In his dialogue with Blanchot (The Disavowed Community vs. The Unavowable Community), Jean-Luc Nancy intended to denounce, but without opposing another figure, the idea according to which the community of lovers, as exemplified by Marguerite Duras in The Disease of Death, would be the accomplishment of the community as a work of death. On the basis of a reading of Richard Dehmel’s poem, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), we would like here to outline the schema of a couple in which the (...) unspeakable is transfigured into the power of the advent of a shared community. (shrink)

Democracy cannot go with philosophical Episteme because it is put to the doxic test of maxims. This text associates this observation with what Nancy called democratic existence in its self-transcendence. A democracy recognizes itself in that it makes possible the existence in excess of the unshareable a-politics of our existences. Separation and representation are then imperatively required by the democratic transaction. The «with» thought by Nancy sketches such a figure, both the possibility of a being-together and the internal possibility of (...) an impossibility, a without-being-together in withdrawal. A democratic thought or philosophy, after Nancy, will be careful not to leave unabridged this set of questions. (shrink)

To touch the untouchable—an axiom which has belongs to the law of touch since Aristotle and runs through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, as J. Derrida has remarked, seems inscribed at the heart of philosophy, the statut of which is laid down by Plato in the Symposium. Going back to this means playing again the relationship between sensible and intelligible, between body and flesh, between love and truth by weakening their opposition.

Being Alive. I Salute You Jean-LucIn this article, we bid farewell to Jean-Luc Nancy by attempting to think being-in-life in a dialogue with him. To do so, the mediation draws on a number of his key concepts, which are brought into play around the notion of life, such as breath, meaning, death, salvation, community, singular plural being, between-body, intimacy and cum. The article aims to show that Nancy is a thinker of finitude who has always given the last word to (...) life, to community, to the meaning of being and of the world. (shrink)

There would be, beyond the work carried out with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the Jena Romantics—the first phase of German Romanticism—in The Literary Absolute (1978; trans. 1988), a “romanticism”, recurrent and yet problematised, of Jean-Luc Nancy. Set forth in a little-known text on Flaubert, this “romanticism” reveals itself to be, not of a school of thought nor of a fantasy, but of a form insofar as it is conveyed by a very new regime of thinking. Moreover, it must itself be overcome, (...) by following the infinity of sense that the fragmentation of totalities qua the world imposes. (shrink)

This article endeavors to interpret the work of Jean-Luc Nancy through the idea of “anastasis”. Each time, something rises from the dead: meaning emerges from significance, the world from the unworldly aspects of globalization, Christianity from the decline of religion, the body from its Western devaluation in favor of the spirit, and community from the failure of state-controlled communism and rampant individualism. Could it be that life, in a unique manner across all those phenomena, arises from death and sustains itself (...) within it? (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy is a prolific thinker, not only because of an abundant body of work—more than a hundred titles—but also and above all because his thought, in the form of an opening, encourages and invites us to think what he himself has not put into question. So it is with the category of “milieu”. This category, of which Georges Canguilhem in his time marked the contemporaneity, is more relevant today than ever. It enables us to think differently about our world, (...) and about what makes the world our world. Who makes the “we,” when we think through the “milieu”? How can we think from the relationship first and not from a primordial subject? How, therefore, can we think of another subjectivity, beyond the reflexive subjectivity of the human? This study aims to show the conditions in which Nancy’s work can contribute in a powerful way to a thought of being-together from an ecosophical point of view. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy’s work revolves around the concept of existence, modified or rather explicated as co-existence. Nancy performs the same operation on existence as Heidegger did on being-in-the-world. Indeed, just as Heidegger could say that there is not at first a subject, then a world, then the question of how the former accesses the latter, Nancy asserts, (with regard to Mitsein, being-with, sociality in the purest and most eminent sense), that there is not at first a subject, a self, then another (...) self, then the question of how one accesses the other, and how they can communicate together. We have to start from “us”, and from the sense that “we” are, i.e. from a “coexistential analytic”. (shrink)

Here I approach J.-L. Nancy’s texts related to the skin of “our world” and to “what happens to us”, by a reading or a contamination between his books and Derrida’s interpretation, particularly regarding “touch”. In a first step, I analyze the meaning of “touch”, I appeal to it with and beyond Derrida, emphasizing Nancy’s perspectives on the meaning/weight of thought/weighting and even on the idea of “transimmanence”; in a second step, I consider his analyses on the meaning of “the skin (...) of the world”, demonstrating that there is a sort of “de-ontologization” in the last Nancy: he weights the weight/meaning of the “world” differently, because he touches on the almost weightiness of the skin’s vapor and on the circulation of perspiring skins, which, for him, still give meaning to the world. Finally, I presume in Nancy’s thinking a contamination of the concept of “world” with that of time and even mind/spirit. (shrink)

This article proposes a rereading of the question of the body and of meaning in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy by considering the phenomenon of sound. The issues of tonality, voice and listening have been at the center of several of Nancy’s studies throughout his philosophical production, but it is from his last publication, the book Cruor, that the analysis of sound outward propagation acquires a major relevance in the thought of bodies. Sound implies a fragmentation which suspends all rhetoric (...) of contact and all spatial valorisation of the “between” (of the in-between, of between-us, of being-with). (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to highlight the issues at stake in Nancy’s assertion according to which ‘‘there is no ‘(final) Sense of sense’ in any of the senses of ‘sense’”. To this end, I examine his acknowledgement of the complete drying up of the regime of sense that has sustained the history of the West, and I show how his deconstruction unburdens “the sense of the world” from principles, reasons and ends, in order to think the fundamental incompletness (...) of a sense that shelters the singular-plural unfolding of existence and that cannot be appropriated, since it sends itself, sends back itself, and circulates without ever being settled. (shrink)

Je rappelle ici l’une des plus constantes préoccupations de la pensée de Jean-Luc Nancy : celle du destin d’un Occident qui, au moment même où il paraît accomplir son élargissement au monde entier, est amené à faire, de plus en plus, le constat de son propre effacement, de son déclin, ou de sa finitude. Je le fais tout en déplaçant quelque peu le point de vue d’où le problème se pose « normalement » car, comme c’est arrivé maintes fois dans (...) mes échanges avec Nancy lui-même, j’y fais jouer mon écart, ou mon arrabal hispanique. (shrink)