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Jean-Luc Nancy | |
|---|---|
 Nancy in 2006 at theEuropean Graduate School | |
| Born | (1940-07-26)26 July 1940 |
| Died | 23 August 2021(2021-08-23) (aged 81) Strasbourg, France |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | University of Paris Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy Deconstruction |
| Institutions | University of Strasbourg European Graduate School |
| Main interests | Literary criticism Ontology Political philosophy Philosophy of technology |
| Notable ideas | The literaryAbsolute,existence asontological responsibility, ontodicy,[1]sense of the world, inoperative community, non-subjectivefreedom,[2]anastasis,[3] dis-enclosure, being singular plural, being-with, sexistence |
Jean-Luc Nancy (/nɑːnˈsiː/nahn-SEE;French:[ʒɑ̃lyknɑ̃si]; 26 July 1940 – 23 August 2021) was a Frenchphilosopher.[4] Nancy's first book, published in 1973, wasLe titre de la lettre (The Title of the Letter, 1992), a reading of the work of FrenchpsychoanalystJacques Lacan, written in collaboration withPhilippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, includingLa remarque spéculative in 1973 (The Speculative Remark, 2001) onGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,Le Discours de la syncope (1976) andL'Impératif catégorique (1983) onImmanuel Kant,Ego sum (1979) onRené Descartes, andLe Partage des voix (1982) onMartin Heidegger.
In addition toLe titre de la lettre, Nancy collaborated with Lacoue-Labarthe on several other books and articles. Nancy is credited with helping to reopen the question of the ground ofcommunity andpolitics with his 1985 workLa communauté désoeuvrée (The Inoperative Community), followingBlanchot'sThe Unavowable Community (1983) andAgamben responded to both withThe Coming Community (1990).[5] One of the very few monographs thatJacques Derrida ever wrote on a contemporary philosopher isOn Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy.[6]
Jean-Luc Nancy graduated in philosophy in 1962 from theUniversity of Paris. He taught for a short while inColmar before becoming an assistant at theStrasbourg Institut de Philosophie in 1968. In 1973, he received hisdoctorate with a dissertation on Kant under the supervision ofPaul Ricœur. Nancy was then promoted toMaître de conférences (associate professor) at theUniversité des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg. In the 1970s and 1980s, Nancy was a guest professor at universities all over the world, from theUniversity of California to theFreie Universität inBerlin. He has been invited as a cultural delegate of the French Ministry of External Affairs to speak inEastern Europe,Britain and theUnited States. In 1987, Nancy became aDocteur d'État at theUniversité de Toulouse-Le-Mirail for a thesis on freedom in Heidegger under the supervision ofGérard Granel. The jury was composed ofJean-François Lyotard andJacques Derrida. It was published asL'expérience de la liberté (1988).
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nancy suffered serious medical problems. He underwent aheart transplant and his recovery was made more difficult by a long-term cancer diagnosis. He stopped teaching and participating in almost all of the committees with which he was engaged, but continued to write. Many of his best known texts were published during this time. An account of his experience,L'intrus (The Intruder), was published in 2000. Nancy was a professor at theUniversity of Strasbourg. Nancy was alsoWilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and Professor of Philosophy at TheEuropean Graduate School.[7]
FilmmakerClaire Denis has made at least two movies inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy and his works. Many other artists have worked with Nancy as well, such asSimon Hantaï,Soun-gui Kim andPhillip Warnell. Nancy has written about the filmmakerAbbas Kiarostami and featured prominently in the filmThe Ister.
Nancy died on 23 August 2021 at the age of 81.[8]
In 1980, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe organized a conference atCentre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle on Derrida and politics entitled "Les Fins de l'homme" ("The Ends of Man"). 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-Labarthe set up in the same year theCentre de Recherches Philosophiques sur la Politique (Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political). The centre was dedicated to pursuing philosophical rather than empirical approaches to political questions, and supported such speakers asClaude Lefort andJean-François Lyotard. By 1984, however, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe were dissatisfied with the direction work at the centre was taking, and it was closed down.[9]
During that period Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy produced several important papers, together and separately. Some of these texts appear inLes Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980 (1981),Rejouer le politique (1981),La retrait du politique (1983), andLe mythe nazi (1991, revised edition; originally published asLes méchanismes du fascisme, 1981). Many of these texts are gathered in translation inRetreating the Political (1997).
Nancy's first book on the question ofcommunity,La Communauté désœuvrée (The Inoperative Community, 1986), is perhaps his best-known work.[10] This text is an introduction to some of the main philosophical themes Nancy continued to work with. Nancy traces the influence of the notion of community to concepts ofexperience,discourse, and theindividual, and argues that it has dominated modern thought. Discarding popular notions, Nancy redefines community, asking what can it be if it is reduced neither to a collection of separate individuals, nor to ahypostasized communal substance, e.g.,fascism. He writes that our attempt to designsociety according to pre-planned definitions frequently leads to social violence andpolitical terror, posing the social and political question of how to proceed with the development of society with this knowledge in mind.La Communauté désœuvrée means that community is not the result of a production, be it social, economic or even political (nationalist) production; it is notuneœuvre, a "work of art" ("œuvre d'art", but "art" is here understood in the sense of "artifice").
"The community that becomesa single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader...) ...necessarily loses thein of being-in-common. Or, it loses thewith or thetogether that defines it. It yields its being-together to a beingof togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being." (Preface, xxxix).
Nancy's dissertation for hisDoctorat d'État looked at the works of Kant,Schelling,Sartre and Heidegger, and concentrated on their treatment of the topic offreedom. It was published in 1988 asL'Expérience de la Liberté (The Experience of Freedom). Since then, Nancy has continued to concentrate on developing a reorientation of Heidegger's work. Nancy treats freedom as aproperty of the individual or collectivity, and looks for a "non-subjective" freedom which would attempt to think theexistential orfinite origin for every freedom. Nancy 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.
Nancy addresses theworld in its contemporary global configuration in other writings on freedom, justice and sovereignty. In his 1993 bookLe sens du monde (The Sense of the World), 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, orexistence, is ourontological responsibility, which precedes political, judicial 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. Thecontingency of our naked existence as an ontological question is the main challenge of our existence in contemporary global society.
All of these themes relating to world are taken up again by Nancy in his 2002 bookLa création du monde ou la mondialisation (The Creation of the World or Globalization), where he makes the distinction between globalization as a deterministic process and mondialisation as an open-ended "world-forming" process. Here, he connects his critique withMarx'scritique of political economy, which saw "free labour" as what produces the world. Nancy argues that an authentic "dwelling" in the world must be concerned with the creation of meaning (enjoyment) and not final purposes, closed essences, and exclusive worldviews. The present system of expanding cities and nodes in the planetary techno-scientific network (tied to capitalism) leads to the loss of world, because the world is treated as an object (globe), even though the self-deconstruction ofontotheology increasingly made it the "subject" of its own creation.
In his bookÊtre singulier pluriel (Being Singular Plural, 2000), Nancy tackles the question of how we can speak of a plurality of a "we" without making 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" (i.e.,Dasein does not precedeMitsein) and that there is no existence without co-existence. In an 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 pre-existent definition.
"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 sovereignty,war andtechnology,ecotechnics,identity, theGulf War andSarajevo. Nancy's central concern in these essays remains the "being-with", which he uses to discuss issues ofpsychoanalysis, politics andmulticulturalism, 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 and has earned respect as an influential philosopher of art and culture. In his bookLes Muses published in 1994 (The Muses, 1996), he begins with an analysis of Hegel's thesis on the death of art. Among the essays inThe Muses is a piece onCaravaggio, originally a lecture given at theLouvre. In this essay, Nancy looks for a different conception ofpainting where painting is not arepresentation of theempirical world, but a presentation of the world, of sense, or of existence. Nancy has published books onfilm andmusic, as well as texts on the problem of representation, on the statute ofliterature, onimage andviolence, and on the work ofOn Kawara,Charles Baudelaire, andFriedrich Hölderlin.
Nancy's textL'intrus formed the basis for French directorClaire Denis's film of the same name.
He has written extensively on film, includingThe Evidence of Film, a short work onAbbas Kiarostami.
Nancy appears in the filmThe Ister, based onMartin Heidegger's 1942 lectures onFriedrich Hölderlin's poem "Der Ister" (published asHölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"). The film focuses on the relation of politics, technology and myth.
Nancy has developed three films in conjunction with artist-filmmaker Phillip Warnell. He appears in their 2009 film Outlandish: 'Strange Foreign Bodies', which also features a text he wrote specifically for the project, Étranges Corps Étrangers. Nancy contributed a poem, 'Oh The Animals of Language' to Warnell's 2014 feature-length film 'Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air'. Warnell and Nancy worked on a new text-film collaboration which was completed in 2017, 'The Flying Proletarian'.
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