At the Boundaries of Birth, Love, and Death: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Batailleanism with Reserve – from Restricted to General Natology

Abstract

ABSTRACT Experience does not have boundaries; it is a boundary. Transgression, as envisaged by Bataille, consists in the realisation of this circumstance. Boundary experiences are experiences of the limit. The experience itself communicates the boundary; communication takes place at the boundary of two experiences. Following Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy further developed this thought, arguing that in this impossible inner experience, a community of beings is communicated, or indicated, but cannot be translated into any specific (organisational) form of community, or concrete politics. Such an ‘inoperative’ or ‘unrepresentable’ community is to be found in birth, love, and death. This paper will try to apply Derrida’s famous judgement of ascribing Bataille a Hegelianism without reserve, by reading Nancy’s thought mutatis mutandis as a Batailleanism with reserve. This coincides with a transition from a restricted natology – which presupposes an equivalence, or exchangeability, of birth and death – to a general natology. This represents a shift in Western philosophy’s thanatological tradition, which over the course of the twentieth century has gradually come to refuse such an easy equation in the wake of its discovery of birth as a philosophical phenomenon in its own right – independent of death.