The Pleasure in Drawing

by Jean-Luc Nancy, Philip Armstrong (Translator)

Originally written for an exhibition Jean-Luc Nancy curated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007, this book addresses the medium of drawing in light of the question of form--of form in its formation, as a formative force, as a birth to form. In this sense, drawing opens less toward its achievement, intention, and accomplishment than toward a finality without end and the infinite renewal of ends, toward lines of sense marked by tracings, suspensions, and permanent interruptions.
Recalling that drawing and design were once used interchangeably, Nancy notes that "drawing" designates a design that remains without project, plan, or intention. His argument offers a way of rethinking a number of historical terms (sketch, draft, outline, plan, mark, notation), which includes rethinking drawing in its graphic, filmic, choreographic, poetic, melodic, and rhythmic sense.
If drawing is not reducible to any form of closure, it never resolves a tension specific to drawing but allows the pleasure of drawing to come into appearance, which is also the pleasure in drawing, the gesture of a desire that remains in excess of all knowledge. Situating drawing in these terms, Nancy engages a number of texts in which Freud addresses the force of desire in the rapport between aesthetic and sexual pleasure, texts that also turn around the same questions concerning form in its formation, form as a formative force.
Between the sections of the text, Nancy has placed a series of "sketchbooks" on drawing, composed of a broad range of quotations on art from different writers, artists, or philosophers.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Theory, Drawing

133 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2011

About the author

Jean-Luc Nancy is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published English translations of a number of his works, including The Muses (1996), The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Birth to Presence (1993), Being Singular Plural (2000), The Speculative Remark (2001), and A Finite Thinking (2003).

Reviews

[Stella Wang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book if you're interested in philosophy of art. The chapter where Nancy discusses the commons between sexual pleasure and aesthetic pleasure based on Freud's work is so refreshing. Nancy points out that the purpose of drawing is to reveal the infinity of becoming visible and I couldn't agree more.

"But this pain itself testifies to the renewed tension of a desire that makes demands on itself, inhabited by the desire to render sensible what can only escape from the senses just as much as from Sense taken absolutely - once again, the formless or the beyond-form of the origin-end. The fever of drawing, the fever of art in general, is born of the frenzied desire to push form right to the limit, to make contact with the formless, as an erotic fever pushes bodies to the limits of their own forms."

"The idea of the thing - the form - is not an ethereal image of the thing, nor is it how it appears. It's neither a noumenon nor a phenomenon. It is the thought of the thing, which is to say, its formation, reformation, or transformation into truth."

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently, I want to say that this is the most beautiful work I've read from Nancy and one of the most incisive into his thinking. It's about drawing, it's about subjectivity, it's about how we experience life as embodied, sexual, finite beings...

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Connecting drawing to ideation, design, beauty, form, truth, and the infinite, anyone who takes pleasure in drawing owes it to themselves to read this. It affirms nearly everything you've ever felt about drawing while expanding the limits of what drawing may seem to be. Five stars doesn't do it justice, in my opinion.

[Melusine Parry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book, very brilliant and virtuosic, a bit superficial and too brilliant in places. The translator does his best, but most of Nancy's invented phrases have to be inserted between square brackets for the English version to make sense. Entertaining and eloquent.

[Soma Jina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautiful words without touching

[Katerina Papazissi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Nancy talks about drawing, and about art as a whole, as the realm of forms experiencing themselves being formed. About sexuality as the driving force of this opening of form to formlessness, of truth as touch. The notion of idea as form is particularly appealing to me as a visual artist. We are used to think of ideas as existing in the realm of the immaterial but he grounds them in the realm of the material. I read each chapter twice, and want to read it again, together with his other books.

[Wayne Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reveals the creative process in a felt intuitive sense.