This volume focuses on the relational aspect of Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking. As Nancy himself showed, thinking might be a solitary activity but it is never singular in its dimension. Building on or breaking away from other thoughts, especially those by thinkers who had come before, thinking is always plural, relational. This "singular plural" dimension of thought in Nancy's philosophical writings demands explication. In this book, some of today's leading scholars in the theoretical humanities shed light on how Nancy's thought both shares with and departs from Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Weil, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Lyotard, elucidating "the sharing of voices," in Nancy's phrase, between Nancy and these thinkers. Contributors: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Emily Apter, Rodolphe Gasche, Werner Hamacher, Eleanor Kaufman, Marie-Eve Morin, Timothy Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John H. Smith
Irving Goh is Associate Professor of Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham University Press, 2014), which won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in French and Francophone Studies. His second monograph, L'existence prepositionnelle, was published by Galilee in 2019. With Jean-Luc Nancy, he published The Deconstruction of Sex (Duke University Press, 2021). He is also editor of French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK (Routledge, 2019), coeditor with Verena Andermatt Conley of Nancy Now (Polity, 2014), and coeditor with Timothy Murray of the diacritics special issue on "The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy" (2 volumes, 2014-15).
Introduction: Jean-Luc Nancy Passes 1 Irving Goh 1 The Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time (Reading Descartes with Jean-Luc Nancy) 21 Georges Van Den Abbeele 2 Nancy with Hegel: The Restless Pleasures of Calculus and the Infinite Opening in Finitude 52 John H. Smith 3 The World, Absolutely: On Jean-Luc Nancy (and Karl Marx) 75 Rodolphe Gasche 4 Worldless: Heidegger, Simone Weil, and Anti-Judaism via Nancy 91 Eleanor Kaufman 5 Flesh and Ecart in Merleau-Ponty and Nancy 111 Marie-Eve Morin 6 Sexistence: Nancy and Lacan 135 Emily Apter 7 Sublime Seizures in Lyotard and Nancy: The Political Blooming of Art and Technology 149 Timothy Murray 8 D'avec: Mutations and Mutisms in Jean-Luc Nancy 166 Werner Hamacher 9 Infinitely Passing (or, Pascal Passes) 205 Jean-Luc Nancy List of Contributors 211 Index 215
Now that Nancy's voice has fallen silent, the essays of this volume will without doubt help to ensure that it nevertheless continues to be heard.-- "French Studies" This is an excellent and erudite collection of well-written essays on a philosopher whose output continues to have timely relevance for wider social, political, and cultural issues. The chapters are organized to form a coherent arc with successive pairs of chapters providing elegant supplements to one another and bringing out certain thematic issues in Nancy's work (worlding, his relation to phenomenology, metaphysics). The topics are also carefully chosen, adding new dimensions on Nancy and extending previous scholarship on him in novel and thought-provoking ways.---Naomi Waltham-Smith, Author of Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life
