Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-) was born in Caudéan near Bordeaux in France. During his studies at the Sorbonne, he worked closely with Canguilhem as well as Ricoeur, who supervised both his 1963 Master’s thesis on Hegel’s philosophy of religion and his 1973 PhD thesis on Kant’s analogical discourse. Shortly after graduating, Nancy joined the philosophy department at the Université des sciences humaines in Strasbourg, where he remained until his retirement in 2002. He has held visiting positions at the Freie Universität in Berlin and at UC Irvine, and is also a member of the faculty at the European Graduate School. Influenced by Derrida, his first books (some of which were written with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), attempted to uncover the subject’s (and hence the system’s) failure at self-foundation. In the 1980s he became known for his work on community, which developed in dialogue with Blanchot and Bataille. Influenced by Heidegger, his concerns for a renewed thinking of being-with led him to rethink the concept of freedom and develop an ontology of what he calls “being singular plural.” Unlike Heidegger’s this ontology is essentially material or embodied. Like Heidegger, but also Marx and Nietzsche, he seeks to overcome nihilism by undermining the opposition between presence and absence, and between inside and outside. He finds resources for this project in a deconstructive engagement with monotheism. Many of his recent works are about politics and directly related to current events. Another growing interest of Nancy is art, not only its theory but also its practice. He has collaborated with choreographer Mathilde Monnier and has written texts and poems to accompany many artists’ works. At the beginning of the 1990s, he received a heart transplant, which he discusses in L’intrus.

Nancy’s most influential works, aside from his book on community (Nancy 1991), are The Experience of Freedom, The Sense of the World, Being Singular Plural, and the two volumes of Deconstruction of Christianity (Nancy 2010, Nancy 2008). Two collections of essays have also been published in English: Birth to Presence and A Finite Thinking. Other important texts include “The Forgetting of Philosophy” in Nancy 1997 (on meaning and nihilism), Corpus (on the body), The Muses and The Ground of the Image (on art) and The Truth of Democracy (on politics).

Two comprehensive introductions to Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking exist in English, Ian James's and Marie-Eve Morin's. Many interviews with Nancy are also published and provide a good entry point in Nancy’s thinking, for example Nancy 2003, Fabbri 2007 and Nancy 2007.