Abstract
This brief introduction outlines the scope and tenor of the essays that compose the current special issue of Cultural Politics devoted to Jean-Luc Nancy. It makes a case for the relevance of his multifaceted work in a time of perpetual crisis, while also showing its resistance to becoming a totalizing paradigm awaiting “application” within specific contexts. Foregrounding a new alignment of bodies and worlds, the introduction situates Nancy as a thinker of ever-new beginnings, a thinker attuned to the uniqueness of each and every present, those world-shaking moments that he experienced while still in life, as well as the moments still to come and that demand our thoughtful care.
Philosophy confronts a profound anxiety. Climate change, habitat and species loss; ubiquitous sociopolitical disillusionment and unrest; the stalling of progress, if not revocation, of civil rights and liberties, as gender and race remain markers of oppression; the proliferation of populism in increasingly insidious forms; eruptions of regressive, brutal wars, which sovereign states refuse to declare but remain keen to conduct; threats to security, privacy, labor, and inherited modes of living, posed by big data and artificial intelligence—anxiety is not short on fuel. The urgency of these crises—a word that circulates like an effaced, valueless coin from mouth to mouth—is equaled only by their complexity, both in isolation and in their often subterranean interrelations. Philosophy can certainly not afford to remain idle. And yet, any attempt to articulate a response must run up against an inescapable tension. On the one hand, philosophy must heed to the urgency of these crises; it must be timely and pertinent, attentive to specificity; on the other hand, it must provide a rare site of repose, a different temporality of patient reflection on the conditions of crisis and on its own previous responses to other crises, even as these responses have for the most part—and perhaps at philosophy's best moments—taken the form of even more incisive questions.
This tension manifests itself in all present crises, but its impact is most apparent in the most dramatic of instances. Events as distinct as the COVID-19 pandemic, already receding into oblivion, and the seemingly interminable Gaza-Israel conflict are marked by the same profusion of wayward rhetorics and insular discourses that run up against a radical impatience and unwillingness to listen, engage in dialogue, measure and ameliorate responses. The urgency of these crises is offered as alibi for the haste with which the latter are articulated—or rather disarticulated—from the domain of media to the highest echelons of political decision-making. However, not only do such crises last longer than these discourses would have us believe—years of lockdowns and of relentless killing are not all that ephemeral—but epidemics and war have been with us long enough to assume their gravity responsibly; only we are urged on headlong less like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, and more like distracted onlookers to the next spectacle of disaster.
Jean-Luc Nancy was one of the few thinkers that confronted this task, faithfully and rigorously inhabiting the tension between urgency and patience. While composing some of the most pregnant theoretical works at the turn of the new century, Nancy diligently queried the historical, epistemological, and technological processes that have fashioned our predicament and bore caring witness to the vicissitudes entailed in it. As a thinker of difference and materiality in the wake of poststructuralism, he confronted the dissolution of the inherited principles of metaphysics, sharing in this work of explicating the Western tradition as one of the key sources of the crises of modernity with other developments in the humanities and social sciences—from affect theory to ecopoetics, from the material turn to speculative fiction, from decolonial studies to Anthropocene literature.
A cursory look at Nancy's book titles attests to his commitment to think the present rigorously. After composing the seminal theoretical work, The Sense of the World (1997), Nancy returned almost obsessively during the last twenty years of his life to the fate of this world, assaulted by rampant techno-capitalist forces. In books such as The Creation of the World or Globalization (2007), What's These Worlds Coming To? (2011), The Possibility of a World: Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin (2017), and The Fragile Skin of the World (2020), to name only a few of his interventions, Nancy's concern and care for the present kept finding fecund ways to aid us to carry forth. Indeed, there may be no more relevant, no more pressing and abiding question in the age of bio-techno-political isolation, psycho-existential solitude, tribal ideological insularity, cultural-religious factionalism, and military fractiousness than the possibility of a shared world. Nancy never settled this question, which the world itself leaves de facto and de jure open, demanding that it be answered anew, each time uniquely yet also, each time, in the patience of the memory of what all past worlds have handed down to us.
Perhaps no title evokes Nancy's sense of responsibility, his commitment to responding to the unique urgency of the present as eloquently as that of one of his minor works: After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes (2012). It is, of course, a provocation. For Nancy it is imperative to realize that one catastrophe cannot be exchanged for another, that suffering is not an abstract value circulating across media platforms until its shock value expires, that every assault to the world is unique, whether this be our world, or the worlds of others. For while there has been no paucity of publications from Western philosophers for all the crises that directly impinge on their lives, hardly any have taken the time to respond patiently to a distant event, easily waved off as an accidental misfortune, a disastrous confluence of nature and technics, beyond the scope of human agency and thus out of this world altogether. Nancy's counterexample, as a way of practicing thought, is thus as important as his ideas, if it is at all possible to speak in a way that sunders the integrity of his philosophical gesture.
Passing from a minor to one of his major works, one discovers the fecundity of philosophical patience in thinking the present. Corpus (2006), arguably Nancy's most widely known book, initiated a trilogy that thematized the experience of corporeality in a way that broke with traditional ways of addressing the body. This thematization coalesced through a series of laborious readings in the notions of spacing, freedom, sharing, sense, exscription, touch, and desire, among others. In his dialogue with Boyan Manchev, conducted in 2009 and presented here for the first time to an American and international public, Nancy was asked to clarify the shift in his thinking from articulating an abstract phenomenological experience of the body to the unwavering post-phenomenological commitment of voicing the desire of bodies, stretching and tensing. Nancy's critique of the analytics of “being-there” (Dasein) in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) recasts our being-in-the-world in terms of corporeal materiality. In his dialogue with Manchev, Nancy explicates his reframing of the question of the world as a matter of desire of bodies in their profound plurality, a desire of being for being, proceeding not merely out of a lack, but as a generative conatus of the exterior within, a principle of plenitude in the heart of being that pushes bodies onward and toward one another.
Nancy pursued this world desire up to the end of his life with texts such as Cruor (2023), which together with a series of other essays, compose Corpus III. In this long arc of exploration, which is nothing but a diagnosis of the present, a description, and a prescription at once, the cosmos as an ordered whole has been abandoned only for the self, or as Nancy would dare to say, the “soul,” to discover itself abandoned to the world of bodies. The soul is “exscribed” into a world of bodies, the implications of which emerge in Martin Crowley's contribution. The ethics of such an exscription as Donovan Stewart's contribution makes clear is no less a matter of hospitality between the soul and the body, the self and self, me and you. Similarly, Marita Tatari showcases how the politics of Nancy's worlds of bodies generate an original notion of causation, while Peter De Graeve explores ontological diffraction at the heart of corporeality. These are some indications of the ways in which the essays of this special issue of Cultural Politics pursue familiar as well as less examined themes in Nancy's corpus. Importantly, their aim is not only to appraise the potential of this work to think the extended moment of crisis that composes the present, but also to test and critique the limits of Nancy's thought, in light of this crisis. Through this double movement, these essays strive to elicit the currency of Nancy's work today.
In the preceding, we have singled out corporeality as a heading around which the currency of Nancy's work can be articulated and through which many of the present contributions can be read. Other headings, however, constituting one of the essays’ foci can serve no worse in clustering around it the remainder of this issue's essays, not by constituting thematic sections but by offering interweaving threads of inquiry: (1) the ongoing relevance of ontology in the face of critiques from within the humanities, disqualifying its pertinence in the face of contemporary crises; (2) life as both concept and practice and the potential for repair in a state of pervasive damage; (3) nonanthropocentric ways of looking at the nonhuman and the other-than-human; (4) the complex demands and promises of hospitality; (5) the lingering question of causality in historic processes; and (6) the world at large as a philosophical problem in the age of radical world transformation.
Despite the modularity of Nancy's thought that allows each of the above headings to become a prism for the rest, a definite structure and sequence had to be decided on for the present collection. Accordingly, the issue opens with two contributions that situate Nancy's engagement with the history of metaphysics. Peter De Graeve's essay, “The Unbroken Spell: Some Comments on Ontology,” approaches this task thematically, showing that ontology, the most traditional of discourses, reinstates itself in the midst of even the most stringent efforts to break with it. De Graeve examines Jean-Luc Nancy's and Karen Barad's parallel attempts to think a nonontological diffraction of being, in which they are persistently haunted by the ontological universality they seek to dispel. As counterpoint, “Truth as Touch: On the Paradigm of Sense Perception in the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy” by Paul Willemarck showcases Nancy's thoroughgoing revision of Aristotelianism, specifically his construal of sense perception and truth as touch. Reading a series of Nancy's texts in tandem with Aristotle's On the Soul, Willemarck demonstrates how the concepts of touch and withdrawal come to the foreground to articulate a new ontology of bodies.
The issue proceeds with two essays that explore the ontology of nonhuman bodies. Bringing Nancy into dialogue with Jean-Christophe Bailly and Olga Tokarczuk, Martin Crowley explores Nancy's under-thematized notion of “exscription.” In his contribution “Exscription and Ecopoetics,” Crowley shows the import of exscription for addressing the nonhuman without being captured by the snares of anthropocentric literary exploitation. The following piece, “Mineral Freedom: Jean-Luc Nancy's Ontology of Matter,” pushes the exploration of the nonhuman further, to consider the inorganic body. Georgios Tsagdis explores the significance of Nancy's aphorism “the stone is free”—a response to Heidegger's “the stone is without world.” Tsagdis argues that the convergence of historico-political and geological forces at the heart of minerality helps recast our understandings of the body, soul, and sense, with far-reaching implications in the age we call “Anthropocene.”
The third section of the issue brings together reflections on the notions of community and hospitality, as well as universality and the singular plurality of the world. Donovan Stewart examines the community of the host and the hosted in the work of Bernard Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, as each lays the emphasis on one of the poles of the relation. In “The Erotic and Pragmatic Senses of Hospitality: Jean-Luc Nancy and Bernard Stiegler's Conversation on Christianity, Politics, and the Ends of Philosophy,” Stewart claims that despite the distinctive ethics that proceed from their opposing perspectives, Stiegler and Nancy share an attentiveness to the sense that informs and structures the relation of hospitality and an emphasis on the need to think through its implications. In “The ‘We’ and the Human Condition: Arendt, Jacobi, Nancy,” Marita Tatari approaches the theme of community through the exchange of three unlikely interlocutors. Engaging Nancy with Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Tatari checks Western philosophy's aspiration to universality, which has been integral to colonial and environmental catastrophe; in its place, the coemergence of “me” and “you” construes a different logic of the event. The section closes with the aforementioned interview of Nancy by Boyan Manchev, titled “Metamorphosis, the World,” translated here for the first time in English and complemented with Manchev's introduction, “The World-Desire.” Manchev relates Nancy's philosophical labor on the notion of world—a notion that brings his work on community to a new register—to his intellectual background and his project of the deconstruction of Christianity. In his engagement with Nancy, Manchev shows that the double necessity to think the here-and-now of the world, and to think beyond this here-and-now, necessitates a metamorphosis of the notion of world.
The issue closes with two intimate reflections on the creative subject. Irving Goh reflects on the apparent absence of melancholy in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy. In his essay “The Melancholic Genius without Melancholia of Jean-Luc Nancy; or, Toward a Reparative Genius,” Goh employs Eve Sedgwick's notion of the “reparative genius” and returns to The Literary Absolute (1978), an early work Nancy coauthored with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, to construe a figure of creativity unencumbered by melancholy. The loss of Nancy—his genius and generosity—motivates the final contribution. In her eulogy “Left in the Dark: Sharing Death with Jean-Luc Nancy,” Aukje van Rooden underscores Nancy's incessant affirmation of life and queries the ways that this gesture may continue beyond the latter's death, in order to establish a community between the past and the future.
We hope that these contributions will not be received as mere Nancy scholarship, but that they will motivate an engagement with the world of Nancy, a world of countless texts and interventions, and through this engagement open new modes of engaging with the singular plurality of the world at large. At the same time, we hope to make apparent that there is nothing doctrinal, nothing unassailable in the world that Nancy invites us to share, that he tempts us to desire, in hope of making new worlds. Even if, however, one is set to leave Nancy's world behind, the passage through it is bound to maintain its resonance and produce its effects in perpetuity. This “internal resonance” constitutes the rare experience of a transformation of thought, an experience that ultimately redoubles the double movement of thinking crisis through Nancy and critiquing the latter through the experience of crisis—for where and when this double movement has been effected, a resonance will continue motivating thought even as this double movement recedes into the quiescence of the unthought.
