Nancy, Jean-Luc - L’Intrus [en].pdf

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L’ I nt r u s
J EAN -L UC N ANCY
Université de Strasbourg
Translated by Susan Hanson, Drake University
There is nothing in fact more ignobly
useless and superfluous than the organ
called the heart, which is the vilest means that
one could have invented for pumping
life into me.
—Antonin Artaud 1
, ,
in any case without the right and without having first been admitted. 2 There
must be something of the intrus in the stranger; otherwise, the stranger
would lose its strangeness: if he already has the right to enter and remain, if
he is awaited and received without any part of him being unexpected or
unwelcome, he is no longer the intrus , nor is he any longer the stranger. It is
thus neither logically acceptable, nor ethically admissible, to exclude all
intrusion in the coming of the stranger, the foreign.
Once he has arrived, if he remains foreign, and for as long as he does so—
rather than simply “becoming naturalized”—his coming will not cease; nor
]
[
’
]
L’ I n t r u s © Éditions Galilée, 2000. All rights reserved. English translation © Michigan State University Press,
2002.
1
[
224593637.001.png 224593637.002.png
2
L’ I nt r u s
] that is to say, being with-
out right, familiarity, accustomedness, or habit, the stranger’s coming will
not cease being a disturbance and perturbation of intimacy.
This matter is therefore what requires thought and, consequently, prac-
tice—otherwise the strangeness of the stranger is absorbed before he has
crossed the threshold, and strangeness is no longer at stake. Receiving the
stranger must then also necessarily entail experiencing his intrusion. Most
often, one does not wish to admit this: the theme of the intrus , in itself,
intrudes on our moral correctness (and is even a remarkable example of the
politically correct ). Hence the theme of the intrus is inextricable from the
truth of the stranger. Since moral correctness [ correction morale ] assumes
that one receives the stranger by effacing his strangeness at the threshold, it
would thus never have us receive him. But the stranger insists, and breaks in
[ fait intrusion ]. This is what is not easy to receive, nor, perhaps, to conceive...
] I have—Who?—this “I” is precisely the question, the old question: what
is this enunciating subject? Always foreign to the subject of its own utter-
ance; necessarily intruding upon it, yet ineluctably its motor, shifter, or
heart—I, therefore, received the heart of another, now nearly ten years ago.
It was a transplant, grafted on. My own heart (as you’ve gathered, it is
entirely a matter of the “proper,” of being one, or one’s “own”—or else it is not
in the least and, properly speaking, there is nothing to understand, no mys-
tery, not even a question: rather, as the doctors prefer to say, there is the sim-
ple necessity [ la simple évidence ] of a transplantation)—my own heart in
fact was worn out, for reasons that have never been clear. Thus to live, it was
necessary to receive another’s, an other, heart.
[
] (But in this case what other program was to cross or run into my
own, physiological, program? Less than twenty years before, transplants
were not done, and certainly not with recourse to cyclosporine, which pro-
tects against rejection of the grafted organ. Twenty years hence, it is certain
to be a matter of another kind of transplant, by other means. Here personal
contingency crosses with contingency in the history of technology. Had I
will it cease being in some respect an intrusion: [
[
 
Jean-Luc Nancy
3
] There is simply the physical sensation of a void already open [ déjà
ouvert ] in my chest, along with a kind of apnea wherein nothing, strictly
nothing, even today, would allow me to disentangle the organic, the sym-
bolic, and the imaginary, or the continuous from the interrupted—the sen-
sation was something like one breath, now pushed across a cavern, already
imperceptibly half-open and strange; and, as though within a single repre-
sentation, the sensation of passing over a bridge, while still remaining on it.
If my heart was giving up and going to drop me, to what degree was it an
organ of “mine,” my “own”? Was it even an organ? For several years already,
I’d been acquainted with my heart’s arrhythmia and palpitations—nothing
really that significant (these were the measurements [ chiffres ] of machines,
like the “ejection fraction,” whose name I liked): not an organ, not a deep red,
muscular mass with pipes sticking out of it, which I now suddenly had to
picture to myself [ me figurer ]. Not “my heart” endlessly beating, as absent to
me [
] till now as the soles of my feet walking.
It was becoming a stranger to me, intruding through its defection—
almost through rejection, if not dejection. I had this heart somewhere near
my lips or on my tongue, like an improper food . . . a sort of mild indigestion.
A gradual slippage was separating me from myself. There I was: it was sum-
mer, I had to wait, something was detaching itself from me, or was coming
up in me, there where nothing had been: nothing but the “proper” immer-
sion in me of “myself ” that had never identified itself as this body, even less
as this heart, and that was suddenly concerned with and watching itself.
Later, for example, while going up stairs, feeling each extrasystole beat dis-
connect like the fall of a pebble to the bottom of a well. How does one
become for oneself a representation?—a montage, an assembly of functions?
lived earlier, I would be dead; later, I would be surviving in a different man-
ner. But “I” always finds itself caught in the battlements and gaps of techni-
cal possibilities. This is why the debate I saw unfolding, between those who
consider this to be a metaphysical adventure and those who would see it as
a technical performance, is vain: it is a matter of both, one in the other.)
From the moment that I was told that I must have a heart transplant,
every sign could have vacillated, every marker changed: without reflection,
of course, and even without identifying the slightest action or permutation.
[
 
4
L’ I nt r u s
] My heart was becoming my own foreigner—a stranger precisely
because it was inside. Yet this strangeness could only come from outside for
having first emerged inside. A void suddenly opened in my chest or my
soul—it’s the same thing—when it was said to me: “You must have a heart
transplant. . . .” Here the mind runs into a non-existent object [ un objet
nul ]—there is nothing to know, nothing to understand, nothing to feel: the
intrusion on thought of a body foreign to thought. This blank will stay with
me, at the same time like thought itself and its contrary.
This half-hearted heart can be only half mine. I was already no longer in
me. I already come from elsewhere, or I come no more. A strangeness reveals
itself “at the heart” of what is most familiar—but familiar says too little: a
strangeness at the heart of what never used to signal itself as “heart.” Until
now it was foreign by virtue of its being insensible, not even present. But
now it falters, and this very strangeness refers me back to myself: “I” am,
because I am ill. [
] (“Ill” is not the proper term; my heart is not infected—
it’s stiff, blocked, rusted.) But what is done for is this other, my heart.
Henceforth intruding, it must be extruded.
] Doubtless, this takes place only on condition that I want it to, and some
others with me. “Some others”: those who are close to me, but also the doc-
tors and, finally, I who find myself here more double or multiple than ever.
Everyone, all at once and for motives that are in each case different, must
agree that it is worth prolonging my life. It’s not hard to imagine the com-
plexity of the strange ensemble that in this way intervenes in what is most
intensely “me.” Let us pass over those who are close to me, and also my “self ”
(which, as I have said, becomes its own double: a strange suspension of
judgment causes me to represent myself dying—without revolt, and also
without attraction: one feels the heart let go, thinks one is going to die, [
]
feeling that one will no longer feel anything). But the doctors—who are here
an entire team—intervene much more than I would have thought: they must
And where does the powerful, mute evidence that uneventfully was holding
all this together disappear to?
[
[
 
Jean-Luc Nancy
5
] I know as well that I can only be grafted
with a heart belonging to blood type O positive, which limits the possibili-
ties. I will never ask the question: how does one decide, and who decides,
when a single available organ is suited to more than one potential graftee?
The demand here is known to exceed the supply.... From the first, my sur-
vival is inscribed in a complex process woven through with strangers and
strangeness.
What must we all agree upon, in the final decision? A decision regard-
ing a survival that cannot be considered from the point of view of strict
necessity: in this case, where would one find one? Moreover, what would
oblige me to survive? This last question opens onto many others: Why me?
Why survive, generally speaking? What does it mean “to survive”? Is it even
a suitable term? In what respect is the length of one’s life a good? I am fifty
years old at this point: but fifty years old is young only with reference to
the population of a developed country at the end of the twentieth cen-
tury.... Dying at the age of fifty was in no way scandalous [
] only two
or three centuries ago. Why today does the word “scandalous” come to
mind in this context? Why, and how, is there no longer for us—we of the
“developed countries” of the year
—a “right” [ juste ] time to die
(scarcely before the age of eighty; and will not this age continue to
increase)? One day, when they had given up finding a cause for my car-
diomyopathy, a doctor said to me, “your heart was programmed to last to
first assess one’s suitability for a transplant, and then propose, not impose it
(at this point they tell me that there will be a compulsory “follow-up,” no
more—and of what else could they assure me? Eight years later, after an
array of other difficulties, I will have contracted cancer as a result of this
treatment—and yet I am surviving today: who can say what is “worth the
trouble,” and exactly what “trouble”?)
But the doctors must also, as I learned bit by bit, decide to inscribe my
name on a waiting list (and, in my case, heed the request that I be enrolled
only at the end of the summer, which supposes a certain confidence in my
heart’s capacity to hold out). Furthermore, this list presupposes choices:
they spoke to me, for example, of another transplant candidate whose con-
dition was too poor to withstand the regimen of follow-up treatment, in
particular the medications. [
 

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