“The only thing I ask is for you to read it carefully,” he wrote three years ago. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy was involved in the controversy surrounding Heidegger for the last time. Emmanuel Faye accused him of learning nothing from the “black book”. Sabine Prokhoris responded to his “notorious” attack in “Liberation”, once reading his article “Heidegger Bennerit” as “in favor of anti-Semitism” “. Philosophers are rarely so depressed. “As for me,” he ended his controversy, “I stick to my determination and retreat from my reading. Good reader, good reader, Salut!”
Jean-Luc Nancy was born in Bordeaux in 1940. He was a student of Paul Ricoeur and worked with him on Kant’s doctorate. He was also attracted to theology. Holderlin is as important to him as Heidegger. In 1968, he came to the University of Strasbourg as an assistant, where he met Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Soon, they moved in with their wives and children. Nancy called their relationship the result of several co-authors, a “sexual intersection.” In the 1980s, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze invited both of them to take up faculty positions at the University of Saint-Denis, which was established in May 68 , Politicians make it possible to study without a high school diploma. These two completely crossed the line, but also the elitist philosopher refused and stayed in Alsace.
Body thinking
Nancy became an influential philosopher of French postmodernism. He has dealt with Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have a deep friendship Jacques DerridaNancy initially published more classic studies on Spinoza, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, and participated in the epoch-making project to “deconstruct” German idealism, which did not stop National Socialism. The world he read is under the mercy of destruction and self-destruction. Heidegger encouraged him in this regard. But he is always looking for new answers: how do people live together in it and how to form a society?
In 1992, he had to undergo a heart transplant. It shaped his “thinking about the body”. For a while, Nancy was teaching in Santiago, and there were rumors of the “Second Strasbourg School”-following in the footsteps of Emmanuel Levinas. Until 2004, he had been a professor in Strasbourg and conveyed his 68-year-old “anti-humanitarianism” to the younger generation.
Successfully self-destruct
The last of his more than 200 books—many with German translations—was published last fall and related to Covid-19: “A virus that is too human.” Jean-Luc Nancy explained it as “A more serious symptom” disease.” He has made the essence of thinking about health and society in the epidemic. He wants a vaccine “against self-destructive rules and success”. He no longer believes in progress and “humanity”. The possibility of living in the world in a different way.” He wrote that after the virus there will be “further symptoms until the vital organs become inflamed and extinct”: “Human life, like all life, will end. “
In Strasbourg last Monday, his second heart stopped beating. The philosopher died of shortness of breath. Recently, he has been traveling between home and the hospital. He outlived his friends Derrida and Raku Rabat by fifteen years. Jean-Luc Nancy left no theory or doctrine. His multi-talented and fragmented works are about survival in the post-totalitarian era and show ways to escape the crisis of civilization. Most readers are his spicy books “Corpus” and “Intrus” on heart surgery. Jean-Luc Nancy was 81 years old. Goodbye, philosopher: Salut.
