El problema del presente es abordado en su dimensión de realidad dada al hombre. En primer lugar, este articulo ahonda en el carácter impersonal del tiempo y en su condición contradictoria de lugar de entrega de lo dado: al presentarse el presente no hay ni donador ni beneficiario. En segundo lugar, declinando el sentido de la palabra francesa "maintenant", se evidencia el "ahora" como nulidad entre pasado y futuro; como intersticio dual en el que se alcanza y se pierde toda (...) cosa. Apoyándose en la concepción kantiana del tiempo y en la noción de donación de Derrida, el autor indica que el "ahora" es receptividad inmediata, intuitiva y no conceptual: en el presente el hombre se da y se recibe a si mismo. El presente, a la vez que constituye el espacio de la identidad, es también vector de diferencia: al hacerse signo a si mismo de sí mismo, el presente aparece como su propia alteridad. La duración del presente, por expresar la relación del hombre consigo mismo, es signo de alternancia entre llegada y partida; entre muerte y reparación. En fin, se analizan las mutaciones del sentido que se le ha dado a la noción de promesa en la historia de Occidente, entendida como la experiencia de la proyección del ahora hacia el porvenir. The problem of present is analyzed as a reality given to man. First, the impersonal character of time is studied in its contradictory condition of opening place of giving: when present appears, there is not a giver, nor a receiver. In the second place, by considering the etymological sense of the French word "maintenant", it is showed that the "now" is a nullity between past and future, a dual interstice in which everything is reached or lost. Following the Kantian conception of time and the Derridian notion of "donation", the author highlights that the "now" is immediate receptivity, intuitive and not conceptual: in the present, man gives himself to himself and receives himself from himself. The present, at the same time that it constitutes the space of identity, it is also the vector of difference: when it becomes a sign to himself of himself, the present appears as his own alterity. The present duration, as it traduces the relation of man with himself, is a sign of alternation between coming and leaving; between dead and reparation. Finally, the mutations in the meaning of the notion of "promise" in Western history are investigated and understood as the experience of the now projected towards the future. (shrink)

This is the first English translation published of Jean-Luc Nancy's acclaimed consideration of the law's most pervasive principles in the context of actual systems and contemporary institutions, power, norms, laws.

Jean-Luc Nancy provides an analysis of the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger's recently published Black Notebooks. Nancy refers to a philosophical or "historial" anti-Semitism marked, nonetheless, by the "banality" of ordinary anti-Semitism pervading Europe. Heidegger's thought is placed in the broader context of the European (especially Christian) impulse toward new beginnings.

In Doing, Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most prominent and lucid articulators of contemporary French theory and philosophy, examines the precarious but urgent relationship between being and doing. His book is not so much a call to action as a summons to more vigorous thinking, the examination and reflection that must precede any effective action. The first section of the book considers this matter tersely: Jean-Luc Nancy's quickness of language and grace of humor lead the reader (...) carefully past the dangers of oversimplification, toward a general awareness of meaningful being. In the last section, Nancy examines the realities of terrorist actions--specifically those that shocked Paris a few years ago, and more generally the frightening world of politics without conscience, where conscience is the root of all thinking. (shrink)

Ego Sum proposes a provocative and unprecedented reading of Descartes. By paying attention to mode of presentation of Descartes's philosophy, Nancy challenges our common understanding of the Cogito and shows how Descartes's ego is not the self-certain, self-transparent Subject of metaphysics but a mouth that opens to utter: ego sum.

Bousculant peuples, pensées, régulations et représentations, deux séismes secouent le monde mondial. L'un est fait d'attentats, l'autre de coups et de coûts écotechniques. Une évidence surnage, une double question : "Que faire?" et "Quelle politique?". Les deux restent sans réponse parce qu'elles ne sont pas justes. Le "faire" lui-même doit être interrogé sur sa portée ; la "politique" doit être repensée dans sa notion. Tout le faire s'est englouti dans le flux du "produire". La "politique" a été emportée par le (...) même flux — ou bien son nom s'est chargé tantôt d'opprobre et tantôt d'emphase magique. Il faut se délivrer des confusions. L'action la plus urgente, dont toute autre dépend, consiste à parler net et à penser clair. Ce qui nous bouscule porte plus qu'une révolution : une mutation dans laquelle se dessine, encore invisible, la forme d'une résolution. Celle qui décidera d'un nouveau monde. Politique ou pas, religieux ou pas, économique ou pas, il est déjà en train de se faire, ce nouveau monde. Il ne se fait pas comme une production mais comme se font les vies, collectives et personnelles, comme se font les vallées et les montagnes, les pensées et les poèmes : par les lentes et profondes poussées des désirs de l'existence. (shrink)

Désirer, qu’est-ce que c’est? Quelle différence entre désirer, vouloir ou avoir besoin? Jean-Luc Nancy, auteur fidèle de la collection, s’attache à percevoir comment le désir travaille en nous, et comment nous vivons avec cette force toujours à l’oeuvre, quels que soient nos âges et nos situations.

When Jean-Luc Nancy first encountered the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, he knew he was hearing something new, a voice genuinely of its time. Thinking with and against each other over the course of their long friendship, the two thinkers reshaped the European intellectual landscape. Nancy's writings on Derrida, collected in this volume, reflect on the elements of their shared concerns with politics, the arts, religion, the fate of deconstruction, and the future of sense. Rather (...) than studies, commentaries, or interpretations of Derrida's thought, they are responses to his presence-not exactly a presence to self, but a presence in the world. (shrink)

L’oeuvre de Jean-Luc Nancy - une des plus importantes aujourd'hui - aura traversé plus qu'une expérience de pensée. La richesse et la complexité de ses analyses, de ses références, de son engagement intellectuel sont d'une densité rare. Rien ne lui aura échappé : histoire de la philosophie, métaphysique, politique, déconstruction, théologie, esthétique, art, littérature... Les entretiens passe en revue ces différents registres de la pensée sans jamais céder à l'exigence philosophique qui caractérise ce partage à deux voix. Ce (...) dialogue entre Danielle Cohen-Levinas et Jean-Luc Nancy a commencé depuis longtemps, un peu sur le mode d'une forme musicale, telle qu'on la trouve à l'époque classique et baroque. L'inventeur de l'invention est Jean-Sébastien Bach. Il s'agit ici d'une invention à deux voix, qui se déploie dans le temps sans jamais viser sa finalité ou sans jamais toucher à sa fin. (shrink)

One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is an attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of this book is that being is always 'being with', that 'I' is not prior to 'we', that existence is essentially co-existence. He thinks this being together, not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment (...) and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the 'I' and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a 'society of spectacle' nor via some form of 'authenticity'. (shrink)

A collection of five essays of French philosopher Nancy, originally published in 1985-86: The Inoperative Community, Myth Interpreted, Literary Communism, Shattered Love, and Of Divine Places.

The last and most poignant of these essays is The Intruder, Nancys philosophical meditation on his heart transplant.

Appearing in English for the first time, Jean-Luc Nancy’s 2002 book reflects on globalization and its impact on our being-in-the-world. Developing a contrast in the French language between two terms that are usually synonymous, or that are used interchangeably, namely globalisation (globalization) and mondialisation (world-forming), Nancy undertakes a rethinking of what “world-forming” might mean. At stake in this distinction is for him nothing less than two possible destinies of our humanity, and of our time. On the one (...) hand, with globalization, there is the uniformity produced by a global economical and technological logic leading to the contrary of an inhabitable world, “the un-world” (l’im-monde)—as Nancy refers to it—an un-world that entails social disintegration, misery, and injustice. And, on the other hand, there is the possibility of an authentic world-forming, that is, of a making of the world and of a making sense that Nancy calls a “creation” of the world. Nancy understands such world-forming in terms of an inexhaustible struggle for justice. This book is an important contribution by Nancy to a philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of globalization and a further development on his earlier works on our being-in-common, justice, and a-theological existence. (shrink)

An essential exploration of sense and meaning. -/- Is there a “world” anymore, let alone any “sense” to it? Acknowledging the lack of meaning in our time, and the lack of a world at the center of meanings we try to impose, Jean-Luc Nancy presents a rigorous critique of the many discourses-from philosophy and political science to psychoanalysis and art history-that talk and write their way around these gaping absences in our lives. -/- In an original style befitting (...) his search for a new mode of thought, Nancy offers fragmentary readings of writers such as Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Lévinas, Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze insofar as their work reflects his concern with sense and the world. Rather than celebrate or bemoan the loss of meaning or attempt to install a new one, his book seeks to reposition both sense and the world between the presence and absence of meaning, between objectivity and subjectivity. Nancy’s project entails a reconception of the field of philosophy itself, a rearticulation of philosophical practice. Neither recondite nor abstract, it is concerned with the existence and experience of freedom-the actuality of existence as experienced by contemporary communities of citizens, readers, and writers. -/- Combining aesthetic, political, and philosophical considerations to convey a sense of the world between meaning and reality, ideal content and material form, this book offers a new way of understanding-and responding to-“the end of the world.”. (shrink)

The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, the birth that characterises being. The first part of this book, 'Existence' asks how, today, one can give sense or meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it comes nude into the world, must now be our 'sense'. In examining what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what presence 'is'; (...) rather, we should conceive presence as presence to someone, including to presence itself. The second section, 'Poetry', asks: What if art exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe the coming of existence as such? The author's trajectory in this book crosses those of Hegel, Schlegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, in their comments on art and politics, existence and corporeality, everyday life and its modes of existence, and ecstasy. An analysis that dares this crossing involves all the varied accounts of existence, political and philosophical, as well as all the realms of poetry. (shrink)

This book is a profound and eagerly anticipated investigation into what is left of a monotheistic religious spirit—notably, a minimalist faith that is neither confessional nor credulous. Articulating this faith as works and as an objectless hope, Nancy deconstructs Christianity in search of the historical and reflective conditions that provided its initial energy. Working through Blanchot and Nietzsche, re-reading Heidegger and Derrida, Nancy turns to the Epistle of Saint James rather than those of Saint Paul, discerning in it (...) the primitive essence of Christianity as hope. -/- The “religion that provided the exit from religion,” as he terms Christianity, consists in the announcement of an end. It is the announcement that counts, however, rather than any finality. In this announcement there is a proximity to others and to what was once called parousia. But parousia is no longer presence; it is no longer the return of the Messiah. Rather, it is what is near us and does not cease to open and to close, a presence deferred yet imminent. -/- In a demystified age where we are left with a vision of a self-enclosed world—in which humans are no longer mortals facing an immortal being, but entities whose lives are accompanied by the time of their own decline—parousia stands as a question. Can we venture the risk of a decentered perspective, such that the meaning of the world can be found both inside and outside, within and without our so-immanent world? -/- The deconstruction of Christianity that Nancy proposes is neither a game nor a strategy. It is an invitation to imagine a strange faith that enacts the inadequation of life to itself. Our lives overflow the self-contained boundaries of their biological and sociological interpretations. Out of this excess, wells up a fragile, overlooked meaning that is beyond both confessionalism and humanism. (shrink)

Autant l'ivresse est présente dans la littérature et - de façon plus limitée - dans la peinture, autant elle semble absente de la philosophie. Elle y joue pourtant un rôle paradoxal qui commence avec le Banquet de Platon. Les philosophes rêvent à la fois de s'enivrer d'absolu et de maîtriser l'ivresse. Ce n'est pas un traité sur ce paradoxe que propose ce livre, mais à partir de lui une série de variations et de vagabondages, dans une humeur de banquet - (...) avec parfois la tête qui tourne un peu. On voit passer Hegel, Dionysos, Apollinaire, Raskolnikov, Malcolm Lowry, Jésus, Rabelais, Spinoza... (shrink)

La catastrophe de Fukushima n’est pas considérée ici seulement comme le dernier désastre majeur qui oblige à repenser l’usage de l’énergie nucléaire. On envisage sa leçon de manière plus générale, en tant qu’elle manifeste l’interdépendance désormais inextricable des phénomènes dits « naturels » et des ensembles techniques, sociaux, politiques, économiques dont la connexion générale nous oppresse. Toutes les catastrophes ne sont certes pas équivalentes. Mais l’équivalence dont on veut parler ici est celle qui met en correspondance et qui fait circuler (...) dans la communication et dans la consommation générales tous les éléments de notre existence – les vies, les biens, les forces, les énergies. Le signe et le porteur de cette circulation n’est autre que la valeur en tant qu’argent, ou valeur du « march頻 : l’« équivalence générale » dont parlait Marx. C’est elle qui propage une catastrophe généralisée.Que veut dire « penser » dans cette condition qui est la nôtre? (shrink)

In Being and Time, Heidegger affirms that being-with or Mitsein is an essential constitution of Dasein but he does not submit this existential to the same rigorous analyses as other existentials. In this essay, Jean-Luc Nancy points to the different places where Heidegger erased the possibility of thinking an essential with that he himself opened. This erasure is due, according to Nancy, to the subordination of Mitsein to a thinking of the proper and the improper. The polarization (...) of Being-with between an improper face, the Anyone, and a proper one, the people, which is also, as Nancy shows, a polarization between everydayness and historicity, between a being-together in exteriority (indifference and anonymity) and a being-together in interiority (union through destiny), between a solitary dying and the sacrificial death in combat, leaves the essential with unthought. This essay shows not only the tensions that arise out of Heidegger’s own analyses of Mitsein and affect the whole of Being and Time but also underlines in the end a “shortfall in thinking” inherent not only to Heidegger’s work but, as Nancy claims, to our Western tradition, a shortfall which Nancy has attempted to remedy in his Being Singular Plural. (shrink)

This collection of writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, the renowned French critic and poet, delves into the history of philosophy to locate a fundamentally poetic modus operandi there. The book represents a daring mixture of Nancy’s philosophical essays, writings about artworks, and artwork of his own. With theoretical rigor, Nancy elaborates on the intrinsic multiplicity of art as a concept of “making,” and outlines the tensions inherent in the faire, the “making” that characterizes the very process of (...) production and thereby the structure of poetry in all its forms. Nancy shows that this multiplication that belongs to the notion of art makes every single work communicate with every other, all material in the artwork appeal to some other material, and art the singular plural of a praxis of the finite imparting of an infinity which is actually there in every utterance. In the collection, Nancy engages with the work of, among others, François Martin, Maurice Blanchot, and On Kawara. (shrink)

This book is a rich collection of philosophical essays radically interrogating key notions and preoccupations of the phenomenological tradition. While using Heidegger’s Being and Time as its permanent point of reference and dispute, this collection also confronts other important philosophers, such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Derrida. The projects of these pivotal thinkers of finitude are relentlessly pushed to their extreme, with respect both to their unexpected horizons and to their as yet unexplored analytical potential. A Finite Thinking shows that, paradoxically, (...) where the thought of finitude comes into its own it frees itself, not only to reaffirm a certain transformed and transformative presence, but also for a non-religious reconsideration and reaffirmation of certain theologemes, as well as of the body, heart, and love. This book shows the literary dimension of philosophical discourse, providing important enabling ideas for scholars of literature, cultural theory, and philosophy. (shrink)

This is the most systematic, the most radical, and the most lucid treatise on freedom that has been written in contemporary Continental philosophy. Finding its guiding motives in Kant's second Critique and working its way up to and beyond Heidegger and Adorno, this book marks the most advanced position in the thinking of freedom that has been proposed after Sartre and Levinas. If we do not think being itself as a freedom, we are condemned to think of freedom as a (...) pure 'idea' or 'right', and being-in-the-world, in turn, as a blind and obtuse necessity. Since Kant, philosophy and our world have relentlessly confronted this schism. To combat this renunciation of freedom, one must think the experience of freedom in thought itself: what it is that, simply in order for there to be thinking, must partake of freedom. (shrink)

The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy. Preface: The. Literary. Absolute. I. "There are classifications that are bad enough as classifications, but that have nonetheless dominated entire ...

At once an introduction to Hegel and a radically new vision of his thought, this work penetrates the entirety of the Hegelian field with brevity and precision, while compromising neither rigour nor depth.

If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. In this collection of writings on images and visual art, the author explores this through an extraordinary range of references.

Un essai qui prend l'époque à revers pour répondre à la question de la faillite de la communauté.

Jean-Luc Nancy discusses his life's work with Pierre-Philippe Jandin. As Nancy looks back on his philosophical texts, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts.

In this book, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy examines the nature of catastrophes in the era of globalization and technology. Can a catastrophe be an isolated occurrence? Is there such a thing as a “natural” catastrophe when all of our technologies—nuclear energy, power supply, water supply—are necessarily implicated, drawing together the biological, social, economic, and political? Nancy examines these questions and more. Exclusive to this English edition are two interviews with Nancy conducted by Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Yuji (...) Nishiyama and Yotetsu Tonaki. (shrink)

Christian parables have retained their force well beyond the sphere of religion; indeed, they share with much of modern literature their status as a form of address: "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear." There is no message without there first being--or, more subtly, without there also being in the message itself--an address to a capacity or an aptitude for listening. This is not an exhortation of the kind "Pay attention!" Rather, it is a warning: if you do not (...) understand, the message will go away.The scene in the Gospel of John in which the newly risen Christ enjoins the Magdalene, "Noli me tangere," a key moment in the general parable made up of his life, is a particularly good example of this sudden appearance in which a vanishing plays itself out. Resurrected, he speaks, makes an appeal, and leaves."Do not touch me." Beyond the Christ story, this everyday phrase says something important about touching in general. It points to the place where touching must not touch in order to carry out its touch (its art, its tact, its grace). The title essay of this volume is both a contribution to Nancy's project of a "deconstruction of Christianity" and an exemplum of his remarkable writings on art, in analyses of "Noli me tangere" paintings by such painters as Rembrandt, Dürer, Titian, Pontormo, Bronzino, and Correggio. It is also in tacit dialogue with Jacques Derrida's monumental tribute to Nancy's work in Le toucher--Jean-Luc Nancy.For the English-language edition, Nancy has added an unpublished essay on the Magdalene and the English translation of "In Heaven and on the Earth," a remarkable lecture he gave in a series designed to address children between six and twelve years of age. Closely aligned with his entire project of "the deconstruction of Christianity,'" this lecture may give the most accesible account of his ideas about God. (shrink)

"Les uns avec les autres" : ni les “uns”, ni les “autres” ne sont premiers, mais seulement l’“avec” par lequel il y a des “uns” et des “autres”. L’“avec” est une détermination fondamentale de l’“être”. L’existence est essentiellement co-existence. Non seulement co-existence de “nous” (les hommes), mais de tous les étants (il faut de tout faire un “monde”). Être-avec, ou s’exposer les uns aux autres, les uns par les autres : rien à voir avec une “société du spectacle”, mais rien (...) à voir non plus avec une inexposable “authenticité". Nous? mais c'est nous-mêmes que nous attendons sans savoir si nous nous reconnaîtrons. (shrink)

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)

Written in a direct and accessible, almost manifesto-like style, The Truth of Democracy presents a forceful plea that we rethink democracy not as one political regime or form among others but as that which opens up the very experience of ...

In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy examines sound in relation to the human body. How is listening different from hearing? What does listening entail? How does what is heard differ from what is seen? Can philosophy even address listening, écouter, as opposed to entendre, which means both hearing and understanding? Unlike the visual arts, sound produces effects that persist long after it has stopped. The body, Nancy says, is itself like an echo chamber, responding to (...) music by inner vibrations as well as outer attentiveness. Since “the ear has no eyelid” (Quignard), sound cannot be blocked out or ignored: our whole being is involved in listening, just as it is involved in interpreting what it hears. The mystery of music and of its effects on the listener is subtly examined. Nancy’s skill as a philosopher is to bring the reader companionably along with him as he examines these fresh and vital questions; by the end of the book the reader feels as if listening very carefully to a person talking quietly, close to the ear. (shrink)

This collection, by one of the most challenging of contemporary thinkers, asks the question: why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the human senses and sense or meaning in general. Throughout the five essays, Nancy's argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation in Hegel's Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit - (...) art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. He considers the emergence of art as presentation rather than representation and looks at the contemporary situation of art, and the question of whether art today is still art. Other essays provide intricate and compelling readings of Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin and an analysis of a traced hand in the grotto of Lascaux as the essential mimetic gesture. (shrink)