books and hundreds of texts or contributions to volumes, catalogues
and journals. His philosophical scope is very broad: from On Kawara to
Heidegger, from the sense of the world and the deconstruction of
Christianity to the Jena-romantics of the Schlegel-brothers.
Nancy is influenced by philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Georges
Bataille and Martin Heidegger. He became famous with La communauté
désoeuvrée (translated as The Inoperative Community in 1991), at the
same time a work on the question of community and a comment on
Bataille. He has also published books on Heidegger, Kant, Hegel and
Descartes. One of the main themes in his work is the question of our
being together in contemporary society. In Être singulier pluriel
(translated as Being Singular Plural in 2000) Nancy deals with the
question how we can still speak of a 'we' or of a plurality, without
transforming this 'we' into a substantial and exclusive identity. What
are the conditions to speak of a 'we' today?
1. Biography
Jean-Luc Nancy was born on the 26th of July 1940 in Caudéran, near
Bordeaux in France. When exactly the philosopher Nancy emerged is
difficult to ascertain, but it is clear that his first philosophical
interests began to arise during his youth in the catholic environment
of Bergerac. Shortly after he obtained his graduate in philosophy in
1962 in Paris, Nancy began to write explicitly philosophical texts. He
published on authors like Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich
Nietzsche and André Breton. This engagement with various different
types of thinkers also came to be characteristic of his later work,
which is renowned for its versatility.
After his aggregate in philosophy in Paris and a short period as a
teacher in Colmar, in 1968 Nancy became an a assistant at the Institut
de Philosophie in Strasbourg – he presently still lives and works in
Strasbourg. In 1973, he obtained his Phd under the supervision of Paul
Ricoeur, via a dissertation on Kant. Soon after, he became the 'maître
de conférences' at the Université des Sciences Humaines in Strasbourg,
the institute to which he is still attached. In 1987, Nancy was
elected docteur d'état (doctor of state) in Toulouse with the
congratulations of the jury. His dissertation handled the topic of
freedom in the work of Kant, Schelling and Heidegger, and was
published as L'expérience de la liberté (translated as The Experience
of Freedom) in 1988. His supervisor was Gérard Granel and members of
the jury included Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard.
However, Nancy didn't wait until 1987 to extend his academic career.
In the seventies and eighties he was a guest professor at the most
diverse universities, from the Freie Universität in Berlin to the
University of California. As a professor in philosophy, he was also
involved in many cultural delegations of the French ministry of
external affairs, particularly in relation to Eastern Europe,
Great-Britain and the United States of America. Together with his
ever-growing publication list, this began to procure Nancy an
international reputation. The quick translation of his work into
several languages enhanced his fame (Nancy mastered, besides his
mother tongue, also German, Italian and English).
This hyperactivity suddenly came to an end when he became gravely ill
at the end of the eighties. He was forced to undergo a heart
transplant (which Derrida talks about in his recently released book on
Nancy, Le Toucher) and his recovery from this was inhibited by a
long-term fight with cancer. These diseases marked his career
fundamentally. Out of sheer necessity, he put an end to all of his
courses at the beginning of the nineties and quit his membership of
almost all of the committees that he participated in. He has recently
restarted most of his activities, but it is surprising that during
these troubles Nancy never stopped writing and publishing. A lot of
his main works, most of which are related to social and political
philosophical topics, were published in the nineties and he even wrote
a text on his disease. It was published as a book in 2000 with the
title L'intrus: the intruder. For the moment, now over sixty, he is a
very active philosopher. He travels around the world as a popular
speaker and thinker on many philosophical congresses and writes one
text after another. Nancy is more alive than ever, both as a man and
as a philosopher.
2. Lacan
Nancy's first book appears in 1973: Le titre de la lettre (The Title
of the Letter). He wrote it with his philosophical partner Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe. Up until now, it has frequently been described as a
critical study on the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Without working this through here, it is worth mentioning that Nancy
quite consistently refers to Lacan, or to psychoanalysis in general,
and most of the time in quite a critical way. In The Sense of the
World he describes the Lacanian notion of the 'Other' as a
'theological excrement'. That, in a nutshell, is what he had already
said in The Title of the Letter: Nancy argues that Lacan questions the
metaphysical subject, but does this in a metaphysical way. Since then,
Nancy has continued to formulate his reservations against
psychoanalytic concepts like Law, Father, Other, Subject, etc. While
he contends that psychoanalytic jargon still bears some theological
remnants, Nancy also thinks that a lot of its concepts are worth
thinking through.
3. Deconstruction
Nevertheless, Lacan is not the author that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe
explicitly study or look up to. It is the other Jacques, Jacques
Derrida, who makes an enormous impression on both of them. With
Derrida, Nancy affirms in several interviews, he had the impression
that, after Sartre, something new and very contemporary was born in
philosophy. Derrida's work inspired both Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe to
such a degree that they organise the famous conference in 1980, Les
fins de l'homme, in Cerisy-la-Salle on Derrida and politics. This
conference helped to consolidate Derrida's solid place at the pinnacle
of contemporary philosophy.
For Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, this conference on Derrida and politics
served as the starting point to deal with more politics. In the same
year, they set up a philosophical platform to investigate the
political. The 'Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique'
(The Centre of Philosophical Research of the Political) started from
the demand to rethink the political and not to rest on the blinding
rhetoric of our current democracy. Over several years, philosophers
such as Claude Lefort and Jean-François Lyotard give lectures on this
topic, and out of this two books sprang up: Rejouer le politique
(1981) and Le retrait du politique (translated as Retreating the
Political in 1997).
In 1984, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe put an end to the activities of the
Centre, because, according to them, its role as a place of encounter
'had become almost completely dissociated from that as a place of
research and questioning'. The Centre had too often been the mere
successive reception of speakers, rather than a common space with
common concerns. Despite the closing down of the Centre in 1984,
Nancy's concern with the question of the political, and that of
community, has never disappeared.
Nancy is, of course, much more than a pupil of Derrida. His work is
from the beginning marked by lots of diverse influences, from Georges
Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to Descartes, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche and
Heidegger. These authors are already evident in the very first books
that Nancy published: 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.
The book that Nancy became famous with is La communauté désoeuvrée
(1982), a comment on the work of Bataille. This text led Maurice
Blanchot to discuss the question of community, and also to consider
Nancy's comments on Bataille, in his La communauté inavouable
(translated as The Unavowable Community in 1988). Later on, a
compilation of essays centring around the theme of community, La
communauté désoeuvrée, is also published as a book. Besides offering
an excellent analysis of the problem of community, this volume is an
interesting introduction to the author Nancy. One can learn to read
Nancy in it, and this is not always an easy job because he starts
mostly from a commentary on the work of other authors and develops his
own thesis out of this commentary. This strategy of reading and
thinking is named deconstruction and Nancy continues Derrida's work
with it. This is one reason why one can call La communauté désoeuvrée
a key text in Nancy's work.
Besides revealing his strategy of thinking, in this text one can also
discover the main philosophical themes that Nancy is concerned with in
his later work. These often circle around social and political
philosophical problems, like the question how to develop our modern
society with the twentieth century knowledge that political projects
that start by trying to build society according to a well-defined
shape or plan have frequently led to political terror and social
violence. In this respect, Nancy is obviously thinking of the former
socialist states, as well as the nazi and fascist states of the
twentieth century.
When Nancy, in the footsteps of Derrida, deconstructs texts of an
author, he researches in the most meticulous way what the author
writes, but also and especially, what he or she doesn't write, where
his or her thinking halts or recoils to think a problem through. He
looks for the place where thinking stumbles. Out of this slip, Nancy
tries to make clear the next step the author wanted to take/should
have taken in order to think his or her problem but nevertheless
didn't.
4. Community
In La communauté désoeuvrée, Nancy applies this deconstruction to the
cry for the restoration of a transparent, small-scale community, a
'Gemeinschaft' that might liberate us from the 'alienation' in modern
society, the 'Gesellschaft'. Nancy's thesis is that at the core of
western political thinking, there is a longing for an 'original
community'. It is the longing for an immediate being-together, out of
the idea that we once lived in a harmonious and intimate community,
but that this harmony has declined throughout history. The modern
society, the Gesellschaft, stands for the opposite of the warm and
cosy pre-modern community, the Gemeinschaft. According to this line of
thinking, we live now in an anonymous society full of selfish
individuals and the close communal ties are no more than memories.
This leads not only to the disintegration of society, but also to
violence, the decline of norms and values, and so forth. The only
solution to fight disintegration is to turn back to the period where
the communal ties were present, or to strive for a future community
where the former ties are restored.
This historic-philosophical scheme is not only used by a large number
of philosophers or social and political thinkers, it is also a central
theme within western society and culture in general. According to
Nancy:
The lost or broken community can be exemplified in all kinds of ways
and by all kinds of paradigms: the natural family, the Athenian city,
the Roman Republic, the first Christian community, corporations,
communes, or brotherhoods- always it is a matter of a lost age in
which community was tight and bound to harmonious bonds in which above
all it played back to itself, through its institutions, its rituals,
and its symbols, the representation, indeed the living offering, of
its own immanent unity, intimacy and autonomy' (The Inoperative
Community, p. 9).
Nancy is thinking largely of the period of the German romantics, of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau who left us a mythical natural community as a
counterpoint to modern society, but the target of his analysis is also
of contemporary communitarianisms, like Alasdair MacIntyre, who speak
of the need for a return to pre-modern communities. The nostalgic
thought that the past or the old days were better, that we have lost
something that was present in the past, is a recognizable paradigm
within our everyday life. This nostalgia is not only present in the
programs of conservative political parties. A quick look at the
commercials from various mediums (especially television) shows us that
a lot of products are pretending to give us back a 'natural'
biological condition of hair colour, for example. Also, in everyday
life, people consistently voice their frustrations with the 'lawless
and wild youths' who have alienated themselves from the community that
they were born in.
It is, of course, remarkable that every generation seems to go back to
the same criticism again and again. Therefore, Nancy says, the longing
for an original community is not a reference to a real period in our
history. It is rather a mythical thought, an imaginary picture of our
past. As such, this nostalgic imagination is innocent, but when it
becomes the starting point for a politics of community, the innocence
disappears. We should become suspicious, Nancy says, of the
retrospective consciousness of the lost community and its identity:
'whether this consciousness conceives of itself as effectively
retrospective or whether, disregarding the realities of the past, it
constructs images of this past for the sake of an ideal or prospective
vision. We should be suspicious of this consciousness first of all
because it seems to have accompanied the Western world from its very
beginnings: at every moment in history, the Occident has rendered
itself to the nostalgia for a more archaic community that has
disappeared, and to deploring a loss of familiarity, fraternity and
conviviality. Our history begins with the departure of Ulysses and
with the onset of rivalry, dissension, and conspiracy in his palace.
Around Penelope, who reweaves the fabric of intimacy without ever
managing to complete it, pretenders set up the warring and political
scene of society – pure exteriority' (The Inoperative Community, p.
10).
Let us take a contemporary example. The harmonic community of which
MacIntyre speaks, is a community of common norms and values, shared by
people with the same identity and background, otherwise the community
wouldn't be harmonic anymore. If we take this moral inclination for a
community of people with the same identity as a political longing, one
is not that far removed from the logic of many nationalisms that are
still present in Western Europe today. Of course, the intentions are
manifestly different but the international political scene shows that
the longing for a pure social identity can still lead to violent
conflicts. The Balkan wars of the nineties, which erupted one by one,
are a sad example of that. Whatever the motives of these wars, the
belonging to an ethnic group has been the criterion in making the
difference between good and evil, between us and them, between
authentic Serbs or real Croats and others. What was sought after was a
pure and undivided social identity, no longer soiled by the stains of
other blood.
In other and fortunately less violent contexts, it is a certain
culture of shared values and norms which delivers the foundations for
social identity. Flemish people are defined as different from Dutch
people, although they are neighbours, speak the same language and have
almost everything in common. Another example is the current 'migration
problem': there is often a suspicion on behalf of citizens around the
world that the values of groups of immigrants might threaten the
identity of a region and thereby affect the social solidarity. The
fear in Western Europe, and elsewhere, seems to be that any influx of
foreigners might change public life so dramatically that our 'own'
former identity would be in danger. Symbols like the headscarf of
Muslim females, for example, play an important role in that debate and
are at the basis of hot political discussions on the identity and the
values of many European nations.
a. Immanentism
Nancy summarises the communal desire for a closed and undivided social
identity with his concept of immanentism. The French word 'immanence'
means to be fully present with oneself, to be closed upon oneself. In
La communauté désoeuvrée, immanentism is the concept by which Nancy
describes the horizon of our attitudes towards identity and community.
He points at two examples. On the one hand, he is thinking of the way
that communities, nations or ethnics try to protect their identity
from the influences of others, so that they are united around their
undivided selfhood, culture or values. On the other hand, immanentism
is also present in the way that the former socialist regimes in
Eastern Europe understood the communist form of constitution as the
final destination of humanity. There too, you can discover a desire
for the annihilation of social alienation and for an immediate and
transparent being-together. The ultimate goal of human acting is to
reach the transparent communist way of life. Once that goal has been
realised, the idea is that all alienation of the capitalist way of
life would disappear and society would finally be harmoniously present
with itself.
With its detailed articulation of this political and philosophical
paradigm of thinking, intertwined with a commentary on Bataille,
Nancy's La communauté désoeuvrée obtained international fame.
Nevertheless, he never elaborated a theory of community, just like he
has not done so with the other main themes from his work. Far more
often, he launches a few theses, offers fragments and traces of
thinking, which he then develops further in later texts. This
fragmentary character of his work sometimes makes it difficult to come
to grips with, but on the other hand, you get in every book or text a
lot of new perspectives and stimulating insights on contemporary
political, philosophical and ontological problems.
b. Heidegger and being-with
Besides his enduring preoccupation with the work of classic
philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, Nancy's thought
concentrates primarily on a reorientation of the work of Martin
Heidegger, especially since his 'doctorat d'état' in 1987. Not that
Nancy's work is just a comment on Heidegger. In The Experience of
Freedom for example, Nancy's study of the notion of freedom within
Heidegger's work, is not only a discussion of Heidegger, but also of
Kant, Schelling and Sartre. Nancy is looking for a sort of
'non-subjective' freedom, a concept of freedom that tries to think the
existential ground from which every freedom (thought as a property of
the individual or a collectivity) starts from. Freedom, instead of
being seen as the classical 'liberum arbitrium' or the subjectivistic
free-will, lies in the being thrown into the world, and into
existence. As Heidegger does, Nancy accentuates the fact that freedom
in Kant's work is a sort of unconditional causality. In 'the second
analogy of the experience' of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (The
Critique of Pure Reason), Kant argues that the specific form of
causality that human freedom is – the subject acts 'spontaneously' –
means that the subject must withdraw itself out of time, to not be
determined by empirical causality. Therefore, as in Heidegger's Vom
Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, Nancy determines Kantian freedom as a
autopositional freedom, the freedom of a subject who 'forgets' that it
is always already thrown into existence, even before it can decide to
be free. So, one has to think freedom from its existential ground, its
finite being. As long as one thinks freedom as the property of an
'infinite' subject, every form of finite being will appear a kind of
heteronomy, as a restraint of my freedom'. My freedom, says Nancy,
does not end where that of the other starts, but the existence of the
other is the necessary condition to be free. There is no freedom
without the presupposition of our being-in-the-world, and of our
being-thrown into the existence. That is why Heidegger's work is
interesting, because he was the first to think the existential
condition, the being of the freedom through.
Nancy's interest in Heidegger's work also has something to do with the
question of community, the question of being-with (Mitsein) in
Heidegger's words. Especially in his book Être singulier pluriel
(Being Singular Plural), written in 1996, Nancy focuses upon that.
This book, together with Une pensée finie from 1990 and Le sens du
monde from 1993, is one of the most important texts in Nancy's work
during the nineties and of his work in general.
In Être singulier pluriel, Nancy deals with the question how we can
still speak of a 'we' or of a plurality, without transforming this
'we' into a substantial and exclusive identity. What are the
conditions to speak of a 'we' today? From Heidegger, Nancy learnt that
our being in the world with others determines us, before we can speak
of a division between and individual and a community. We are always
already thrown into the world, but this contingent positioning can
never be the basis to speak of a natural or original community.
Contrary to Aristotle or Plato, we can no longer fall back on a fixed
metaphysical or natural (phusis) ground. Neither is the world an
entity created by God, wherein we occupy a well-defined place. The
modern philosophical order, especially since Nietzsche, has finished
with there 'truths'. Once community or being-together is no longer a
'natural' fact wherein I'm originally dwelling, community becomes a
capital question for modern political philosophy. Also, in our time
the problem of community is confronted with the further question: how
to understand community when it is no longer given to us as a gift of
God, or as a harmonic being-together and identification with our 'own'
people?
To Nancy, Heidegger is the philosopher who handles this question in a
quite ambiguous way and that makes him controversial, still today.
Everyone who drops the name Heidegger in philosophical circles, knows
of the controversy he still evokes. More than is the case with, for
example, Maurice Blanchot, Heidegger's extreme right sympathies are
still the cause of hot polemics, certainly when one, as Nancy does
explicitly, touches the ethical and political terrains. Nancy does not
deny this ambiguity. On the contrary, he takes it as the starting
point of his reorientation of Heidegger. On the one hand, Nancy argues
that Heidegger makes it clear, in the most radical way, that every
human being (Dasein as he calls it) is always being opened unto a
world. Being in the world is being with others, and this being-with is
an essential trait – if one can still speak of essence; rather it is
the unsubstantial essence, the being of every being-there. So, being
there is being-with, to exist is to coexist.
According to Nancy, there is no more radicalised point of view to
think community in a modern, contingent way. We are always being-with,
but this being-with is no longer a substantial being-together out of a
shared trait, identity of race. On the other hand, he realises very
well that Heidegger is the author who at a certain moment speaks of a
true German community and leaves behind the openness and radical point
of view he himself had postulated. Only this community, so Heidegger
says in his famous rectoral speech, can lead to a proper existence.
Heidegger was convinced the national-socialist movement would
guarantee a collective escape from an improper existence. How this had
to happen in a concrete way, Heidegger seemingly didn't know when he
wrote Being and Time. He left his readers in a state of uncertainty,
but this uncertainty didn't stop him from partaking in a horrible
political regime, from connecting his thought to the
national-socialist movement and from identifying himself with one of
the most murderous political regimes ever.
It seems quite preposterous that an author like Nancy who announces
the end of every immanent community, appeals to a philosopher who puts
forward a true German community. How can Nancy, who explicitly writes
against all nostalgia for provincialism, refer to Heidegger who
withdrew into his hut in Todtnauberg?
As already said, Nancy's attitude towards Heidegger is twofold, and he
also makes this clear in his text 'La decision d'existence' (published
in Une pensée finie). On the one hand, he is inspired by Heidegger's
articulation of being-with. On the other hand, he wants to question
fundamentally every claim that Heidegger makes regarding a proper or
original community. Out of Nancy's analysis in Être singulier pluriel
it becomes clear that this is exactly the obstacle in Heidegger's
philosophical reflection on being-with, and in the contemporary
philosophical and ethical complaint of a lost community (although one
cannot compare the two in many points). In this respect, think again
of the important role that the communitarians are playing nowadays,
with very influential authors like Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel and
Alasdair MacIntyre.
In his interest in Heidegger, Nancy is touching the problem of
community at its deepest core. Heidegger's ambiguity is a signal for
him to develop the 'with', the constitutive relationality of
being-there, and to radicalise it in what he calls an analysis of the
coexistential. This is a fundamental analysis of the way that we stand
to each other and to the world and how this can be the basis for a
thinking of community. This, and the attempt to think community in a
radical way as being-with, gets its start in Heidegger's Being and
Time but is, according to Nancy, largely insufficient.
5. Ontology
a. Globalization
The theme of community is one of the main and most interesting threads
throughout Nancy's work, but there are numerous other themes and
questions in his work. Nancy is not only very familiar with a large
part of the history of philosophy (see his books on Kant, Descartes,
Hegel, and so forth), but he also discusses in his work political
themes like justice, sovereignty and freedom, and how they may apply
in our increasingly global world. He always maintains a very singular
voice and perspective. Take for example the contemporary debate on
globalization. In 1993, Nancy wrote his book Le sens du monde in which
he searched for what we mean when we say that we are living in a
world, or in one world; about what we mean when we say that the sense
of the world is no longer situated above but within the world. The
world, the existence, that is our radical responsibility he says, but
by this doesn't mean that we are always responsible for everything and
everyone. He wants to make clear that the political, juridical or
moral responsibility in concrete situations is based on a preceding
ontological responsibility. From the moment that the measure for our
responsibility is no longer given by a metaphysical or divine order,
we are living in a world where we are exposed to a naked existence,
without the possibility to fall back upon a preceding fundamental
cause of the world. For Nancy, the contingency of our naked existence
is not in the first place a moral problem. It is an ontological
question. Whereas in a feudal world the meaning and destination of
life was clear and fixed, contemporary existence can no longer refer
to a general metaphysical framework. Nothing other than this
contingency is the challenge for our global existence today, says
Nancy. It is indeed the case that today we are confronted with a lot
of uncertainties and that we are thrown into many complex situations,
but it is not certain at all whether that is something we should
complain about.
For Nancy, becoming-worldly means, in the first place, responding to
the demands of our time. He asks what it means when we think today
that we are living in a world. Becoming-worldwide is in a radical way
being exposed to sense, to the world as such. The 'sense of the world'
is in no way still given by a creator. What is left as a horizon is
that the world, and only the world, is there. Sense is not so much
something that we, as secularised successors to God, ascribe to the
world. This would only confirm the idea that the world stands for a
lack of sense, or for an 'object' to which sense is given from outside
by a 'subject'. Thus Nancy says we have to think 'world' as beings who
are always already in the world. There is nothing new about that and
yet, he does not stop telling us. It seems so evident, almost banal,
and this banality is what counts today. There's nothing hidden anymore
behind the question of the world. We have to confront ourselves with
this nothing, with this ex nihilo of the world. This ontology, this
logic of the ontos, is what Nancy wants us to deal with, as he makes
clear in one of his most recent books La création du monde ou la
mondialisation.
b. Deconstructing Christianity
Thinking through the problem of globalisation means for Nancy at the
same time deconstructing Christianity. Of course, a deconstruction of
Christianity is different from a mere criticism of Christianity. It is
the question of whether atheism is the antipode of religion, or if
religion has a sort of auto-critical gesture towards itself. We
'moderns' love to say that we are no longer Christians, but maybe the
Christian aspects of our existence are so evident that we are no
longer conscious of them. Take for example the question whether our
existence has a meaning. The thought that existence has indeed a
meaning and that this meaning is attached to existence by some self
constituting thing – whether it is a God or a subject – is present in
atheism as much as in Christianity. Also the nihilistic claim that
existence is meaningless starts from this idea.
Nancy therefore tries to think 'the sense of the world' out of the
transcendental conditions of our existence. An atheist's world is a
world in which sense is no longer attached to the world, but where it
is the condition of our being-in-the-world as such. The world does not
have sense, it is sense, and this naked existence means that we have
to exist in the sense that we are, and can no longer hide behind some
or another presupposed meaning of life. We are exposed to the world
and to ourselves, and that is the sense of existence.
At first sight, Nancy seems to limit himself to a sort of affirmation
of the status quo of the world as it is, and it seems that he affirms
the common idea that since the collapse of the former socialist states
we would live in an accomplished humanity. It seems, especially, that
we cannot disagree on the 'good' of some matters: there are human
rights, individual liberties and humanitarian missions of the UN to
keep guard over this moral world order, and so forth. Nancy's thesis
is nothing but the questioning of that very idea, and it seems to me
that the work of Nancy in general becomes interesting when it is used
as a hyperbolic questioning of that sort of philosophical or political
correctness.
6. Sovereignty
As much as in his earlier work like L'oubli de la philosophie in 1986
as in many other texts like Changement de monde in 1998, Nancy
questions in a very singular way the evidences and rhetorics of our
time. That certainly does not mean that he is only a social or
political philosopher. If philosophy has to be engaged today, he says,
it has in the first place the task to philosophize. Let's take one
example to make that clear.
One sees that with an ever growing number of missions the UN
continually tries, with or without success, to quench potential
hotspots here and there, and thus to maintain the order in and of the
world. By means of humanitarian interventions one wants to apply
international law in places where it is violated. These interventions
seem to indicate that there is no longer any sovereignty. There is no
longer a declaration of war from one sovereign to another, but an
application of international law in the name of humanity in general.
There are nevertheless, Nancy analyses, a number of signs or symptoms
that seem to show that sovereignty is still playing a part in
contemporary politics, albeit in a subdued, private manner. This
reluctance to talk about sovereignty on the one hand, and the full use
of its symbolic values on the other, were the motivations for Nancy to
write a text about the Gulf War. In it, he examined what part
sovereignty can still play in contemporary political and social
thinking. The waning role of sovereignty in the West, and its subdued
return in the Gulf War, is a given which he consciously wants to
confront rather than forget. For his analysis, Nancy was inspired by
what Carl Schmitt made clear with the slogan: one who says humanity,
wants to cheat. Even if a state pretends to make war in the name of
humanity, it takes over a universal concept to use it polemically
against its opponent, its enemy. A world which is becoming worldwide
tends to, explains Schmitt, criminalize its enemies. It no longer
suffices to put the enemy back behind his borders. One goes looking
for him in his own national territory and disqualifies him in a moral
way. He becomes literally inhuman: he falls out of the moral human
order, he is an illegal combatant, as the U.S. government called the
Taliban prisoners.
7. Art and Culture
Finally I want to point to the fact that Nancy is also a very
influential philosopher of art and culture. Already in 1978 he
published with Lacoue-Labarthe a book on the Jena-romantics of the
Schlegel brothers. The book is called L'absolu littéraire (translated
as The Literary Absolute in 1987) and sets up a large discussion of
the Jena-romantiek, the German 'Frühromantik': the place and the group
of the brothers August-Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel (and partially
also Novalis and Schelling). This study focuses on the review
Athenaeum published by the brothers Schlegel at Jena, who thereafter
founded a literary circle. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy focus on the
question of literature realising and fulfilling itself as a work, an
œuvre as it is called in the French language: the writer produces
himself in the literary work he writes so that he, as the subject, the
support of this work, becomes himself an œuvre, a self-productive
individual. L'absolu littéraire points at the fact that a lot of these
romantic themes still play a substantial role in our modern society.
Besides his interest for literature, film, theatre and poetry, Nancy
also writes many contributions in art catalogues, especially in
relation to contemporary art. At various different times, Nancy also
exhibited some of his own work together with the French artist
François Martin, and he has also written a few poems and theatre
texts. One can read his philosophical reflections on the statute of
art in general, in the book Les Muses, published in 1994 (translated
as The Muses in 1996). In it, Hegel's thesis of the death of art takes
a central place. There is also a text from a lecture from 1992 at the
Louvre museum in Paris on the painting 'The death of the virgin' by
the Italian painter Caravaggio. This text was already published in
1993, in a number of Paragraph, fully dedicated to Nancy's work. From
Caravaggio's painting, Nancy is looking for another conception of
painting. The painting is not a representation of the empirical world
– understood in the platonic, metaphysical way – but a presentation of
world, of sense, of existence:
'From the inside of (the)painting to the outside of (the) painting,
there is nothing, no passage. There is painting, there is us,
indistinctly, distinctly. Here, (the) painting is our access to the
fact that we do not accede – either to the inside or to the outside of
ourselves. Thus we exist. This [Caravaggio's] painting paints the
threshold of existence. In these conditions, to paint does not mean to
represent, but simply to pose the ground, the texture, and the pigment
of the threshold' (in Kamuf P. (ed.), Paragraph, 1993, p. 115)
In 2001, Nancy published The Evidence of Film, a book on the Iranian
filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. In it, he writes that:
'Cinema presents – that is to say shares (communicates) – the
intensity of a look upon a world of which it is itself part and parcel
(a film properly speaking and as video, as television, but also as
photography and as music: these motives will come up again). It is
part of it precisely in the sense that it has contributed to its
structure as it is now: as a world where looking at what is real is
resolutely substituting for every kind of visionary seeing, foreseeing
and clairvoyant gazing. […] Clearly, films turn out (with photography,
of course, and starting with it: Kiarostami never forgets this, and
this will have to be discussed) to be something very different from a
relatively new support for received ways of experience (stories or
feelings, myth or dream, etc.). Well beyond the medium that it also
is, cinema adds up an element: the element of looking and of what is
real insofar as it is looked at. All in one, film is ubiquitous, it
can take in everything, from one far end of the earth to the other …'
(The Evidence of Film, p. 20).
Nancy also wrote numerous texts on art in several international
journals. Texts on Baudelaire, the relation between image and
violence, the problem of representation in art, the statute of
literature, on Hölderlin, on contemporary artists On Kawara and
Soun-gui and even on techno-music. It seems that nothing is unfamiliar
with the philosopher Nancy.
8. References and Further Reading
Major works of Nancy:
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.
English translations: almost all of Nancy's major works are 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
Secondary bibliography
Bernasconi R., On deconstructing nostalgia for community within the
West: the debate between Nancy and Blanchot, Research in
Phenomenology, 23, 3-21, 1993.
Derrida J., Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris, Galilée, 2000.
Devisch I., A trembling voice in the desert. Jean-Luc Nancy's
re-thinking of the space of the political, Cultural Values, 4(2),
239-255, 2000.
Devisch I, La «Négativité Sans Emploi». SymposiumIV(2):167-87, 2000.
Devisch I, 'Wij. Jean-Luc Nancy en het vraagstuk van de gemeenschap'
(Uitgeverij Peeters, Leuven, 2003, forthcoming)
Dow K., Ex-posing identity: Derrida and Nancy on the (im) possibility.
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 19 (3-4), 261-271, 1993.
Kamuf P.(ed.), Paragraph. On the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy, 16(2), 1993.
May T., The community's absence in Lyotard, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe.
Philosophy Today, 275-284, 1993.
May T., Reconsidering difference. Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and
Deleuze. Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
Sheppard D. e.a., On Jean-Luc Nancy. The sense of philosophy, London,
Routledge, 1997.
Studies in Practical Philosophy 1(1), 1999 (fully dedicated to the
work of Nancy).
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