On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy

The work of Jean-Luc Nancy has been taken up by writers ranging from Jacques Derrida to Claude Lefort and all his major works have been translated into English. As many struggle to find meaning at the end of philosophy, his writing has provided the impulse for contemporary philosophical debates around the questions of community, the political, and freedom. Situating his work in an explicitly contemporary context - the collapse of communism, the Gulf War, the former Yugoslavia - Nancy has forced us to rethink nothing less than what ‘doing’ philosophy entails. The result has been his theory of a loss of sense, which far from being catastrophic, allows us to think sense, art and community anew. On Jean-Luc Nancy; The Sense of Philosophy explores this and other crucial ideas in Nancy’s work and provides fascinating insights into one of the most contemporary philosophers writing today. The full range of Nancy’s work as a philosopher of the contemporary is considered, allowing us to see his engagement with Hegel, Marx, Nietzche, Heidegger, Bataille and Derrida. The issues of violence and power, finitude, the place of thinking today, east and west, the meaning of ‘Europe’, and the crisis of the global community are all approached through Nancy’s work. This collection will make it impossible to approach philosophy and its relation to the political without reference to Jean-Luc Nancy. Georges Van Den Abeele, University of California, Davies, Miguel de Beistegui, University of Warwick, Howard Caygill, Goldsmiths College, London, Fred Dallmayr, Universit