Abstract

It is the task of this article to explore the status of experience within Jean-Luc Nancy’s exposition of freedom in order to discover his positioning of “the empirical” within philosophical discourse. It is my intention to (a) determine the coherence of the etymological work relating experience to the various manifestations of the sense of pir- (PIE base per-), (b) survey the role of “experience” in Nancy’s work on freedom, and (c) propose a reading of “the empirical” within Nancy’s work and, by extension, philosophical discourse generally. Interested in “the empirical” in philosophy, not empiricism as a philosophy, Nancy seeks to revise empiricist notions of experience and freedom by means of what he refers to as “empirico-transcendentalism.” I shall argue that, in raising empirical concepts (givenness, seizing, testing, self-evidence, factuality, etc.) up to a “transcendental” level of inquiry, Nancy’s “empirico-transcendentalism” bears no fruitful relationship with “classical empiricism” itself.