The All-Too-Human Departure of Jean-Luc Nancy Irving Goh (bio) On August 23, 2021, Jean-Luc Nancy, one the most important thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, left this world. There is no doubt that he will be remembered for his writings, which make us critically rethink in “deconstructive” or even “post-deconstructive” ways the senses (particularly touch), community, existence (including its entanglement with sex, or “sexistence” in Nancy’s more recent formulation), freedom, and the world (which creates itself in much indifference to the determining forces of globalization). Here, in the wake of his passing, I would just like to remind readers that he is also perhaps the thinker of departure, of leaving, of parting. I am going to do this by simply recalling some of his thoughts on it from a talk he gave to kids aged ten and above, a talk titled “To Leave—Departure” no less (the original French version was subsequently published by Bayard in 2011 as Partir—Le départ). In this regard, the text that follows is in a way very much inflected by Nancy’s voice, if not a “sharing of voices”—as Nancy would say—between his and mine. But to go back to Nancy’s talk: we should not take too lightly or even condescend to the context of the talk, for we are mostly not unlike kids when it comes to parting or departure. We tend to refuse accepting the fact of its occurrence, especially when it concerns that of a loved one; we become like kids who throw tantrums when faced with the harsh reality that denies them their desires. Nevertheless, we have to grant that our refusal here is more than a petulant behavior: something with a greater and deeper gravitas or pathos. Perhaps more than death, parting or departure is something difficult for us to learn. Or else, as adults, if not precisely because we are adults, parting or departure is something we largely fail to learn well, even though we have to, or are forced to, learn it anew each time another parts or departs. So why not listen in with the kids when the very idea of parting or departure is first articulated and elucidated to them in a more or less philosophical way, and try one more time to learn to accept parting or departure? [End Page 187] There is perhaps no one better than Nancy to teach us about parting or departure, since he is for the most part cool about leaving or parting, even when it comes to the more definite departure that we associate with death, exhibiting barely any somber emotion or affect when thinking or writing about it. (Unlike his close friend Jacques Derrida, who had expressed apprehension and resistance toward learning to die in his last interview, published as Apprendre à vivre enfin, we find a certain nonchalance in Nancy in L’intrus, which reflects on his heart transplant decades later, when he was initially faced with the possibility that he would not receive a new heart. Neither does Nancy have a Work of Mourning book like Derrida, which collects the latter’s eulogies for his philosopher-friends who have passed. Nancy generally refuses effusiveness and avoids the brooding or melancholic tone when paying tribute to the dead. He would say, in “Salut à toi, salut aux aveugles que nous devenons,” a text written on the occasion of Derrida’s death, that the time of mourning is never the time for analysis or discussion.) We will come back to the question of death. For now, we simply note that the sense of departure, in Nancy’s view, does not come only with death or its imminence. Leaving is something we do all the time. We have been doing it since birth, right from the moment when we left our mother’s womb. We do it as kids when we have to leave the comfort of own homes for school. We leave our parents’ home in more definite terms, or in a somewhat more permanent way, when we enter adulthood and seek to build our own lives elsewhere. It is indeed by leaving familial and/or familiar...
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Jun 1, 2022
Holly Willis 
Open Access