Jean-Luc Nancy and the Hospital: Imagining Clinical Environments of Strangeness and Multiplicity

Abstract

This article explores representations of illness and medical treatment in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, arguing that his philosophy urges us to re-imagine healthcare environments and hospital spaces. In L’Intrus (2000), Nancy describes how undergoing a heart transplant led him to encounter the intrinsic strangeness and multiplicity of his body and identity. This text, it will be seen, explores also the spatialization of this strangeness and multiplicity; Nancy characterizes the transplant as an ‘intrusion’ and details the extension of his body and being across a network of medical treatments and technologies. This article brings L’Intrus into dialogue with approaches to hospital environments in the medical humanities, as well as with Nancy's interrogation of conceptions of construction, destruction, and ‘struction’ in Dans quels mondes vivons-nous? (2011). It proposes that Nancy's work invites us to rethink clinical environments as spaces which must embrace, rather than resist, strangeness and multiplicity.