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'Jean-Luc Nancy' (born July 26, 1940) is a French philosopher.
Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was ''Le Titre de la Lettre'', written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Nancy is the author of numerous works on many different thinkers, including ''Le Discours de la Syncope'' (1976) and ''L’Impératif Catégorique'' (1983) on Immanuel Kant, ''La remarque spéculative'' (translated as ''The Speculative Remark'', 2001) on G. W. F. Hegel, ''Ego sum'' (1979) on René Descartes and ''Le Partage des Voix'' (1982) on Martin Heidegger. He wrote several other books and articles in collaboration with Lacoue-Labarthe. Major influences include Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Contents

Biography

Works

''Les Fins de l'Homme''

''La Communauté désœuvrée''

''L'Expérience de la liberté''

''Le sens du monde''

''Être singulier pluriel''

Artistic analysis

Cinema

Bibliography

Titles in French

English translations

Secondary literature

See also

External links

Biography

Jean-Luc Nancy graduated in philosophy in 1962 in Paris. 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 the supervision of Paul Ricœur. He was then promoted to ''maître de conférences'' at the ''Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg''. 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. In 1987 Nancy received his ''docteur d'état'' from the ''Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail'', under the supervision of Gérard Granel and with a jury including Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. It was published as ''L'expérience de la liberté'' (1988).
In the late 1980s and early 1990s Nancy had to take a break from his active career because of illness. He underwent a heart transplant, and his recovery 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 moving account of his experience entitled ''L'intrus'' (''The Intruder'') was published in 2000. Today he remains an active philosopher, speaking around the world at many philosophical congresses and writing ceaselessly. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg.
Filmmaker Claire 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 as Simon Hantaï and Soun-gui Kim. Nancy has written about the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. He featured prominently in the film ''The Ister''.

Works

''Les Fins de l'Homme''

In 1980, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe organized a conference on Derrida and politics in Cerisy-la-Salle called ''"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 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.”

''La Communauté désœuvrée''

Nancy’s first book on the question of community, ''La Communauté désœuvrée'' (''The Inoperative 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 notion of community to concepts of experience, discourse, and the individual, and argues that it has dominated modern thought. Discarding popular notions, Nancy redefines community, asking what can it be if it is not to be reduced to a society (an economic association based on needs) - and its corrolary, individualism - on one side, or to a hypostased mystic fusion, blood community (fascism), on the other side? Community is not a subject, he argues, finally defining it 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. ''La Communauté désœuvrée'' means that community is not the result of a production, be it social, economic or even political - nationalist - production; it is not ''une '' (which comes from the latin opus), a "work of art" ("œuvre d'art", but "art" is here understood in a large sense). “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 on sovereignty is also a subject of ''La communauté désoeuvrée'', in writing his own ''La communauté inavouable'' (trans. ''The Unavowable Community'' in 1988) as a response to Nancy. They would continue to participate in dialogue together until Blanchot's death.

''L'Expérience de la liberté''

Nancy's dissertation for his ''docteur d'etat'' 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 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, as Nancy had already shown in ''The Inoperable Community''.

''Le sens du monde''

Nancy addresses the world in its contemporary global configuration in other writings on freedom, justice and sovereignty. In his book ''Le sens du monde'' (1993, trans. ''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, 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.

''Être singulier pluriel''

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 (i.e. a community as a product, or a group of people with a single "essential" characteristic). 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.

Artistic analysis

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 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, Baudelaire, and Hölderlin.

Cinema

Nancy's text ''L'intrus'' formed the basis for French director Claire Denis' film of the same name.
He has written extensively on film, notably ''The Evidence of Film'' about Abbas Kiarostami, which also features a conversation between the two.
Nancy appears in the film ''The Ister,'' based on Martin Heidegger's 1942 lectures on Hölderlin's poem "Der Ister" (published as ''Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"''). The film focuses on the relation of politics, technology and myth.

Bibliography

Titles in French

★ ''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.

★ ''Le sens du monde'', Paris, Galilée, 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.

★ ''Nus sommes. La peau des images''. Paris, Klincksieck, 2003. (with Federico Ferrari)

★ ''La déclosion (Déconstruction du christianisme 1)''. Paris, Galilée, 2005.

★ ''Iconographie de l'auteur''. Paris, Galilée, 2005. (with Federico Ferrari)

★ ''Tombe de sommeil'', Paris, Galilée, 2007.

★ ''Juste impossible''. Paris, Bayard, 2007.

English translations

★ ''The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism''. With Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988.

★ ''The Inoperative Community''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

★ ''The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan''. With Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992.

★ ''The Birth to Presence''. Stanford University Press, 1993.

★ ''The Experience of Freedom''. Stanford University Press, 1993.

★ ''The Muses''. Stanford University Press, 1996.

★ ''The Gravity of Thought''. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997.

★ ''Retreating the Political''. With Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; edited by Simon Sparks. London: Routledge, 1997. ISBN 0-415-15163-5.

★ ''The Sense of the World''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

★ ''Being Singular Plural''. Stanford University Press, 2000.

★ ''The Speculative Remark: One of Hegel's Bons Mots''. Stanford University Press, 2001.

★ ''Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative''. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

★ ''A Finite Thinking''. Stanford University Press, 2003

★ ''The Ground of the Image''. Fordham University Press, 2005.

★ ''Multiple Arts (The Muses II)''. Stanford University Press, 2006.

★ ''The Creation of the World or Globalization''. SUNY Press, 2007.

★ ''Listening''. Fordham University Press, 2007.

★ ''Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity''. Fordham University Press, forthcoming.

★ ''Philosophical Chronicles (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)''. Fordham University Press, forthcoming.

Secondary literature

★ Derrida, Jacques. ''On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy''. Stanford University Press, 2005.

★ Hutchens, B.C. ''Jean-Luc Nancy and The Future of Philosophy''. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005.

★ James, Ian. ''The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy''. Stanford University Press, 2006.

★ Kamuf, Peggy, ed. ''On the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy: A Special Issue of Paragraph''. Nov. 1992

★ Sparks, Simon, ed. ''On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy''. Routledge, 1997.

See also

★ deconstruction

★ deconstruction-and-religion

★ List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction

External links

★ Faculty profile at the European Graduate School, includes bibliography, quotations, and video clips.

★ Between Story and Truth by Nancy.

★ Review of ''The Sense of the World'', by David Patrick.

★ The Technique of the Present, lecture given by Nancy in January 1997 at the ''Nouveau Musée'' during the exposition of On Kawara's work.

★ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry

★ Review of ''Being Singular Plural''.

★ Review of ''La Déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme, 1''.

★ Review of "Au ciel et sur la terre. Petite conférence sur « Dieu »", by Elie During.