Hutchens Benjamin C. - Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy

Jean-Luc Nancy
and the Future of Philosophy

Jean-Luc Nancy and the
Future of Philosophy

B. C. Hutchens

Contents

Abbreviations

parallel lines meet at infinity, an infinity that must be truly vast to accommodate so many things, dimensions, lines straight and curved and intersecting, the trams that go up these tracks and the passengers inside the trams, the light in the eyes of every passenger, the echo of words, the inaudible friction of thoughts

Jos Saramago

Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, co-founder of the former Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political and author of numerous influential books about meaning, freedom, community, art and politics. However, he is not merely another academic celebrity seduced by the allures of pedantry. His ideas not only bear on social realities; they also stem from them. For approximately a decade, he has endured the suffering of both a heart transplant and cancer, and written profoundly about both in such works as The Heart of Things and LIntrus. It is from Nancy that we learn that, if each part of a body could take over or spread over the body itself, then there is no such thing as body at all, only a sharing out of bodies and their relations (BP: 207). His misfortunes have inspired a relentless enquiry into the meaning of the bodys fragility and fragmentation, the tenuous connections of a community of such bodies, and the plurality of voices that express their sense. The single heart of all things, their sense, he writes, never stops coming into presence, and putting us in its presence, the presence of this concretion of being, always unique and always whatever (BP: 188). Clearly, not even the grievance against human finitude that he could so naturally possess has forced him to lose his spirited fascination with the incertitude and undecidability of discourses that incessantly fail to acquiesce in comprehension. One can only admire the fortitude of a thinker whose thoughts are not swayed by misfortune, but encouraged, deepened and even vindicated by it. Perhaps not since Pascal has a thinkers pained musing been more stirringly apt to the human condition.

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy is a book addressing what this philosopher has written about the future of philosophy and the concept of the future. It surveys Nancys timely insights about the unstable conditions under which existence is always endured and fleetingly understood. Philosophical thoughts are master only of those domains they imagine for themselves; they are as vulnerable to the exigencies of a coming future as all human bodies are. It is with that in mind that Nancy writes of the corpus of philosophy, the catalogue of the ways that bodies have sense only because sense itself is bound to corporeal states and activities open to their own improvidence. Just as philosophy is troubled by the coming of sense, so are bodies in contiguity with and invaded by strangenesses that never cease being a disturbance and a perturbation of intimacy (L: 2). There is something foreign in us all, and in this respect we are each equally exposed to our shared strangeness. When the invader exposes bodies strangeness to themselves, then the philosopher is exposed to what Jos Saramago calls the inaudible friction of thoughts (see epigraph). But if there are only bodies, then every reader of this corpus should recognize the sharing in the community of bodies this necessarily brings to presence. Despite the cacophony of voices in which we philosophers share, we are nonetheless answerable to this inaudible friction between our thoughts of what is to come for our bodies and what we represent our bodies to be.

It is appropriate, then, to dedicate this book in gratitude to Jean-Luc Nancy himself. It is as much about the man as it is the stimulations his ideas have undoubtedly provided to appreciative readers.

In this book, it has been my objective to survey the relevance of Nancys expansive vision to many contemporary philosophical concerns, all of which relate to the question of the future of our time and the status of the concept of the future today. I have chosen to present Nancys critiques of various prevailing contemporary presuppositions: in particular, the substantialist, transcendentalist and immanentist metaphysics are discernible in the context of libertarianism, post-secular theology, communitarianism, contractarianism and specific, timely questions about technology and globalization. There are gaping holes in coverage, some of which are scandalous: literature, the visual arts, love, joy, and justice are some of the concepts that figure only glimmeringly in this book, if they figure at all. Nancys voluminous work on the visual arts alone would require an independent study I must confess would be beyond my abilities. Nevertheless, I hope that the reader will find what follows to be at least a suitable primer for the study of this fascinating contemporary thinker.