Sensing Being-Such As Emptiness through Literary Reading: Jean Luc-Nancy’s Aesthetics and Mahayana Buddhist Philosophy

Abstract

This essay discusses how Nancy’s thought and writing style is, to a great degree, similar to Buddhist philosophy and can be used as a means to develop to step into the discourse on the dimension of genuine spirituality by turning to Buddhism and Taoism. It first examines that what Nancy means by “the sense of the world” and “Truth” as “being-such.” The sense of the world is the sense of the real self as it is called in Buddhist philosophy and Levinasian ethics which has no room for the abstraction. N?g?rjuna’s thought on the real self as the full emptiness is explored. That is, the Truth as being-such is the perfect emptiness. These ideas of Nancy comprize his aesthetics that I make use of for the purpose of reading literary texts. Nancy’s notion of the sublime subject and his aesthetic view in The Muses and The Muses II show that the text as a fragment that is equal to the whole opens “sense as such” and leads us to infinity, the exterior. Practical reading strategies are discussed with the notions of “koan,” and “Hua-yen” in the Avatamsaka S?tra in view of the reading of literary texts to reach the dimension beyond the language of the literary text.