Exscription and Ecopoetics Free

Abstract

This article explores the possibilities offered by Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of “exscription” for ecopoetic practice and ecocritical thought. Bringing this notion into relation with the work of Nancy's friend and collaborator Jean-Christophe Bailly, as well as writing by Olga Tokarczuk that engages other-than-human existences, the article argues that if duly extended beyond its strict purview within Nancy's writings, “exscription” names a non-appropriative, non-extractive mode of writing through which such existences may be affirmed without capture. On this basis, the article suggests that the notion can contribute to the ecocritical analysis of ecopoetical configurations of the human encounter with these existences.

Exscription as Ecopoetics

Jean-Luc Nancy was not a thinker of totality. There is in his thinking no striving toward completion, summation, finality. Finitude is exposure, not arrival; and existence is always departure. He may, however, have been a thinker of everything. Of every thing, that is: of the existence of all beings in their ceaselessly plural relations or, rather, of each being in its relation to other beings. Each thing in relation, no thing otherwise.

Among so many things—so many topics decisively opened, reshaped, shared—Nancy was a thinker of appearance. Of emergence, of the birth to presence (Nancy 1993): of “compearance,” as he called it with Jean-Christophe Bailly, existence as exposure in finitude to other beings, and, with other beings, to the in-finitude of sense (Bailly and Nancy 1991; Nancy 1992). Of appearance and withdrawal, then: of the withdrawal thanks to which there is appearance as exposure in finitude. The withdrawal of the gods, one day, which opens adoration, freeing it from mythical determination, opening the relation to presence as transimmanence, relation as adoration (Nancy 2013); or the withdrawal of community as co-belonging, always already and again and again as task, as duty, even: the unworking in which community opens to and is opened by finitude, below and beyond all forms of gathering (Nancy 1991). Insistently, then, Nancy was a thinker of coexistence: of coexistence as primary relationality, the condition of any existence at all. Of “being singular plural” (Nancy 2000).

This commitment to understanding existence in terms of the constitutive relationality of irreducibly singular beings suggests a compelling affinity between Nancy and attempts to develop egalitarian modes of relation between human beings and all those other beings so many of these humans have so often instrumentalized and consumed. If Nancy (1997: 157) was sharply skeptical about what he referred to as “metaphysical ecology [écologisme],” which he identified with an environmentalism bound to repeat the human privilege it sought to reject (albeit in the mode of careful guardianship), this was precisely because, in his view, the persisting metaphysical commitments of such a position prevented it from rethinking relationality as rigorously as this rejection requires. As Mick Smith (2010, 2013), in particular, has shown (see also Crowley 2019), although Nancy's own thought may arguably exhibit a “residual human exceptionalism” (Smith 2013: 30n34), its recasting of coexistence in terms of primary relationality nonetheless has much to offer ecologically motivated forms of egalitarianism.

In this article, I will explore an aspect of Nancy's work that has not yet received much attention, but which can, I believe, make a significant contribution to that zone of the environmental humanities known as ecocriticism. Throughout his career, Nancy frequently wrote about the arts in all their forms, not least literature; beyond his early work with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on German Romanticism, however (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988), he is not often thought of as a literary theorist. It is precisely in this guise that I intend to consider him here. I will argue, in fact, that the aspect of his thought that I will foreground offers fundamental insights into literary attempts to engage other-than-human existences (that is, into forms of ecopoetics); and that as a result, Nancy has more to offer than we have yet suspected to critical analysis of such attempts (that is, to ecocriticism).

In the second part of a composite article published in 1990, Nancy reads Georges Bataille.¹ In his reading, Nancy thinks about the exorbitantly immediate relation to which Bataille laid claim between his writings and his life, to which he laid claim in the wake of Nietzsche, inspired by and replaying Nietzsche's dramatizations in inscribing his own, in the farce of that supposed immediacy. In his own essay, Nancy develops the figure of “exscription” as a way to think about the relation between writing and life, existence, and sense. Borrowing the term in his Plant-Thinking, Michael Marder (2013: 112) uses it to evoke the way in which time is marked on “the vegetal body”; in what follows, I want to build on this connection, tracking Nancy's thinking of exscription in order to suggest something of what—at its outer limits, perhaps—it can offer to an understanding of the techniques and stakes of contemporary endeavors to affirm the existence, and the relation to sense, of forms of life of all kinds.

Exscription

The notion of exscription appears more than once in Nancy's writings; in addition to that 1990 essay, it features especially in Corpus (Nancy 2008) and in A Finite Thinking (Nancy 2003). Jacques Derrida is Nancy's most assiduous reader here: the notion forms a discretely persistent thread throughout Derrida's (2005) On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. Otherwise, it has received a modest amount of scholarly attention, increasingly so in recent years; notably, it was the subject of a special issue of the journal Parallax in 2020. But the essay in which Nancy develops his notion of exscription in relation to Bataille offers its most sustained treatment with reference specifically to the question of writing; and so it is this essay that I will focus on here.

In this reading of Bataille, Nancy carefully follows the twists and turns of that farce which sees Bataille denounce in writing the petty machinery by which writing inexorably neutralizes the experiential intensity that everywhere exceeds it. “I speak only of lived experiences,” writes Bataille (Nancy 1990a: 61, citing Bataille 1973: 261), doing everything he can to press into a fantasy of existentially full speech the writing he knows will always resist this, which elsewhere he describes as masking a scream (Nancy 1990a: 61). But the Romanticism of this inseparable pair—that denunciation and its failure through performative contradiction—is not enough for Nancy (nor, he says, was it enough for Bataille, although this is perhaps debatable). For the life this writing invokes is for Nancy of the order of sense. It is existence—not this or that existence, but the fact of existence, and the fact of the existence of anything you might care to mention, anything whose existence writing might seek to inscribe. In these terms, life (a life, say, a life lived, “lived experiences”) is to existence as meaning—this or that meaning, determinate signification—is to sense. And the inscription of this or that life, like the inscription of this or that meaning, exscribes sense. Nancy (1990a: 63) writes, “Writing exscribes sense just as much as it inscribes significations” (translation modified). That writing exscribes sense means that “it shows that what it's about, the thing itself, Bataille's ‘life’ or ‘scream,’ and ultimately the existence of everything which is ‘in question’ in the text, . . . that all these are outside the text, take place outside writing” (63; translation modified). This is not the outside “of a referent to which signification would refer,” however, not even “the ‘real’ life of Bataille, signified by the words ‘my life’ ”: this outside is “the infinite withdrawal of sense by which each existence exists” (63–64; translation modified). Exscribing the withdrawal of sense, writing affirms existence.

Exscription is not exteriority, then: it is an indication of exteriority. As such, it takes place here, right here. The outside indicated by exscription, that infinite withdrawal of sense, is “entirely exscribed into the text” (64; translation modified). As Robert Luzar (2016: 182) writes, “Exscription turns inscription outward”; the withdrawal of sense opens right within signification. As a consequence, however, this last stage of Nancy's exposition loops back on itself: if this outside is not the location of “a referent to which signification would refer,” the opening to this outside is nowhere other than right here, in these words, “ ‘my life.’ ” Existence is affirmed—exscribed—in the writing of a life, a life lived, “lived experiences,” by those traces that, as what is left of this referential relation, remain to mark the site of that exscription. Not the exteriority indicated, then, but not cleanly extratextual either: the biographical banality of “a life” is scattered around the edges of the opening of exscription, so much detritus without which there is no threshold, no “right here” as the site of this opening. In Irving Goh's (2019: 1080) elegant phrase, “ ‘exscription’ is writing that is both the trace of sense and on the trail of sense”; marking the pressure with which prior, passing existences continue to press on writing at the sites of these traces, Patrick ffrench (2005: 111) accordingly writes that “the thing exscribed by the word is right on it, touching without penetrating, abutting upon it.” Nancy's phrasings tell something of this, re-marking the self-erosion of the words in question, the textual residues that remain, and the passing existences that these residues track: the opening of the withdrawal of sense right here within signification. Thus, for example, “Bataille's scream is not masked or stifled; it makes itself heard as the cry that is not heard” (Nancy 1990a: 64; translation modified). Heard and unheard, something of the scream remains, right here. A vestige, perhaps, as Nancy (1996) defines it, the trace of its passage, of the passage and passing of its body, Bataille's body, any body, but still a body—“the finite trampling of an exscription of finitude” (Nancy 1990a: 65; translation modified). This is exasperating, says Nancy:

In some respects, and no doubt inevitably, given the broadly postphenomenological (and hence post-Kantian) context in which he is working, Nancy's configuration here of the drama of writing in terms of the relation between a form (here, “what is being read”), and the escape or withdrawal of what this form might be thought to be representing (“ ‘my life’ ”), can recall various versions of a modernist sublime (in the work of an Anselm Kiefer, say, a Marguerite Duras, or a Cy Twombly), in which the residues of representational form signal the unavailability to representation of overwhelming or otherwise excessive content. But such resemblances serve mostly to underline the particularity of this notion of exscription. For there is here nothing unrepresentable. What we have, rather, is a relation between the trace of a passage and the fact of existence—a relation marked right here, in these traces of this existence. In which, crucially, this existence is neither sublimated into form nor consigned to the sublime formlessness of the unrepresentable. At which point, the notion of exscription might in fact start to loosen its ties to this broadly postphenomenological inheritance.

In exscription existence is indicated in the form of a writing as outside this form; the features of this writing track the passage of existence and existences, vestigial marks of their prior flight, which continues to press on this form. Such writing thus becomes a site from which the fact of existence is affirmed. And from this fact, this other fact—of being singular plural. “That there is—being, or some being, or indeed beings . . . : that is what instigates all possible meanings, that is what is the very place of meaning but which has no meaning” (64; translation modified). Right here, signification opens to “the very place of meaning,” the fact of singular-plural existence. Although he insists, as we have seen, that the site of exscription is marked by the textual residues of passing existences, Nancy mostly emphasizes that exscription is an opening onto this fact—that is, the fact of coexistence. In a sense, I want here to reverse this emphasis: to insist on the passage of this body, of a life, as what is marked around the edges of that exscriptive opening. And if I want to do this, it is to pose the question of which bodies, and which lives, might see the traces of their passage inscribed in and as the site of such exscription. Of which screams might persist, heard and unheard. And so the larger question, here,concerns what is meant by being singular plural or coexistence. For Nancy, it would appear that this may, in this instance, be limited to human coexistence. With the material removed above restored, Nancy's full phrase runs, “That there is—being, or some being, or indeed beings; and in particular that there is us, our community (of writing-reading)” (64; translation modified). There is no explicit sign that this is an example of Nancy's “residual human exceptionalism,” as mentioned above; but, as usual, when Nancy invokes language, it is hard to avoid this conclusion. Even if Nancy is here circumscribing coexistence in this way, however, there is no necessary connection between any such circumscription and how we understand exscription itself. It is, rather, an a priori decision, which we are free not to follow. Unless we want to follow Martin Heidegger (1995: 176–273), say, and restrict access to existence “as such” to human beings, there is nothing in the operation of exscription that would oblige us to understand the coexistence exscribed in and out of writing as solely or primarily engaging human beings. I am not sure that understanding this coexistence as that of beings of all kinds quite constitutes a modification of exscription as Nancy frames it: his implicit specification of “our community” as human is not so strong as to require that degree of intervention. Rather, I would argue that understanding this coexistence in this way respects the operation of exscription in its entirety, while also opening its relation to ecocritical thinking—to which, I believe, it has much to offer.

Right here, then, existences of all kinds are inscribed in their—our—fleeting disparity, the passings of bodies, in flight or otherwise, whose traces all open to the “infinite withdrawal of sense.” Inscriptions in which, out of which these passings are exscribed, and in which, out of which that disparity—the fact of coexistence—is forever escaping.

Counting, with Figures

Thinking of disparity, and of flight, we might recall that when, in 1983, Nancy wrote the first version of his essay “The Inoperative Community” (of which a later version opens the book that would take this name), it was in response to an invitation from Bailly to contribute to an issue of the journal Aléa with the title “La communauté, le nombre.” Community, number. Two terms we can read as in apposition: community is numerous, necessarily. But as in tension too (and Nancy, more than most, will have taught us this): community—in what remains its dominant, operative form, at least—gathers plurality into unity, cuts into this number to divide it, distinguishing between those who count and those who don't. That is to say: community in part entails the distinction between those who share in community, and those with no share, as Jacques Rancière (1999) would come to put it—who do not count and are not counted. Counting with Nancy, we would need to say, first, that the plurality of singular beings will always overspill the unity that community invariably selects: in this sense, returning to the problematic of exscription, we would say that the finitude exscribed in writing—the exposure to existence, and the exposure of existence to the withdrawal of sense—is not amenable to determination in advance as the proper attribute of this or that type of being; and thus it resists conscription into police operations seeking to secure a community against its savage outsiders. As John Paul Ricco (2020: 361) puts it, “It is this limit, suspension, and impossibility at the heart of community that is written and read as exscription.” As we have seen, exscription is an opening to and of in-finitude; and this opening is inappropriable, including by that police operation which imposes a hierarchy of species difference. The exposure so exscribed might accordingly be that of any being whatsoever: when it comes to exposure, there are no degrees of relative richness and poverty.

The question that now arises, then, is: just how might a plurality of singular beings of all kinds find itself inscribed in specifically human forms? Frequently, the response here is to position nonhuman beings as the next community to whom the privilege of representation might be granted, continuing that ongoing democratization of symbolic forms toward the inscription by anyone whatsoever of anything whatsoever in any way whatsoever, which for Rancière (2011) characterizes literary modernity. Nonhuman existences would thus find themselves inscribed within human forms, in a gesture motivated by faith in the empathy—and consequently the more generous treatment—called forth by imaginative identification. If this response is indeed generously motivated and has produced works of no little significance (Anna Sewell's Black Beauty [1877], say, Jack London's White Fang [1906], or Richard Adams's Watership Down [1972]), it also presents a significant problem. For if such expansion based on imaginative identification extends the limits defining those who count, this expansion is still imagined along the lines of a phenomenology that takes the human version of the relation between beings and their surroundings as its template. To Thomas Nagel's (1974) influential formulation of the question of this extension—“What is it like to be a bat?”—this approach responds that there is indeed something that it is like to be a bat (or a horse, a dog, or a rabbit), and that this something resembles what it is like to be a human being closely enough to be amenable to representation via the imaginative resources of literary fiction. In this response, the line between inclusion within and exclusion from the number of those existences that count is moved further out into what Michel de Montaigne (1991: 505) called “the crowd of other creatures” (translation modified); but the criterion of resemblance cements the human centrality it purports to displace, and indeed—more fundamentally—the role of inclusion itself as governing imperative goes unexamined. The “anthropological machine,” in Giorgio Agamben's (2004) phrase, is still at work, generating endless border disputes as to which beings count and which do not, and admitting those that are deemed to count via a process of assimilation by appropriative reduction. Granting admission on the basis of imagined resemblance, this approach is, as Claire Colebrook (2014) has observed with reference to forms of posthumanism, best considered a form of ultrahumanism. (As Montaigne [1991: 505] goes on to write, “How can [Man], from the power of his own understanding, know the hidden, inward motivations of animate creatures?”) And it is against this expansionist regime of imaginative identification that the interest of exscription for critical thinking about ecopoetics comes sharply onto focus.

As we have seen, in the thinking and the practice of exscription, existences appear not as sites of identification, ripe for the gathering, but as indicated in the traces of their flight, and so always escaping representational capture, including via the drive to assimilation encouraged by imagined resemblance. We see this at work when Bailly opens The Animal Side with the scene of a passing, a flight, an encounter with the disparity that is coexistence. Bailly (2011: 1–2) writes,

Someone emerged, and its track, its vestige, its trace is here—not captured, but inscribed, among what Bailly calls our “passages, fleeting sovereignties, occasions, escapes, encounters” (2). And this trace is inscribed to declare that, as Bailly says, “there are those hearts, those existences; there is the whirlwind of all those lives and the beating of each and every heart” (5). The beating heart of a passing life is registered, that the trace of its flight might affirm the fact of its existence, of our existence, of singular-plural coexistence, as spacing, sharing, encounter, ungatherable exposure in common. The deer written into Bailly's text is not gathered into a community of resemblance, but honored in its passage. The vestige of this passage that is its writing affirms its existence—its exposure to existence —as always elsewhere, the elsewhere, indeed, of this writing and of its beating heart, “the whirlwind of all those lives” as the centrifuge of exposure. The deer's exposure to existence is exscribed right here—alongside Bailly's, alongside mine, and yours—in the vestiges of its moving life, never here, always passing.

The trace of this flight thus recalls what Thangam Ravindranathan (2020: 63), adding torsion to Thomas Keenan's reading of Aesop, calls “ ‘passing’ from the other side”: that the figure which would turn animal into human (by means of imaginative identification, say) opens also, by return, onto “what lies on the other side of naming”—“a habitat,” and “nameless, unaccountable” other beings (63). Deer, perhaps, which neither count nor do not count but which disappear into the hedgerows, fleeting figures of escape. As Akira Mizuta Lippit (2000: 163) writes, “The contact between language and the animal marks a limit of figurability”; and in the mode of ecopoetic exscription, the figure withdraws from itself, implodes gently and leaves this limit, marked in the traces of an uncaptured life. In its contact with an animal, language, including its literary version, can (and mostly does) refigure this recalcitrant being, stabilize it within form, render it identifiable, “a coherent and ‘individualized’ entity” (Ravindranathan 2021; my translation). But as Ravindranathan (2022) notes elsewhere, this identificatory operation risks reproducing the instrumental capture of beings of all kinds, human and other than human, their violent translation into figures, precisely, rendered fungible within the regime of general equivalence, value extracted and “externalities” disregarded (see also Shukin 2009; Moore 2015). Against this rendering, exscription attends to overlooked remnants that both track the edge of the opening onto singular-plural existence and persistently honor a life that—however violent that translation—will not have been completely stabilized into a figure. “The figure never uses the whole of the animal,” Ravindranathan (2020: 7) reminds us, “so that something is left unsubsumed and protrudes—an extra limb, incongruous flesh, an unseemly gait.” Moving elsewhere, unsubsumed in its “exorbitance,” its “flickering” (8, 9), an existence addressed in the mode of exscription also invites us to repudiate the shambles of that economy which grasps after figures.

Tracking this implosive opening of figurality by “a living metaphor that is by definition not a metaphor, antimetaphor—animetaphor” (Lippit 2000: 165), an exscriptive approach to other-than-human existences thus offers that “altogether more unsettling experience of reading [that] opens up when we resist the naturalist temptation and defer ‘recognition’ ” (Ravindranathan 2020: 6). “Writing is always this surprise,” writes Naomi Waltham-Smith (2020: 397), “because there is no touch, no contact with the page, that would not already have been scattered and dispersed by animal prints and cries.” Honoring this prior, ungatherable scattering of any tendency toward capture, writing in the mode of exscription “brushes the site of” these existences (Lippit 2000: 163), “brush[es] upon the edges of their being” (Marder 2013: 13)—a movement toward, as Éric Trudel (2022) shows in his sustained analysis of such poetic exscription, affirming relationality while suspending recognition; an indirect approach, tangential, sketching and touching on the edges of a departure. “An apprenticeship in non-power,” as Trudel writes, with “no transformation into figures” (26; 21, citing Foglia 2018: 93; my translation). A strange meeting, not quite an encounter. The quasiencounter invited by exscription thus produces what Marder (2013: 13), finding help from Portuguese, calls a “desencontro,”: “an untranslatable word, which roughly refers either to a narrowly missed meeting, a crossing of paths that was about to happen but ended up not taking place, or to an encounter that is too improbable and was never meant to happen, or, again, to a divergence of two or more (usually human) beings, each of them existing on her or his own wavelength.” A not-quite-meeting with divergent existences, their traces marking the edges of imploded figurality, writing in the mode of exscription presents the vestigial phenomenal appearance (these words, right here) of these existences’ prior escape from phenomenal apprehension. Intentionality here extends as far as the page, those vestiges “on the edge or at the limit of phenomenality” (19)—and no further. In the opening-out of signification, there is no being-for. Yet this is not the sublime: remember, “there are those hearts, those existences; there is the whirlwind of all those lives and the beating of each and every heart” (Bailly 2011: 5). They may not be here, but they are, elsewhere. Beating away, the traces of these hearts are also pressing right here, on this writing, “the pulsation of exscription” (ffrench 2005: 111).

“A Different Posture”

Among other reasons, Olga Tokarczuk's 2009 novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, is remarkable for the insistence with which its writing presents itself as “already [having] been scattered and dispersed by animal prints and cries.” Such prints, in particular, play a significant role in the plot; beyond this, however, the prior pulse of other-than-human existences is registered constitutively in the disposition of Tokarczuk's prose. The novel's first-person narrator and focalizer is passionately attuned to the living beings of all kinds whose habits shape the woods and landscape around her home, and she takes up their cause in increasingly angry protest against the murderous violence to which they are subjected by their human neighbors, notably a local group of recreational hunters. If the work is thus organized around a core of cross-species sympathy, or fellow-feeling, and the solidarity to which this gives rise, and if for this reason its plot depends on a refusal to arrogate meaningful agency to human beings alone, it is all the more extraordinary that the other-than-human existences at its heart are never drawn into an expanded realm of interiority by means of imaginative identification. On the contrary: these existences form so many sites of opacity within the narrative, the attention of narrator and reader sliding somehow off their resistant hides or shells. Thus,

Unfathomable, the Deer return the gaze of the narrator not reciprocally, but asymmetrically, looking out from an impossibly distant sovereignty. Unfigured in obscurity, they are not amenable to identification; supremely calm, they remain, unmoving and unmoved, watching as the narrator and her companion go on their way. In this Tokarczuk has us understand that there is nothing literal about the prior flight of the existences indicated by exscription: the existences of these deer, their exposure to existence and to coexistence, escape these vestigial marks of their passage—just as did that of the running deer almost encountered by Bailly—even as they stand, calmly. The phenomenal traces we read, right here, affirm the flight-in-place of these existences from capture, as from the figurality that here gives way. (These deer have nothing to say to us.) Whether they stand or wander, in fact, they will not be arraigned:

Again stood still, these other strangers, so far from fleeing, have come toward us; and still they have flown, already unmoved, unafraid of any lineup. And so “strangeness [declares] itself anew . . . , a different posture, a different impetus, and quite simply a different modality of being” (Bailly 2011: 2).

Tokarczuk (or her narrator) may not sustain this affirmative exteriority without fail: ascriptions of calm, of an absence of fear, hover between behaviorist observation and imaginative projection; and the narrator's reference to one group of deer as “Young Ladies” (2019: 14) would appear to be a thoroughly anthropomorphic gesture of respect. (For which reason it is doubtless unsurprising that in the quotation above, this phrase is qualified by “the same.”) But such departures signal only more clearly the exceptional fidelity to this affirmation that characterizes the novel as a whole. Throughout this work, Tokarczuk's writing invariably arranges her readers’ perceptions in revolt against assimilation, its narrator's attentive intransitivity carrying these perceptions up to the page and no further, exscribing the existences whose tracks she marks, whose traces we read. (Not for nothing was the 2017 film adaptation of the novel entitled—in its English version—Spoor.) Writing in the mode of exscription, Tokarczuk eschews the dubious pleasures of identification, to celebrate the multiple passings of disparate bodies, honoring singular-plural coexistence against the bloody devotion to resemblance. (This combative dynamic may also be noted in the way the film's English-language title strains against its Polish original, Pokot, meaning the number of animals killed on a hunt.) “Joyfully I realized that I didn't recognize them,” declares Tokarczuk's narrator (208). Or, in Bailly's (2011: 2) words, “In no way had I entered that world.”

Conclusion

As a philosopher, Nancy is perhaps interested principally in exscription as a defining dimension of all writing. As we have seen, however, this dimension can define some forms of writing more than others. We might accordingly think of exscription as a mode of writing, as I have often called it here; and as a mode, it may or may not be emphasized by particular texts. Or we might consider it a tendency, which some forms of writing may minimize (through more or less generous gathering into resemblance, for example), and which others may promote, intensify, or amplify. What is clear, though, is that those works that adopt this mode, or promote this tendency, thereby exhibit a distinct ethos, honoring the fact of disparate singular-plural coexistence by marking its prior escape from figural capture. And if Nancy himself may not configure the coexistence so exscribed in terms of more-than-human disparity, there is no reason for us, inspired by his formulation of this notion, not to configure it in this way, given what it might contribute to ecocritical approaches, something of which I have tried to suggest here. Nancy's thinking will have many and multiple futures; of this we may be sure. And one of these may, perhaps, be through what it has to offer to reflections on literary efforts to do justice to the singular-plural coexistence of beings of all kinds.

Acknowledgments

I thank Thangam Ravindranathan, Éric Trudel, and Phillip Warnell for their inspiring work and for discussions that have shaped the ideas in this article.

Note

References