Nihilism or Joy

Nancy names the alternatives to nihilism as desire, joy, and jouissance. He offers a sort of genealogy of joy from Plato to Christianity to Protestantism to Modern Philosophy to Freud and contemporary life. He distinguishes joy from need and relates it to the greeting of a world.

Politics and Religion

Nancy and Jandin discuss Schmitt and the history of sacrifice in Christianity and in Constantine in particular. The broader focus of the chapter is on how the philosophical, the religious, and the political interconnect. The chapter concludes with Nancy’s comments on the bodily or corporeal nature of an intellectual.

The World

Nancy retraces the concept of “world” throughout his body of work. He comments on religion, the twentieth-century critique of humanism or “man,” and his recent book and collaboration with an astrophysicist. He goes on to describe a world as a “meeting” or “assembling.”

The Present, Presence

Nancy is invited to speak about time and the concept of “presence.” The chapter is at once a discussion of Heidegger and Derrida and a recapitulation of Nancy’s philosophy of time. Nancy reintroduces his notion of the “coming about” or “coming to pass” and says that this notion “remains to be thought.”

Political Affects

Nancy considers the necessary role that affects play for political cohesion or common belonging. Nancy discusses the role of love in the Christianity, Machiavelli, and the French Revolution, as well as in the work of Blanchot, Duras, and Bataille.

Community

Nancy extends his discussion of a “world” into a discussion about “community.” While Nancy is asked to discuss the possibility of shared or collective affects, much of the focus of this chapter is on Nancy’s relationship to Marxist and post-Marxist thought. His timely comments on Rancière, Hardt and Negri, and non-hierarchical movements will be of particular interest to political philosophers.

Formative Years

Jean-Luc Nancy describes how he initially became interested in philosophy. He discusses his strange curiosities as a young person, his childhood in France and Germany during and after the war, his Christian activist youth, his creative years writing poetry and doing theater, his experience of 1968, and his first encounters with Heidegger and Derrida.

The Quest for “Art”

Nancy describes the various arts as sensuous. He discusses the role of the arts in the recreation and the expression of worlds.

People and Democracy

Nancy thinks about democracy by deconstructing the notion of a “people.” Nancy then suggests that a true notion of a “people” would depend on a people’s ability to make new declarations for itself and about itself—ones that have no ties to a superior authority or to outworn traditions.