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Ginette Michaud: Demande de Jean-Luc Nancy, ou Comment rephraser la « philolittérature »
Demande de Jean-Luc Nancy, ou Comment rephraser la « philolittérature »
(p. 319 – 334)

Ginette Michaud

Demande de Jean-Luc Nancy, ou Comment rephraser la « philolittérature »

PDF, 16 pages

The publication of Expectation in 2015 underscored the significance of literature within Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical body of work. Ever since The Literary Absolute and The Title of the Letter, co-written with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, which left a mark on what they dub “philoliterature,” the question of “literature” [poîesis, Dichtung) has given rise to several theoretical, aesthetic, and political meditations, as well as—unusually for a philosopher—formal experiments (pastiches, poems, dialogues, recitatives, etc.). After recalling the legacies of early German Romanticism, Benjamin, and Blanchot, I examine some of Nancy’s statements on literature or, better yet, on fiction defined as a “fashioning” of forms and as the “creation” of the world. I then analyze the key elements of his approach to writing as nascent form, involved in a process of formation and transformation. Literature for Nancy makes sense through excess and intensification; immemorial and without a prior “taking-place,” it is characterized by the sharing of voices, address, and orality, the constant interaction between (the) sense(s) and the body. Lastly, the final section focuses on poetry insofar as it bears the sharpest tip of our relationship with language.

  • post-structuralism
  • community
  • democracy
  • deconstruction
  • ethics

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Ginette Michaud

Ginette Michaud is Professor Emerita at the University of Montréal. As a member of the international committee responsible for the edition of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, she has co-edited The Beast and the Sovereign (University of Chicago Press, 2009 and 2011), Le parjure et le pardon (Seuil, 2019 and 2020), and Derrida’s writings on the arts, Thinking Out of Sight (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and architecture, Les arts de l’espace (La Différence, 2015). She has dedicated several essays and collections to Derrida, Nancy, Cixous and Kofman. Her latest publications include: La vérité à l’épreuve du pardon (PUM, 2018), Sarah Kofman et Jacques Derrida. Croisements, écarts, différences (with I. Ullern, Hermann, 2018), Lire dans la nuit et autres essais – Pour Jacques Derrida (PUM, 2020), and Ekphraser. Nouvelles poétiques de l’ekphrasis en déconstruction (PUM, 2022).
Susanna Lindberg (ed.), Artemy Magun (ed.), ...: Thinking With—Jean-Luc Nancy

With this book, we would like to resume the passionate conversation that Jean-Luc Nancy was engaged in throughout his life, with philosophers and artists from all over the world. Now that he has passed away, it is not enough for us to simply reflect on his work: we would like to stay true to the stance to which his thought invites us, in a pluralistic and communal way. Jean-Luc Nancy takes up the old philosophical question of truth as a praxis of a with — understanding truth without any given measure or comparison as an articulation of a with. It is a thinking responsible for the world from within the world, a language that seeks to respond to the ongoing mutation of our civilization.

 

With contributions by Jean-Christophe Bailly, Rodolphe Burger, Marcia Sá Calvacante Schuback, Marcus Coelen, Alexander García Düttmann, Juan-Manuel Garrido, Martta Heikkilä, Erich Hörl, Valentin Husson, Sandrine Israel-Jost, Ian James, Apostolos Lampropoulos, Nidesh Lawtoo, Jérôme Lèbre, Susanna Lindberg, Michael Marder, Artemy Magun, Boyan Manchev, Dieter Mersch, Hélène Nancy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Aïcha Liviana Messina, Ginette Michaud, Helen Petrovsky, Jacob Rogozinski, Philipp Stoellger, Peter Szendy, Georgios Tsagdis, Marita Tatari, Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Aukje van Rooden.

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