1st Edition
The Pulse of Sense Encounters with Jean-Luc Nancy
This volume stages a series of encounters between the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and leading scholars of his work along four major themes of Nancy’s thought: sense, experience, existence, and Christianity.
In doing so, the volume seeks to remind readers that Nancy’s sens has many meanings in French: aside from those that easily carry over into English, i.e., everything to do with "meaning" and "the senses"; it also includes the "way" they are "conducted," the "direction" they take, the "thrust" or "pulse" in which the circulation of sense exists. Faithful to this plural understanding of sens, the writings collected here aim to join Jean-Luc Nancy in the process of "making-sense" that animates his thinking, rather than to deliver a definitive summary of his position on any given issue. They are conceived of as notes "along the way," documenting "encounters" as moments of "(re)direction" and recording the "pulse" of sense that animates them. In that spirit, Nancy himself has provided each contribution with an "echo" in which he, in turn, responds to each author and thereby continues their mutual encounter. Aside from these echoes, this volume includes an original essay in which Nancy reflects upon the international trajectory of his thinking; a trajectory that is to be and undoubtedly will be continued, in many different directions, across and around the world.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
Introduction: The Conduct of Existence
Marie Chabbert and Nikolaas Deketelaere
Part 1: The Fragility of Sense
1. The World’s Fragile Skin
Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. by Marie Chabbert and Nikolaas Deketelaere
2. Insistence, or the Force of Jean-Luc Nancy
Irving Goh
3. Nancy on Trial: Thinking Philosophy and the Jurisdictional
Peter Gratton
4. The Fragility of Thinking
Leslie Hill
Part 2: The Poetics of Experience
5. Pir-ating the Given: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Critique of Empiricism
Benjamin Hutchens
6. Abraham’s Ordeal: Jean-Luc Nancy and Søren Kierkegaard on the Poetics of Faith
Nikolaas Deketelaere
7. Interpreters of the Divine: Nancy’s Poet, Jeremiah the Prophet, and Saint Paul’s Glossolalist
Gert-Jan van der Heiden
8. Art’s Passing for Hegel, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy
John McKeane
Part 3: The Corporeality of Existence
9. Jean-Luc Nancy, a Romantic Philosopher? On Romance, Love, and Literature
Aukje van Rooden
10. Spread Body and Exposed Body: Dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy
Emmanuel Falque, trans. by Marie Chabbert and Nikolaas Deketelaere
11. An Ontology for Our Times
Marie-Eve Morin
12. Affectivity, Sense, and Affects: Emotions as an Articulation of Biological Life
Ian James
Part 4: The Emancipation of Christianity
13. Metamorphosis or Mutation? Jean-Luc Nancy and the Deconstruction of Christianity
Joeri Schrijvers
14. Desecularisation: Thinking Secularisation Beyond Metaphysics
Erik Meganck
15. Raising Death: Resurrection between Christianity and Modernity – A Dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy’s Noli me tangere
Laurens ten Kate
16. The Eternal Return of Religion: Jean-Luc Nancy on Faith in the Singular-Plural
Marie Chabbert
17. Nancy is a Thinker of Radical Emancipation
Christopher Watkin
Part 5: Coda
18. An Accordion Tune
Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. by Marie Chabbert and Nikolaas Deketelaere
Biography
Marie Chabbert is Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s St John’s College. Her research interrogates how contemporary French thinkers inaugurate new perspectives for thinking faith in the postsecular age. Her first monograph, Faithful Deicides: Modern French Thought and the Eternal Return of Religion, is forthcoming.
Nikolaas Deketelaere is a researcher at the Catholic University of Paris, France, and the Australian Catholic University. His research considers questions of experience and embodiment in contemporary phenomenology and philosophy of religion. He has published articles in Literature and Theology, Open Theology, and Angelaki.
