This volume focuses on the relational aspect of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking. As Nancy himself showed, thinking might be a solitary activity but it is never singular in its dimension. Building on or breaking away from other thoughts, especially those by thinkers who had come before, thinking is always plural, relational. This “singular plural” dimension of thought in Nancy’s philosophical writings demands explication.
In this book, some of today’s leading scholars in the theoretical humanities shed light on how Nancy’s thought both shares with and departs from Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Weil, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Lyotard, elucidating “the sharing of voices,” in Nancy’s phrase, between Nancy and these thinkers.
Contributors: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Emily Apter, Rodolphe Gasché, Werner Hamacher, Eleanor Kaufman, Marie-Eve Morin, Timothy Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John H. Smith

Irving Goh is Associate Professor of Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham University Press, 2014), which won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in French and Francophone Studies. His second monograph, L’existence prépositionnelle, was published by Galilée in 2019. With Jean-Luc Nancy, he published The Deconstruction of Sex (Duke University Press, 2021). He is also editor of French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK (Routledge, 2019), coeditor with Verena Andermatt Conley of Nancy Now (Polity, 2014), and coeditor with Timothy Murray of the diacritics special issue on “The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy” (2 volumes, 2014-15).

Irving Goh's profile page

Georges Van Den Abbeele is Professor of French, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine. His publications include Travel as Metaphor, Community at Loose Ends, A World of Fables, French Civilization and Its Discontents, and numerous articles on travel narrative, critical theory, and early modern French literature, as well as translations into English of Jean François Lyotard. His latest book, Sense and Singularity: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Interruption of Philosophy, is due out from Fordham University Press in Spring 2023.

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Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature, and Chair of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at New York University. Her books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (coedited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). Her current project, What Is Just Translation? takes up questions of translation and justice across media. Her essays have appeared in Public Culture, diacritics, October, PMLA, Comparative Literature, Art Journal, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum, and Critical Inquiry. In 2019 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017–18 she served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association. In fall 2014 she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University, and in 2003–4 she was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. She edits the Translation/Transnation book series at Princeton University Press.

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Rodolphe Gasché is SUNY Distinguished Professor & Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His interests concern the history of aesthetics, German Idealism and Romanticism, phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought, hermeneutics, and critical theory. His most recent books include Europe, or The Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford University Press, 2009); Un Arte Muy Fragile: Sobre la Retorica de Aristoteles, trans. Rogenio Gonzalez (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2010); The Stelliferous Fold: Toward a Virtual Law of Literature’s Self-Formation (Fordham University Press, 2011); Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology (Stanford University Press, 2012); Geophilosophy: On Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “What Is Philosophy?” (Northwestern University Press, 2014); Deconstruction, Its Force Its Violence (SUNY Press, 2016); Persuasion, Reflection, Judgment: Ancillae Vitae (Indiana University Press, 2017); Storytelling: The Destruction of the Inalienable in the Age of the Holocaust (SUNY Press, 2018); De l’Éclat du Monde: La “valeur” chez Marx et Nancy (Editions Hermann, 2019); Locating Europe: A Figure, A Concept, An Idea? (Indiana University Press, 2020). His latest book-length study, Plato’s Stranger, will be forthcoming from SUNY Press in 2022.

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Werner Hamacher (1948–2017) was Professor for General and Comparative Literature at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University. Among his pathbreaking works of philosophy and literary criticism available in English are Pleroma: Reading in Hegel; Premises: Essays on Philosophy from Kant to Celan; and Minima Philologica.

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Eleanor Kaufman is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), and At Odds with Badiou: Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (forthcoming, Columbia University Press).

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Ian Alexander Moore is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and a faculty member at St. John’s College. He is the author of Dialogue on the Threshold: Heidegger and Trakl (SUNY Press, 2022) and Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement (SUNY Press, 2019/2020); editor of Reiner Schürmann’s Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance (Diaphanes, 2020); coeditor of Jean Wahl’s Transcendence and the Concrete (Fordham University Press, 2017); and translator of texts by Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Nancy, and Hamacher, among others.

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Marie-Eve Morin is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Alberta in Canada. She is the author of many articles on Derrida, Nancy, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Sartre, Latour, and Sloterdijk. She is also the author of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being: At the Limits of Phenomenology (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and Jean-Luc Nancy (Polity, 2012); editor of Continental Realism and Its Discontents (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); as well as the coeditor, with Peter Gratton, of The Nancy Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and of Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Politics, Art, and Sense (SUNY Press, 2012). She has also translated some of Nancy’s works into English, including Ego Sum (Fordham University Press, 2016).

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Timothy Murray is Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, Professor of Comparative Literature and Literatures in English, and Curator of the Cornell Biennial and the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art. Publications include Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2022); Medium Philosophicum: Para un pensamiento tecnológico del arte (Universidad de Murcia, 2021); coeditor with Shin-Yi Yang, Xu Bing’s Background Stories (Mandarin) (Beijing: Life Bookstore, 2016); coeditor with Irving Goh, “The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy,” 2 vols., diacritics (2014–15); Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Zonas de Contacto: El arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999); Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, and Art (Routledge, 1997); and Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993).

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Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. He is especially known for works such as The Inoperative Community, The Experience of Freedom, Being Singular Plural, The Sense of the World, and The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translations of his later important works such as the two volumes of The Deconstruction of Christianity, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence have been published by Fordham University Press.

Jean-Luc Nancy's profile page

John H. Smith is a Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine. He has published monographs on Hegel and philosophies of the will. He has essays on a range of literary and philosophical topics, most recently on Goethe and Idealism, on Nietzsche and the decadent will, and on Ereignis in Heidegger and the Novelle. His latest book is Dialogues between Faith and Reason: The Death and Return of God in Modern German Thought. He is currently working on a project entitled “How Infinity Came to Be at Home in the World,” which explores the place of the infinitesimal calculus and the mathematical infinite in the German philosophical tradition. And he is coeditor of the Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts.

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This is an excellent and erudite collection of well-written essays on a philosopher whose output continues to have timely relevance for wider social, political, and cultural issues. The chapters are organized to form a coherent arc with successive pairs of chapters providing elegant supplements to one another and bringing out certain thematic issues in Nancy’s work (worlding, his relation to phenomenology, metaphysics). The topics are also carefully chosen, adding new dimensions on Nancy and extending previous scholarship on him in novel and thought-provoking ways.---Naomi Waltham-Smith, Author of Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life