Encounters: Gerard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis

The two essays in the volume follow a long tradition in critical discourse that turns to Art’s domain as a source of inspiration, instruction, and as material for the construction of its concepts and the development of its problems. The case study of Suite Grunewald, 159+1 variations, by the artist Titus-Carmel, returns to a subject that has been eclipsed in past decades by the imperative to remember: namely, the creation of the new as an event, or rather, the event of the new as creation. This is an especially vexatious problem following, on the one hand, the massive displacement of the subject as the author and creator of its works and, on the other, the introduction of the influential Deleuzian-Bergsonian notion of the new as immanent continuity rather than – as the commonsense notion would have it – a rupture, interruption, and discontinuity. The first essay develops this problematic by working alongside with Titus-Carmel variations / deconstruction of Grunewald’s original painting of the Crucifixion as an exemplary site where the creation of the new – at once incalculable and necessary – finds a living and urgent expression. The second essay stages an encounter and sets free the resonances between the writing of Jean-Luc Nancy on and around the body and the cinema of Claire Denis as a cinema that mobilises the force of bodies that it itself invents, and to which it gives a unique form of presence.