First Choreography: Or the Essence-of-Dance

Franois Laruelle, Alyosha Edlebi

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 21, Number
2, Spring/Summer 2013, pp. 143-155 (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
DOI: 10.1353/qui.2013.0008

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/qui/summary/v021/21.2.laruelle01.html

Access provided by Yale University Library (28 Jul 2013 11:45 GMT)

First Choreography
or the Essence-of-Dance
franois laruelle
Translated by Alyosha Edlebi

Up to now, aesthetics has merely been a system of fine arts. We

seek what it would become within the limits of a science of the essence of art.
What is at stake? Rendering art intelligible, producing a science
of it instead of a philosophy. It is not a question of mimetically describing what the dancer and the photographer do, of photographing photography and dance, of dancing dance and photography, of
fabricating the philosopher, a half-dancer half-photographer being.
We will not add a thinker so as to double up the thing itself.
There is an order of aesthetic reasons more important to us than
what artists spontaneously and apparently do. For by what right
do we know that they are artists, whether it is a question of the
dancer in dance or the photographer in photography? This
is a pure supposition that legitimates philosophy only because it
is itself, by a supplementary turn, philosophical. But neither is it a
question of making a science of finished, individual works offered
to consumption; for there is no science of singular things, but a science of universal essencesof the essence of the work of art.
In the system of fine arts, dance and photography would be held
at extremes, as two arts of unequal dignity in terms of antiquity

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and proximity to the body. No two arts are more opposed: one is
an excess of movement, the other a deceleration; one testifies to
ancient intoxication, the other to the modern art of surfaces and
to science; one symbolizes life, the other death. So much so that to
photograph dance, according to the ideal of philosophy, is to attempt one of the most improbable syntheses.
Lets modify our hypothesis and no longer think art thus, in
terms of movement, which is to say of Becoming or of Being, in
ontological terms; lets abandon this hierarchical classification that
such a system requires. Within this system, movement (at times
Becoming, at others Being) was the universal element of the work,
the ontological material thought to be primary and folded on itself.
Lets thus situate the center of gravity of art elsewhere than in its
material or in its tissue.
Dance and photography are two states of the body. But what
body is at stake? It is already superficial to oppose the extreme
immobility of the photographing body and the extreme mobility
of the dancing body: there is a dance of the photographer and a
hallucinatory fixity of the eye of the dancer. But even this identity
remains insufficient. Lets displace it, then, and with it the center
of gravity of art, of this universal elementalways abstract and
too broad to be capable of explaining aesthetic affectprecisely
toward this affect itself insofar as it would be primary, and movement, space, and time no longer but secondary. Lets dissolve the
amphibology of affect and movement (or excess). It is not a question of psychology, but perhaps of phenomenology, of the immanent phenomenon of art, that is to say, the phenomenal heterogeneity of essences like affect and movement; or of the whole first
experience of an aesthetic affect, there where crops up in an irreducible, emergent manner not so much a thing-of-beauty, as Keats
says, but an emotion-of-beauty. There is always in art, contemplated or in the course of production, something ready-made, instantaneous and prior to the analysis of its elements.
What can we say about this affect? If it is first, accompanied
perhaps by movement but without movement being primary, that
is because it is by right independent of this movement. One always
says that affect is caused by an object, but the order must be in-

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verted: before being caused or specified by a work, affect has to be

given as uncreated, as non-produced, non-constituted, given as human substance, an a priori or a requisite of every possible experience; as the already-Given that precedes the very emergence of the
work of art and that alone can communicate to it this otherwise
inexplicable aspect of emergence. The problem is the following:
Typically, in philosophical aesthetics, affect is only aesthetic as an
effect, for external reasons, through a system of technical causes
or stylistic motivations supposedly primary or forming a hierarchy
with affect, that is called, by pretense or presumption, aesthetic.
Not only because Being, in other words the objective conditions of
its existence, proves to be simultaneous with itsince philosophy
has also recognized this latter traitbut because affect is transcendental immanence and index sui. It will thus be aesthetic strictly
for its own reasons and will have to be conceived as non-produced.
Deploying Sartrean terms outside of their context, we will
say that this lived is affect (of) itself, that it is in its essence nonpositional (of) itself, or that it remains in itself. In short, it retains
its identity, which by consequence is not alienated in an object or
in the World. It is in it that the work of art resonates as such; it is
to it that it leads; it is from it that it commences. It is there that the
work of art will have its site or its locus rather than in the generalities or abstractions of space and time, techniques and stylistic
codes and so on, with which the various aesthetics attempt to reconstitute it from outside or seek to negate it. This lived is in no
way comparable, by its internal essence, to Being or to Becoming;
it is not a metaphysical entityit is the human substance itself, a
lived identity, an identical lived through and through. And as such,
it does not have its locus within the World. This is why the transcendence of beauty does not account for itself, as Plato supposed;
it discovers its cause, for it also has a cause, in the inalienable One.
But this is the lived in its essence, not yet the properly aesthetic
lived. What is required for this affect (of) itself to be presented with
an aesthetic character? Precisely that, without ceasing to be solitary,
it be accompanied; that there be a kind of return of movement, of
space and time, of the supports of the work, all that makes up its
objectivity. A simultaneous presence of the lived and the means of

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the work, of the One and Being if you want; an affinity and a simultaneity of affect (nevertheless independent of the World) and of the
World. Miraculous affinity, thoroughly contingent or inexplicable,
in which the World and its material accompany the immanent lived
without determining or causing it, without alienating it. We will
define art by the simple coincidence or the without why transparency (without dialectical reason for example) of the most objective outside and the most secret inside; of supports, surfaces, and
movements of the work and of this wholly interior and transparent
seizure by affect; of this objectivity and this interior or immanent
we will not hesitate to say quasi-mysticalvision. Affect is only
aesthetic when we reconcile or conciliate, without synthesis, affect (inalienable in the World) and the World itself through which
it transits, yet without becoming lost in it. Art does not limit this
independence, but adds to independent terms, and as equal, the dependent instances; Being with the One nonetheless independent of
Being; being (techniques, supports, styles, etc.) with Being nonetheless partially independent of being. If there is an aesthetic syntax,
it would be this: let there be X and Y; X is with Y, simultaneous
with Y which is nevertheless absolutely independent of it. This is
to say that art manifests or implements the invisible real without
modifying it, incarnates it without destroying or transforming it.
Aesthetic pleasure is born in connection with what emerges from
its invisibility (but not from its dissimulation, from its withdrawal
or its hiding place, for it would then be transformed) in a fully
positive fashion and without thereby being undermined or altered,
without losing its invisible essence in this operation. Art, as philosophy does, manifests or implements the real but, unlike philosophy, without transforming it or bringing it about.
Aesthetic feeling is de-objectivated and de-empiricized in relation to its classical forms. The root resides in the affect (of) itself,
in the absolutely invisible human substance; its existence lies in the
affinity of this affect and of Being, even of de-objectivated beingexistence. It changes its nature and ceases to be determined by the
empirical, supposedly aesthetic sensibility. But it equally changes its
status and stops being a simple predicate or effect of the object
of the object of art or of being. Whereas classical aesthetics spin

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affect around being, then Being-object, we spin being around the

extroverted yet intact affect. By its nature, affect is interiorized
and more than interiorized: it is wholly interior. The function of art
is to render it sensible, ontologically sensible, to diffuse it through
the whole sphere of objectivity without ever ascribing it to an object; to endow it with an absolutely universal exteriority devoid of
local reference.
A system of fine arts arises from the comparison of arts to each
other, if not from the comparison of finished works. It is a system
of aesthetic representations, universals or abstract generalities in a
state of survey [survol] in relation to experience. They give place
to aesthetic categories that generalize experiences without relying
on the essence of art as such, but by contenting themselves with
postulating it, with postulating those experiences as aesthetic. In
opposition, we set out from a science of essences, but essences on
one hand determined in terms of the real or the aesthetic lived of
the work and, on the other, overdetermined or codetermined by a
particular material. There is no general essence of art, no universal
first object of a philosophical aesthetics, but a science of essences
each time determined in the final instance by real lived experiences,
and codetermined by means and supports drawn from the World.
There is indeed an essence, something like an a priori of art. But
from one perspective, it is now secondary with respect to its real
affect, which is its cause; and from the other, it is filled with a particular material. There is no universal or philosophical knowledge,
no first knowledge of art, but a science that on one side is given
as objects of supposedly aesthetic works through determined
theories; and on the other, a real cause or a given-of-the-lived that
prohibits this science from claiming to be first in the ontological
sense of the word; and which elaborates knowledges on an always
specified and second essence, although this essence nevertheless accompanies it.
The system of fine arts emerges vitiated from this operation,
which reinscribes aesthetic knowledge between two heterogeneous
types of given: the cause of art and the material that specifies this
knowledge. The difference of arts no longer makes up a system.
Now, it can only rely on secondary differences, those of techniques

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and supports; whereas an analogous system, like the system of aesthetic Being, relies on the essential or determinant character of the
material. We thus eliminate the hierarchical distinction of arts; for
example, distinction through lack or excess of movement over itself. Dance ceases to be a passage to another world through the
intensification of movement, a meta-physical excess that would engender a new utility and necessity which would be those of art.
The problem is instead that of the existence and cause of this very
dimension of excess, of this passage that leads movement beyond
itself. What is the cause of this metaphysical dimension, this necessity and this universality of dance or of photography, and which
have to be given a priori in relation to movement itself, to its intensification or its slowdown? Excess is fixed now by the One that
gives it this identity of-the-final-instance. It no longer needs to split
or redouble itself, to rely on or reaffirm itself, to seek in intensification the means of its salvation, to sublimate dance in this superior
choreography that is philosophy.
Generally speaking, we will avoid interpreting art in terms of
passage to the limit. It finds its place in a space of a priori fiction
that is not itself obtained by an empirical passage to the limit. The
belief that dance and photography are idealizations of empirical
movement and immobility is already the whole of metaphysics.
The ideality of dance or of the photograph precedes the operations of idealization by which we inscribe in themthrough an entire labormovement or immobility and all of the artistic techniques to which they give place. Just as the static and what we call
fictional dimension precedes the empirico-ideal operations of
fiction. We therefore cease interpreting the cause of photography
and dance through the opposites of movement. Even if this phenomenon exists, photography is not, in its being-art, a degradation
and a death of movement, like an infra-physics liable to re-create
a semblance or an appearance of meta-physics. Photography and
dance move in a univocal dimension, identical for the two arts and
specified solely by their respective techniques, but in no way divided and opposed to itself through them. A homogeneous science
of the aesthetic Continent has to posit, as far as possible, on one
side the Cause, the lived-One of arts and, on the other, the Being of

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art, its objective element or its essence, respectively as absolutely or

relatively independent of materials and techniques.
It is the whole interpretation of works that has mutated. In general, philosophy presupposes meta-physical excess as primary and
as cause of art; and excess in return gives rise to a new necessity and utility, to superior codes. This is tantamount to assuming
first the two or dyad of excess, then the unity of the Oneit is
to reconstitute a philosophical system with art as a form at once
superior and inferior to philosophy. This is philosophy itself and
we wonder what utility there is in redoubling it, what knowledge
is produced through this useless operation? On the other hand, a
science or a transcendental use of science or the condition of the
One (of) affect posits the Identity or the cause of art, inalienable
in its essence, as primary. This already restores art to everyday
life instead of rendering it the exalted and superior form of life.
Excess comes second, as effect rather than as cause; it is ordered
to a cause that alone can account for the very dimension of excess
or alterity. Only in this way is art justified in not falling back into
the empirical forms of life. As doubling in the effect, as divided
and doubled excess, it is in danger of reverting to the exteriority of its conditions of existence and to the philosophical point of
view that governs and privileges them. The excess of dance and
photography is retained as such in relation to the empirical only
by the One, by its subjectivities-of-the-final-instance that do not
alienate themselves in the World. In contrast to the meta-physical
conception of art as excess of life over itself, the One of affect-ofthe-final-instance is the ordinary conception that restores to art,
to any experience whatever, its positivity. An ordinary rather
than metaphysical aesthetics is an aesthetics transcendental-in-thefinal-instance (what transcendental philosophy, for example Kantian philosophy, is not), which places the cause of art outside of art
itself instead of in the first excess supposed to be its Nietzschean
element, but which cannot by definition treat artistic experiences
with positivity and equality.
The science of art has to be ordered to its cause, to the Given of
the lived-One. However, it is indeed a science that is at stakeand
first aesthetics is strictly a science (on a transcendental basis) of the

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essence of art, not a manifestation of ontological entities. Science,

unlike a system of fine arts, postulates a certain equality of essences and the inessential or occasional character of their differences.
Only a science enables us to determine the real essence of art as
the aesthetic affect that expresseson the basis of their order, not
of their hierarchythe affinity of the One and Being, of Being and
being, whereas philosophy constitutes their affinity on the basis
of their supposed hierarchy. The affect of art is only given to such
a science and can only be given to it as the Given itself. Whence
this equality by right of arts and of their positivity that a system of
fine arts which thinks from materials, from being rather than Being, from Being rather than the One, cannot recognize. Suffice it
to posit this two-without-dyad of aesthetic affect as only a science
would have posited it, whereas a philosophy would have already
injected it with an irretrievable inequality, on the basis of the material supposed to determine it.
Lets now leave affect as cause of art aside in order to take up
the objective element, the body of the work, what we have called
its being, what Heidegger calls the being-work of the work: how
can we determine or grasp it since we have ceased to posit it as primary, renouncing thereby a philosophical aesthetics? Here again,
lets distinguish the essence of the body and its aesthetic specification. Affect is first, the being or body of the work second, even if
it accompanies affect in a kind of unhoped-for equality. As to the
material, lets equally set it aside; it is, for a science of art, if not for
the artist himself, merely a secondary cause of the work and still
less a cause of affect, even if he also benefits from its influence. In
this body, body of the work of dance or photography, we can distinguish several levels of experiences:
1. The body is unreal or derealized in a double sense: it is deaffected in the sense that the real has sought refuge in affect; and
it is de-objectivated in the sense that the empirical, the sensible,
or other content is no more than secondary and no longer determines it. It is thus a dimension of fiction, a fictional irreducible
to the operations of fiction, a dimension of the void irreducible to
destruction, to negation, to non-being. Art begins by derealizing
the common World but also by de-objectivating the objectivity of

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the work. The artist begins by situating himself in this dimension

that is always that of objectivity, yet without progressively entering into it.
2. But the void is not nothingthe dancer and the photographer haunt a void that is not thoroughly oriental; the fictional
itself has an original and specific type of reality. It is as though the
dancer and the photographer suspended the existence of objects
(figures, images, or movements as ob-jects) in order to conserve the
experience and dimension of objectivity in their pure state. Nothing is more objectivenecessary and universalthan art; and yet
nothing is more deprived of references, heaviness, and closures
peculiar to objects. We must generalize certain philosophical remarks, for example those of Valry: dance would correspond to an
excess of physiologically useless movement, an excess giving place
to a new necessitythat of art. No doubt, but there is a still more
general cleavage, and it happens elsewhere; not between physiological usefulness and uselessness or, for the photographer, between
useful perception and useless images, but in ontological generality,
between objects and objectivity. To begin with, art produces an
extraordinary flattening. Objectivity is indeed real, but absolutely
devoid of depth, secret, or folding: whether dance or photography
is at stake, they postulate first of all an infinite opening, vacant of
every object or of every folding on itself.
3. This objectivity devoid of objects presents, nevertheless, an
original content. What can inhabit the dimension where dancer
and photographer move? What must be named the Multiple, this
inhabitant of the void; a multiple in the original state, which does
not derive from the One and is not thereby obtained by division of
identity; which is without a form of metaphysical closure, precisely
without object. Yet, what is its content? The dancer, as Paul Valry
depicts him, can give us an approximate idea: The dancing body
seems unaware of its surroundings. It seems to be concerned only
with itself and one other object, a capital one, from which it breaks
free, to which it returns, but only in order to gather the wherewithal for another flight. . . . That object is the earth, the ground, the
solid place, the plane on which everyday life plods along, the plane
of walking, the prose of human movement.1 And again: all the

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sensations of the body, which is both mover and moved, are connected in a certain orderthat they call and respond to each other,
as though rebounding or being reflected from the invisible wall
of a sphere of energy within the living being (pd, 203). This
sphere of lucid, passionate life (pd, 197) is an actual duration;
it consists entirely of nothing that can last (pd, 203) and goes
through the improbable, the unstable, the impossible.
Lets subtract from these texts of Valry the forms of continuity or consistency with which he still imbues them; lets suspend
them in some way: what remains, if not a chaos? This chaos is
neither the empirical nor the vulgar, neither the physical nor the
scientific. It is a free multiplicity of points that are so many planes
and so many drives. The capital object around which the dancer
revolves decomposes as follows:
(a) It is a point, a point of contact in the multiple state, a multiple in the free state; a thousand points, if you want, a thousand
and one since they are no longer numerically distinct;
(b) It is a plane or a surface, at least what conserves from a
plane or a surface the function of reference, fixity, and hardness.
In fact, if we presuppose a horizontal plane, a surface, we also
have to say that it is without opening, absolutely flat, thus without
perspective or intentionality; a transcendence so horizontal that it
is even deprived of the horizon and of course the thickness of objects. A thousand plateaus, to quote Deleuze, but finally stripped
of every form of closure or organization, every continuity of flow
and regeneration; absolutely dispersed or disseminated, and which
do not reconstitute a great full Body of dance. In mathematical
terms, this multiple is absolutely inconsistent. It is only symbolized or incarnated by this fixed spatiotemporal plane that Valry
presupposes. But it does not reconstitute a new norm or a new teleological closure, a new philosophical or stylistic form. Art (but
not only art) discovers its principal element not in a process of
decoding or abstraction that is merely an effect and which presupposes an empirical perspective, but in an absence of every code or
in an abstract and static dimension that is then limited or filled by
the laws of material and style. It is, as it were, a plane-withoutplanification. In art, the plane is always in excess with respect to

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its element: chaos. And this excess with which art has to compose
is an external restriction on chaos, but in no way its destruction or
its internal limitation.
(c) This still does not suffice to fill the void. The two preceding
determinations are absolutely general, even outside of art, and define the sphere of transcendence or of Being in contrast to that of
the real or that of affect. The third defines the concrete spheres of
experience that specify transcendence: technical, ethical, aesthetic.
They have a general attribute: they are experiences of resistance.
What resistance? Recall that our problem, that which we can pose,
is not the philosophical problem of a particular finished work,
from which we could circularly interpret the essence, but the scientific (in the transcendental sense) problem of the essence of the
work of art. For the knowledge of this essence, the finished works
are no longer but a regional material. We thus have to assume an
absolutely universal concept of resistance, of form-resistance itself.
This can only be the exact antithesis of affect (of) itself and of
its non-positional (of) itself nature: auto-position by consequence,
characteristic of philosophy and the World. The essence of art has
to be conquered, and conquered by a science, precisely against the
philosophical interpretation of works and against the aesthetics
that begins by positing works as objects in themselves or, when
it is not a question of objects, as interpretations always in themselves, circularly already given as aesthetic and independent of the
cause of art, of the affect-One.
We deduce from this trait the nature of the third characteristic: the thousand point-references are drives opposed to resistance;
bodies as it were, but outside of every body object or proper
body form. A thousand drives, whose cause is the subjectivityof-the-final-instance and which swarm the void of Being, without
thereby amounting to movements. Instead: static drives directed
unilaterally against resistance. What we have called the fictional
finds its true content with those drives. It is worthwhile to note
that they still are not, until now, overdetermined or specified by the
materials, styles, and work of the artist.
(d) But what is at stake here is still the body as a thought of the
affect-One can posit it. When it is specified as aesthetic, this body

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undergoes a veritable implementation through the affinity (which

traverses it) with materials on one side and with its cause on the
other. In effect, it has to be implemented in its turn because the
body, subjective-in-the-final-instance, is not yet a work of art, but
becomes one through the affinity or equality of unequal orders;
equality that does not destroy their inequality, but makes it resonate or felt differently. To feel differently means that invisible affect is felt and finally manifested, that it is the object of a manifestation while conserving its invisible nature. Radical interiority
remains what it is, not by being objectivated as a simple object of
course, but by being borne and conveyed, supported by this sphere
of Being or drives, sphere of objectivity-without-object. Whence
the internal and everywhere extended aura that makes up the precarious and evasive mystery of beauty and that emanates from Being toward being, toward the materials of implementation. Beauty
is felt or, more precisely, more originally, resides in this ascent
to the surface of affect (of) itself as essence of feeling. Thoroughly
invisible, it is finally sensed thanks to the drives of Being and the
materials that they animate. For the first time, the Manifest is itself
manifested without being for that reason objectivated. It keeps its
nature as a feeling even when it penetrates and renders iridescent
the dimension of Being and, from there, the material it also inhabits. In other words, it submits to a kind of absolute and original
extraversion that was never the opposite or reversal of an introversion, the alienation of what is proper and what is appropriated. Or
again: a kind of extension that passes through the space-time of
Being, but is not reduced to it or content with sliding on it as if it
could not locate a foothold therein. Or lastly: a sort of radiationwithout-ray, reflection-without-shimmer.
The cause of art thus ceases to be separated from the essence and
materials while conserving its priority and its nature as a cause.
Without enveloping them as a whole (the objective philosophical
appearance of art as an experience of synthesis and totality), it
maintains to its transcendent content an equality-without-relation
in which it does not cease to conserve its intrinsic specificity and
inequality. So much so that the work of art does not re-create a
hierarchy on the rubble of the identity of heterogeneous qualita-

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tive orders, but supplies the supplement or grace of an equality

which owes nothing to the leveling of a prior hierarchyto the
qualitative inequality that makes up the ground of the real. Such
an equality is not obtained by violence, but instead prolongs the
non-hierarchical character of the real as the science we call first
already reveals it. It accomplishes a kind of non-religious salvation, non-metaphysical parousia of matter and more generally of
objects: the work of art is the sole absolute and absolutely positive
justification of materiality and ideality, without thereby destroying
sensibility. We have endeavored to carry out a far as possible the
search for an essence of art that holds both for photography and
for dance. The only difference lies in the materials that specify and
overdetermine this essence. Materials finally equal or simultaneous
to the essence that is nevertheless relatively independent of them
by the force of its cause, this subjective-in-the-final-instance lived.
The equality of subjectivities-of-the-final-instance imposes that of
essences and finally destroys the very idea of a system of fine arts,
without nullifying the differences of finished works. There is an
aesthetic democracy; it is not ensured by the theory of communication affixed to the philosophy of works, but by the first aesthetics that alone is capable of equally and positively deducing the
arts of subjectivity or of life-of-the-final-instance.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank germs and Marthe Ridart for granting
their permission for this translation. The text appeared originally in Danse et Pense, ed. Ciro Bruni (germs, 1993). Groupe
dEtude et de Recherche des Mdia Symbolique, http://germs-artpensee.blogspot.com.
Note
1. Paul Valry, Philosophy of the Dance, in The Collected Works of
Paul Valry, vol. 13, ed. Jackson Mathews, trans. Ralph Manheim
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 205. Translation modified. Hereafter cited as pd.

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