Lessons in Futility: Francis Alÿs and the Legacy of ... - Grant Kester

in place before the viewer, while the artist’s relationship to the viewer is
necessarily distanced and custodial.
This discourse typically operates through a juxtapositional logic in which a
“good” form of subjectivity, defined as fluid, open, shifting and incapable of
violence is contrasted with an antithetical form of “bad” subjectivity, defined as
fixed, closed, coherent, and violently instrumentalizing. It is linked, in turn, with
debates in political theory (e.g., Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy) over the
relationship between collective or communal identity (assumed to be
always/already oppressive and universalizing) and a radical singularity that is
seen as intrinsically liberatory. Nancy’s writing is emblematic in this regard.
Community, for Nancy, can only be ethically constituted if it arises in an instant,
in a moment of “unworked” epiphany. As soon as the experience of community
involves a durationally extended process of social exchange it descends into
mythic essentialism. Thus, Nancy’s ideal community is a “workless and
inoperative activity. It is not a matter of making, producing or instituting a
community” and “Community is given to us—or we are given and abandoned to
the community; a gift to be renewed and communicated, it is not a work to be
done or produced.” 1 In his understandable desire to foreclose the potential
violence of direct, inter-subjective exchange, Nancy reduces all human labour
(“work,” “making,” “production”) to a simple expression of conative aggression,
functioning only to master and negate difference. The result is a fetishization of
simultaneity in aesthetic experience (the sublime, shock or disruption), and a
2