This paper compares Sartre's and Nancy's experience of the plurality of beings. After briefly discussing why Heidegger cannot provide such an experience, it analyzes the relation between the in-itself and for-itself in Sartre and between bodies and sense in Nancy in order to ask how this experience can be nauseating for Sartre, but meaningful for Nancy. First, it shows that the articulation of Being into beings is only a coat of veneer for Sartre while for Nancy Being is necessarily plural. (...) Then, it contrasts Nausea as an experience without language with Nancy's thinking of the excription of sense in the thing. (shrink)

A philosophical obituary on Jean-Luc Nancy, who died in 2021, published in the German journal Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie. Ein philosophischer Nachruf auf den 2021 verstorbenen Jean-Luc Nancy, erschienen in der Allgemeinen Zeitschrift für Philosophie.

This article explores the change in meaning of the term `utopia' between 1968 and today. It proposes an interpretation of 1968 based on the connection between utopia and desire; the emergence of subjectivity in history meant a new way of becoming subjects of one's own history, and a new understanding of socio-political change, as including daily life and personal emotions.

Kirjoitus tarkastelee Martin Heideggerin myöhäisajattelussa esiin nousevaa olemisen ainutkertaisuuden (Einzigkeit, Einmaligkeit) teemaa ja sen edelleenkehittelyä Jean-Luc Nancyn ajattelussa. Teeman osoitetaan kytkeytyvän Heideggerin välienselvittelyyn filosofian esisokraattisen alun, erityisesti Parmenideen ajattelun kanssa. Parmenides ajattelee olemista kaikkia yksittäisiä ilmentymiään, "kuolevaisten" äärellisiä "näkemyksiä" (doksai) yhdistävänä absoluuttisen homogeenisena ja itseidenttisenä ilmeisyytenä (alētheia), todellisuuden puhtaana läsnäolona ajattelulle. Tätä vasten Heidegger ajattelee olemisen nimenomaan yksittäisten ilmentymiensä kontekstuaalisena ainutkertaisuutena, mielekkyystilanteiden ainutkertaistavana kontekstualisoitumisena. Nancy jatkaa ajatusta kuvailemalla olemista "ainutkertaiseksi-monikolliseksi" (singulier pluriel), mutta täydentää Heideggerin ajatteluun tunnetusti jäänyttä aukkoa soveltamalla ajatusta (...) yhteisön ajattelemiseen ainutkertaisuuksien yhdessäolemisena ja keskinäisyytenä. Näin avautuva "ainutkertaisuuden politiikan" teema onkin viime vuosikymmeninä noussut mannermaisen poliittisen ajattelun keskiöön. (shrink)

Whether it is a question of apprehension, grasp, or simple contact, the vocabulary of perception clearly points towards the materiality of touch through what we usually think of as just a metaphorical variation. This is what ancient Greek thought recognized, or dimly felt, as a sometimes hidden constant in its history and its project: sensation, which describes the primary access to being, is first of all and above all a way of touching. Far from indicating a simple perceptual realism, this (...) acknowledgement implies a specific idea about the presence of things in the world: touch assumes a surface, and every being, in order to appear and be seen, must therefore be entirely surface, be articulated within a boundary that describes it perfectly. (shrink)

This text is an examination of the democratic public sphere in relation to the presently dominating crisis discourse. More precisely, we endeavor to expose assumptions, aims and consequences entailed by the discourse of crisis, hereafter considered as a rhetorical apparatus asserting that crisis reveals an unambiguous and mandatory nature of things imposing self-evident and thus non deliberative decisions concerning both singular existence and communities. The crisis discourse serves to endorse indisputable certainty and therefore to blur or even suppress indeterminacy. Nevertheless, (...) and it is our guiding allegation formulated mainly in reference to Claude Lefort’s political thought, the possibility of democracy and of its public sphere depends constitutively on a unique indeterminacy. Our analysis proves that restoring certainty cannot but go along with a naturalist fallacy and an abuse of rhetoric power postponing deliberative-shaped democratic practices. This line of reasoning comes to define public sphere as a rhetorical counter-power strategy meant to reassert democratic indeterminacy. (shrink)

In a recent volume titled Demande (Expectation), containing texts written over a period of more than thirty years, but each devoted to different aspects of the relationship between philosophy and literature, Jean-Luc Nancy offers a suggestive account of their mutual genesis and ongoing dialogue in order to underline the way in which, beyond their apparent dialectical reciprocity, philosophy and literature are each inseparable from the unanswered and unanswerable questions they ask themselves and each other. Both, in other words, are said (...) to belong to the “in-between,” that fragile zone of undecidability that, according to Nancy’s reading of Kant, is a salient characteristic of all supposed self-identity. This article explores some of the implications of Nancy’s formulation as it affects the seemingly intractable question of myth’s interruption. It considers in particular some of the problematic features, deriving, it argues, from the inescapable fragility of thought itself, that may to be found in Nancy’s sometimes tense and contradictory engagement with the work of Maurice Blanchot, the subject of two important essays in Demande, which raises probing questions of Nancy’s own philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

Con el objeto de identificar lo que creemos constituye una ontología política posmetafísica en el pensamiento de Bataille –fuertemente vinculada a la práctica de la escritura– el presente trabajo intenta situar la especificidad teórica que ocupa el exceso como problema ontológico en su filosofía, a partir del desarrollo de un recorrido que reflexiona sobre el estatuto de dicho exceso en Lévi-Strauss y el posestructuralismo, por un lado, y en el pensamiento político posfundacional, por el otro.

Con el objeto de identificar lo que creemos constituye una ontología política posmetafísica en el pensamiento de Bataille –fuertemente vinculada a la práctica de la escritura– el presente trabajo intenta situar la especificidad teórica que ocupa el exceso como problema ontológico en su filosofía a partir del desarrollo de un recorrido que reflexiona sobre el estatuto de dicho exceso en Lévi-Strauss y el posestructuralismo, por un lado, y en el pensamiento político posfundacional, por el otro.

En el presente texto proponemos realizar un primer trazado de una zona de correspondencia entre cuerpo y materialidad, para replantear esta materialidad a partir de ciertas categorías conceptuales. La hipótesis planteada es que hay determinadas concepciones del cuerpo en el pensamiento del siglo XX en adelante que suponen una materialidad no reductible a principios de determinación, una materialidad emparentada con la libertad, donde la necesidad se subsume a la contingencia concreta de los cuerpos. Nos proponemos bosquejar una construcción conceptual de (...) materialidad que pueda articular diferentes pensamientos que incluyen al cuerpo de un modo relevante, especialmente el de Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

This article introduces a distinction between two ways of thinking the common and the political in contemporary, post-foundational political thought which I call “political” and “impolitical”. Both stances share the idea that the community is both impossible and necessary. Nonetheless, while the political perspective seeks to think a new political subjectivity to produce a new commonality, the impolitical will try to think ways of desubjectification in order to avoid cooperating with any form of Power. The paper tries to show their (...) useful insights and to point out their limits to re-think the common and politics in times of neoliberal governmentality. (shrink)

A partir de las lecturas realizadas por Blanchot y Derrida sobre la obra de Artaud, sostenemos aquí que el descentramiento antrópico de la escritura permite repensar un materialismo que hace justicia a la organolepsia impersonal del arte toda vez que no la reduce al horizonte representativo humano. En el recorrido que proponemos, la lógica que Blanchot y Derrida recuperan de la obra artaudiana implica una reconfiguración de la noción de superficie y fuerza que, concomitantemente, expone un nuevo planteo ontológico y (...) estético. Dicha propuesta revela la necesidad de una distancia con respecto al horizonte moderno para acoger la potencia inorgánica de los materiales sin expropiarlos de su animación y, a la vez, reivindicar lo viviente sin plegarlo a las condiciones de lo humano. (shrink)

On the Theological Legitimacy of DemocracyThe following study attempts to inquire on the possibility of a theological discourse on democracy. It reflects, first of all, the multiple forms of the political theology and describes one specific scenario, that of a hermeneutical relation between the two poles. The next step is to identify concrete historical forms of this relation and depicts two main possibilities: the ideological religious legitimation of the political and the messianic vocation as original tension that makes possible both (...) discourses . Two ways of conceiving democracy are further discussed: the “ideological” democracy and the “dialectical” form, that assume the absolute transcendence of its subjects. (shrink)