An abyss has opened up in his own chest. From here a new voice speaks, a foreign voice, confronting him with the old question: Who am I?
There is nothing that is not foreign, just as nothing is self-sufficient.
The foreign heart opens up the porous boundaries between the self and the outside world, the invaded and the self, between the self and the other. «What is this 'own life' that one is trying to save?» And answers: «One's own life is nowhere to be found, not even in this organ... » But for Nancy this also becomes a new opening, for the imagination, for thinking. For him an experience of intimacy with a strangeness, as a real basic condition for all life. There is nothing that is not foreign, just as nothing is self-sufficient. All borders are porous. No walls or barriers can maintain the desired separation.
His own immune system is also now inextricably linked to the intruder's intrusion – the stranger's. immune system, which blends with Nancy's own. The intimate first person 'I' in The uninvited, here slips into the plural 'We', always divided, mutually entangled. While the I remains separate, this 'we' is always indefinite, imperfect, in progress. The strangeness of the other is a way of discovering and confirming the world. Human being is this co-existence, hence also the title of an important book in Nancy's writings: Being Singular Plural (2000) The uninvited will be the beginning of a new essayistic writing practice, where themes such as body, touch, skin, religion, faith, city, wandering, painting and film will leave their mark.
Claire Denis: Confronting Strangeness
The uninvited also forms the framework for the film director Claire Denis#'s film The Intruder (2004). The film was the beginning of a collaboration and friendship about film, philosophy, politics and poetry that lasted until Nancy's death in 2021. Strangeness, exile and vulnerability are recurring themes in Denis' films. But it is always with the sensual and fragile body as the focal point. Her elliptical way of telling shows the porous, vulnerable, but also necessary presence of the intruder in our lives. The porosity and the foreignness open up a search. In cinematic terms, a visual, sensual and rhythmic pulse of life that challenges and explores the boundaries that live in us, in our bodies, in families, friends, walls, doors, fences, borders, refugees.
"My heart became my own stranger"
Her films help to destabilize our division between the internal and the external, the human and the animal, the lived and the dreamy.
In Denis's little documentary To Nancy (2002) Nancy talks to a young Yugoslav student about national identity, homogeneity and the intrusion of the foreign while they are riding a train down through Europe, a topic that draws threads back to The uninvited. At one point he says: “To normalize and assimilate by abandoning difference is to ignore the alienation of the intruder. To provide an immunized identity is stupid, closed, sealed… like a stone.” One must make room for the uninvited. The intruder is “an inherent part of the truth of the stranger.”
Threshold and fire
The uninvited is an intimate, almost physical reading experience. Translator Frederik Tøt Godsk hits the mark precisely with both word choice and syntax.
For the book is also an example of how much language and word choice mean for our openness to the world, and conversely our closedness. Life is what circulates, arrives, reappears and gains space by passing through something, a threshold. It is not just an intrusion, as Nancy notes: «There is an opening in me, where an endless river of strangeness flows through. Never before has the strangeness of my own identity, which has always seemed so alive to me, touched me with such violence.» It is here on this threshold that life flows through me. That something thinks in me. He is neither sick nor old (he is 50 years old when his own heart stops): «What affects or infects me is what heals me, and what heals me makes me age prematurely. My heart is twenty years younger than me, and the rest of my body is (at least) fifty years older than me. In this way, I rejuvenate and age at the same time.»
Fire revives, but it also burns.
But the same technology that has made Nancy's late life extension possible is also a double-edged sword. And he knows it. For technology is also consumption, privilege, capitalism and the plundering of living things. And the science of life extension and pain relief, is in many cases not experienced as an increase in standard of livingone, but an increased life load. And one thing is the abolition of the boundaries between the natural and the artificial (if pure naturalness ever existed). Something else is the ongoing process … «life has invented another life and yet another life. We are experimental laboratories, countries of immigration, the bearers and poets of a new fire. The fire revives, but it also burns.
