Marie-Eve Morin

We tend to think of violence as something that happens within the world, as something done by a thing, a being or an existent, to another thing, being or existent. Dhat would it mean to speak of the violence done to the world or, inversely, of the violence done by the world? Are there ways in which an existent, a being, can do violence, not to another existent, but to the world within which all such existents come to presence? Reciprocally, is there a sense in which the world itself presents itself as sort of primordial or originary violence? In this article, I rely on Jean-Luc Nancy's elaboration of the concepts of existence, world and sense to develop the double question of the violence of the world (violence done by and to the world). Ultimately, I show that contrary to the impression given by the use of terms such as generosity and spaciousness, there is at the bottom of Nancy’s ontology a certain originary violence.

In this essay, I focus on the community of thinking between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The relationship between those two thinkers is far from unambiguous: if they can be said to be thinking together, it certainly does not simply mean that they think the same thing or that they think it in the same way. I show that, because of its insistence on separation, Derrida's thinking is still a thinking of the one and the other and retains a Levinasian flavour that is absent from Nancy's. Nancy's thinking insists on plurality, on the 'explosion of presence in the manifold of its partition'. It insists, in other words, on the world. If Nancy prefers the fabric of the world to the Other, it is because it only allows one to think a plurality that doesn't sacrifice the gift that each singularity is.

This article seeks to situate Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of embodiment in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s description of the lived body, especially as it is found in The Phenomenology of Perception. It shows that while both Nancy and Merleau-Ponty develop their view of the body through an engagement with Descartes, Nancy’s reappropriation of the Cartesian partes extra partes leads him to blur the distinction between corpus meum and alia corpora. By contrasting the radical fragmentation of Nancy’s body with the kind of unity Merleau-Ponty attributes to the lived body, I show that Nancy’s body should not be equated with the lived body or the body proper of phenomenology. This does not mean that the body is merely an object for Nancy. Bodies make sense, but this sense is inorganic rather than intentional.

In this chapter, I delineate the central trajectories of Sloterdijk’s creative reappropriation of certain Heideggerian motives. Essentially, Sloterdijk wagers that the Heideggerian climate that weighs on our contemporary thinking is not adequate for grasping the globalised, technological world. In order to show how Sloterdijk is lead to abandon or overcome the understanding of globalisation influenced by Heidegger, I first present what could be called Sloterdijk’s onto-anthropology, that is, his story of the pro-duction or the coming-to-the-world, of the human animal. There, Sloterdijk shows how the “radical openness” of the human is predicated upon an act of insulation, the building of protective spaces, called greenhouses, incubators or spheres. Understanding this interplay between distance and nearness is crucial to understanding Sloterdijk’s onto-kinetics or his description of the ontological movement of existence. While Heidegger thinks existence according to the vertical movements of falling and gathering, Sloterdijk emphasises lateral movement, an expansion on the same plane [Ausbreitung in der Ebene]. Sloterdijk’s insight into the lateral spatiality of human existence sheds light onto his interpretation of the history of humankind as history of globalisation. Here, I concentrate on the transition between the second and third of these phases of globalisation because it is this third phase which, according to Sloterdijk, is no longer explicable in terms of Heideggerian enframing and the will to will. This inevitably leads us to ask whether the globalised world requires a response different from a Heideggerian meditative thinking and poetic dwelling and what form(s) our inhabitation of the globalised world might take.