Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy ( nahn-SEE, French: [ʒɑ̃lyk nɑ̃si]; 26 July 1940 – 23 August 2021) was a French philosopher. Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre (The Title of the Letter, 1992), a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including La remarque spéculative in 1973 (The Speculative Remark, 2001) on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Le Discours de la syncope (1976) and L'Impératif catégorique (1983) on Immanuel Kant, Ego sum (1979) on René Descartes, and Le Partage des voix (1982) on Martin Heidegger.

In addition to Le titre de la lettre, Nancy collaborated with Lacoue-Labarthe on several other books and articles. Nancy is credited with helping to reopen the question of the ground of community and politics with his 1985 work La communauté désoeuvrée (The Inoperative Community), following Blanchot's The Unavowable Community (1983) and Agamben responded to both with The Coming Community (1990). One of the very few monographs that Jacques Derrida ever wrote on a contemporary philosopher is On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy. Jean-Luc Nancy graduated in philosophy in 1962 from the University of Paris. He taught for a short while in Colmar before becoming an assistant at the Strasbourg Institut de Philosophie in 1968. In 1973, he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Kant under the supervision of Paul Ricœur. Nancy was then promoted to Maître de conférences (associate professor) at the Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg. In the 1970s and 1980s, Nancy was a guest professor at universities all over the world, from the University of California to the Freie Universität in Berlin. 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 1987, Nancy became a Docteur d'État at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail for a thesis on freedom in Heidegger under the supervision of Gérard Granel. The jury was composed of Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. It was published as L'expérience de la liberté (1988).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nancy suffered serious medical problems. He underwent a heart transplant and his recovery was made more difficult by a long-term cancer diagnosis. He stopped teaching and participating in almost all of the committees with which he was engaged, but continued to write. Many of his best known texts were published during this time. An account of his experience, L'intrus (The Intruder), was published in 2000. Nancy was a professor at the University of Strasbourg. Nancy was also Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and Professor of Philosophy 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, such as Simon Hantaï, Soun-gui Kim and Phillip Warnell. Nancy has written about the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami and featured prominently in the film The Ister.

Nancy died on 23 August 2021 at the age of 81.