Today, the “we” has not lost its place in contemporary debates. On the contrary, it has become a crucial question in the political and philosophical debates relating to global-scale disasters and traumatic events, which expose all of humanity to the same risks and same threats. In a dramatic and paradigmatic way, these events invite us to “mourn” the fantasy of self-sufficiency of the I and remind us to which extent our lives are immediately linked to those of others. At the (...) same time, however, these events, which yields the potential to reveal a relationality constitutive of “who we are,” also suggest the need to reframe our understanding of the “we,” and to overcome the us/them divide upon which it has been construed until now. In this essay, I take up this challenge by first engaging in a critical discussion of Judith Butler’s ethics of vulnerability, and then turning to the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

The analyses at the core of this essay focus attention on the concepts of “Compearance” and “Exposition” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical reflection. Starting from the analyses carried out by Sartre, Lévinas and Derrida, this paper aims to define and highlight one of the fundamental concepts in Nancy’s philosophical work, which is touching. A “corpus of touch” that is a syncopated corpus, interrupted and mixed with other bodies; here the whole sense of compearance and exposition is at stake.

Jen-Luc Nancy’s thinking of the event stems from his understanding of being as based on no principle, ground or essence. Nothing preexists the event of being, no principle, arche or prior substance. With such a statement, a thinking of the event emerges: not preceded by any principle or ground, being is nothing but the event of itself. In turn, the event is no longer anchored in a principle that itself would not be happening. Thus, preceded by nothing and grounded in (...) no essence, the event of being can only come as a surprise. The event is always the bringing forth of the unprecedented: the event always comes as a surprise. I first show how Nancy thinks the event from the very motif of the surprise, indeed claiming that an event is surprising or it is not an event. In a second part, I explore Nancy’s thinking of the event of the world, understood as creation ex nihilo. Ultimately, I show that Nancy understands the eventfulness of the event in terms of the essencelessness of existence. (shrink)

The author analyzes the deconstruction of the community carried out by Jean-Luc Nancy. For Nancy, the aim of the community has been historically accomplished by its self-destruction in the “work of death” of totalitarianism. This does not lead him to renounce the notion of community, like Derrida, but to highlight its paradoxical (im-)possibility. This is why Nancy proposes the concept of a “community without community” which would retain only the cum of the communitas, the with of being-with or being in-common. (...) The author shows that this approach is subject to aporias. Indeed, Nancy wants to base being-with on an ontology of bodily touch. As he considers touching as distancing, displacement, he fails to understand the cum, that is to say the possibility of constituting a community. (shrink)

This article discusses the relation between philosophy and heart from the viewpoint of a transplanted heart. It is a reflection on Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts on the heart as intruder in the thought of the world. Departing from the personal experience of a heart transplant, Nancy develops a deconstruction of the idea and experience of the self, showing that the need of another heart in the body of philosophy and in the body of the world has to do with the urgence (...) of experiencing the self as soi-autre, as selfother, which is perhaps nothing but rhythm. Reading passages of his last book Cruor, the article aims to think together the rhythm of a transplanted heart, and of the heart of selfother. (shrink)

The general objective of this essay is to systematize Jean-Luc Nancy’s post- deconstructive reflections on the concept of evidence. A general claim of this paper is that the post-deconstructive concept of evidence is genuinely an epistemic concept of evidence insofar as it refers to structures involved in verification processes. Evidence is the presentation of a state of affairs that relates the presentation not only to what we claim about this state of affairs but also to the singular circumstances of its (...) production. Verification (the production of a claim’s truth) results directly from the singularities involved in the production or presentation of evidence. This means that evidence is never exhausted in the truth it produces or the knowledge it validates but remains a priori exposed or available to produce and validate unknown knowledge about unknown states of affairs. (shrink)