Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community

The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has made of the question of community one the central questions of his oeuvre. For Nancy, the question of community is the question of our time, and the need to subject it to thorough philosophical analysis has assumed the central place in his work, alongside his reflections on art, religion and literature. It is not so much a new theory of community Nancy has in mind. Rather than abandoning a specific form of thought, he aims… (more)

The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has made of the question of community one the central questions of his oeuvre. For Nancy, the question of community is the question of our time, and the need to subject it to thorough philosophical analysis has assumed the central place in his work, alongside his reflections on art, religion and literature. It is not so much a new theory of community Nancy has in mind. Rather than abandoning a specific form of thought, he aims to put the ways we speak and think about the social bond into question, to break them open and exhaust all of their registers. Nancy's work takes another look at community, at the social bond and at identity more generally, than we are used to. His point of departure is the ontological social condition that, according to Nancy, we are always already in. For Nancy, every form of being-with starts out from this condition, but this has been denied in the thinking of community until very recently.