The Style of Thought

Once the possibility of signifying truth is a thing of the past, another style is
necessary …. It is not a matter of stylistic effects or ornaments of discourse, but of
what sense does to discourse if sense exceeds significations. It is a matter of the
praxis of thought, its writing in the sense of the assumption of a responsibility for
and to this excess.1

If Nancy’s is a finite thinking, then it is also, and ever more decisively, a thinking of
infinity. Finitude, in Nancy, the finitude of existence, of sense, and of world, is always,
one might say always already, infinitude.2 It can only be thought as the infinite excess of
existence, sense, and world over themselves. This thinking of the infinite excess of
finitude imposes a certain rigour or constraint upon the language and style of philosophy
itself. For how can one make present to thought that which infinitely exceeds, or is
infinitely inappropriable to thought itself? The infinite excess of existence, sense, and
world would necessarily be in excess, infinitely, of any signification that could inscribe
itself within the discourse of philosophy, and philosophy itself would find itself exposed
to: ‘l’infini d’un sens inappropriable’ [The infinite of an inappropriable sense].3 As
Nancy remarks in the passage from Le Sens du monde [The Sense of the World] cited
above, once the ambition of philosophy to signify truth is has been surpassed then
another style of thought is necessary.

Yet if this style is a praxis of writing which takes responsibility for and to excess, it is
certainly not a question of evoking or affirming some abstract, ideal or even spiritual
beyond, a realm which would stretch out infinitely beyond the limits of the finite. As
Nancy argues in Une Pensée finie [A Finite Thinking], this is: ‘non une pensée de la
limitation, laquelle implique l’illimité d’un au-delà, mais une pensée de la limite comme
cela sur quoi, infiniment finie, l’existence s’enlève, et à quoi elle s’expose’ [not a
thinking of limitation, which implies the unlimited space of a beyond, but a thinking of
the limit as that upon which, infinitely finite, existence is raised, and to which it is
exposed’ .4 The medium of finite thinking, that to which thought is infinitely exposed, is
material ; it has a certain weight or mass. Finite sense may be an infinite excess but at the
same time: ‘La pensée pèse exactement le poids du sens’ [Thought weighs exactly the
weight of sense].5 Sense has a density, a mass. Its excess over and absence from
discourse is marked at a point where, in its very withdrawal, absence and excess, sense
touches thought ; this is: ‘un point matériel, un point pesant : la chair d’une lèvre, la
pointe d’une plume ou d’un style, toute écriture en tant qu’elle trace le bord et le débord
du langage’ [a material point, a point which weighs: the flesh of lips, the point of a pen
or a style, all writing insofar as it traces the border and overflowing of language].6 How
then is one to articulate this material point, this tracing of the border and overflowing of
language? Exactly how is this other style of thought to be thought?

Certainly a philosophy exposed to the infinitely inappropriable, yet resolutely material,

finitude of sense cannot be a philosophy of concepts or of the evidence of clear and
distinct ideas. It must be, Nancy argues, a philosophy where the figural, rather than the
conceptual, dimension of language is engaged. Unlike a concept a figure does not
determine or signify.7 It presents an image, a tracing of an outline, of line or form, a limit
which exposes thought to the inapropriable excess of thought. We can only think :
‘l’appropriation de l’inappropriable dans des figures, ou dans une figurabilité à la fois
générale et éclatée […]. L’inappropriable n’est pas représentée : il se présente, il présente
l’absentement qui se fait dans la venue en présence’ [the appropriation of the
inappropriable in figures, or in an at once general and fragmented figurability […]. The
inappropriable is not represented: it presents itself, it presents the absenting which occurs
in coming to presence].8 To read Nancy’s philosophy in any systematizing manner, or to
expect it to be elaborated in a gesture of conceptual systematicity would therefore be to
gravely misconstrue the specificity of the constraint to which it responds. The infinitude
of finitude requires a gesture or philosophical style which responds to the infinite
dispersal and ungraspable excess of sense.

Such a gesture, the gesture of a philosophical style which is resolutely figural, can be
discerned in different ways at different yet decisive moments of French
phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought. In each case a thinking emerges
which might be said to expose itself to, or gesture towards, an instance of infinite alterity.
Such alterity resists or exceeds the phenomenological reductions as conceived by
Husserl, and, indeed, any horizon of being or possibility of ontological disclosure. Most
obviously one might cite in this context Lévinas’ thinking of, time, alterity and the il y a,
as elaborated, for instance, in his lectures of 1946 and 1947, published under the title Le
Temps et l’autre [Time and the Other]. Here Lévinas speaks of the ‘Infini de
l’absolument autre’ [Infinity of the absolutely other] and of the need to think time as a
‘relation à ce qui, de soi inassimilable, absolument autre, ne se laisserait pas assimiler par
l’expérience ou à ce qui, de soi infini, ne se laisserait pas comprendre’ [relation to that
which, of itself infinite, would not allow itself to be understood].9 One might also
mention in this context Derrida’s thinking of ‘différance infinie’ in La Voix et le
phénomène [Voice and Phenomena].10 In perhaps very different ways such a gesture
might be said to be shared with other French thinkers whose work critiques, deepens or
transcends the phenomenological account of presence, and opens thought onto an
incalculable excess. Merleau-Ponty’s affirmation of a negative infinity of openness in Le
Visible et l’invisible [The Visible and the Invisible] might be mentioned in this regard, as
might, respectively, the evocations of the auto-affection of infinite life in Michel Henry’s
thought, and the delimitation of finite horizons in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc
Marion.11

Placing Nancy in this broader trajectory may help us to understand that his philosophical
style is not simply a form of eccentric idiosyncrasy nor, indeed, simply a perverse
attachment to, or continuation of, the Heideggerian poetic ‘saying of Beyng’. Rather the
style of Nancy’s philosophical discourse needs to be interrogated within the context of
this broader question: the question of how and why the exposure of thought to the infinite
dictates a specific, and specifically figural style of philosophizing. The broader question
here relates the way in which the fundamental ontological and epistemological
assumptions of phenomenological and post-phenomenological philosophy come to order
or organize the style and techniques of philosophy itself.
 *

In order to pursue the question of Nancy’s style the related questions of the infinity and
materiality of finite sense need to be engaged with in more detail. For Nancy, of course,
sense is always to be understood as that which, in excess of signification or any relation
of signifier to signified, is the always already meaningfulness of a shared material world
which is sensed, perceived or experienced in the shared spacing of bodies. As he puts it in
Une pensée finie:
« Le sens » veut dire ici, bien entendu, le sens, pris absolument : le sens de la vie,
de l’homme, du monde, de l’histoire, le sens de l’existence. C’est-à-dire l’existence
qui est ou qui fait sens, faute de quoi elle n’existerait pas. Et le sens qui existe, ou
qui fait exister, faute de quoi il ne serait pas sens.
[ “Sense” means here, of course, sense taken absolutely : the sense of life, of man,
of the world, of history, the sense of existence. That is to say an existence which is
or which makes sense, and without which it would not exist. And sense that exists,
or which makes exist, without which it would not be sense.12]
Sense here is a fundamental existential or ontological meaningfulness that the world
simply is. Nancy plays on the double meaning of the French word ‘sens’ which can refer
to sense as meaning but also as the faculty of sense perception or bodily sensing. Before
signifying our embodied sense perception make sense and it is only in this sharing of
sense between bodies that the world appears to us as it does. According to Nancy the
interplay of bodily sense perception and meaning is to be thought in terms of the way in
which the senses, that is sensory experience, or what one might simply call the operation
of sensing, always engage sense (as meaningfulness), and through very specific
movement of referral, of sending and return (‘renvoi’ in French). characterized as an
infinite movement of resonance, echo or as a rhythm, or syncopated beat. It is in this
syncopated movement of referral or resonance that makes possible sense perception,
worldly meaningfulness, thought and (inter)subjective self awareness. Such a movement
is, for Nancy, exposed to, or passes through, the infinite. It is only in this exposure, this
affection of the finite by the infinite, that the awareness of self and world, that thought
and reflection have their condition of possibility.
The relation of sensing, sense, and thought to infinity needs to be understood in Nancy
according to an articulation of three distinct instances. Firstly he affirms the radical
multiplicity or heterogeneity of embodied sensing. Secondly, he elaborates sensing as a
process of the presentation and withdrawal, or contact-in-distance of that which is sensed.
Finally, this process or articulation is conceived as a movement, itself infinite in a certain
manner, of referral, sending and return, which structures the always already meaningful
experience of sense perception. This threefold structure articulates the meaningfulness of
sense perception and the condition of thought as resonance, echo, rhythm and syncopated
beat.

From the mid 1990s onwards Nancy’s meditation on sense perception and sensing is
most often developed alongside his thinking about art and aesthetics. In this context his
thinking more generally emerges as a sustained mediation on aisthesis, that possibility of
sensory experience perception which underpins both the existence of art and conscious
life in general. Key examples would by Nancy’s interrogation of the visual image in his
work on the film of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, L’Évidence du film [The
Evidence of Film].13 Or more recently is interrogation of hearing and music in the 2002
work A l’écoute [Listening].14 He has also written various works on painting, portraiture
and visual art in general, and in particular, the two volumes of Les Muses [The Muses]
dedicated to a sustained thinking of the multiplicity of art.15

The key term for Nancy in relation to the sense of sensing and its irreducible
heterogeneity, exteriority and alterity is ‘le toucher’. In many ways ‘touch’, for Nancy,
can be seen to be another term for the co-articulation of sense and the senses:16

Le toucher n’est autre chose que la touche du sens tout entier, et de tous

les sens. Il est leur sensualité comme telle […] le toucher présente le

moment propre de l’extériorité sensible, il le présente comme tel et comme

sensible […] Le toucher est l’intervalle et l’hétérogénéité du toucher. Le

toucher est la distance proxime. Il fait sentir ce qui fait sentir (ce que c’est
 que sentir) : la proximité du distant, l’approximation de l’intime.

[Touch is nothing other than the touch of sense altogether and of all the

senses. It is their sensuality as such, […] touch presents the proper

moment of sensible exteriority, it presents it as such and as sensible […].

Touch is the interval and heterogeneity of touch. Touch is proximate

distance. It makes one sense that which makes one sense (what it is to

sense): the proximity of the distant, the approximation of the intimate.]17

Touch is not, for Nancy at least, a governing principle which would resolve the singular

plural of sense into a unity or homogeneity. It functions rather as a mode of relation by

which the singular plural of sensing is articulated as a non-totalizable, one might say

infinite, singular plurality. It is also a principle of unbridgeable distance or withdrawal

which would exceed any finite limitations of sensible experience or any of logic presence

or originary finitude.

This emphasis on the ‘infinity’ of sensing is repeated in Nancy’s more recent work on

hearing, À l’écoute. À l’écoute could be described as a meditation on the phenomenology

of hearing, or, more precisely, the excess of hearing over any phenomenology. If, from

Kant to Heidegger, Nancy suggests, the stakes of philosophy have been to interrogate the

appearance or manifestation of phenomena, world-disclosure one might say, and to

circumscribe the ultimate ‘truth’ of phenomenal appearance, why should this truth be

something that is ‘seen’ rather than heard. As elsewhere in his thinking Nancy is calling

into question the dominance of a visual register in phenomenological philosophy.

In this context he returns once more to the general question of sensing – to aesthesis ─

and reminds the reader that since Aristotle sensing has always had a reflexive structure.

le sentir (l’aisthesis) est toujours un ressentir, c’est-à-dire un se-sentir-sentir :

ou bien, si l’on préfère, le sentir est sujet, ou il ne sent pas. Mais c’est peut-

être sur le registre sonore que cette structure réfléchie s’expose le plus

manifestement.

[sensing (aesthesis) is always a feeling, that is to say a sensing-oneself-sense:

or if you prefer, sensing is the subject, or there is no sensing. But perhaps this

reflexive structure is most obviously exposed in the register of sound.] 18

À l’écoute is an interrogation of this reflexive structure of sound, and its relation to

perceptual awareness, awareness of self and world. Nancy is exploring here the relation

of sensing to the possibility of a sense of self and of sense understood as meaningfulness

or that which makes sense. In so doing he suggests that such a reflexive structure of

sensing is the condition for perceptual awareness , for any sense of self and any

possibility of thought in general. Nancy comes to call this reflexive structure or

movement an ‘accès au soi’ [access to self]:

tous les registres sensibles composent cet accès au “soi” (c’est-à-dire au

“sens”). Mais le fait qu’ils soient plusieurs – et sans totalisation possible –

marque ce même accès, d’emblée, d’une diffraction interne, laquelle peut-être

à son tour se laisse analyser en termes de renvois, d’échos, de résonances et

aussi de rythmes.

[all the registers of sense compose this access to “self” (that is to say to

“sense”). But the fact that they are many – with no possibility of totalisation –
 marks this very access, from the outset, with an internal diffraction, which in

turn allows itself to be analyzed in terms of sending and return, echoes,

resonance and also rhythms.]19

This formulation both repeats and gathers together key motifs of Nancy’s thinking of

sensing which are developed elsewhere, in, for instance, Les Muses and L’Évidence du

film. Once again the making of sense consistently emerges in and through the non-

totalisable heterogeneity of the senses and of the operation of sensing and internal

diffraction, contact in distance, presentation in withdrawal, proximity in separation etc.

The movement here is always one of referral, echoes, and resonance: This is where

infinity is always at play. Nancy picks up on Hegel’s distinctions regarding infinity. He is

very careful to repeat Hegel’s distinction between “good” and “bad” infinity. “Bad”

infinity would imply the infinity of a progression or unending expansion. “Good” infinity

is actual and as it were already traversing the finite; it is ‘l’instabilité de toute

determination finie, l’emportement de la présence et du donné dans dans le movement de

la présentation et du don’ [the instability of all finite determination, the sweeping away of

presence and of the given in the movement of presentation and of the gift].20 The self of

sensing-sensing-itself is not a subject in the sense of an autonomous self-posing

consciousness – it not a Cogito, nor a phenomenological subject, nor a subject of an

enunciation, nor of any symbolic order, nor any form of substratum which would found

or ground consciousness or perceptual awareness. It is, for Nancy, the a vibration or

resonance of a sensing body or corpus, that corpus of sensing, which, we might recall
from Les Muses: is one body with sensing, that makes of sensing a body, that is simply

the corpus of the senses. Nancy puts this in the following terms:

Accès au soi : ni à un soi propre (moi), ni au soi d’un autre, mais bien à la

forme ou à la structure du soi en tant que tel, c’est-à-dire à la forme, à la

structure et au mouvement d’un renvoi infini, infini puisqu’il renvoie à ce

(lui) qui n’est rien hors du renvoi.

[Access to self : neither to a proper self (a me), nor to the self of another, but

rather to the form or to the structure of self as such, that is to say to the form,

to the structure and the movement of an infinite referral, infinite, because it

refers to that self which is nothing outside of the movement of referral.]21

In this context, Nancy’s, ‘access to self’ is always passing through an exteriority, or

outside, an alterity which would be the alterity of that which is sensed, its sense, and the

affective force with which it imposes itself upon the body of sensing.

Sound emerges here as a privileged figure of this reverberative, resonating, and infinitely

referred model of sensing and of self. Sound, for Nancy, exceeds key qualities of visible

appearance or manifestation. Key oppositions of the visible and invisible, of light and

dark, of clarity and obscurity, and of disclosure and concealment are all transgressed:

Le son n’a pas de face cachée, il est tout devant et derrière et dehors dedans,

sens dessus dessous par rapport à la logique la plus générale de la présence

comme paraître, comme phénoménalité ou comme manifestation et, donc,

comme face visible d’une présence subsistant en soi. Quelque chose du

schème théorique et intentionnel réglé sur l’optique y vacille.

 [Sound does not have a hidden surface, it is all before and behind, outside and

inside, above and below in relation to the most general logic of presence as

appearance, as phenomenality or as manifestation, and, therefore, as the

visible surface of a presence subsisting in itself. Something within the

theoretical and intentional schema regulated on the optical vacillates in

sound.] 22

In Nancy’s juxtaposition of listening and sound with the figures of lighting, seeing,

clearing etc. a key gesture of his philosophical style can be discerned. His writing works

at the limits of the philosophical figures which structure phenomenological discourse (all

relating to the visible presentation of the phenomenon) and does so in order to both to

think the structure of thought as an exposure to the infinite referral of sensing and, at the

same time, to expose thinking itself to that infinity, to that which exceeds all finite limits

or possibility of limitation. Here thought, as it moves beyond phenomenology, shifts into

a different figural register, that of sound, in order to open onto, without fully grasping,

that which is infinitely in excess of conceptualization or phenomenological and

ontological disclosure. Here, sense is understood as a finite sensing

always and already passing through an actual infinity of referral but it is never grasped as

such. The finite sense engaged in sensing remains an infinite excess and finite thought is

exposed to its in-finitude.

The main thrust of Nancy’s argument in À l’écoute is that the structure of sensing in

general, most clearly articulated in the structure of listening takes us beyond the

phenomenological subject:
 Le sujet de l’écoute ou le sujet à l’écoute […] n’est pas un sujet

phénoménologique, c’est-à-dire qu’il n’est pas un sujet philosophique et,

qu’en définitive, il n’est peut-être aucun sujet sauf à être le lieu de la

résonance, de sa tension et de son rebond infinis.

[The subject of listening or the subject to listening is not a phenomenological

subject […], it is perhaps not a subject at all unless it is thought as a site of

resonance, of its own tension and infinite reverberation.]23

As has been repeatedly emphasized what is at stake in Nancy’s thinking about sensing, is

the question of sense as that which is both sensed and which makes sense. Yet sense in

this context is also the condition of possibility of reflexive thought, that is to say,

subjectivity. Subjectivity, here, cannot be a ground or foundation, it emerges only in the

syncopated rhythm of sensing, in the exposure of a heterogeneous and internally

diffracted corpus of sensing to a movement of infinite, referral, of sending and return,

resonance and echo, of that which is sensed. Something here resembles perhaps, a

crossing of the body-subject or flesh of Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la

perception [Penomenology of Perception] and Le Visible et l’invisible, a crossing of

these, with Derrida’s thinking of différance.

This thinking of sense, subject, and infinity directly underpins Nancy’s reading of Hegel

in Hegel: l’inquiétude du négatif [Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative]. In fact, this

work arguably marks a decisive moment in Nancy’s thinking, a certain shift or turn

which resonates into his works of the late 1990s and into his more recent work at the

beginning of the twenty-first century. Nancy stresses that his short book is not intended to
be, nor can it succeed in being, a simple gloss on ‘Hegelianism,’ nor a restitution of

Hegel’s thinking. Rather, he insists, ‘on lit Hegel, ou on le pense, tel qu’il fut déjà relu ou

repensé jusqu’à nous, tel qu’il s’est déjà rejoué dans la pensée’ [Hegel is being read, or he

is being thought, such as he is having already been reread or rethought up until now, such

as he is having already been replayed within thought].24 This is not a simple exegesis of

the Hegelian text, therefore, but rather a rereading of Hegel which occurs in the wake of,

and can only be understood in the light of, a prior (largely French) tradition of

interpretation. What emerges from Nancy’s reading is not a Hegel for whom the

operations of dialectical thought and the thinking of ‘absolute knowledge’ constitute a

desire for totalization. This is not Hegelianism viewed as a totalizing gesture by which

difference and alterity would be appropriated by the logic of the Same. This is a Hegel

for whom the negative, or the ‘work’ of negativity, represents a ceaseless restlessness

which ruptures temporality and the presencing or presentation of the present. Negativity,

here, does not determine the finite present through the work of concrete negation, rather it

traverses existence in a manner which exposes it to the instability of any and all finite

determination. This then is the ‘good’ infinity that was alluded to earlier. Nancy appeals,

then, to the Hegelian restless negative, to the infinity of finite determination. The manner

in which the finite is traversed by the infinity of the negative is articulated very clearly by

Nancy himself when he speaks of:

L’actualité pleine et entière de l’infini qui traverse et qui travaille et qui

transforme le fini. Ce qui veut dire : la négativité, le creux, l’écart, la
différence de l’être qui se rapporte à soi par cette différence même, et qui est
ainsi, de toute son essence et de toute son énergie, l’acte infini de se rapporter
à soi, et ainsi la puissance du négatif.
[The full and complete actuality of the infinite that traverses, works, and
 transforms the finite. Which means: negativity, the empty hollow [le creux],
the gap, the difference of being which relates to itself through this very
difference, and which is thus, in all its essence and all its energy, and thus the
infinite act of relating to itself, and thus the power of the negative.]25
Again the notion of infinite relation, of renvoi or referral is key here. The thinking of
Hegel, negativity, and determination here brings together, or repeats in a different
philosophical register, the Nancean thinking of sensing, sense, self and subjectivity which
has been circumscribed throughout this discussion. The Hegelian negative, for Nancy,
can be thought as another way of figuring the passing through of all finite determination
through the infinite, the exposure of all sense and sensing through an exteriority or
outside irreducible to any finite determination. Nancy puts this as follows:
Telle est la première et fondamentale signification de la négativité absolue : le
négatif est le préfixe de l’in-fini, en tant que l’affirmation de ce que toute
finitude (et tout être est fini) est en soi excédante de sa determinité. Elle est
dans le rapport infini.
[Such is the first and fundamental signification of absolute negativity: the
negative is the prefix of the in-finite, as the affirmation that all finitude (and
every being is finite) is in itself in excess of its determinacy. It is an infinite
relation].26
The nothing, the absolute negativity of the Hegelian negative, is thought as infinitude or
the infinite relation of all finite existence to itself. Here Nancy occupies or inhabits
Hegelian philosophical discourse in such a way as to elaborate in a different register the
thinking of sense, sensing, and infinite referral which unfolds in À l’écoute.

Nancy’s, then, offers a philosophical meditation on the sense of the senses, on the touch

in distance which forms the corpus of sensing, and on the reflexive structure of sensing-

self-sensing through which access to a self which makes sense can occur. Without this

complex structure of sensing, of resonance, and infinite referral there would be no subject

or self of sense perception and perceptual awareness generally. All this comes together in
Nancy’s thinking of the Hegelian negative and the actual infinity. Taking all this

together, it can be argued that Nancy’s philosophy emerges not just as an extension and

repetition of phenomenology or of existential phenomenology in particular. Specifically

extreme care must be taken not to confuse his thinking with, or reduce it to, a

Heideggerian thinking of originary finitude. Rather, Nancy’s thinking seeks to inhabit the

thought of other thinkers, that of Heidegger certainly, but also, as has been shown here,

that of Hegel. One might add to this list think the names of, amongst others, Descartes,

Kant, Husserl, Bataille, Blanchot, Lacan, Merleau-Pony and Derrida. Nancy’s

philosophical writing inhabits the discourse of others thinkers and treats those discourses,

not strictly as resources of a philosophical conceptuality, but rather as a resource for a

kind of discursive figurality which he traces and pushes to a certain limit point at which it

is exposed to excess. He articulates these figures of thought in such a way as to expose

them to the limits of figurality itself, up to the point at which thought is exposed to that

which is in excess of thought and in excess of the limits which circumscribe the

phenomenological account of world disclosure.

This, then, is Nancy’s other style of thinking. It is a style which does not simply

deconstruct the thought of other, but rather a style which produces new forms of thought

as thought exposes itself to its impossible excess. His writing enacts a complex

marshalling of diverse philosophical registers, which are woven together, repeated, and

transformed. Nancy has perhaps too often been dismissed as a straightforward

Heideggerian. Yet if he is so he is so hyperbolically, excessively and to an extent which

would make Heidegger unrecognizable, since he would also at the same time be
hyperbolically Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian, Husserlian, Bataillian, Lacanian, Merleau-

Pontean, Derridean and so on. He repeats and transforms the figures of thought and

thought unfolds as a medium of material and infinite finitude.. It is in such instances of

repetition, transformation and exposure to the inappropriable infinity of sense that

Nancy’s writing helps us to make sense, philosophically, of making sense.

1
Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Sens du Monde [The Sense of the World] (Paris: Galilée, 1994), p. 37. All citations of philosophical
works in French are to the original French editions.
2
In an essay dedicated to Nancy’s thought Badiou writes: ‘“finitude” is the master signifier of Jean-Luc Nancy’s
philosophical discourse’ in ‘L’Offrande réservée’, in François Guibal and Jean-Clet-Martin (eds), Sens en tous sens (Paris :
Galilée, 2004), 13-24. Any attempt to think finitude is, for Badiou is an inescapably Heideggerian gesture. His analysis
entirely ignores Nancy’s discourse on the infinite which is discussed here.
3
Le poids d’une pensée, (Grenoble : Presses Universitaire de Grenoble), p. 15.
4
Une Penee finie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), pp. 48-49.
5
Le Poids d’une pensée, p. 5.
6
Ibid. , p. 8.
7
Nancy perhaps owes a debt here to Jean-François Lyotard’s key work, Discours figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971).
8
Le Poids d’une pensée, pp. 11-12
9
Emmanuel Lévinas, Le Temps et l’autre (Paris: P.U.F., 1983), pp. 9-10. These lectures lay the ground, of course, for
Lévinas’ later major work Totalité et infini (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961).
10
Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le phénomène (Paris : P. U. F., 1967), p. 114.
11
Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 221, pp.299-300 ; Michel Henry, ‘Quatre principes de
la phénoménologie’, in Revue de métaphysique et de Morale, pp. 11-12 ; see in particular, Jean-Luc Marion, Étant donné
(Paris : P.U. F., 1997), pp. 280-96.
12
Une Pensée finie, pp. 10-11.
13
Jean-Luc Nancy, Abbas Kiarostami, L’Évidence du film (Bruxelles: Yves Gaevert, 2001) ; for a commentary on this essay
and the relation of Nancy’s analysis to phenomenology see Ian James, ‘The Evidence of the Image: Nancy and Kiarostami’,
L’Esprit Créateur, 47:3, (2007), pp. 68-79
14
Jean-Luc Nancy, À l’écoute (Paris : Galilée, 2002).
15
Jean-Luc Nancy, Les Muses (Paris: Galilée, 1994); Multiple Arts: The Muses II, Simon Sparks (ed.) (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2006).
16
In his seminal work published in 2000, Le Toucher Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida aligns the motif of touch in Nancean thought
very explicitly with the phenomenological category of ‘originary intuition’ and the primary presence or givennes of sense
experience and perception. See Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000).
17
Nancy, Les Muses, p. 35.
18
Nancy, À l’écoute, p. 23.
19
Ibid., p. 31, n. 1.
20
Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel. L’inquiétude du négatif (Paris : Hachette, 1997), p. 19. Interestingly Nancy’s distinction with
regard to the infinite here repeats the distinction made by Merleau-Ponty between the infinite of ‘openness’ and the
‘unending’ infinite (‘Offenheit’/‘Unendlichkeit’) in Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 221.
21
Nancy, À l’écoute, p. 25.
22
Ibid., p. 33.
23
Ibid., p. 45.
24
Nancy, Hegel. L’inquiétude du négatif, p. 11
25
Ibid., p. 15
26
Ibid., p. 19