Nancy is predominantly a thinker of life in all its forms and expressions. For him, to be, to exist, is always a question of being alive in the most vivacious, intense and restless way, i.e. to be in a relentless relation of exchange with one’s environment and with others. Apart from being a central theme in Nancy’s work, this vivid relationality is also a distinctive feature of his mode of writing. Nancy’s death therefore poses a fundamental challenge to his own thinking and writing. For how to relate oneself to a dead author? How to form a community with the dead? How to share the absence of life, of this specific life: how to share the death of Nancy? In this commemorative essay, Aukje van Rooden investigates these questions in an attempt to make sense of Nancy’s passing.

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.