from Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking (2003), pp. 39-40; 45:
To conceal, dérober, to dis-guise, if you like, is also to disrobe. And yet this is but one aspect of the term, since “robe” and “disrobe” have the same origin (as English “rob” or German rauben suggest, the robe would, in the first instance, be a garment seized by a thief). We all know Bataille’s phrase “I think in the same way that a woman undresses,” and there are plenty of texts that deal with what is thus laid bare. A thinking that conceals itself, therefore, is also one that undresses itself, that disrobes, exposing itself, more specifically, as a naked woman: as truth.
To be naked is, first and foremost, to be undressed, to be without any covering that could present or signify a state or a function. It is to reveal everything but, at the same time, to show that there is nothing more to see. It is to show that there’s nothing beyond nakedness except still more nakedness. Hence, I cannot see nakedness except by placing it at a distance from the object, by situating it in terms of the (medical, anthropomorphic…) object. I see nakedness only by entering into it, or by letting it enter into me.
What this means is that nakedness can only be opened or, rather, that it is itself an opening. And this, in turn, means that nakedness touches on the other. There is no solitary nakedness. If I am naked and alone, I am already an other to myself, an other with myself. By its very essence, a nakedness touches on another nakedness: it wants to touch, no longer to see, to enter into the night of nakedness. It touches it and opens it by opening itself to it. And yet, essentially obscure and devoid of all foundation, all it opens is its closure; it leads onto the night. But it still leads; it still opens.
Nakedness discloses the fact that “truth takes place only in passing from one to another” (and Bataille offers little clarification of the point: “it begins with conversations, shared laughter, friendship, eroticism”). Night or nakedness, insofar as they give nothing to be seen, give this: the fact that sense only gives itself by passing from one to another. In this passage, sense is concealed from the “one” as much as it is from “the other.” As such, it is devoid of any sense of appropriation. Likewise, and this is actually the same thing, language is what is only between us. There is no private language. And yet, between us, there is nothing, certainly nothing upon which we might confer a signification without the immediate threat of suffocation (whether the signification is that of the mystical body, communal, race, etc., or the mutual surveillance of all too clear-sighted looks, the “hell of other people” as Sartre has it, and between the contrasting figures of himself and Bataille lies the formidable modern worry over the “between-us” that conceals itself).
…I cannot speak — and this also means that I cannot think — without this “sense in the other” already resonating “in me,” without its night already standing against my eyes. “To pass from one to the other” isn’t just one more operation for thinking: it is thinking itself insofar as it conceals itself in the truth of sense.
Such are the stakes of the cracked nudity that haunts Bataille’s work — not in the manner of an aroused voyeurism but in the sense of the night of a clear eroticism. Beneath the removed or raised garment, and so no longer beneath, strictly speaking, but exposed, nudity is what conceals and what conceals itself: leading into the space that the intimacy of the other is, not only for me but for itself as well. Leading, then, not into a mystical union in which a knowledge of one in and through the other might be reconstituted, but into the renewed concealment of not-knowing that, rather than uniting us, divides us: an infinite agitation of sense. Concealing thinking is identical to communication, and this identity is itself the night of not-knowing.