Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy (, ; 26 July 1940 – 23 August 2021) was a French philosopher.

Jean-Luc Nancy graduated in philosophy in 1962 from the University of Paris.

He taught for a short while in Colmar before becoming an assistant at the Strasbourg Institut de Philosophie in 1968.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Nancy was a guest professor at universities all over the world, from the University of California to the Freie Universität in Berlin.

He has been invited as a cultural delegate of the French Ministry of External Affairs to speak in Eastern Europe, Britain and the United States.

Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre (The Title of the Letter, 1992), a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including La remarque spéculative in 1973 (The Speculative Remark, 2001) on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Le Discours de la syncope (1976) and L'Impératif catégorique (1983) on Immanuel Kant, Ego sum (1979) on René Descartes, and Le Partage des voix (1982) on Martin Heidegger.

In addition to Le titre de la lettre, Nancy collaborated with Lacoue-Labarthe on several other books and articles.

In 1973, he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Kant under the supervision of Paul Ricœur.

Nancy was then promoted to Maître de conférences (associate professor) at the Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nancy suffered serious medical problems.

He underwent a heart transplant and his recovery was made more difficult by a long-term cancer diagnosis.

He stopped teaching and participating in almost all of the committees with which he was engaged, but continued to write.

Many of his best known texts were published during this time.

In 1980, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe organized a conference at Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle on Derrida and politics entitled "Les Fins de l'homme" ("The Ends of Man").

The conference solidified Derrida's place at the forefront of contemporary philosophy, and was a place to begin an in-depth conversation between philosophy and contemporary politics.

Further to their desire to rethink the political, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe set up in the same year the Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur la Politique (Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political).

The centre was dedicated to pursuing philosophical rather than empirical approaches to political questions, and supported such speakers as Claude Lefort and Jean-François Lyotard.

Some of these texts appear in Les Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980 (1981), Rejouer le politique (1981), La retrait du politique (1983), and Le mythe nazi (1991, revised edition; originally published as Les méchanismes du fascisme, 1981).

By 1984, however, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe were dissatisfied with the direction work at the centre was taking, and it was closed down.

During that period Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy produced several important papers, together and separately.

Nancy is credited with helping to reopen the question of the ground of community and politics with his 1985 work La communauté désoeuvrée (The Inoperative Community), following Blanchot's The Unavowable Community (1983) and Agamben responded to both with The Coming Community (1990).

One of the very few monographs that Jacques Derrida ever wrote on a contemporary philosopher is On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy.

Nancy's first book on the question of community, La Communauté désœuvrée (The Inoperative Community, 1986), is perhaps his best-known work.

This text is an introduction to some of the main philosophical themes Nancy continued to work with.

Nancy traces the influence of the notion of community to concepts of experience, discourse, and the individual, and argues that it has dominated modern thought.

Discarding popular notions, Nancy redefines community, asking what can it be if it is reduced neither to a collection of separate individuals, nor to a hypostasized communal substance, e.g., fascism.

He writes that our attempt to design society according to pre-planned definitions frequently leads to social violence and political terror, posing the social and political question of how to proceed with the development of society with this knowledge in mind.

La Communauté désœuvrée means that community is not the result of a production, be it social, economic or even political (nationalist) production; it is not une œuvre, a "work of art" ("œuvre d'art", but "art" is here understood in the sense of "artifice").

In 1987, Nancy became a Docteur d'État at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail for a thesis on freedom in Heidegger under the supervision of Gérard Granel.

The jury was composed of Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida.

It was published as L'expérience de la liberté (1988).

Many of these texts are gathered in translation in Retreating the Political (1997).

An account of his experience, L'intrus (The Intruder), was published in 2000.

Nancy was a professor at the University of Strasbourg.

Nancy was also Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School.

Filmmaker Claire Denis has made at least two movies inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy and his works.

Many other artists have worked with Nancy as well, such as Simon Hantaï, Soun-gui Kim and Phillip Warnell.

Nancy has written about the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami and featured prominently in the film The Ister.

Nancy died on 23 August 2021 at the age of 81.