Nancy’s Pleasure in Kant’s Agitation

In the Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus and “Why Are There Several Arts, Not Just One?”, Jean-Luc Nancy engages with the work of Immanuel Kant in order to launch an aesthetic inquiry into the quandries of representation and the creation of worlds. In Kant’s nervous experience of the sublime and mental ailments, Nancy finds the somatic feeling of an ill philosopher whose agitation is a mode of creation without law, an abnormal creator of infinite unproductive and aporetic relations set in-between syncopated heterogeneous finites which are contingent upon the suspension of judgment and non-knowledge. Here, the unruly traits of agitation expose the eventful cacophony found in the sceptic’s suspension of judgment, unsettling the margins of art, the work of creation, and the portrait of Kant.