Jean-Luc Nancy 1940 – 2021
Jean-Luc Nancy was a French philosopher whose work extended the heritage of Heidegger and Derrida into an original thinking of community, the body, and shared existence. After teaching for decades at the University of Strasbourg, he produced a long series of works including The Inoperative Community, Being Singular Plural, Corpus, and the two-volume Deconstruction of Christianity, in which co-existence rather than the lone subject is taken as the basic structure of being. A heart transplant in 1991 inspired the autobiographical philosophical essay The Intruder. His friendship and joint work with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe shaped much of late twentieth-century French philosophy.
Key facts
- Nationality
- French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Post-Structuralism, Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Jean-Luc Nancy:
“Being is being-with.”
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Attributed to Jean-Luc Nancy:
“Community is not lost; it is always already happening.”
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Attributed to Jean-Luc Nancy:
“The body is not a sign; it is the very space of meaning.”
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Attributed to Jean-Luc Nancy:
“Sense is the dimension along which we exist with one another.”
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Attributed to Jean-Luc Nancy:
“To deconstruct Christianity is to follow it to the end of itself.”