The Singular Politics of Jean-Luc Nancy

In this wide-ranging and philosophically rigorous examination of Jean-Luc Nancy’s reinvention of ontology as a theory of political contestation, Joanna Hodge proposes a model of Nancy's philosophy as collective practice: thinking with others, navigating translation, responding to crisis.

The Singular Politics of Jean-Luc Nancy identifies the French philosopher as linking a theory of innovation and meaning to a theory of a contestation of worlds, within which the structures basic to politics and political analysis themselves mutate. The book focuses on the inventions in Nancy’s writing itself, alongside the more familiar themes, retreating the political, being singular plural, and a deconstructing of Christianity, the strategies of interruption and fragmentation. His distinctive notions of comparution, and partage, of ecotechnics and excription, of sexistence and concealed thinking are introduced, his reception and re-formulations of key Christian phrases are made pivotal: ecce homo, noli me tangere, vox clamans in deserto; behold the man, do not touch me, a voice crying in the wilderness.

Connections between western political theorising, a fraught religious inheritance and a relative autonomy of art practice form a context for assessing what comes after a disruption of sovereignty and subjectivity, as governing terms delineating a domain of political thinking. Joanna Hodge shows how Nancy rethinks time and history, examining his disruptive relation to a time of inheritance, a time of current contestation and a time of anticipated futures, through his focus on time as insurrection and birth to presence.