Jean-Luc Nancy is a philosopher. He is not simply a “thinker” or a “theorist”. Of course, philosophers spend their time thinking, often in the most theoretical and abs...

Volume 29, Issue 3, June 2024, Page 82-89.

Mourning is predominantly understood as an emotional process caused by the loss of a beloved other. This is challenged in this article on Hervé Guibert's 1990 La Pudeur ou l'impudeur, a documentary in which the author and photographer represents his physical and emotional suffering through the last stages of HIV-AIDS. The article explores this suffering via the idea of ‘self-mourning’, which denotes Guibert's reflection on his own mortality in the light of terminal illness. In particular, the article focuses on what (...) happens to the notion of time in mourning against the backdrop of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

In this paper, in the first place, I aim to enquire into Bernard Stiegler’s critical appropriation of his mentor Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance, emphasizing how Stiegler’s philosophy of technology stems from an original interpretation of the main tenets of deconstruction. From this perspective, I will investigate Stiegler’s definition of technology as tertiary retention, i.e., exosomatized, artificial memory interrelating with biological memory, testing its hermeneutic strengths as well as possible weaknesses. In the second place, I aim to contrast Stiegler’s understanding (...) of technology with the concept of multistability brought forward by postphenomenological philosophies of technology such as those elaborated by Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek. This investigation will enable me to submit that Stiegler’s approach represents a peculiar and innovative way to conceive of technology. On the one hand, indeed, it does not seem to fall prey to the criticisms raised by postphenomenology against traditional philosophies of technology such as Martin Heidegger’s or Jacques Ellul’s, deemed to be overly deterministic, abstract and pessimistic in their understanding of technology. On the other, it retains important methodological precautions from deconstruction, thereby pointing at some possible blind spots of postphenomenology, especially concerning the vexed question of the empirical-transcendental divide, which Stiegler aims to develop beyond both Derrida’s and postphenomenology’s stances. (shrink)

The question of the body spans across the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, from Noli me tangere, to Corpus and Jacques Derrida’s dialogue with Nancy in On Touching. In constant conversation with Christianit...

The question of the body spans across the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, from Noli me tangere, to Corpus and Jacques Derrida’s dialogue with Nancy in On Touching. In constant conversation with Christianity (“This is my body” or Dis-Enclosure), corporeality in Nancy can be summarised using the figure of the “exposed body (corps ex-peausé)”: a demonstration of the surface of the skin (peau) and an exposition of the self to the other in the sense of a “staging” (Corpus). In my work, (...) the concept of the “spread body,” situated between Descartes’ “extended body” and Husserl’s “lived body,” is also one of a confrontation with the “This is my body” of Christianity (The Wedding Feast of the Lamb). In confronting one with the other, it is a matter of seeing how my expansion of the body, says something different than, or articulates differently, Jean-Luc Nancy’s exposition of the body, this time drawn from the biological side though nevertheless without ceasing to be intentional. It is certainly a matter of philosophy, but also of ethics, in the possibility of describing such a body, especially in the suffering situation of palliative care (Ethics of the Spread Body). (shrink)

In the perhaps most decisive reopening of philosophy in the twentieth century, Heidegger presented an existential analytic. This can be viewed as the highly complex analysis of one simple action: being-there. In the paper at hand, a Spinozist interpretation of this action is proposed. This implies a shift in the Aristotelian conceptuality, which, to a large extent, informs Heidegger’s analysis. The action of being-there is not a movement from potentiality to actuality. It is a force of existence. However, this force (...) is located right at the threshold between potentiality and actuality. Accordingly, it is not a matter of dismissing Aristotle’s concepts, but—with Heidegger—to observe carefully their deconstruction and pursue it to the point where these concepts become indistinct and where—beyond Heidegger—a Spinozian force of existence emerges. (shrink)

Although scars never disappear completely, in time most people will basically get used to them. In this paper I explore what it means to habituate to scars against the background of the phenomenological concept of incorporation. In phenomenology the body as Leib or corps vécu functions as a transcendental condition for world disclosure. Because of this transcendental reasoning, phenomenology prioritizes a form of embodied subjectivity that is virtually dis-embodied. Endowing meaning to one’s world through getting engaged in actions and projects (...) is most successful indeed when one’s body is “absent,” “transparent,” or, at least, if it is not in the center of one’s attention. This taken-for-granted nature can be disturbed by discomfort, disability, and disfigurement. Incorporation, so I explain, aims at maintaining or restoring the body’s taken-for-grantedness. My analysis of the case of a woman who successfully habituated to her mastectomy scar demonstrates, however, that habituation to a perceptible scar can only be understood partly in terms of incorporation. Next to a decrease of explicit attention for the scar and the discomfort it produces, the scar should also stop being a sign that refers to something else than itself. This is only possible, I argue, by taking the body’s materiality seriously, rather than it being wiped out as a result of transcendental reasoning. (shrink)

Law and literature, an exemplary product of the textual turn in the study of culture, has found itself challenged by the more recent visual turn in critical thought. However, debate hitherto has been largely based on a two-dimensional approach to the visual. By going beyond the metaphor of the ‘legal screen’ in favour of a theory of the ‘statuesque’, this essay adds a new dimension to the way we think about the force of law in culture. Drawing on eighteenth-century and (...) contemporary aesthetic theory, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century public art, the article presents an account of the political aesthetics of law in which a place for the possibility of justice may be made. (shrink)

While fidelity is a crucial aspect of Jacques Derrida’s thinking as it pertains to issues of faith, ethics, and responsibility, this key position in deconstructionist discourse has hardly yet been brought to light. Less still have the biopolitical resonances of Derrida’s work, with its careful attention to the terms and stakes of life particularly in his later writing, been considered as a deconstructionist practice of fidelity and infidelity in its own right. In pursuing these threads, this essay argues that thinking (...) a deconstructionist ethics through fidelity and biopolitics makes possible the crafting of a new philosophical weave for catching our responsibilities to others – to the very otherness of life itself – that Derridean hospitality opens up. Taken together in this way, a deconstructionist fidelity to life otherwise, to a biopolitics to come, makes possible an infidelity to political order as we know it that explodes the limitations of biopolitical theory. In squinting, blinking, tearing up, and listening, the borders of life are blurred in an ambivalent ethics of a transness within which life itself is made to waver and arrive anew. (shrink)

This essay locates Jean-Luc Nancy's analyses, developed in relation to three invented terms, expeausition, excription, sexistence, in a threefold context: between Immanuel Kant on experience and Heidegger on existence; with Derrida on rethinking life and death ( lavielamort); and as a response to the alteration in phenomenology consequent on a transposition of key themes out of the German speaking context of the analyses of Husserl and Heidegger into the French language context of the French reception. An intensification ( survie) of (...) life forces may arrive in a ‘living on’ ( survivre) where thought processes only partially brought to expression in the lifetimes of their originators acquire precision and definition in moments of extremity, danger and horror, adding a fourth dimension to the initial three. (shrink)

In this article the author traces the limits of the philosophy and politics of recognition as manifest in colonial settler contexts. Forms of property ownership and ways of being, sutured by the racial body, are contained by a restricted economy of owning, knowing and being. Bringing the concept of plasticity to bear on the relationship between the body, property and the colonial, the author illuminates the ways in which practices of ownership that exceed the restricted economy of recognition exhibit a (...) temporal and spatial plasticity in the context of the Palestinian struggles over land in the West Bank. (shrink)

This paper explores Jean‐Luc Nancy's philosophical reflection on surviving his own heart transplant. In ‘The Intruder’, he raises central questions concerning the relations between what he refers to as a ‘proper’ life, that is, a life that is thought to be one's own singular ‘lived experience’, and medical techniques, shaped at this particular historical juncture by cyclosporine or immuno‐suppresssion. He describes the temporal nature of an ever‐increasing sense of strangeness and fragmentation which accompanies his heart transplant. In doing so, Nancy (...) opens up the concealed of transplantation in terms of the problematic ‘gift’ of a ‘foreign’ organ, the unremitting suffering intrusiveness of the treatment regimen, and the living of life as ‘bare life’. He uncovers and exposes the relentless uncanniness that pervades the post‐transplant experience, which for him is an example of our humanistic, never‐ending impulse, to alter ourselves. Nevertheless, Nancy offers no answer to this dilemma, but instead calls us to think about the meaning or ‘sense’ of the prolonging of life and deferring of death, which currently drives our medical interventions. (shrink)

In this article, I go deeper into the educational meaning of tiredness. Over and against the mainstream view that tiredness is an impediment for education, I show that this phenomenon is intrinsically meaningful. My arguments are based, first, on a detailed phenomenological analysis of tiredness, as proposed by Buytendijk. Tiredness can be defined as the point where lack of willpower and lack of ability become utterly indistinguishable. Second, I turn to Agamben’s genealogy of the will, which shows that willpower was (...) invented in order to control a more original, but also more arcane sense of what it means to be able to do something: potentiality. I argue that tiredness, as analysed by Buytendijk, is a state of potentiality. As such it has the power to interrupt the contemporary ordering of society and of the realm of education, which is fully predicated upon individual wilful self-commandment. More positively speaking, tiredness has an important educational value in that it grants the opportunity of beginning anew with the world. This article is also an attempt to show how phenomenological work and genealogical approaches can inform one another. (shrink)

This paper seeks to elucidate Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s shared understanding of faith by providing a phenomenology of faith. This is accomplished by applying Nancy’s conception of experience to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, of which this paper thus offers a phenomenological reading in order to analyse the experience of faith its pseudonymous author relates. In doing so, however, we will discover that faith belongs to a realm of experience that is more fundamental than, and thus takes priority over, the (...) lived-experience of classical phenomenology: it is an experience of life as a whole that as such forms the basis on which things are subsequently lived in experience. Faith is therefore held up as the prime example of the phenomenologically primary sense of “experience”: namely, the experience in which a life lived consists, the experience of undergoing life itself; the experience that, as Nancy puts it enigmatically, is existence. Since classical phenomenology fails to think this experience that makes its lived-experiences possible, the paper suggests that phenomenology should turn itself into poetics: namely, a discourse on the creative forms of life that constitute all lived-experiences. To that end, the paper proceeds in four steps: the first step consists in an exposition of the phenomenological framework used ; the second and third steps consist in applications of said framework to Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith; the fourth and final step draws on Nancy to spell out the consequences of the preceding analysis. (shrink)

Статтю присвячено дослідженню дискурсу як механізму контролю тілесності. Використовуючи методологічні підходи, автор пропонує прояснити основні теоретичні засади, що лежать в основі дослідження дискурсу та концепту тілесності.В статті розкриваються та описуються основні підходи до визначення дискурсу також аналізуються різні концепти тілесності. Автор виявляє зміни у соціокультурному середовищі та приходить до висновку, що вплив медійного дискурсу змінює сутнісні характеристики концепту жіночої краси. Так у сучасному суспільстві з’являються певні метаморфози щодо ставлення до жіночого тіла, змінюються нормативні тілесні канони та практики їх досягнення.У тексті (...) розглядається поняття дискурсу не лише як засобу висловлення думок, але й сукупності комунікативних дій. Дискурс артикулює соціальні уявлення та досягає комунікативного ефекту, впливаючи на тих, хто говорить і слухає. Текст аналізує роль дискурсу в формуванні ідентичності та визначенні тілесності в суспільстві.Зазначається, що дискурсивні практики створюють смисли, індивід не є вільним суб’єктом, а полем для різних дискурсів. Влада дискурсу конструює тіло людини, формуючи його під впливом соціальних, економічних та культурних процесів.У зазначених теоретиків, таких як М.Фуко, Р.Барт, і Ж. одрийяр, висвітлено вплив дискурсу на тіло в контексті влади, моди та споживання. Акцент робиться на сучасному медійному дискурсі, який конструює ідеали жіночої тілесності. В заключній частині статті автор підкреслює, що у сучасному суспільстві ідеали тілесності формуються медіа, особливо через телебачення та інтернет. Людина стає залежною від впливу масової культури, текст констатує важливість медіа-дискурсу в конструюванні «нормативної зовнішності» та його ролі в формуванні ідентичності жінок у сучасному суспільстві. (shrink)