Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy (born 26 July 1940) is a French philosopher. His first introduction to philosophy was in his youth in the Catholic environment of Bergerac. In 1962 in Paris he graduated in philosophy. He taught for a short while in Colmar, and then in 1968 he took on a position as an assistant at the Institut de Philosophie in Strasbourg. In 1973 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Kant under supervision of Paul Ricoeur. He was then promoted maître de conférences at the Université des Sciences Humaines. In the 1970s and 1980s he was guest professor at universities all over the world, from the University of California to the Freie Universität in Berlin. His international reputation has grown, and he has been invited as a cultural delegate of the French ministry of external affairs to speak in Eastern Europe, Britain and the United States.

It is evident from his first publications that Nancy has been influenced by many varied and diverse thinkers. He has written Le Discours de la Syncope (1976) and L’Impératif Catégorique (1983) on Kant, La remarque spéculative (translated as The Speculative Remark, 2001) on Hegel, Ego sum (1979) on Descartes and Le Partage des Voix (1982) on Heidegger. Other major influences include Bataille, Blanchot and Nietzsche. His first book, published in 1973, was titled Le Titre de la Lettre (The Title of the Letter), and was written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. A critical study of the work of Jacques Lacan, Nancy’s main critique of psychoanalysis is that Lacan puts the metaphysical subject to task, but does so in a manner couched in metaphysics. Nancy has continued to critique psychoanalytic concepts since this book, believing ideas like the Law, Father, Other and Subject worth studying, but warning against the theological remnants embedded in psychoanalytical language.

Nancy’s book on the question of community, La Communauté Désoeuvrée (The Inoperable Community, 1982), is perhaps his best known work. This text is an introduction to some of the main philosophical themes Nancy will continue to work with. Nancy traces the influence of the idea of community to concepts of experience, discourse, and the individual, and argues that it has dominated modern thought. Discarding popular notions, Nancy redefines community through its political nature in its resistance to immanent power, rather than as a project of communal production or fusion. He writes that our attempt to design society according to pre-planned definitions frequently leads to social violence and political terror, and poses the social and political philosophical question of how to proceed with the development of society with this knowledge in mind. “The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader…) necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being.” Maurice Blanchot was inspired by Nancy’s work on community and Bataille, whose work is also a subject of La communauté désoeuvrée, in writing his own La communauté inavouable (trans. The Unavowable Community in 1988).

In 1980, Nancy and Lacoue-Lebarthe organized a conference on Derrida and politics in Cerisy-la-Salle called "Les fins de l'Homme" ("The Ends of Man"). Nancy has said that Derrida inspires his belief that something new was born in philosophy after Sartre. The conference solidified Derrida’s place at the forefront of contemporary philosophy, and was a place to begin an in-depth conversation between philosophy and contemporary politics. Further to their desire to rethink the political, Nancy and Lacoue-Lebarthe set up in the same year the Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur la Politique (The Centre of philosophical Research of the Political). The Centre was a space for discussion on this topic, and supported such speakers as Claude Lefort and Jean-François Lyotard. Two of Nancy’s books, Rejouer le Politique (1981) and Le Retrait du Politique (translated as Retreating the Political in 1997), were inspired by this time in his career. By 1984 however, the Centre was failing to meet the original aspirations of its founders as a common space with common concerns, becoming instead a podium for a succession of speakers. They decided to close the Centre, saying that the Centre as a place of encounter “had become almost completely dissociated from that as a place of research and questioning.”

Nancy was elected docteur d’état (doctor of state) in 1987 in Toulouse with the congratulations of the jury, who included Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. His supervisor was Gérard Granel. His dissertation looked at the works of Kant, Schelling, Sartre and Heidegger, and concentrated on their treatment of the topic of freedom. It was published in 1988 as L'Expérience de la Liberté (trans. The Experience of Freedom), and since this time Nancy has continued to concentrate on a reorientation of Heidegger’s work. Nancy treats freedom as a property of the individual or collectivity, and looks for a ‘non-subjective’ freedom which would attempt to think the existential or finite origin for every freedom. Freedom is what is in dasein, or the being-thrown-into-the-world, and not being. Like Heidegger, Nancy interprets Kant’s freedom as an unconditional causality; freedom is that of a subject who, before it can make a decision to be free, forgets that it is always already thrown into existence. He argues that it is necessary to think freedom in its finite being, because to think of it as the property of an infinite subject is to make any finite being a limit of freedom. The existence of the other is the necessary condition of freedom, rather than its limitation. Freedom is reliant on the presupposition of our being-in-the-world.

Nancy addresses the world in its contemporary global configuration in other writings on freedom, justice and sovereignty. In his book Le Sens du Monde (The Sense of the World, 1993), he asks what we mean by saying that we live in one world, and how our sense of the world is changed by saying that it is situated within the world, rather than above or apart from it. To Nancy, the world, or existence, is our ontological responsibility, which precedes political, juridical and moral responsibility. He describes our being in the world as an exposure to a naked existence, without the possibility of support by a fundamental metaphysical order or cause. Contemporary existence no longer has recourse to a divine framework, as was the case in feudal society where the meaning and course of life was predetermined. The contingency of our naked existence as an ontological question is the main challenge of our existence in contemporary global society.

In his book Être Singulier Pluriel (trans. Being Singular Plural, 2000), Nancy tackles the question of how we can speak of a plurality of a ‘we’ without making of the ‘we’ a singular identity. The premise of the title essay in this book is that there is no being without ‘being with’, that ‘I’ does not come before ‘we’ (dasein is not prior to mitsein), and that there is no existence without co-existence. In an obvious extension from his thoughts on freedom, community, and the sense of the world, he imagines the ‘being-with’ as a mutual exposure to one another that preserves the freedom of the ‘I’, and thus a community that is not subject to an exterior or preexistent definition. He writes, “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.” The five essays that follow the title piece continue to develop Nancy’s philosophy through discussions of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity and hybridism, the Gulf war and Sarajevo. Nancy’s central concern in these essays remains the ‘being-with’, and he uses this as a place for discussion relevant to issues of psychoanalysis, politics and multiculturalism, looking at notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’, in current contexts.

Nancy has also written for art catalogues and international art journals, especially on contemporary art. He also writes poetry and for the theatre, earning him respect as an influential philosopher of art and culture. In his book Les Muses, published in 1994 (trans. The Muses, 1996), he begins with an analysis of Hegel’s thesis on the death of art. Among the essays in The Muses is a piece on Caravaggio, which was originally a lecture given at the Louvre. In this essay Nancy looks for a different conception of painting where painting is not a representation of the empirical world, but a presentation of the world, of sense, or of existence. Nancy has published books on film and techno-music, as well as texts on the problem of representation, on the statute of literature, on image and violence, and on the work of On Kawara, Soun-gui, Baudelaire, and Hölderlin.

In the last part of the 1980s and early 1990s Nancy had to take a break from his active career due to illness. He underwent a heart transplant, and his recovery from this was made more difficult by a long-term fight with cancer. He stopped teaching, and quit participation in almost all of the committees with which he was engaged, however he never stopped writing. Many of his best known texts were published during this time. A book on his experience entitled L'intrus (The Intruder) was published in 2000. Today he remains an active philosopher, invited to speak around the world for many philosophical congresses, and writing ceaselessly. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, and a member of the faculty at the European Graduate School.

Bibliography

Selected works:

• La Remarque spéculative (Un bon mot de Hegel), Paris, Galilée, 1973.
• La titre de la lettre, Paris, Galilée, 1973 (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe)
• Le Discours de la syncope. I. Logodaedalus, Paris, Flammarion, 1975.
• L'absolu littéraire. Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand, Paris, Seuil, 1978 (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe).
• Ego sum, Paris, Flammarion, 1979.
• Le partage des voix, Paris, Galilée, 1982.
• La communauté désoeuvrée, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1983.
• L'Impératif catégorique, Paris, Flammarion, 1983.
• L'oubli de la philosophie, Paris, Galilée, 1986.
• Des lieux divins, Mauvezin, T.E.R, 1987.
• L'expérience de la liberté, Paris, Galilée, 1988.
• Une Pensée Finie, Paris, Galilée, 1990.
• Le poids d'une pensée, Québec, Le griffon d'argile, 1991.
• Le mythe nazi, La tour d'Aigues, L'Aube, 1991 (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe)
• La comparution (politique à venir), Paris, Bourgois, 1991 (with Jean-Chrisophe Bailly).
• Corpus, Paris, Métailié, 1992.
• The birth to presence, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993.
• Les Muses, Paris, Galilée, 1994.
• Être singulier pluriel, Paris, Galilée, 1996.
• Hegel. L'inquiétude du négatif, Paris, Hachette, 1997.
• L'Intrus, Paris, Galilée, 2000.
• Le regard du portrait, Paris, Galilée, 2000.
• La pensée dérobée. Paris, Galilée, 2001.
• The evidence of film. Bruxelles, Yves Gevaert, 2001.
• La création du monde ou la mondialisation. Paris, Galilée, 2002.

Almost all of Nancy's major works have been translated into English.

• The Inoperative Community (1991). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• The Birth to Presence (1993): Stanford University Press.
• The Experience of Freedom (1993). Stanford University Press.
• The Gravity of Thought (1997). New Jersey: Humanities Press.
• Retreating the Political (1997). With Lacoue-Labarthe (edited by Simon Sparks). London: Routledge.
• The Sense of the World (1998). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Being Singular Plural (2000). Stanford University Press

External links

• “Between Story and Truth” (http://www.littlemag.com/jul-aug01/nancy.html) by Nancy
• A 2004 film, The Ister, is based on Heidegger's 1942 lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin, and features Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Bernard Stiegler, and Hans-Juergen Syberberg. * Official site (http://www.theister.com/)
• Faculty profile at the European Graduate School (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jeanlucnancy.html) includes bibliography, quotations, and video clips.
• Review of “The Sense of the World” (http://www.uwo.ca/modlang/ailc/old32/current/B~Nancy~patrick.htm) by David Patrick
• “The Technique of the Present” (http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/nancy.html) lecture given by Nancy in January 1997 at the Nouveau Musée during the exposition of On Kawara's work
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry (http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/n/JLNancy.htm)
• University of Minnesota Press description of “Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative” by Nancy (http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/nancy_hegel.html)
• Review of “Being Singular Plural” by Nancy (http://www.frenchculture.org/books/release/philosophy/nancy1.html)