Nancy, Violence and the World

Published as: Nitsche, M. (2012): Thinking Non-violence within the Framework of Phenomenological Ontologies, in: P. Šajda et al., Affectivity, Agency and Intersubjectivity, L`Harmattan, Budapest, ISBN 978-963-236-587-9, s. 111 -124.]

Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture

The article raises the question of constant violent acts, primarily military, despite the longtime general condemnation thereof. This turns us to the problem of ontology of violence. The approach suggested here is based on understanding violence as labor with the excessive use of force. This is related to the understanding of force as the truth. Thus, for the archaic mind, force (and violence), the sacred, and truth were different projection-implementations of one entity. The civilizational world model contains in its basis not the principles of a single truth, but the principles of collaboration and coexistence of different stances instead of the submission to one entity. The old model of violence as a way to participate in the object's truth and to confirm the subject's sacred status stays effective. This paper argues that violence has an ontological dimension in the old model of a single truth, but cannot have it within a civilizational approach.

Brill, 2023

Ontologies of Violence provides a new paradigm for understanding the concept of violence through comparative interpretations of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, philosophical theologians in the Mennonite pacifist tradition, and Grace M. Jantzen’s feminist philosophy of religion. By drawing out and challenging the remarkably similar priorities shared by its three sources, and by challenging the assumption that differences necessarily lead to displacement, Ontologies of Violence provides a critical theory of violence by treating it as a diagnostic concept that implies the violation of value-laden boundaries. "Kennel’s Ontologies of Violence does not offer a definition that can become the cornerstone of a political vision. Instead, it undoes easy sloganeering and even challenges the headiest of theorizing in order to bring to the fore what is left unsaid when the term ‘violence’ is said." - Guy Lancaster in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books (November 2023)

Hypatia, 2006

In this essay, Houle focuses in on the ways in which a Foucauldian-framed account of violence, such as the one Gail Mason offers in Spectacles of Violence, rattles liberal (theoretical and ‘common-sensual’) understandings of culpability and lawfulness. Mason's analysis dares to suggest that violence is constitutive, not simply destructive of selves, of lives. Asking after the ways in which that constitution is asymmetrical in events of violence, Houle reintroduce some cautions and concerns about drawing from a poststructuralist perspective. This, in turn, raises the question as to which ontology of the self such a rebalancing requires. The essays ends by making use of Mason's own distinction between our selves as ‘who’ and ‘what,’ to give a modified reading of the ways these aspects of selfhood are constituted or made possible in events of violence, which does not fall back upon the liberal conception of the self.

2009

Continental Philosophy Review

It would not be wrong to say that relationality has a central importance in Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking. It can further be argued that it is the centrality of relationality that holds together, as it were, all the diverse and heterogeneous elements in Nancy’s entire oeuvre. In relation to this, two concepts come to the fore with regard to the issue of relationality, namely “comparution” (co-appearance) and “partage” (sharing). Given this, this presentation attempts to show that comparution and partage can be understood as two distinct but inextricable components of Nancy’s central ontological concept, viz., “being singular plural.” In order to do so, I will first clarify how the notion of comparution lays out the conditions of possibility of co-existence and hence plurality. Secondly, I will attempt to show how what Nancy calls the “sharing/parting of being” opens to an ontology of singularity without recuperating any kind of atomistic individuality. Finally, this will lead to an analysis explicating how these two concepts, i.e., comparution and partage become to constitute what Nancy calls “being singular plural” indicating an understanding of being in terms of relationality and event.

2015

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.

2022

Paper presented at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) 2022 The theoretical links that can be established between Girard and Heidegger are manifold. However, the core of these links consists in the identification of the Greek term polemos as the original foundation.Girard affirms that Heidegger's reflections on the Greek logos and the Christian logos that he carried out in Introduction to Metaphysics are not only of great value insofar as they contributed to the deconstruction of metaphysics, but that this work was done from the revelation of the logos of violence, reaffirming what for Girard will be the archaic sacred in the process of hominization. Nevertheless, and what this brief essay aims to do, is to present a sketch of Heidegger's ontological understanding of the concept of polemos, for although Girard praises Heidegger's analysis and the unveiling of the Greek logos, on the other hand, he finds it frightening insofar as the philosophy of the German thinker reaffirms its belonging in the archaic sacred, denying the redeeming role of the Christian logos. Thus, we must scrutinize what is the fundamental sense of the Heraclitean logos that Heidegger applies in his philosophy in order to understand why he does not renounce it and, on the contrary, reaffirms his thought from there. With this, it is hoped that the meta-anthropological dialogue that both authors maintain will be enriched and will yield new conclusions that will allow us to analyze the mechanisms of violence that have led us to the critical situation in which we find ourselves.

This is the text of my lecture at the Modern French Research Seminar of Cambridge University on 20 May 2018. References are to the "Prologue" in La Littérature antillaise entre histoire et mémoire, 1935-1995 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020), which was still a work in progress.