Background
Jean-Luc Nancy was born on July 26, 1940, in Caudèran, France to the family of Roger, an engineer, and Jacqueline (née Gendronneau) Nancy.
5 Allée Antonio Machado, 31058 Toulouse, France
In 1987, Nancy received his Docteur d'État from the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail under the supervision of Gérard Granel and a jury including Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida.
15-21 Rue de l'École de Médecine, 75006 Paris, France
Nancy graduated with a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1962, where he worked with Georges Canguilhem. In 1973, he obtained his doctoral degree under the supervision of Paul Ricoeur, via a dissertation on Kant.
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy
(In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy e...)
In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy examines sound in relation to the human body. How is listening different from hearing? What does listening entail? How does what is heard differ from what is seen? Can philosophy even address listening, écouter, as opposed to entendre, which means both hearing and understanding?
https://www.amazon.com/Listening-Perspectives-Continental-Philosophy-Jean-Luc/dp/0823227731/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Jean-Luc+Nancy&qid=1592898603&sr=8-2
2002
(Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French no...)
Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French notion of jouissance. The philosophers Adèle van Reeth and Jean-Luc Nancy engage in a lively dialogue, ranging from consumerism to video games to mysticism and from Spinoza, Hegel, andAugustine to the Marquis de Sade, Marguerite Duras, and Henry Miller.
https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Jean-Luc-Nancy-ebook/dp/B01N2RQ3HT/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=Jean-Luc+Nancy&qid=1592898603&sr=8-9
2011
(In Doing, Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most prominent and l...)
In Doing, Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most prominent and lucid articulators of contemporary French theory and philosophy, examines the precarious but urgent relationship between being and doing.
https://www.amazon.com/Doing-French-List-Jean-Luc-Nancy/dp/0857427849/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Jean-Luc+Nancy&qid=1592898603&sr=8-1
2020
Jean-Luc Nancy was born on July 26, 1940, in Caudèran, France to the family of Roger, an engineer, and Jacqueline (née Gendronneau) Nancy.
Nancy graduated with a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1962, where he worked with Georges Canguilhem. During his time at the Sorbonne, he also worked with Paul Ricoeur, who supervised his Master of Arts thesis on Hegel’s philosophy of religion.
In 1973, he obtained his doctoral degree under the supervision of Paul Ricoeur, for a dissertation on Kant.
In 1987, Nancy received his Docteur d'État from the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail under the supervision of Gérard Granel and a jury including Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida.
Jean-Luc Nancy briefly taught in Colmar before becoming an assistant at the Institut de philosophie at the University of Strasbourg in 1968. In 1973, Nancy became maître-assistant (later maître de conférences) at the Université des Sciences Humaines in Strasbourg, where he remained a professor until his retirement in 2002. He has been a guest professor at numerous universities, among them the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School.
Nancy's research is very diverse and his work challenges the modern idea of systematicity. While he has written on numerous major European thinkers such as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, he has also responded to many key twentieth-century French contemporaries, such as Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. The philosopher's most important topics include the question of community, the nature of the political, German Romanticism, psychoanalysis, literature, technology, and hermeneutics.
Jean-Luc Nancy began publishing his work in the 1970s. Two of his earliest books, Le titre de la lettre: Une lecture de Lacan (1972; The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan) and L'absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand (1978; The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism), were co-written with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Le titre de la lettre is a close reading of Jacques Lacan's essay "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud." According to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, the Lacanian discourse remains metaphysical because meaning is understood as the origin of the play of signifiers.
In the same period, Nancy wrote another two books entitled La remarque spéculative (1973; The Speculative Remark) and Le discours de la syncope. I. Logodaedalus (1976; The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus). In Le discours de la syncope, on Kant, Nancy deals with a similar problem: how the supposed subversion of metaphysics becomes recuperated within metaphysics? However, another important question investigated in this book is the problem of presentation (Darstellung). Together with Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy returns to this problem in L'absolu littéraire. In this book, they address the manner in which the early German Romantics responded to the crisis of presentation. L'absolu littéraire is also important because it marks the beginning of Nancy's thinking on the nature of the fragment and on the fragmentary demand.
In 1980, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe organised a Cérisy-Colloquium on Derrida’s work, Les fins de l’homme (The Ends of Man). This conference also constituted the beginning of an in-depth exploration of the notion of the political and a beginning for posing the question about the interconnections between deconstruction and politics. In the same year, they also formed the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique. Two books, Rejouer le politique (1981) and Le retrait du politique (1983), were results of the Centre’s work (most of its important papers were translated into English in 1997 as Retreating the Political). While the Centre was closed in 1984, Nancy continued to investigate the questions of community and politics.
The result of this investigation became La communauté désoeuvrée (1986; The Inoperative Community), an examination of the idea of community. In this well-known work, "Nancy shows that [community] is neither a project of fusion nor production. Rather, he argues, community can be defined through the political nature of its resistance against immanent power."
In 1987, Jean-Luc Nancy became docteur d’état in Toulouse, with recognition from the jury (among the jury members were Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida). His supervisor was Gérard Granel. Nancy's dissertation was published as L'expérience de la liberté (1988; The Experience of Freedom), a study focusing on the notion of freedom in Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. It also marks Nancy’s return to a critical engagement with Heidegger"s fundamental ontology and especially with the notion of Mitsein or "being-with."
The most important work from this period of Nancy's career is Être singulier pluriel (1996; Being Singular Plural), which continues to explore some of the crucial themes presented in L'expérience de la liberté and which, in addition to the same-titled essay, Être singulier pluriel, consists of five shorter essays. The key argument of the book is again that our being is always "being-with" and that our existence is always already co-existence. Together with the exploration of this central concern, Nancy engages other important topics, among them national sovereignty, war and technology, and identity politics.
In the 1990s, Nancy started a new project that he entitled "a deconstruction of Christianity." The results were two books: La Déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme 1 (2005; Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity) and L'Adoration: Déconstruction du christianisme 2 (2010; Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II). However, during this period, Nancy also experienced a serious illness. He received a heart transplant in the beginning of the 1990s in the midst of his long-term fight with cancer. His short text L’intrus (2000; The Intruder) offers a personal account of his condition, and it inspired the film of the same name directed by Claire Denis in 2004.
Alongside his collaborations with different artists (e.g., choreographer Mathilde Monnier), Jean-Luc Nancy writes on contemporary art and regularly contributes to exhibition catalogues. He has written on the artists On Kawara (Technique du présent: essai sur On Kawara; 1997) and Jean Michel Atlan (Atlan: Les Détrempes; 2010), and his book L'evidence du film (2001; The Evidence of Film) is on the work of the Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami. While Nancy's most important philosophical reflections on art can be read in the book Les Muses (1994; The Muses), he does not limit himself to theory and criticism, but has also written poetry and theatrical texts, including an adaptation of Goethe's Faust, Part One for an installation by the artist Claudio Parmiggiani.
(In Doing, Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most prominent and l...)
2020(In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy e...)
2002(Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French no...)
2011Nancy's position concerning contemporary religion and post-secular theology is unequivocal. He attacks not only the resurgence of religion in the social and political discourse of the West, but also the post-secular effort to show that religion has never been vanquished by secularization and retains all its vital significance in Western culture (albeit somewhat discordant and fragmentary in nature). He categorically dismisses post-secular theology's gesture of refusing secularization and awaiting the coming of a god as merely an activity of reflective immanence that closes people off from the undecidability of the future. Moreover, unremitting efforts to render divinity un-representable by fragmenting its signification through all cultural discourse (philosophy, ethics, legality, poetry) have served only to corrode the very nature of representation and disseminate "the god" into every "spiritual" activity culture entertains.
Generally speaking, Nancy rarely looks to religion for respectable addresses of discourse and, moreover, suggests that Christianity is especially deserving of deconstruction. Although Nancy speaks of Christianity as "empty," and deserving of further emptying, he does remark that the future of Christianity will be "the West coming out from the self-deconstruction of Christianity," a "to-come" that will not resemble traditional or contemporary versions of this faith. One should be open to whichever form of "coming" comes, but that is not to say that this awaiting should be eschatologically charged with redemptive values. It would be difficult to ignore the rebuke in his claim that a "sickening traffic has grown up around a so-called return of the spiritual and of the religious," typified by the triumph of religion in post-Communist Poland, the demise of Communism, the emergence of Islam as a geopolitical force and so on (and one could add the religious revival at American universities).
Nancy's main philosophical themes often circle around social and political philosophical problems, like the question of how to develop the modern society with 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.
Nancy's writings constantly engage those post-Kantian German thinkers - Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger - who declare, each in his own way, that philosophy has come to an end. Both his critical commentaries on philosophical texts and his attempts to rethink the terms in which political and social philosophy are cast take their point of departure from what Heidegger called "the end of philosophy." This phrase means, for Nancy, that the resources of representation have been exhausted: philosophy can no longer claim to bring the essence of a phenomenon into view on the basis of a unified subject of any sort. Since philosophy has come to an end, and since it cannot be simply overcome, there is no choice but to repeat the history of philosophy. There are two ways to undertake this repetition: either ignore the end of philosophy and proceed to rework previous philosophical positions, or expose philosophy to its end and thus develop a "finite" thought of community, sharing, meaning, freedom - to name a few of the topics Nancy has explored in detail. By re-examining these topics from the perspective of what Jacques Derrida has called the "closure of metaphysics," Nancy has made a significant contribution to the general project of deconstructing the history of Western metaphysics.
Nancy's readings of philosophical texts closely match those of Derrida. What distinguishes his writings from other versions of "deconstruction" is his decision to rethink certain topics often associated with existentialism. By reconsidering such topics as existence, abandonment, embodiment, freedom, community, and communism on the basis of a more rigorous reading of Hegel and Heidegger than any of the existentialists could claim, Nancy has been able to disclose significant political and social dimensions to the project of deconstruction. His attempts to rethink these terms are all oriented on one "fact": existence is without essence. Nancy does not proclaim, as does Sartre, that "existence precedes essence" but that existence precedes, exceeds, and succeeds itself, for existence is sheer non-coincidence with itself. From its inception, philosophy has interpreted the "fact" that existence precedes itself by representing it in terms of a subject that underlies and is thus prior to its various attributes and accidents. Even when the subject is viewed as an ideal or as an incomplete project, the basic structure of "infinite" and thus "onto-theological" thought remains intact: the subject grounds itself in its prior or future essence. The "finite thought" Nancy proposes never proceeds beyond the "fact" that existence is without essence and without ground. Forever receding from representation, existence consists of an exposure to the groundlessness of being.
One of the most innovative aspects of Nancy’s work is the way in which it brings the existential analysis of Being and Time into conjunction with Heidegger's late reflections on Ereignis ("event of appropriation"). Nancy presents being (être) not as the essence of things or the ground of phenomena but as a "free" and "generous" event: being takes place as existence. Since existence cannot support itself, it can never be alone or on its own. "Being in common" thus defines "finite" existence. No one participates in anything when existence takes part in, or "shares" being. Existence can even be understood as co-exposure to the absence of anything held in common as long as this absence is not then represented as something communal or "socially useful" work could seek to repair. If "being in common," which Nancy associates with "the political" as opposed to "politics," is represented in terms of a programme for securing what society lacks, it - and therefore the "political" - are destroyed. Drawing on Kant's thesis of radical evil, Nancy presents the destruction of "being in common" in L'Expérience de la liberté (The Experience of Freedom, 1993) as "wickedness."
Many of Nancy's later writings explore the bodily character of "being in common." Thought itself is presented as bodily: to think is not simply to weigh various options but to be weighed down. The kind of thinking that takes its point of departure from the "fact" that existence cannot be represented is indistinguishable from touching, for, according to Nancy, to touch and to be touched are two modes of being at the limit of representation. Nancy thus counters the Kantian conception of thought as spontaneity with "passive" thinking whose "passion" consists in an exposure to an always antecedent sense. Sens ("sense," "meaning"), according to Nancy, precedes and exceeds all signification; it cannot be grasped, granted, discovered or produced. As long as the body is the locus of sense, it cannot be securely located, only absolved, shared, and parcelled out: "There is no whole, no totality of the body - but its absolute separation and sharing out. There is no such thing as the body. There is no body." All of Nancy's explorations of the political and social dimensions of deconstruction assign themselves the same task as his writings on "the body": they gesture toward what allows for and what destroys "being in common."
Jean-Luc Nancy married Claire Matet on July 11, 1963. The couple has two children: Anne and Geneviève.