On the one hand, freedom is said to be the property of a subject. On the other, freedom only happens in the space of being-in-common. Freedom, then, is the place of a conflict between the “self” and the “with,” between independence or autonomy and dependence or sharing. Resolving this apparent antinomy requires showing how the with ontologically constitutes the self. This, in turn, allows for a rethinking of freedom beyond what liberal democracy and political economy have to offer, as the (...) renewed opening of existence onto nothing, or onto an “outside” that the opening itself constitutes. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy is one of the leading contemporary thinkers in France today. Through an inventive reappropriation of the major figures in the continental tradition, Nancy has developed an original ontology that impacts the way we think about religion, politics, community, embodiment, and art. Drawing from a wide range of his writing, Marie-Eve Morin provides the first comprehensive and systematic account of Nancy’s thinking, all the way up to his most recent work on the deconstruction of Christianity. Without losing sight of (...) the heterogeneity of Nancy’s work, Morin presents a concise articulation of the organizing concepts, which structure Nancy’s body of work. The guiding thread is that of an essential rift at the heart of any “self” by which this self is exposed and relates to itself and other selves. Nancy’s ontology undercuts dichotomies between individual and community, interior and exterior, matter and spirit, thing and thought, not in the name of mere deconstruction, but in seeking to open a thinking of the “limit” or the “edge” as the locus of sense. While Nancy’s work has often been presented in relation to Heidegger or Derrida, Morin demonstrates the originality of Nancy’s work and argues that, despite the variety of its preoccupations and topics, it possesses its own rigorous internal logic. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy and related fields who seek a systematic and critical understanding of one of the most original contemporary thinkers. (shrink)

Against a certain contemporary style of thinking that wishes to go beyond finitude entirely, I propose a finite praxis modeled after Jean-Luc Nancy’s finite thinking. I argue that the desire to imm...

In this chapter, I delineate the central trajectories of Sloterdijk’s creative reappropriation of certain Heideggerian motives. Essentially, Sloterdijk wagers that the Heideggerian climate that weighs on our contemporary thinking is not adequate for grasping the globalised, technological world. In order to show how Sloterdijk is lead to abandon or overcome the understanding of globalisation influenced by Heidegger, I first present what could be called Sloterdijk’s onto-anthropology, that is, his story of the pro-duction or the coming-to-the-world, of the human animal. There, (...) Sloterdijk shows how the “radical openness” of the human is predicated upon an act of insulation, the building of protective spaces, called greenhouses, incubators or spheres. Understanding this interplay between distance and nearness is crucial to understanding Sloterdijk’s onto-kinetics or his description of the ontological movement of existence. While Heidegger thinks existence according to the vertical movements of falling and gathering, Sloterdijk emphasises lateral movement, an expansion on the same plane [Ausbreitung in der Ebene]. Sloterdijk’s insight into the lateral spatiality of human existence sheds light onto his interpretation of the history of humankind as history of globalisation. Here, I concentrate on the transition between the second and third of these phases of globalisation because it is this third phase which, according to Sloterdijk, is no longer explicable in terms of Heideggerian enframing and the will to will. This inevitably leads us to ask whether the globalised world requires a response different from a Heideggerian meditative thinking and poetic dwelling and what form(s) our inhabitation of the globalised world might take. (shrink)

This paper compares Sartre's and Nancy's experience of the plurality of beings. After briefly discussing why Heidegger cannot provide such an experience, it analyzes the relation between the in-itself and for-itself in Sartre and between bodies and sense in Nancy in order to ask how this experience can be nauseating for Sartre, but meaningful for Nancy. First, it shows that the articulation of Being into beings is only a coat of veneer for Sartre while for Nancy Being is necessarily plural. (...) Then, it contrasts Nausea as an experience without language with Nancy's thinking of the excription of sense in the thing. (shrink)

We tend to think of violence as something that happens within the world, as something done by a thing, a being or an existent, to another thing, being or existent. Dhat would it mean to speak of the violence done to the world or, inversely, of the violence done by the world? Are there ways in which an existent, a being, can do violence, not to another existent, but to the world within which all such existents come to presence? Reciprocally, (...) is there a sense in which the world itself presents itself as sort of primordial or originary violence? -/- In this article, I rely on Jean-Luc Nancy's elaboration of the concepts of existence, world and sense to develop the double question of the violence of the world (violence done by and to the world). Ultimately, I show that contrary to the impression given by the use of terms such as generosity and spaciousness, there is at the bottom of Nancy’s ontology a certain originary violence. (shrink)

This article seeks to situate Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of embodiment in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s description of the lived body, especially as it is found in The Phenomenology of Perception. It shows that while both Nancy and Merleau-Ponty develop their view of the body through an engagement with Descartes, Nancy’s reappropriation of the Cartesian partes extra partes leads him to blur the distinction between corpus meum and alia corpora. By contrasting the radical fragmentation of Nancy’s body with the kind of unity (...) Merleau-Ponty attributes to the lived body, I show that Nancy’s body should not be equated with the lived body or the body proper of phenomenology. This does not mean that the body is merely an object for Nancy. Bodies make sense, but this sense is inorganic rather than intentional. (shrink)

In this essay, I focus on the community of thinking between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The relationship between those two thinkers is far from unambiguous: if they can be said to be thinking together, it certainly does not simply mean that they think the same thing or that they think it in the same way. I show that, because of its insistence on separation, Derrida's thinking is still a thinking of the one and the other and retains a Levinasian (...) flavour that is absent from Nancy's. Nancy's thinking insists on plurality, on the 'explosion of presence in the manifold of its partition'. It insists, in other words, on the world. If Nancy prefers the fabric of the world to the Other, it is because it only allows one to think a plurality that doesn't sacrifice the gift that each singularity is. (shrink)

Around people who were close to him, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe would sometimes cry out with anger: “Death is a scandal! It is intolerable!” When he died almost fourteen years ago, prematurely and af...

In Briefings on Existence, Alain Badiou calls for a radical atheism that would refuse the Heideggerian pathos of a “last god” and deny the affliction of finitude. I will argue that Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of monotheism, as well as his thinking of the world, remains resolutely atheistic, or better atheological, precisely because of Nancy’s insistence on finitude and his appeal to the Heideggerian motif of the last god. At the same time, I want to underline the danger of Nancy’s maintenance (...) of the word “god” to name the infinite opening of the world right at [à même] the world, by considering it as a Derridean paleonymy. (shrink)

Wide-ranging essays on Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought.

In this paper, I read Jean-Luc Nancy's work on community in relation to Jacques Derrida's uneasiness with both the word "community" and the thing itself. in doing so, I underline a key difference, maybe even an opposition, in their way of thinking the singular plural, the singular in the plural, or the plurality of singularities. As a result, I oppose what I call Derrida’s politics of sacrifice to Nancy’s ontology of offering.

In this article, I put Nancy’s thinking in conversation with contemporary demands for a flat ontology. I show that Nancy does in fact propose an ontology that is flat and in that way undoes the priority of human experience as the producer of sense. At the same time, I show that Nancy avoids two pitfalls other flat ontologies often fall into: a formalism that forgets materiality and falls prey to general equivalence and a depoliticization that removes any agential role for (...) human beings in the creation and destruction of the world. (shrink)

A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approaches and traditions ranging from transcendental and speculative idealism to phenomenology and deconstruction for failing to do justice to the real world as it is ‘in itself’, that is, as independent of the structures of human consciousness, experience, and language. This volume presents a collection of essays that take up the challenge of realism from a variety of historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives. This volume includes essays that engage (...) the fundamental presuppositions and conclusions of this new realism by turning to the writings of seminal figures in the history of philosophy, including Kant, Schelling, and others. Also included are essays that challenge anti-realist readings of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Nancy. Finally, several essays in this volume propose alternative ways of understanding realism through careful readings of key figures in German idealism, pessimism, phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, and deconstruction. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop what I call, following Steven Shaviro, Merleau-Ponty’s “cautious anthropomorphism.” Rather than defending Merleau-Ponty against the accusation of anthropomorphism, I show the role this anthropomorphism plays in Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the Cartesian-Sartrian ontology of the object. If the thing is always “clothed with human characteristics,” as Merleau-Ponty says in the Causeries, it is not so that it can be reduced to a powerless object that can easily be assimilated but rather to ensure its own resistance or (...) adversity – and even, paradoxically, its inhumanity. After developing Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s views of things, focusing on their respective reading of Ponge in “Man and Things” and the Causeries, I put Merleau-Ponty in conversation with Jeffrey Cohen’s book Stone to push for a non-humanistic reading of Merleau-Ponty’s anthropomorphism. (shrink)

The first dictionary dedicated to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.Jean-Luc Nancy is a key figure in the contemporary intellectual landscape. This dictionary will, for the first time, consider the full scope of his writing and will provide insights into the philosophical and theoretical background to his focus on community and aesthetics.Drawing on an internationally recognised expertise of a multidisciplinary team of contributors, the 70 entries explain all of his main concepts, contextualising these within his work as a whole and relating (...) him to his contemporaries. It will appeal to students and scholars alike.Key Features:* comprehensive definitions which are contextualised* fully cross-referenced throughout* extensive list of secondary readingKeywords: politics, democracy, freedom, morality, aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper takes up Peter Sloterdijk’s proposition for a new thinking of the world as global foam. After quickly reminding the reader of the main characteristics of “bubbles” as “immune spheres of existence”, I retrace the three phases of the history globalization as they have been developed by Sloterdijk in the Spheres trilogy. I then focus on the third phase, also called Global Age, and try to bring together the two seemingly opposed concepts Sloterdijk has used to discuss the age (...) of globality: “worldly interior” and “foams” by arguing that the former represents our world in its globality while the latter represents it in its irreducible plurality. The result is a system of co-fragility and co-isolation: a compact proximity between fragile entities and the necessary closure of each cell unto itself. If this is the case, the question we need to ask concerns the space left opened in the worldly interior for a ‘world-forming’ praxis. In the end politics can only consist in “managing” the worldly interior, stabilizing it and regulating its exchange with an outside. Without overview, without initiative, it is not clear in what ways politics can still be a trans-forming praxis and is not a mere function of the system. (shrink)

In this article, I pursue the question whether it is possible to understand Derridean ethics in terms of space rather than time. More precisely, I ask whether what Derrida proposes as an ethics (and exactly what that is will have to be explained) falls under the general heading of future-oriented, ‘eschatological’ or ‘messianic’, ethics that sacrifices the present for a better future, or whether it can be understood in terms of presence, more specifically of the demand to cohabit here and (...) now in the world. After proposing a reading of the to-come in terms of the intrusion of exteriority in the present, I turn to the figure of hospitality to show that Derrida's ethics is better understood in spatial rather than temporal terms: it requires a certain way of relating to the space in which we dwell. (shrink)

This essays takes up the question whether the self constitutes the other (as Husserl believed) or whether the other institutes the self (as Levinas argues). It examines how Derrida’s concept of testimony and his work on the structure of the sign, leads us away from this debate into a necessary openness to plurality or community.

This article attempts to sort out the misunderstandings between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy surrounding the question of the animal as they come to the fore in the conversations published in For Strasbourg. While Derrida finds the lack of animals in Nancy’s world puzzling, Nancy criticises Derrida’s blurring of the border between the human and the animal for inadvertently reinstating a scale or a difference, if not between humans and animals, at least between the living and the non-living. Though this (...) criticism appears misguided at first, I argue that Nancy’s recasting of finitude in terms of the limit as the place of exposure undoes the phenomenological, or more precisely Heideggerian, understanding of sense and world, which Derrida still attributes to Nancy. Ultimately, what we have in both thinkers is a radically different account of plurality. Whereas Derrida emphasises the abyss between singularities and places faith, engagement, and responsibility at the origin of the world, for Nancy the edges between singularities always already hold any inside in contact with an outside, any one in contact with the other. (shrink)