Abstract
The chapter is occupied by an exhaustive analysis of Nancy’s investigation of the sense of the world. Nancy invokes a return to the world structured as a retracing of the tradition. The demand for thought today is then to think through what the tradition has offered us in order to open it up, differently from how it pictures itself.
The analysis is developed from the question What does it mean that the world is without sense?’ and pays particular attention to the Nancean project of deconstruction of Christianity. Nancy pictures the West’s relation to the world as one that is entirely permeated by absence. The unfolding of this absence produces a world without given sense out of which Nancy develops the idea of a surpassing of knowledge as decisive for man’s relation to the world and its sense. Nancy’s proximity with Cavell is made explicit here.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Souvent la police est venue nous arrêter quand on tournait l’autre jour. On s’était arrêté sur le côté de l’autoroute, et puis ils nous ont dit: “Vous n’avez pas le droit, sauf en cas d’urgence.” On leur a dit: “Il y a urgence: il y a la lumière, elle va durer dix seconds”’.
- 2.
The French reads ‘sans appartenence’, which is in this case more felicitous since it evokes the idea of being apart; these singularities are precisely that which have not been set apart from the whole; they are in themselves the apart.
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Rugo, D. (2016). Nancy and the World Without Sense. In: Philosophy and the Patience of Film in Cavell and Nancy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58060-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58060-3_3
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