In a conversation with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe published in 1992, Jean-Luc Nancy draws attention to a significant difference between himself and his close friend and long-time collaborator. Lacoue-Labarthe, says Nancy, prefers always to emphasise the paradoxical self-suspension of any figural inscription, the impossibility of the definitive accomplishment of which such figures might dream; whereas for his part, Nancy habitually points to the renewed invention operated by this same incompletion. ‘You tend always’, says Nancy,

If this is a significant difference, it is also, as Nancy's language suggests, a question of two complementary tendencies, twin gestures peeling away from each other in response to a common movement – incomplete and incisive, inseparable and incompatible. Incomplete: the line cannot finally enclose what it is at once enclosing (and so ending, interrupting once and for all) and exposing to an outside its cutting is indicating as such. Incisive: this cutting is nonetheless creating a determinate figure, a kind of inside, however compromised; and the exposure of this kind-offigure to its constitutive outside both imperfectly closes its own epoch and opens the space – the time: the future – of another moment of possible figuration.

As we know, then, to trace a line is thus both to cut off, to circumscribe, to interrupt; and to open onto an inappropriable vacancy. To delimit. By definition set right up against this vacancy, the line may also invite its contemplation, its affirmation and perhaps even its maintenance: the incision may also be a form of care for this space beyond colonisation – better, for the spacing, the rhythm of differentiation which makes possible any movement and any presence whatsoever. This chapter considers the operation within Nancy's thought of just these two tendencies: the delineation of forms (here called cutting, despite and because of Nancy's ambivalence towards this term, as will be discussed) and the affirmation of the movement of presentation (which will here bear the Heideggerian name letting-be).