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This is the first book to provide a systematic investigation of the relation between community and literature in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. It develops the original claim that this relation has to be understood as a rethinking of myth. Traversing the entirety of Nancy’s vast oeuvre, the author offers an incomparable account of the ways in which Nancy’s central questions of community and literature are linked together. Moreover, by putting this linkage in terms of ‘myth’, this book situates Nancy’s work within a larger tradition, leading from German Romanticism to contemporary theories of the social relevance of literature.
This is the first book to provide a systematic investigation of the relation between community and literature in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. It develops the original claim that this relation has to be understood as a rethinking of myth. Traversing the entirety of Nancy’s vast oeuvre, the author offers an incomparable account of the ways in which Nancy’s central questions of community and literature are linked together. Moreover, by putting this linkage in terms of ‘myth’, this book situates Nancy’s work within a larger tradition, leading from German Romanticism to contemporary theories of the social relevance of literature.
Abstract
In light of the mandate of social distancing imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the subsequent disruption in habitual practices involving physical contact, the essay explores the ancient gesture of the handshake with reference to both its cultural codifications and its iconography, widespread especially in Mediterranean and Near Eastern areas. While involving manifold semantic and symbolic significance, the handshake is taken into account especially as a gesture implying a tactile exposure to another, hinting at the possibility of joining radically discontinuous worlds (mortals and immortals, dead and living). Ancient Greek funerary art is considered and a few final remarks return to the experience of isolation we lived on a global scale in recent years.
Abstract
This paper examines the figure of silence in the works of Michel Serres and Simone Weil. It argues that, in the spirit of Serres and Weil, our time of crisis calls not for a short-term response, but for long-term engagement in a dialectics of silence: the dialogical movement between the silencing of institutions and the attentive silence of visionary insights. Such dialectics can revalidate the value of institutional silencing if based on solid rational proof (rebutting so-called visionary ideas that are baseless) while simultaneously showing the value of visionary ideas that rightfully combat problematic institutional silencing. Especially in this current moment, in which science and scientific propositions are relentlessly questioned, there is a need to lean into silence so as to promote a productive dialogue that regains trust in proven scientific ideas and institutions while allowing visionary insights their place as well, provided that we are willing to test them.
Abstract
This paper proposes to reflect self-critically on an ongoing research project entitled “Grammars of listening,” which started as a philosophical approach to the question of listening at the site of trauma and the challenges this kind of listening poses to our conceptions of memory and history, and has recently shifted to asking about the possible limitations to such a reflection when confronted with a decolonial perspective on temporality. I start by presenting a conceptual background for my inquiry, and asking what kind of listening is required when trauma is considered as a colonizing form of violence – that is, when its effects are not only understood as an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible. Following the kind of challenges that such an understanding of trauma poses to the responsibility to listen to its testimony, the paper moves on to propose that only a decolonial approach to listening can truly do justice to the task of rendering testimonies of traumatic violence audible. By decolonizing the frameworks that organize and determine colonial and colonizing distributions of sense, I propose that grammars of lo inaudito understood as decolonial grammars contribute to resisting and disorganizing the criteria for legibility and audibility that colonizing forms of violence not only institute but constantly actualize in their attempt to perpetuate their silencing power.