Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking

Description

Jean-Luc Nancy is one of the leading voices in European philosophy of the last thirty years, and he has influenced a range of fields, including theology, aesthetics, and political theory. This volume offers the widest and most up-to-date responses to his work, oriented by the themes of world, finitude, and sense, with attention also given to his recent project on the "deconstruction of Christianity." Focusing on Nancy's writings on globalization, Christianity, the plurality of art forms, his materialist ontology, as well as a range of contemporary issues, an international group of scholars provides not just inventive interpretations of Nancy's work but also essays taking on the most pressing issues of today. The collection brings to the fore the originality of his thinking and points to the future of continental philosophy. A previously unpublished interview with Nancy concludes the volume.
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction

I. Expositions of the World: Creation, Globalization, and the Legacies of Christianity

1. The Creation of the World
François Raffoul

2. No Other Place to Be: Globalization, Monotheism, and Salut in Nancy
Christina Smerick

3. Christianity’s Other Resource: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Deconstruction of Faith
Alfonso Cariolato

4. Deconstruction and Globalization: The World According to Jean-Luc Nancy
Martin McQuillan

II. Expositions of Ontology, or a Post-Deconstructive Realism

5. Nancy’s Materialist Ontology
Anne O’Byrne

6. On Interface: Nancy’s Weights and Masses
Graham Harman

7. The Speculative Challenge and Nancy’s Post-Deconstructive Realism
Peter Gratton

III. Expositions of the Political: Justice, Freedom, Equality

8. Archi-ethics, Justice and the Suspension of History in the Writing of Jean-Luc Nancy
B. C. Hutchens

9. Jean-Luc Nancy on the Political after Heidegger and Schmitt
Andrew Norris

10. The Task of Justice
David Pettigrew

IV. Expositions of Sense: Art and the Limits of Representation

11. De-monstration and the Sens of Art
Stephen Barker

12. Poetry and Plurality: On a Part of Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Muses
William Watkin

13. Forbidding, Knowing, Continuing:  On Representing the Shoah
Andrew Benjamin

V. Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy:  The Commerce of Plural Thinking

Bibliography of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Works in English

List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie du langage
• Philosophie de la religion
• Philosophy
• Philosophy of religion
• Philosophie de la langue

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 09 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438442280
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SUNY SERIES IN C ONTEMPORARY F RENCH T HOUGHT
 
David Pettigrew and François Raffoul, editors

JEAN-LUC NANCY AND PLURAL THINKING
Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense
E DITED BY
P ETER G RATTON
M ARIE -E VE M ORIN
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Meehan Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jean-Luc Nancy and plural thinking : expositions of world, ontology, politics, and sense / edited by Peter Gratton and Marie-Eve Morin.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary French thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4226-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-4227-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Nancy, Jean-Luc. I. Gratton, Peter. II. Morin, Marie-Eve.
B2430.N364J43 2012
194—dc23
2011025882
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, the series editors, for their support of this project from its earliest stages. We would also like to thank Andrew Kenyon, assistant acquisitions editor at SUNY Press, for his assistance in bringing this project to completion. We want to acknowledge the support from the University of Alberta and the help of Octavian Ion and Mike Lockhart with the editing of the volume and the compiling of the bibliography. Finally, our deepest gratitude goes to Jean-Luc Nancy, who always responded, even through hardship and illness, thoughtfully to the interview questions we sent his way.
ABBREVIATIONS

WORKS BY JEAN-LUC NANCY ARE “Les arts se font les uns contre les autres,” in Art, regard, écoute: La perception à l'œuvre (St-Denis: Les Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2000). BP The Birth to Presence , trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). BSP Being Singular Plural , trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). C Corpus , trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). CW The Creation of the World or Globalization , trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press, 2007). D Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity , trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). EF The Experience of Freedom , trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). FT A Finite Thinking , trans. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). GI The Ground of the Image , trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). GT The Gravity of Thought , trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (New York: Humanities Press, 1997). IC The Inoperative Community , ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). IRS L'« il y a » du rapport sexuel (Paris: Galilée, 2001). M The Muses , trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). MA Multiple Arts: The Muses II , ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). NM Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16:2 (Winter 1990), pp. 291–312. OC On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores , trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). RP Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political , ed. Simon Sparks (New York: Routledge, 1997). SW The Sense of the World , trans. Jeffery Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997). TS “Within my breast, alas, two souls …,” Topoi 25:1–2 (2006), pp. 69–71. TD The Truth of Democracy , trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). WM “War of Monotheism,” trans. Amanda McDonald, Postcolonial Studies 6:1 (2003), pp. 51–53.

OTHER FREQUENTLY CITED WORKS BT Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). CP Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political , expanded edition, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007) FCM Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concept of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude , trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). OT Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy , trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). QT Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays , trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).
INTRODUCTION

Peter Gratton and Marie-Eve Morin
In On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores , Nancy provides an apt meditation on what it means to read in a world in which books have become status symbols and often sit without disturbing us (in the strong sense) on coffee tables and library shelves. Beyond the commodity fetishism of the object, long gone are the days in which the world itself was thought to be a “great book” ( OC , 23). This loss of the importance of books, Nancy argues, has meant that we risk missing the “new stakes, new sense or lost sense,” unique to each work of writing, senses that would bind and unbind us in our reading. In order to do so, what is required is a “play of opening and closing” in reading by which a book becomes the “subject of a reading” ( OC , 35–36). The “closing” of the book refers to the new, literally the unedited ( inédit ), that remains forever illegible to the eyes that scan and remain open onto each page, that is, to what can never be captured synoptically in each reading ( OC , 27).
No doubt, all introductions to books like this one are metonymic of the appeal by books in general: calling on the reader to proceed further, to move on to the essays in order to take in what has been left all-too-unedited or what is new ( inédit ) in this very book. Nancy notes,
A book is an address or an appeal. Beneath the melodic line of its singing there intones, without interruption, the continuous bass of its invitation, of its request, injunction, or prayer: “Read me! Read me!” (And that prayer murmurs still, even when the author declares “Don't read me!” or “Throw my book away!”). ( OC , 12)
We will begin with no such grand declarations. Offered here nevertheless, between the opening and closing of the binding of this book, is a singular-plural exposition of Nancy's plural thinking, divided and linked among four sections on the world, ontology, politics, and sense.
One of the most read and prominent of contemporary French philosophers, Nancy has published more than twenty-five books, along with numerous contributions to journals, art catalogues, and other volumes. He has written on major thinkers in the history of European philosophy, such as Descartes, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Heidegger, and has engaged contemporary French thinkers such as Lacan, Bataille, Blanchot, and Derrida. Nancy's work touches on issues as diverse as psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, globalization, community, Nazism, resurrection, Christian painting, German Romanticism, modern dance, and film and has been influential in reconfiguring numerous debates in Continental philosophy. In Being Singular Plural , Nancy addresses the question of the “with” at the heart of Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Reinitializing Heidegger's analytic of Dasein, Nancy sets out to do no less than reorient our thinking of being to its spacing and plurality, and thus to the plurality of thought and genres of thinking (e.g., artistic, political, theological) necessary for taking on this very plurality. In The Sense of the World and The Creation of the World or Globalization , Nancy provides an important intervention into the question of globalization and what it means to “create” a world beyond the senselessness provided by modern techno-capitalism. In his Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity , he argues that if the world no longer has a meaning or sense provided by a transcendent God, this also means that the world is sense itself. That is to say, we must respond to the world as it is without recourse to transcendental discourses, including the still-theological discourses of modernity operating within the logic of Christianity and its messianism. While charting this rethinking of what “sense” and “world” means, especially in his encounters with the texts of Blanchot and Derrida, Nancy also argues that far from a separation from the world, art presents and brings to the fore, as he argues in The Evidence of Film , the world itself. Art is nothing other than a plurality of art forms that takes in and gives back another sense of the world in its infinite variety.
Nancy thus continues to address the most pertinent questions remaining after Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God. What makes Nancy's work particularly provocative is his care always to write in such a way as to respond to the contemporary situation; his texts are rarely just abstract discussions of age-old philosophical problems. For example, Nancy addresses questions of the sense of the world in light of a certain view of the world as resource that is part of economic globalization. His writings on Christianity not only come at a time of supposed secularism in western Europe, but also at a time of rising fundamentalisms, from the Christian and other religious traditions. It should also be said that Nancy's work