## Jean-Luc Nancy (2008). *On a Divine Wink*. : Fordham University Press. > [!INFO] > Type:: [[]] > Title:: On a Divine Wink > Author(s): [[Jean-Luc Nancy]] > Year:: 2008 > Tags:: > DOI:: > Citekey:: nancy_divine_2008 > ZoteroURI:: [Open in Zotero: On a Divine Wink](zotero://select/items/@nancy_divine_2008) > ReviewedDate:: [[2024-01-21]] ## Citation ```latex [@nancy_divine_2008] ``` ## Related ```dataview TABLE file.aliases AS "Title" FROM [[@nancy_divine_2008]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ``` ## Summary - ## Annotation French Interpretations of Heidegger : an Exceptional Reception Jean Luc Nancy’s chapter, “On a Divine Wink,” enters into a thinking of “the hint” and of the “last God” in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Nancy’s discussion revolves around the sentence, “The last god: his occurring is found in the sign \[im Wink\], in the onset and absence of an arrival \[dem Anfall und Ausbleib der Ankunft\], as well as in the flight of the gods that are past and their hidden metamorphosis” (FIH 167). The German word for hint (Wink), which has been rendered by Derrida as clin d’œil, is a term that Nancy calls, properly speaking “untranslatable” (FIH, 168). Nancy raises concerns about understanding Wink as a sort of sign, but also about the interpretation of the term clin d’œil.“Clin d’œil,” he writes,“. . . would introduce other connota- tions just as suspect, and of an order more fraught or more carefree than that of signe understood in the sense of Zeichen, of signifying sign, of meaning-to- say . . .” (FIH, 168).With Wink, Nancy insists, it is anything but a question of meaning. Indeed, Nancy suggests that any translation is inadequate because Wink refers to the contradictory event of what is simultaneously an arrival and a flight.The word, Nancy writes, is “awaiting its own true sense.”And further: “The Wink is a sign of awaiting, or of putting expectation in the position of a sign. It is suspended between hope and disappointment.We must await its inter- pretation, but that waiting is, in itself, already a mobilization, and its mobility or motility is more important than its final interpretation” (FIH, 169). For Nancy, the proper sense of the term Wink, as well as what it portends in this context,is“deferred.”Further,this fact of deferral and impossible translation— the “exception of the untranslatable”—represents what Nancy calls the very “law of translation.”The exception suggests a sovereign exclusion of language, or any language, and the impossibility of a simple translation except with a certain “wink.” Nancy shows that in Heidegger’s text, the word Wink is associated with another enigmatic term, Vorbeigang, or “passage,” with the connotation of “in pass- ing.” Describing the link between Wink and Vorbeigang, Nancy asserts that “The Wink, here, in its function of sign or divine signal—of god-signal, one would have to murmur—is identified as fugitiveness, as the beating of the instant according to which what arrives leaves and, in leaving . . . remains absent . . .” (FIH, 171). It is with the Wink that Nancy seeks to determine the nontheological divinity of the last God. In such a Wink of the passing, Nancy discerns the “appearance of the inapparent.” The Wink is that which is “in excess of itself, or else in lack” (FIH, 175).Why must this passing, Nancy asks, a “gesture in the direction of the inappropriable Being of being,” be referred to as God? (FIH, 177) In response, Nancy suggests that “Some one who passes, is but the tread of the passing, not a being who would have passing as an attribute. One should not speak—Heidegger himself should not—of the passing of the god: but God is in the passing. God is the passerby and the step of the passerby” (FIH, 178). This is for Nancy the “divine truth” of the Wink: “. . . there is no wink of god, but that the god is the wink. He does not do it, he winks himself there, just as he states his name in it, properly common and commonly proper—the name, in sum, of every person” (FIH, 182). ### Related ```dataview LIST FROM [[@nancy_divine_2008]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ```