Being mondaine : Jean-Luc Nancy's Enumerations of the World

Abstract

In one of his latest books, La pensée dérobée (2001), Jean-Luc Nancy continues writing about the major themes of his work up until now: community, sense, being as being with, or singular plural being. These themes come together in a witnessing of the world “as such”: that is to say,the world here and now in which we are living in common. The sense of the world is nothing but this being-in-common. This makes Nancy a thinker of “globalization”, albeit in a very specific way, one concerned with the way in which we are “world”. One way to argue this is to consider the way in which Nancy's workis larded with enumerations. Very often he “recites” our singular plural being by giving lists of the diversity of “things”. This is also the case for a few of the texts in La pensée dérobée. In trying to catch an echo of these “recitals”, I want to review the theme world in Nancy's oeuvre and ask the question if and how Nancy thinks of our global coexistence nowadays. A part of this text was presented at the 4th annual conference of The Society for European Philosophy at the Manchester Metropolitan University (11–13 September 2001).