Think about both the human body and the social body: the new coronavirus had offered Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most important French philosophers, the opportunity to write on these two themes which were particularly close to him ("A too human virus ”, Bayard, 2020).
Born in Bordeaux in 1940, the former professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg and disciple of Jacques Derrida died Monday evening, according to the Latest News from Alsace.
In 1992, Jean-Luc Nancy had a heart transplant.
About ten years later, he recounted and analyzed this transplantation in “The Intruder”, an intimate and moving philosophical tale.
A question also on identity.
Who is he with this vital organ of a person he knows nothing about.
"I can feel it, it's much stronger than a feeling: never has the strangeness of my own identity, which was always so keen for me, touched me with such acuity", he writes in this work. published by Léo Scheer.
In “The Philosopher's Body”, he returns to this graft and to the relationship to the body in our society.
The director, Marc Grün, follows him as closely as possible in his daily life.
"We must relearn to breathe"
In “A too human virus”, Jean-Luc Nancy explains that “the pandemics of the past could be regarded as divine punishments (…), exogenous to the social body.
Today, the majority of diseases are endogenous, produced by our living conditions, food and intoxication.
What was divine has become human - too human as Nietzsche says, ”according to a quote from Philosophy Magazine.
“We have to relearn how to breathe and how to live, quite simply.
(…) Let's be children.
Let's recreate a language.
Let us have this courage.
"
The "sense of nuance"
This member of the international college of philosophy has multiplied the forums on the phenomena which agitate the world. He has collaborated with other writers and philosophers such as Jacques Rancières or Alain Badiou, with plastic or stage artists such as the choreographer Mathilde Monnier or the singer Rodolphe Burger who was his pupil. They both appear in an often funny video-fiction inspired by Georg Büchner's "Lenz" at the Palais des Rohan in Strasbourg.
“Jean-Luc was the teacher who really introduced me to philosophy. Above all, I liked his sense of nuance, he never made an affirmation without following it up with a reservation that changed the subject, testifies photographer Jean-Louis Hess. I loved his duettist numbers with his accomplice Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe ”, who died in 2007. The two philosophers wrote with four hands“ The Literary Absolute - Theory of Literature of German Romanticism ”(Seuil, 1978). Brilliant courses on Georges Bataille or the sublime which marked several generations of philosophy students.