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It is evident from his first publications that Nancy has been influenced by many varied and diverse thinkers. He has written ''Le Discours de la Syncope'' ( 1976 ) and ''L’Impératif Catégorique'' ( 1983 ) on Kant , ''La remarque spéculative'' (translated as ''The Speculative Remark'', 2001 ) on Hegel , ''Ego sum'' ( 1979 ) on Descartes and ''Le Partage des Voix'' ( 1982 ) on Heidegger . Other major influences include Bataille , Blanchot and Nietzsche . His first book, published in 1973 , was titled ''Le Titre de la Lettre'' (''The Title of the Letter''), and was written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe . A critical study of the work of Jacques Lacan , Nancy’s main critique of Psychoanalysis is that Lacan puts the Metaphysical Subject to task, but does so in a manner couched in Metaphysics . Nancy has continued to Critique psychoanalytic Concepts since this book, believing ideas like the Law , Father , Other and Subject worth studying, but warning against the Theological remnants embedded in psychoanalytical Language . BIOGRAPHY Jean-Luc Nancy graduated in philosophy in 1962 in Paris . He taught for a short while in Colmar, and then in 1968 he took on a position as an assistant at the ''Institut de Philosophie'' in Strasbourg . In 1973 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Kant under supervision of Paul Ricœur . He was then promoted ''maître de conférences'' at the ''Université des Sciences Humaines''. In the 1970 s and 1980 s he was guest professor at universities all over the world, from the University of California to the ''Freie Universität'' in Berlin . His international reputation has grown, and he has been invited as a cultural delegate of the French ministry of external affairs to speak in Eastern Europe , Britain and the United States . In the last part of the 1980 s and early 1990 s Nancy had to take a break from his active career due to illness. He underwent a heart transplant, and his recovery from this was made more difficult by a long-term fight with cancer. He stopped teaching, and quit participation in almost all of the committees with which he was engaged, however he never stopped writing. Many of his best known texts were published during this time. A book on his experience entitled ''L'intrus'' (''The Intruder'') was published in 2000 . Today he remains an active philosopher, invited to speak around the world for many philosophical congresses, and writing ceaselessly. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University Of Strasbourg , and a member of the faculty at the European Graduate School . Filmmaker Claire Denis has made at least two movies inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy and his works. Many other artists have worked with Nancy as well, for example the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami and the artist Soun-gui Kim. WORKS ''Les Fins de l'Homme'' Conference (''The Ends of Man'', 1980) In 1980 , Nancy and Lacoue-Lebarthe organized a conference on Derrida and politics in Cerisy-la-Salle called ''"Les Fins de l'Homme"'' ("The Ends of Man"). Nancy has said that Derrida inspires his belief that something new was born in philosophy after Sartre . The conference solidified Derrida’s place at the forefront of contemporary philosophy, and was a place to begin an in-depth conversation between philosophy and contemporary politics. Further to their desire to rethink the political, Nancy and Lacoue-Lebarthe set up in the same year the ''Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur la Politique'' (The Centre of philosophical Research of the Political). The Centre was a space for discussion on this topic, and supported such speakers as Claude Lefort and Jean-François Lyotard . Two of Nancy’s books, ''Rejouer le Politique'' ( 1981 ) and ''Le Retrait du Politique'' (translated as ''Retreating the Political'' in 1997 ), were inspired by this time in his career. By 1984 however, the Centre was failing to meet the original aspirations of its founders as a common space with common concerns, becoming instead a podium for a succession of speakers. They decided to close the Centre, saying that the Centre as a place of encounter “had become almost completely dissociated from that as a place of research and questioning.” ''La Communauté désœuvrée'' (''The Inoperative Community'', 1982) Nancy’s first book on the question of '' (which comes from the latin Opus ), a "work of art" ("œuvre d'art", but "art" is here understood in a large sense). “The community that becomes a single thing ( Body , Mind , Fatherland , Leader …) necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being.” Maurice Blanchot was inspired by Nancy’s work on community and Bataille , whose work on Sovereignty is also a subject of ''La communauté désoeuvrée'', in writing his own ''La communauté inavouable'' (trans. ''The Unavowable Community'' in 1988 ) as a response to Nancy. They would continue to participate in Dialogue together until Blanchot's death. ''L'Expérience de la liberté'' (''The Experience of Freedom'', 1988) Nancy was elected ''docteur d’état'' (doctor of state) in origin for every freedom. Freedom is what is in '' Dasein '', or the being-thrown-into-the-world, and not Being . Like Heidegger, Nancy interprets Kant’s freedom as an Unconditional Causality ; freedom is that of a Subject who, before it can make a Decision to be free, forgets that it is always already thrown into existence. He argues that it is necessary to think freedom in its finite being, because to think of it as the property of an infinite subject is to make any finite being a limit of freedom. The existence of the other is the necessary condition of freedom, rather than its limitation. Freedom is reliant on the presupposition of our being-in-the-world, as Nancy had already shown in ''The Inoperable Community''. ''Le Sens du Monde'' (''The Sense of the World'', 1993) Nancy addresses the World in its contemporary global configuration in other writings on freedom, Justice and Sovereignty . In his book ''Le Sens du Monde'' (''The Sense of the World'', 1993 ), he asks what we mean by saying that we live in one world, and how our sense of the world is changed by saying that it is situated within the world, rather than above or apart from it. To Nancy, the world, or Existence , is our Ontological Responsibility , which precedes political, juridical and moral responsibility. He describes our being in the world as an exposure to a naked existence, without the possibility of support by a fundamental metaphysical order or cause. Contemporary existence no longer has recourse to a divine framework, as was the case in feudal society where the meaning and course of life was predetermined. The Contingency of our naked existence as an ontological question is the main challenge of our existence in contemporary global society. ''Être Singulier Pluriel'' (''Being Singular Plural'', 2000) In his book ''Être Singulier Pluriel'' (trans. ''Being Singular Plural'', 2000 ), Nancy tackles the question of how we can speak of a plurality of a ‘we’ without making of the ‘we’ a singular identity (i.e. a community as a product). The premise of the title essay in this book is that there is no being without ‘being with’, that ‘I’ does not come before ‘we’ ('' Dasein '' is not prior to ''mitsein''), and that there is no existence without co-existence. In an obvious extension from his thoughts on freedom, community, and the sense of the world, he imagines the ‘being-with’ as a mutual exposure to one another that preserves the freedom of the ‘I’, and thus a community that is not subject to an exterior or preexistent definition. He writes, “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.” The five essays that follow the title piece continue to develop Nancy’s philosophy through discussions of National Sovereignty , War and Technology , Identity and Hybridism , the Gulf War and Sarajevo . Nancy’s central concern in these essays remains the ‘being-with’, and he uses this as a place for discussion relevant to issues of psychoanalysis, politics and Multiculturalism , looking at notions of ‘ Self ’ and ‘other’, in current contexts. ARTISTIC ANALYSIS Nancy has also written for art catalogues and international art journals, especially on contemporary art. He also writes poetry and for the theatre, earning him respect as an influential philosopher of art and culture. In his book ''Les Muses'', published in 1994 (trans. ''The Muses'', 1996 ), he begins with an analysis of Hegel’s thesis on the death of art. Among the essays in ''The Muses'' is a piece on Caravaggio , which was originally a lecture given at the Louvre . In this essay Nancy looks for a different conception of Painting where painting is not a Representation of the Empirical World , but a Presentation of the world, of sense, or of existence. Nancy has published books on Film and Techno-music , as well as texts on the problem of representation, on the statute of Literature , on Image and Violence , and on the work of On Kawara, Soun-gui , Baudelaire , and Hölderlin . BIBLIOGRAPHY Selected works
English translations
Secondary texts in English
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