Writing after Hegel and his ‘end of art thesis’ you’ve embraced a more pluralist approach to the arts, in which different arts reflect and operate on different senses. Why do you reject the idea that art is an expression of ‘ideas’ or of our historical being?

JLN: Hegel wanted to say that art is no longer the sensible expression of intelligible truths since philosophy presents truth, outside of all forms of presentation –even outside of language.

Nonetheless, the concept is grey; it is a greyness deprived of the colours of life (as he says) which recovers the age of the concept. Philosophy thus comes from life and even from the life of the concept. If the concept is living, it gives it colour. Colour is not an idea and does not express ideas: it touches, it stains, it spurts, it caresses, it trickles, it overflows, it soaks, it crosses. It expresses nothing. It is expressed by things, by bodies, flowers, water, the sky. It is a pressure rather than an expression.

In your writing on art you’ve shown the ways in which thought both depends on and cannot appropriate the ‘materiality’ of artworks, the body and the world in general. Why do you think thought is unable to do this?

JLN: To appropriate what is outside of ourselves - bodies, exteriority - would be to strip them of their “outside” and thus of their independent nature, foreign to all assignment of property. It would be to appropriate the expropriation with which thought begins.

You draw out many differences between the sonorous and the visual, but also suggest how each sense touches upon the other. Does listening contain a different approach to the self?

JLN: The “self” is an infinite relation to self. It has no completion, it is nothing more than opening and referral. It is neither a “substance” nor a “subject”, it is a to-itself, in-itself, for-itself, it is a to-in-for-without-towards-by-from. It hears itself and hears that it hears, but what it hears is nothing but the distance from the self that opens it up as self. In the first analysis, seeing is different: the subject sees things outside of itself and as a result refers back to itself as an object. However, it does not see its seeing. On the contrary, seeing escapes in the view and in view. But it disappears into the view and reemerges like another vision which turns back on itself and sees that it sees nothing, nothing but the distance from itself.