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The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the

Time of Scenes

Matthew Ellison & Tom Hastings

To cite this article: Matthew Ellison & Tom Hastings (2015) The Decision Between Us: Art and
Ethics in the Time of Scenes, Parallax, 21:2, 229-234, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2015.1022367

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2015.1022367

Published online: 28 Apr 2015.

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parallax, 2015
Vol. 21, No. 2, 229–234, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2015.1022367
Book Review
John Paul Ricco. The Decision Between Us:
Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes.
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2014)
The Decision Between Us engages the philosophy of
Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, to consider scenes
in ‘art’s work’ that ineluctably retreat from the
protocols of the art historian. John Paul Ricco
borrows this term from one of the book’s
dedicatees, William Haver, to describe the art-
work as a ‘full force of potentiality’ (25). For the
author, those aspects of the artwork the reader
might expect to be addressed in the way of form,
medium-specificity, and symbolic content, are
precisely what is beside the matter here. The
Decision turns instead to what Ricco calls the ‘time
of scenes’; that is, to the spacing of a ‘shared
separation’ that implicates me, you, in the infinity
of a finitude that is coincident with the withdrawal
of the frozen object of formalism’s inquiry. This
formulation is difficult to grasp from the position of
any number of disciplinary methods of approach;
the ‘time of scenes’ is not locatable, and nor is it
possible to describe. Against the possibility of an
approach, the author identifies his own position in
The Logic of the Lure (2002) – a book that precedes
and makes room for the current publication – in
the following way:
It is as if I am an art historian for whom art
history is never a possibility, an art historian
who insists on remaining within the space of
writing, refusing art history, or more precisely
to exist where it is impossible to exist in art
history, in the other art history, the Outside of
art history, the one that cannot be thought or
known or written.1
The paradox of the art historian at work in a space
of writing where writing itself is not adequate
confronts the reader on every page of The Decision.
The presence of this paradox is irksome and
tantalising by turn, as it lures the reader to share in
scenes of an unknown body without which the
body of knowledge staged here remains clandes-
tine. For this reason, we are a step away from the
kinds of embodiment that generate beings-in-the-
world for queer studies. As the author declares
early on, The Decision seeks to move beyond ‘the
binary terms of sameness and difference that
continue to prevail as the most dominant modes
for theorizing sociality and relationality’ (2), by
focusing instead on ‘scenes [that are] scenes of
being-together to the precise extent that they have
been staged through various forms of retreat and
withdrawal via the force of finitude: erasure,
intrusion, erotics and sex, neutral, offering, and
death’ (3). These terms are elaborated in
connection with such diverse figures as Robert
Rauschenberg, Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras,
Catherine Breillat, Roland Barthes and Felix
Gonzales-Torres, via a wide-ranging intervention
into post-Heideggerian French philosophy and the
corpus of Jean-Luc Nancy. Before discussing the
matter further, it is worth noting some aspects of
queer studies that touch upon The Decision.
Ricco comes close to the negativity forwarded by
Leo Bersani in ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987)
and ‘Shame on You’ from Intimacies (2008), in that
he sees the redemptive reading of art’s work – or,
the emancipatory recovery of gay male sex from its
subsistence under AIDS and government neglect
– as claiming community at the expense of the
power of the subject, (a subject who is imbricated
in forms of non-anthropomorphism that must now
be thought on their own terms.) In ‘Is the Rectum
a Grave?’ Bersani writes that ‘sexual desire
initiates, indeed can recognised by, an agitated
fantasmatic activity in which original (but, from
the start, unlocatable) objects get lost in the
images they generate.’2 The following question is
as stake in this literature: How is it possible to
reclaim the power dynamic of sex from the
pastoralising movement of sexual desire, and by so
parallax
229
 doing to engage an ethics of the self that has been
lost to the fantasmatic activity of dominant forms
of public discourse? One might say that the site of
writing for Ricco is around the evacuated scene in
which the above question may have once been
posed, meaning, the site of a sexual encounter.
As Ricco writes: ‘notions of original plenitude
prior to withdrawal, and ultimate emptiness in the
wake of the final piece having been taken, are two
notions that are conceptually, but as we shall see,
materially, impossible’ (179). In light of Ricco’s
past curatorial work concerning AIDS and
cultural production, this implicit context can be
felt throughout The Decision, though it is not
directly engaged for reasons that will become
apparent.
Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) provides
resources for thinking the ‘matter of how we reside
in space’3 in relation to an extra-poetics of sexual
orientation, but it is toward Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003), and in
particular to her conception of the ‘peri-perfor-
mative’, that Ricco orientates himself methodolo-
gically. The following excerpt gives the reader a
sense of this modality, as well as of the narrative
style of The Decision:
Psyche is body: this is what escapes it, and this
escape (or retreat) is what constitutes psyche,
in and as “a dimension of not (being able/
wanting)-to-know-itself.” In a word, as “non-
knowledge”. In its spacing, non-knowledge is
the not entirely measurable dimension
“around”, which comes to constitute co-ex-
posed bodies in a non-totalizing, non-unifying
erotogenic zone of peri-corporeality. In this
peri-spacing of bodies, “the body of sense” is
born on and as the scene for the sense of life,
soul, animation, and sensation. Self-
separated, outside, suspended, in advance of
itself and never returning to, or having
re-course back to, itself (as subject) but
always to-come (evenire) in its infinitely finite
coexistence – this is sense, this is body (91).
The body of Psyche lies halfway through The
Decision, and provides the reader with an ur-
referent that functions as an allegory for how to
read the book’s ensuing scenes. Psyche is figured
by Nancy in an eponymous essay that extends
outward from a posthumous note by Freud and
takes in both the Heideggerian category of Da-sein
and the Cartesian categories of res extensa and res
cogitans. Following Nancy’s notion of the ‘inop-
erative community’ and the partes extra partes,
Ricco decisively draws the reader away from the
Book Review
230
‘“see here”’ of ‘a psychoanalytical, phenomenolo-
gical, or existential philosophy of relationality’, to
the ‘“here lies”’ (97) of a scene that, as seen above,
is only ever ‘around’ us.
This epistemological spacing away from a
dominant model illustrates the sense of the ‘peri-
performative’. Ricco employs this modality in
concert with Sedgwick’s theorisation of ‘reparative
reading’; a textual practice that, as Sedgwick
writes, works against ‘paranoid reading’ to invite
‘the many ways selves and communities succeed in
extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture
– even of a culture whose avowed desire has often
been not to sustain them.’4 The hermeneutical
precariousness involved in what, after Nancy, is
referred to as the ‘deontologizing or unbecoming
ontology of exposition and exposure’ (86), is
shown to necessitate such a reading. However, the
peri-performative spacing as evidenced above is
stymied toward the end of the chapter by the
following performative statement: ‘I propose naked
image as one name for the image or scene of
partaking in this exposure to the infinitely finite
sense of existence that we have come to call naked
sharing’ (97). Yet as we shall see, Ricco does defer
to Nancy with each key transition in The Decision,
as when he advances from Psyche to a discussion of
Marguerite Duras’s The Malady of Death (1982)
and Catherine Breillat’s film, The Anatomy of Hell
(2004): ‘Nancy [ . . . ] continues to serve as our
principle theoretical guide: ‘whether being-
together can do without a figure, as a result,
without an identification, if the whole of its
“substance” consists only in its spacing’ (114).
Often in reading The Decision, the force of Ricco’s
theoretical investments comes through with
scintillating flashes in the passagework, before or
after the governing thesis is stated. For instance,
the above elaboration of the peri-performative and
its summation with the ‘naked image’ is brought to
bear on a reading of Roland Barthes’s Camera
Lucida (1980), in which the ‘punctum’ of the
photograph is described as ‘opening up [ . . . ] a
space around the image, which neither lies entirely
outside of the image-field nor is wholly the domain
of the viewing subject, but more precisely is the
mise-en-scène of their coexistence – affective
spacing and animating force between them’
(141). Ricco’s interrogation of a shared space of
‘perigraphic writing’ (129) as operative in the
oeuvre of Barthes is magnificently expounded
through the formal analysis of a series of
photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. The
author fosters a kind of queer sociality in these
passages – ‘for Michel Foucault and any number
of us postromantic queers’ – that invites the reader
to partake, as opposed to share, in scenes of a kind.
Ultimately, these explorations have much to offer
for queer studies in pursuit of negativity beyond
anti-redemption narratives, as can be found in the
work of Leo Bersani, Lauren Berlant, and José
Esteban Muñoz.
For the conceptual vocabulary of his discussion
Ricco turns to the contemporary French thinker
Jean-Luc Nancy. Much of Nancy’s work, from the
1970s to the present day, is concerned to articulate
a thinking of being as shared and relational.
Central to this project (as well as to Ricco’s
concern in The Decision Between Us) is Nancy’s use
of the French noun partage, which evokes both the
sharing of existence and its division between
singularities (Ricco calls this ‘sharing in separ-
ation’). This co-existence is for Nancy not
accidental but primordial: we do not ‘choose’ to
be in relation, for singularity is only produced out
of the originary partage or plurality of existence.
Nevertheless, it does not follow from its ontological
irreducibility that sharing (or what Nancy will
also call ‘spacing’) is indestructible. As Ricco
notes, this spacing is constitutively vulnerable to
its effacement by ‘figure, identification, represen-
tation, project and projection, destination or
enclosure’ (5). (One could add what Ricco
names ‘liberal sociality’ (55) to this list, which
also functions according to logics of economic
equivalence and the reduction of singularities to
sameness.) The indeterminacy of this originary
spacing must instead be sustained, held open.
We must not restrict the play between sharing and
division that drives our existence.
Ricco’s concern is to locate moments in art history
and literature which stage the ‘resonance of a
syncopated rhythm’ of spacing (1), and to argue
that such works present us with this spacing as ‘the
“secret” of our ethical sociality’ (2). We will return
to the stakes of Ricco’s invocation of an ‘ethics’ in
the context of Nancy’s thought later. For now it is
necessary to introduce another of Ricco’s key
terms, the notion of retrait, also borrowed from
Nancy, which signifies both withdrawal and re-
tracing/re-treatment (retrait is thus marked by the
same characteristically deconstructive movement
of simultaneous withdrawal and affirmation,
absence and presence at work in Nancy’s under-
standing of partage). In Nancy’s writings on ‘the
political’, for example, retrait refers to the with-
drawal of (and from) given political models, a
gesture which calls for a re-treatment, retracing
and reinscription of the political.5 While not at all
unrelated to this usage, Ricco’s interest in the
Nancean idea of retrait lies in the ways it allows us
to think certain artworks as a giving of form which
at the same time does justice to the ontologically
constitutive ‘exposure’ of being-together, works
that, in his words, ‘present, exhibit, and performa-
tively open up and stage “the distance that
separates, but [ . . . ] also [ . . . ] prevents us from
being separated”’ (3). Following Maurice Blan-
chot, Nancy calls this undecided and ‘unmade’
nature of our common existence ‘de´sœuvrement’
(worklessness, unworking, inoperativity). In an
elegant formulation, Ricco describes this concept
as neither ‘ready-made (yesterday, in the past) nor
as yet-to-be-made (tomorrow, in the future), but
as already unmade here and now at every
“decisive” moment’ (6). The task of The Decision
Between Us, then, is that of discerning in artworks
the rather difficult logic of a simultaneous tracing
and withdrawal (or of sharing and division; retrait
and partage are structurally analogous in Nancy), a
logic which, according to Ricco, exposes us to a
certain ethicality. Importantly too, insofar as
Ricco’s text is a contribution to queer theory, this
movement for Nancy ‘“organises everywhere an
intimate division and synthesis of all our identities
and individualities”’ (7).
The idea of the retrait is central to Ricco’s first
chapter, ‘Name No One Man’, which presents a
brilliant reading of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased
de Kooning Drawing (1953). Rauschenberg created
this work entirely through a process of erasing a
drawing by Willem de Kooning. All that remains
is an apparently blank sheet of paper that bears
only the faint traces of de Kooning’s original
drawing. Ricco’s interest in the Erased de Kooning
Drawing lies initially in its particular deployment
of erasure, and the way it allows us to
overcome any straightforwardly oppositional
relationship between erasing and drawing.
Rauschenberg shows that erasing is far from
being purely destructive. Rather, Ricco insists,
erasing is the necessary complement to drawing, its
very condition insofar it ‘opens up or exposes
drawing to its potential return’ (32). As is the case
with Nancy’s writing on the subject, Ricco’s
discussion bears less upon drawn forms or
drawings than on the act of drawing per se, on
its origin as a beginning again. Accordingly, Ricco
argues that Rauschenberg’s work is not engaged in
a ‘representation’ of erasure but in the performa-
tive enactment of erasing as the ‘source of
creation’, that is, as the possibility for future
differential inscriptions. Erasure is thus at once
‘the breaching and fraying of every edge that
would otherwise coalesce as the confinement of an
outline, partition, or limit’ (23), and the staging or
parallax
231
 figuration of a new space of sharing. Ricco’s
reading thus shows quite convincingly that
Rauschenberg’s performing of the scene of erasure
illuminates the double movement that Nancy
articulates in both partage and retrait.
Ricco is equally concerned to read the Erased de
Kooning Drawing as the enacting of an encounter
between the two artists. Here, we are told, lies the
work’s political and ethical import, for it raises the
question as to who or what is able to subsist
through the movement of drawing/erasure.
Adopting a Derridean idiom, Ricco argues that
the Erased de Kooning leaves the signatory identity of
neither artist intact but inscribes their presence in a
‘mutually haunting’ manner. ‘Both artists can be
said to have a ghostly presence’, Ricco writes. ‘De
Kooning in a persistence of inscribed traces that
can never be completely erased; Rauschenberg in a
turning drawing back, a returning to drawing
through erasure that returns drawing to its
originary condition, yet origin in the sense of
remainder, return and revenant’ (35). At stake here
is what Ricco, drawing on Jean Genet’s Funeral
Rites, calls a ‘positive form of betrayal’ (37) – the
act of exposing the other to the space of shared-
separation, not leaving his or her identity
unscathed but exposing it to a constitutive contact
with otherness. Ricco describes this as ‘the betrayal
of identity that is enacted and sensed in the
exposure to a mutually shared abandonment and
expropriation’ (45), an unworking of given
identities which makes possible and calls for other
identificatory gestures. This mutual exposure
opens ‘[o]nto a future without individual artistic
egos and the sociality that is the relation of ego to
ego that typically goes by the name of community’
(38). It is here that Ricco offers his idea of the
‘unbecoming community’, ‘a mode of sociality that
is a non-relational sharing in equality, without
being reduced to the unitary oneness of identity or
the collective totality of community’ (46–7).6 In
this way Rauschenberg’s work presents us with the
‘exposition of an image of shared sociality’ (19) –
in this, Ricco argues, lies the ethical significance of
the work, insofar as it calls for responsible decision,
the act of deciding on our own existence and
sustaining its exposure to others.
For Ricco, this solicitous destabilising of identity
also bears importantly upon the conceptual
registers of queer theory:
While queer theory has been a critical and
theoretical discourse dedicated to
questioning, resisting, and refusing the
binary logics and structures in which
Book Review
232
dominant understandings of gender and
sexuality have been shaped, nonetheless, the
vast majority of this discourse continues to be
articulated in terms of sameness and
difference – a dominant binary structural
logic that is particularly potent in its ability to
exclude, hierarchize, and totalize. As this
study has proposed in terms of sociality,
aesthetics, and ethics, what if, when it comes
to thinking about sex and sexuality, we were
to replace the ontological dyad of sameness/
difference with the aporetic shared-
separation, in order to name the ethical
spacing between any two or more bodies, in
their retreat and withdrawal? [ . . . ] This
would entail a series of shifts in discourse,
from bodies inscribed with identity to the
performative exposition and scene of their
shared-separated spacing (114).
Even if at times Ricco seems to privilege the
withdrawal of identity over the equally important
reinscription of another identity – ‘the pleasure of
losing oneself’ (38) makes no sense without some
recuperation of self, however fleeting – his move
away from the tiring language of sameness and
difference in favour of the logic of partage and
retrait, which allow us to think identity as
simultaneous appropriation and expropriation
(sameness in difference, or what Derrida would
call ‘ex-appropriation’), is certainly welcome. It is
equally important for the reception of Nancy, who
is all too often presented a ‘utopian’ thinker with
little time for identities.7 Against this, Ricco does
much to remind readers of the potential value of
Nancy’s work for a thinking of identity.
The final chapter negotiates the work of Felix
Gonzales-Torres, an artist who seemingly perfectly
fits the conclusions Ricco draws from the corpus of
Nancy. Consolidating an art historical genealogy
that proceeds from Marcel Duchamp through
John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, Gonzales-
Torres – who is often addressed on first name
terms – is effectively the zenith of Ricco’s project:
‘Felix Gonzales-Torres’s work can be perceived as
the convergence of all of the major questions and
themes of this book.’ This may be true, but surely
there is a danger in striking such a hermeneutical
stance, even if it does make sense?
Yet Ricco’s reading of Gonzales-Torres’s stacks
and spills certainly checks this caution, as it
recapitulates each aspect of The Decision by
engaging the artist’s own writings and tactics.
The following analogue highlights this thoughtful
work: ‘By placing in permanent suspension any
definitive mark of the works beginning or
ending . . . Felix Gonzales-Torres’s certificates of
authenticity and ownership operate opposite the
archival logics of the birth certificates of the state-
sanctioned maternity ward and the death certifi-
cates of the country morgue.’ At its most
compelling, the full potential of Ricco’s main
thesis is presented through the shared incommen-
surability of an intimate relationship that extends
outward from a discussion of the spills and stacks:
‘In a way that is as logical as it is seemingly
paradoxical, this shared-exposure to finitude is
what instills a sense of freedom, since the two (or
more) people can proceed with the relationship,
absent the anxiety or fear that it might, one day,
eventually end, and (or) that the other person(s)
might abandon you.’ (196).
Ricco’s engagement with Nancy’s writings on art
and the body is detailed and wide-ranging. One
potential problem with Ricco’s appropriation of
Nancy, however, lies in the former’s assumption of
the language of ‘ethics’. Nancy’s work is not
immediately ethical in any conventional sense,
and he is largely uninterested in ethics as a
discourse in its own right, usually placing the term
within scare quotes (this includes a rare passage
from Nancy on ethics that Ricco cites (69)). More
fundamentally, and in accordance with his general
privileging of the ontological over the ontic, Nancy
is more interested in gesturing toward that which
exceeds any discourse of ethics and reveals its
finitude.8 For example, in The Experience of
Freedom, a text to which Ricco makes reference,
Nancy distinguishes between ethics as the estab-
lishment of ‘content and norms’ and what he
names, following Heidegger, an ‘ethos’. This term
for Nancy denotes a pre-theoretical, pre-ontologi-
cal and pre-ethical mode of being-in-the-world,
the originary spacing of existence that renders
inadequate the claims of any ethical standards at
the same time as it makes their renewal necessary.9
In his statement of the book’s argument, Ricco
seems to effect an unavowed transposition of

Nancy’s terms. Ethos, which features nowhere in
The Decision Between Us, becomes ‘the aesthetic’:
‘the aesthetic is the technique and praxis of
standing in this groundless ground, or as Nancy
has put it: “the art of standing, what permits in
general having or maintaining a standing in,
including, and especially, where there is no longer
any support or firm basis for whatever stance there
is”’ (4). Ricco’s definition of the aesthetic here is in
fact lifted from Nancy’s definition of ethos in The
Creation of the World. Ricco continues by arguing
that ‘the ethical is the decision of this stance, of
taking and suspending the step that in its
separation is the scene and decision of existence’
(4). Ricco shifts Nancy’s terms here too, insofar as
the latter claims that ‘[d]ecision is the empty
moment of every ethics, regardless of its contents
and foundations. Decision, or freedom, is the ethos
at the groundless ground of every ethics’.10 This
amounts to claiming that the act of deciding on
new norms and content, if they are to be genuinely
new, cannot itself be ethical. It may be that Ricco
needs to make a distinction between ‘ethics’ as
norms and ‘the ethical’ as its condition and driving
force (as ethos), but this is nowhere to be found,
with the two terms seemingly being used
interchangeably. In fact Ricco seems uninterested
in ethics in this sense. This is not to say that Ricco’s
book is of no interest to a thinking of ethics or
politics, and, of course, he is not bound to remain
within Nancy’s terms. Nonetheless, his appropria-
tion of the term ‘ethics’ in a way that seems to be
incompatible with his major theoretical source
requires some degree of justification. Moreover, by
referring repeatedly, in such quick succession and
often without distinction to ‘the inoperative
aesthetic, ethical and political praxes and tech-
niques’ (181) of the artists under investigation
Ricco also runs the risk of blurring conceptual
registers, a risk Nancy is everywhere at pains to
avoid. This is particularly undesirable when
writing on the political, given that Nancy sees
the tendency to reduce distinctions to a kind of
general equivalence as partly responsible for what
he calls the ‘apolitical form of contemporary
politics’.11
Another potential difficulty with Ricco’s book lies
at what we might call the formal level. With the
exception of chapter four, which engages with the
work of Roland Barthes, the reader will at times
miss critical tension with other thinkers. Ricco
often makes reference to Freud, Heidegger,
Blanchot and Derrida, all of whom exerted
profound influence on Nancy, but he rarely
shows how they diverge from the latter’s work.
Such a lack of productive difference, when coupled
with a writing style that seems to mimic Nancy’s
but that frequently lacks its incisiveness, risks
having the unfortunate effect of presenting
Nancy’s thought, a corpus so insistent on exposure
and sharing, as something of a world unto itself.
Correlatively, aside from expressing disagreement
with one critic on the question of ‘naked existence’
in Nancy’s thought (210 n17), Ricco makes scant
reference to other work on Nancy, at one point
claiming that ‘[m]ost contemporary engagements
with Jean-Luc Nancy’s antiproductivist aesthetics
and politics have not gone far enough in their
parallax
233

rethinking of the author and the audience, and the
“collaborative work” that can occur between
them’ (233n26) without mentioning who these
other commentators might be. The introduction of
other points of contact and separation would
perhaps allow us better to discern the precise value
of Ricco’s text as a reading of Nancy.
The Decision may therefore frustrate readers
looking for an incisive engagement with Nancy’s
thought, and at times it risks recuperating the
reductive logics it is concerned to overcome.
Moreover, while it advances illuminating formal
readings of artworks, it is not a conventional work
of art history. Nonetheless, insofar as it seeks to be
attentive to the fragile line that simultaneously
organises and troubles all identities, the elusiveness
of Ricco’s book may in fact constitute one of its
virtues. Ricco’s overwhelming concern is to
develop, through works of art, another thinking
of relation beyond sameness and difference, to
trace another space of sharing, and as such is of real
value to the thinking of queer sociality to come.
Notes
1
John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003),
p.xxi.
2 York Press, 2007) and Being Singular Plural, trans.
Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ October,
vol. 43, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Acti-
vism (Winter 1987), p.221.
3 pp.65, 71.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations,
Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press,
2006), p.1.
4
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid reading and
reparative reading, or, you’re so paranoid, you
probably think this essay is about you’ Touching
Feeling: Affect Pedagogy Performativity (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003), pp.50–1.
Book Review
234
5
See, for example, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed.
Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997).
6
On the notion of ‘unbecoming’, see John Paul
Ricco, ‘An unbecoming introduction’, Parallax,
vol.11, no.2 (2005), pp.1–3.
7
Andrew Norris, for example, argues that ‘Nancy
is committed to [ . . . ] the notion that, since the
assertion of political identity is the assertion that
that identity constitutes a subject, it is inherently
nihilistic and destructive’. See ‘Jean-Luc Nancy
and the Myth of the Common’, Constellations, vol.7,
no.2 (2000), pp.272–95 (p.287).
8
This is also the case with politics in Nancy, a
problem Ricco does not acknowledge and which
would serve to complicate his rather thin ‘reading
of Nancy on the political’ (p. 68). Instead,
Ricco seems to rely on Jacques Rancière’s view
of politics. ‘Politics’ is not a term whose
meaning Nancy sees as self-evident. For Nancy’s
most recent articulation of his understanding
of politics, see ‘The Political and/or Politics’,
The Oxford Literary Review, vol.36, no.1 (2014),
pp.5–18.
9
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans.
Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1993), pp.162–3. Among other places,
Nancy also employs the term ethos throughout The
Creation of the World, trans. Franc ois Raffoul &
David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New
Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000),
10
Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, pp.162–3.
11
Nancy, The Creation of the World, p.108.‘
q 2015 Matthew Ellison & Tom Hastings
Emails: matthew.ellison.11@ucl.ac.uk;
fhtmh@leeds.ac.uk