Papers by Marie-Eve Morin
Angelaki, 2022
Against a certain contemporary style of thinking that wishes to go beyond finitude entirely, I pr... more Against a certain contemporary style of thinking that wishes to go beyond finitude entirely, I propose a finite praxis modeled after Jean-Luc Nancy’s finite thinking. I argue that the desire to immunize life against death by postponing indefinitely the moment of demise radically misunderstands the nature of death as a limit and the meaning of finitude thereby implied. Starting from the intuition developed by Simone de Beauvoir in All Men Are Mortal that the meaning of existence does not come from an extended future but from human relations, I subsequently turn to Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology of the singular plural. Nancy arrives at this ontology by developing Heidegger’s concept of being-towards-death and Derrida’s notion of differance in such a way as to emphasize the inherently relational nature of existence. While finite existence is always singular for Nancy, it is also always exposed to and affected by all there is. A Nancyan ethics of finitude then, does not advocate that we limi...
Nancy and the Political, 2015
Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Ontology 2. Christianity 3. Community 4. P... more Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Ontology 2. Christianity 3. Community 4. Politics 5. From Body to Art Conclusion Bibliography
N ancy engages with democracy most explicitly in his little book The Truth of Democracy, the publ... more N ancy engages with democracy most explicitly in his little book The Truth of Democracy, the publication of which marks the 40 th anniversary of May '68. 1 At the beginning of the eponymous essay, 'The Truth of Democracy,' Nancy identifies as the 'real singularity' of May '68 a certain disappointment with democracy itself, whose triumphal recovery after World War II failed to live up to its promises. 2 Nancy calls it a 'scarcely visible but insistent disappointment, the nagging sense that we had never recovered something whose triumphant return seemed to have been announced by the end of the Second World War, namely, democracy.' 3 The target of the May '68 uprisings was, according to Nancy, a 'kind of managerial democracy,' or what he calls elsewhere ecotechnics: the management of production, exchange, and growth of the world, now understood as the global oikos. 4 While the polis was supposed
![Research paper thumbnail of [Review of the book Jean-Luc Nancy: Justice, Legality and World, by edutchens]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/88976115/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Reviewed by MarieEve Morin, University of Alberta Among the various collections of essays on Jean... more Reviewed by MarieEve Morin, University of Alberta Among the various collections of essays on JeanLuc Nancy's work that have recently been published, this volume distinguishes itself by its focus on questions of justice and law. Certainly, as far as the incommensurability of justice or the groundlessness of law are concerned, Derrida's name comes to mind more readily than Nancy's. One could point to at least two reasons for the relative neglect of questions of justice and law in Nancy's work. The first is the somewhat elliptical nature of his remarks on justice, or on the imperative that arises out of his ontology, and the difficulty of sketching out concretely what such an imperative ("to create a world") would entail. The second is the more or less complete absence, in the secondary literature, of discussions of Nancy's reworking of the Kantian categorical imperative. Nancy's engagement with Kant's ethics is, aside from a chapter in The Experience of Freedom, most pronounced in his 1983 work L'impératif catégorique, whose essays have been translated into English in various books such as A Finite Thinking and Birth to Presence. We might speculate that such a dispersion of the subject matter has prevented the recognition of the important role that the problematic of imperative and law plays in Nancy's work. The present volume seeks to remedy both of these lacunae. And while it is certainly successful in doing so especially with Christopher Watkin's and Ian James's essays in Part One, and Francois Raffoul's essay in Part Two it is the third and longest part of the book, dedicated to recent and more familiar themes in Nancy's work world, globalization, politics, democracy, communism that in my eyes makes this collection especially worthwhile. The first section of the book, "Justice, Incommensurability and Being," starts with an essay by Nancy titled "From the Imperative to Law." The editor does not mention that this text is a longer version (the last two sections on droit have been added) of the Preface to the Italian translation of L'impératif catégorique, which appeared in French in Le portique in 2006. In this preface Nancy develops anew the question that occupied him in the earlier work, that is, the imperative or obligation that being or existence consists in. This short essay does shed light on the passage from existence as beingobligated (Existenz as Zusein, as Heidegger would say) to the imperative to create a world. Nancy justifies the shift from one to the other by making "the category" (or the complete table of categories) that which the categorical proposition commands (12). What must be then is "the totality of determined existences, in the community of their relations," or in other words, "the world of reason" or "reason as world" (13). The difficulty lies in understanding this command not as the demand to bring about a certain ideal order (turning the one who is commanded into a demiurge or a Subject) but as the demand to stand in the opening that the world is. Nancy reiterates here a theme familiar to his readers: neither the world nor the human are given, and hence neither freedom nor human rights are given, be it as fact or as ideal to be accomplished. Understanding the kind of presence that freedom and rights have (neither present nor absent, neither real nor ideal) is what is at stake in Nancy's "nonmetaphysical" ontology. The next essay in this section, by Watkin, nicely sets the stage for a discussion of the normative force of Nancy's ontology. If a specific politics is derived from and justified in terms of what is, then such a politics "easily arrogates to itself the right to dispense Ultimate Justice on the basis of an ultimate and inflexible ontological justification" (19). To prevent such totalizing violence, thinkers such as Derrida and Levinas insist on the incommensurability of justice, a justice that always remains to come, absolutely open to the radically other. Watkin explains in what sense Nancy's ontology is an ethos and how this ethos informs his notion of justice (which, as he rightly points out, is different than saying that there is in his work a transition from ontology to ethics, and from ethics to politics). Ultimately, by distinguishing incommensurability according to the "with" from incommensurability according to the Other, Watkin is able to show how Nancy's notion of justice does not lead to either paralysis or messianic hope.
Continental Realism and Its Discontents, 2017
A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approache... more A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approaches and traditions ranging from transcendental and speculative idealism to phenomenology and deconstruction for failing to do justice to the real world as it is ‘in itself’, that is, as independent of the structures of human consciousness, experience, and language. This volume presents a collection of essays that take up the challenge of realism from a variety of historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives. This volume includes essays that engage the fundamental presuppositions and conclusions of this new realism by turning to the writings of seminal figures in the history of philosophy, including Kant, Schelling, and others. Also included are essays that challenge anti-realist readings of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Nancy. Finally, several essays in this volume propose alternative ways of understanding realism through careful readings of key figures in German idealism, pessimis...
Parallax, 2015
In this article, I would like to pursue the question whether it is possible to understand Derride... more In this article, I would like to pursue the question whether it is possible to understand Derridean ethics in terms of space rather than time. More precisely, I would like to ask whether what Derrida proposes as an ethics (and exactly what that is will have to be explained) falls under the general heading of future-oriented, 'eschatological' or 'messianic', ethics or whether it can be understood in terms of presence, more specifically of the demand to cohabit here and now in the world.
Kulturphilosophische Debatten zum Verhältnis von Gabe und kulturellen Praktiken
Symposium, 2011
In Briefings on Existence, Alain Badiou calls for a radical atheism that would refuse the Heidegg... more In Briefings on Existence, Alain Badiou calls for a radical atheism that would refuse the Heideggerian pathos of a "last god" and deny the affliction of finitude. I will argue that Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction of monotheism, as well as his thinking of the world, remains resolutely atheistic, or better a-theological, precisely because of Nancy's insistence on finitude and his appeal to the Heideggerian motif of the last god. At the same time, I want to underline, by considering it as a Derridean paleonymy, the danger of Nancy's maintenance of the word "god" to name the infinite opening of the world right at (à meme) the world.
Derrida Today, 2016
This article attempts to sort out the misunderstandings between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nanc... more This article attempts to sort out the misunderstandings between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy surrounding the question of the animal as they come to the fore in the conversations published in For Strasbourg. While Derrida finds the lack of animals in Nancy's world puzzling, Nancy criticises Derrida's blurring of the border between the human and the animal for inadvertently reinstating a scale or a difference, if not between humans and animals, at least between the living and the non-living. Though this criticism appears misguided at first, I argue that Nancy's recasting of finitude in terms of the limit as the place of exposure undoes the phenomenological, or more precisely Heideggerian, understanding of sense and world, which Derrida still attributes to Nancy. Ultimately, what we have in both thinkers is a radically different account of plurality. Whereas Derrida emphasises the abyss between singularities and places faith, engagement, and responsibility at the orig...
We tend to think of violence as something that happens within the world, as something done by a t... more 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. But what 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? Of course, answering these questions, or gesturing towards the possible link between violence and world, requires that we clarify what is meant here by "world." I want take up the question of the link between violence and world from a very specific angle: the thought of the world developed by Jean-Luc Nancy in the wake of Heidegger. This choice might at first seem somewhat arbitrary but I think that the question of violence and its relation to the world imposes itself within the economy of Nancy's ontology in two quite striking ways. First, there is something about Nancy's thinking of Being-with, exposition and world that seems to exclude all connections with violence. After all, for Nancy, finitude is linked not to limitation but to a generosity or liberality of Being, and the experience of freedom offers itself not in the confrontation or conflict between a plurality of existents exercising their absolute freedom but rather in an experience of the spaciosity of world. 1 Such claims might lead one to attribute a certain optimism, if not even a certain naivety, to Nancy's thought: the world, as the free space in which existents come to presence and expose themselves-or "space themselves out"-is a generous and spacious opening that can be affirmed immediately and without reserve. 2 At the same time, the first impression left by Nancy's "generosity" and "spaciosity" only makes the question of violence more urgent: Is violence to be understood merely as a purely empirical event that would leave the generosity of being or the spaciosity of the world unaffected? Part of what I want to show in this article is that such a first impression is mistaken: there is at the bottom of Nancy's ontology a certain originary violence.
Continental Realism and Its Discontents
This introductory chapter provides a historical overview of the emergence of new realist movement... more This introductory chapter provides a historical overview of the emergence of new realist movements in contemporary continental philosophy, focusing in particular on speculative realism and materialism, object-oriented ontology, and transcendental nihilism. Provided also is a conceptual introduction to recent realist critiques of the correlationism of post-Kantian philosophy as well as its supposed fideism, anthropocentrism, and anti-scientific bias. This introduction also contains an overview of the volume and the included chapters.
Jean-Luc Nancy often asserts that his ontology is also an ethos and praxis. I seek to develop thi... more Jean-Luc Nancy often asserts that his ontology is also an ethos and praxis. I seek to develop this affirmation with a view to understanding the role and place of 'another politics' or 'another of politics' in Nancy's work. I start by unfolding Nancy's understanding of existence as abandonment, freedom, and decision, and underline the shifts in emphasis in his reappropriation of Heidegger's thought: from 'es gibt' to 'il y a', from gift to freedom, from guarding and sheltering, to opening and exposing. This is in an effort to show how the decision of existence is entwined with the praxis of inhabiting the world. Such praxis is a struggle for the world as an ungrounded, untotalisable plurality of existences, co-existing and co-appearing to themselves and each other.
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Papers by Marie-Eve Morin