Marie-Eve Morin

Jean-Luc Nancy is one of the leading contemporary thinkers in France today. Through an inventive reappropriation of the major figures in the continental tradition, Nancy has developed an original ontology that impacts the way we think about religion, politics, community, embodiment, and art. Drawing from a wide range of his writing, Marie-Eve Morin provides the first comprehensive and systematic account of Nancy’s thinking, all the way up to his most recent work on the deconstruction of Christianity. Without losing sight of the heterogeneity of Nancy’s work, Morin presents a concise articulation of the organizing concepts, which structure Nancy’s body of work. The guiding thread is that of an essential rift at the heart of any “self” by which this self is exposed and relates to itself and other selves. Nancy’s ontology undercuts dichotomies between individual and community, interior and exterior, matter and spirit, thing and thought, not in the name of mere deconstruction, but in seeking to open a thinking of the “limit” or the “edge” as the locus of sense. While Nancy’s work has often been presented in relation to Heidegger or Derrida, Morin demonstrates the originality of Nancy’s work and argues that, despite the variety of its preoccupations and topics, it possesses its own rigorous internal logic. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy and related fields who seek a systematic and critical understanding of one of the most original contemporary thinkers.

The first dictionary dedicated to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.Jean-Luc Nancy is a key figure in the contemporary intellectual landscape. This dictionary will, for the first time, consider the full scope of his writing and will provide insights into the philosophical and theoretical background to his focus on community and aesthetics.Drawing on an internationally recognised expertise of a multidisciplinary team of contributors, the 70 entries explain all of his main concepts, contextualising these within his work as a whole and relating him to his contemporaries. It will appeal to students and scholars alike.Key Features:* comprehensive definitions which are contextualised* fully cross-referenced throughout* extensive list of secondary readingKeywords: politics, democracy, freedom, morality, aesthetics.

This article attempts to sort out the misunderstandings between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy surrounding the question of the animal as they come to the fore in the conversations published in For Strasbourg. While Derrida finds the lack of animals in Nancy’s world puzzling, Nancy criticises Derrida’s blurring of the border between the human and the animal for inadvertently reinstating a scale or a difference, if not between humans and animals, at least between the living and the non-living. Though this criticism appears misguided at first, I argue that Nancy’s recasting of finitude in terms of the limit as the place of exposure undoes the phenomenological, or more precisely Heideggerian, understanding of sense and world, which Derrida still attributes to Nancy. Ultimately, what we have in both thinkers is a radically different account of plurality. Whereas Derrida emphasises the abyss between singularities and places faith, engagement, and responsibility at the origin of the world, for Nancy the edges between singularities always already hold any inside in contact with an outside, any one in contact with the other

This paper compares Sartre's and Nancy's experience of the plurality of beings. After briefly discussing why Heidegger cannot provide such an experience, it analyzes the relation between the in-itself and for-itself in Sartre and between bodies and sense in Nancy in order to ask how this experience can be nauseating for Sartre, but meaningful for Nancy. First, it shows that the articulation of Being into beings is only a coat of veneer for Sartre while for Nancy Being is necessarily plural. Then, it contrasts Nausea as an experience without language with Nancy's thinking of the excription of sense in the thing

In Briefings on Existence, Alain Badiou calls for a radical atheism that would refuse the Heideggerian pathos of a “last god” and deny the affliction of finitude. I will argue that Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of monotheism, as well as his thinking of the world, remains resolutely atheistic, or better atheological, precisely because of Nancy’s insistence on finitude and his appeal to the Heideggerian motif of the last god. At the same time, I want to underline the danger of Nancy’s maintenance of the word “god” to name the infinite opening of the world right at [à même] the world, by considering it as a Derridean paleonymy.

- Brings a new dimension to thinking about philosophical materialism and realism in the wake of phenomenology and deconstruction - Challenges speculative realism’s critique of contemporary Continental philosophy as correlationism - Uses Merleau-Ponty and Nancy to develop an ontology that respects the materiality and exteriority of what exists without reinstating the mind–world divide - Shows how Merleau-Ponty and Nancy overcome the Cartesian presupposition at work in current realist appeal to step out of our own thoughts to reach the ‘great outdoors’ - Provides an alternative to the phenomenological reduction of being to sense - Defends anthropomorphism as a way of overcoming the Cartesian–Sartrian ontology of the object Marie-Eve Morin proposes a reinterpretation of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy from the perspective of realist and object-oriented tendencies in contemporary philosophy. The realist critique of subject-centred anthropocentric thinking indicates the danger, inherent in the phenomenological approach, of reducing being to sense. Morin demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty and Nancy avoid this pitfall through the development of ontologies that respect the materiality and exteriority of what exists without reaffirming the Cartesian divide between mind and world.

This paper takes up Peter Sloterdijk’s proposition for a new thinking of the world as global foam. After quickly reminding the reader of the main characteristics of “bubbles” as “immune spheres of existence”, I retrace the three phases of the history globalization as they have been developed by Sloterdijk in the Spheres trilogy. I then focus on the third phase, also called Global Age, and try to bring together the two seemingly opposed concepts Sloterdijk has used to discuss the age of globality: “worldly interior” and “foams” by arguing that the former represents our world in its globality while the latter represents it in its irreducible plurality. The result is a system of co-fragility and co-isolation: a compact proximity between fragile entities and the necessary closure of each cell unto itself. If this is the case, the question we need to ask concerns the space left opened in the worldly interior for a ‘world-forming’ praxis. In the end politics can only consist in “managing” the worldly interior, stabilizing it and regulating its exchange with an outside. Without overview, without initiative, it is not clear in what ways politics can still be a trans-forming praxis and is not a mere function of the system.

In this article, I put Nancy’s thinking in conversation with contemporary demands for a flat ontology. I show that Nancy does in fact propose an ontology that is flat and in that way undoes the priority of human experience as the producer of sense. At the same time, I show that Nancy avoids two pitfalls other flat ontologies often fall into: a formalism that forgets materiality and falls prey to general equivalence and a depoliticization that removes any agential role for human beings in the creation and destruction of the world.

In this paper, I develop what I call, following Steven Shaviro, Merleau-Ponty’s “cautious anthropomorphism.” Rather than defending Merleau-Ponty against the accusation of anthropomorphism, I show the role this anthropomorphism plays in Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the Cartesian-Sartrian ontology of the object. If the thing is always “clothed with human characteristics,” as Merleau-Ponty says in the Causeries, it is not so that it can be reduced to a powerless object that can easily be assimilated but rather to ensure its own resistance or adversity – and even, paradoxically, its inhumanity. After developing Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s views of things, focusing on their respective reading of Ponge in “Man and Things” and the Causeries, I put Merleau-Ponty in conversation with Jeffrey Cohen’s book Stone to push for a non-humanistic reading of Merleau-Ponty’s anthropomorphism.

A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approaches and traditions ranging from transcendental and speculative idealism to phenomenology and deconstruction for failing to do justice to the real world as it is ‘in itself’, that is, as independent of the structures of human consciousness, experience, and language. This volume presents a collection of essays that take up the challenge of realism from a variety of historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives. This volume includes essays that engage the fundamental presuppositions and conclusions of this new realism by turning to the writings of seminal figures in the history of philosophy, including Kant, Schelling, and others. Also included are essays that challenge anti-realist readings of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Nancy. Finally, several essays in this volume propose alternative ways of understanding realism through careful readings of key figures in German idealism, pessimism, phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, and deconstruction.

In this article, I pursue the question whether it is possible to understand Derridean ethics in terms of space rather than time. More precisely, I ask whether what Derrida proposes as an ethics (and exactly what that is will have to be explained) falls under the general heading of future-oriented, ‘eschatological’ or ‘messianic’, ethics that sacrifices the present for a better future, or whether it can be understood in terms of presence, more specifically of the demand to cohabit here and now in the world. After proposing a reading of the to-come in terms of the intrusion of exteriority in the present, I turn to the figure of hospitality to show that Derrida's ethics is better understood in spatial rather than temporal terms: it requires a certain way of relating to the space in which we dwell.