Symposium Introduction: The Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy and the Study of Education

Abstract

Our introduction is divided into three parts. We begin with a brief overview of Nancy's life, career, and thought. We then explain the motivation for the symposium and how it developed over several years. We conclude with an introduction to the five articles, focusing on aspects of their appeal to Nancy's first philosophy. The underlying message is that Nancy's philosophy reorients us to fundamental educational questions. For Nancy, to be is to be with others. In other words, our existence is inherently social. Being, then, is a matter of our addressing, and being addressed by, others. The value of Nancy's conception of being is that it avoids solipsism as a problem and it implies that our learning and understanding are never complete, as our condition is one of always becoming. By considering Nancy's philosophy in relation to the topics of democracy, the arts, listening, and learning and teaching, we hope to encourage informed and critical debate about it and its utility for addressing educational issues.

Jean-Luc Nancy was a prolific writer of more than twenty books and many journal articles and book chapters that had an expansive philosophical range. Born in France in 1940, he earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Paris in 1962. In 1973, he completed his PhD on the topic of Immanuel Kant, supervised by Paul Ricoeur. In 1987, he was elected to the docteur d'état (doctor of state) degree by a jury that included Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. Nancy wrote his dissertation on the topic of freedom in Heidegger and other philosophers under the supervision of Gérard Granel. The dissertation was later published as The Experience of Freedom.⁸ As early as 1980, Nancy began his remarkable collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Lebarthe, starting with a conference on Derrida and the establishment of a Center for Philosophical Research on the Political, which later closed. After publishing several co-authored texts with Lacoue-Lebarthe,⁹ Nancy went on to publish The Inoperative Community.¹⁰

It is generally accepted that The Inoperative Community represents a milestone in the development of Nancy's thought because he introduces his idea that communities should not be understood as conferring upon their members a unifying identity or purpose. According to Nancy, communities are “inoperative” in the sense that are not made through work; they spontaneously come into being. If anything is inherent in our human condition, it is our passion for sharing life with others. To undertake any activity — philosophy, art, politics, education — is to undertake that activity in community with others. Nancy's abiding interest in community culminates in his book, Being Singular Plural,¹¹ which is considered his most important philosophical work, and in which he argues that there is no being without “being with,” and no “I” without a “we.” As will be elaborated in our summary of the articles that follow, "being with" is to be understood as our mutual exposure to one another that both preserves the freedom of the “I” and establishes a community that is not subject to an imposed or pre-existent characterization.

In 1973, Nancy was appointed to the faculty of the University of Strasbourg in France, where he remained a professor until his retirement in 2002. Nancy also went on to hold a joint professorial appointment at The European Graduate School at Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Additionally, he held visiting appointments at international universities, including the University of California in both Irvine and Berkeley, and the Freie Universität in Berlin. His later academic career is characterized by a deepening interest in Christian thought, resulting in two books that have yet to be translated into English. This last project was interrupted by a life-threatening illness. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nancy's lymphatic cancer, together with undergoing a heart transplant, compelled him to resign from his teaching and administrative responsibilities. This gave him more time to write books, including one on his experience of having a heart transplant: The Intruder.¹²

Nancy is known for his readings of contemporary and traditional thinkers that define the Western philosophical tradition, including Jacques Lacan, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, René Descartes, and Martin Heidegger. This might be because the first decade of his academic career was, to quote Ian James, dedicated to publishing “philosophical texts that can be situated broadly within the genre of commentary.”¹³ It was only during his extended period of illness that Nancy stepped out of the shadows of the great philosophers to tackle what were for him urgent philosophical themes, such as ontology and embodiment. As James observes, “the development of Nancy's thinking follows a trajectory from philosophical commentary to works which engage with more general philosophical concerns or questions.”¹⁴ It was as if the limitations of Nancy's failing body emboldened his mind to reach beyond previously self-imposed limits of thought. It strikes us that the early period of writing commentary served Nancy well, as his thinking about ontology and embodiment is highly original and draws from a rich array of philosophical sources. It is unsurprising, therefore, that one of the few monographs that Jacques Derrida wrote on a contemporary philosopher was On Touching — Jean-Luc Nancy.¹⁵

Despite his long and complicated illness, Nancy lived until the age of 81, taking his last breath on August 23, 2021. One of the most striking features of Nancy's thought, from the perspective of education at least, is that throughout his long and illustrious career, he was always concerned with issues of the day. Furthermore, his thinking is characterized by a steadfast refusal to ignore what is distinctly human about us: our humanity, vulnerability, and mortality. It is unsurprising that his last publication, The Fragile Skin of the World, deals with issues confronting those he leaves behind, including climate change and species extinction.¹⁶ In response to these and other concerns, he writes: “After all, we know very well — even if this knowledge is very obscure — that love, thought, play, art, speech itself, and every form of relation are not ways to salvation, but fervent salutations of existence.”¹⁷ Nancy's point is that even without the possibility of salvation or redemption, we can salute what is “our so singular adventure.”¹⁸

Some of the contributors to this symposium did not come to the project as scholars of Jean-Luc Nancy. Thus, some of us were better acquainted with his philosophical writings than others. The origins of the project can be traced back to 2017 when, to understand the formal structure of listening, Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty began reading and working together to interpret Nancy's text, Listening.¹⁹ We became so interested in his philosophy of listening, that we sought to develop a broader understanding of his general philosophical perspective and so invited René V. Arcilla, Eduardo Duarte Bono, David Hansen, Chris Higgins, Duck-Joo Kwak, Rachel Wahl, and Stanton Wortham to join us in an online reading group.²⁰ The group participants each selected one of Nancy's texts as a focus for a discussion — texts that might yield insight into their own particular interests and, at the same time, enable others to develop a broader understanding of Nancy's philosophy. As our discussions evolved, the goal became to encounter Nancy's philosophical thinking and allow it to resound with our own. Together, we sought to draw out themes in Nancy's philosophical work that spoke to us and our interests.

Arcilla, who was most familiar with the Nancy corpus, led the first discussion on The Truth of Democracy²¹ and then suggested that we read Being Singular Plural.²² For many of us, the latter was especially compelling, as can be seen in its repeated citation in the articles. Arcilla, Haroutunian-Gordon, and Laverty, along with Hansen, for example, found its pages full of illumination; Arcilla makes much of Nancy's first philosophy; Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty relate the text to Nancy's account of listening; Hansen became inspired by Nancy's concept of “being with.” We spent several months discussing Being Singular Plural with Arcilla's adroit guidance, always challenged and at moments enlightened. From here, Haroutunian-Gordon, Laverty, and Duarte Bono moved our discussion to a consideration of Listening. Eventually, Chris Higgins turned our attention to Nancy's writings on the arts in The Muses.²³

Over this time, we gave several conference presentations on Nancy, including presentations at annual meetings of the Philosophy of Education Society in 2020 and 2024, and at the International Conference of Education Research on Re-conceptualizing Education in the Times of Global Crisis at Seoul National University in South Korea (October 2021).

On January 27–28, 2023, the members of our reading group participated in an online workshop that was organized around our plan for the present symposium. Nicholas Burbules joined the workshop in his role as editor of Educational Theory. Prior to the event, authors drafted article-length manuscripts on aspects of Nancy's philosophy that related to their research interests. We each read all the manuscripts in advance and used the workshop to discuss them. We then revised our manuscripts in light of our conversations. The five articles that comprise this symposium are the culmination of that process.

The following paragraph briefly introduces the five articles. With a focus on Nancy's The Truth of Democracy and The Inoperative Community, Arcilla seeks to understand how Nancy's vision of democracy might resuscitate and redefine humanistic education.²⁴ With a focus on The Muses, Higgins grapples with his sense of the tension between Nancy's universalizing phenomenological method, on the one hand, and his pluralistic ideal, on the other. Higgins worries that Nancy's pluralistic ontology, even with the lyrical address, turns out to be just another “flight from finitude” because it fails to do justice to lives characterized by contingency, choices, and regret. Arcilla and Higgins acknowledge the rhetorical challenge created by Nancy's ontology, specifically concerning how philosophy can and should be written. Whereas Arcilla heeds Nancy's call for philosophy to be written in a relational key, Higgins interrogates it. Duarte Bono focuses on Nancy's Listening. And while Arcilla's article is composed as a dialogue with Nancy, Duarte Bono's piece offers a series of detailed examples that work together to show how Nancy illuminates what might be happening when we listen to music. Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty explore Nancy's conception of listening as presented in Listening. Their aim is to understand Nancy's story of how listening takes place and how that story can be used to construct accounts of listening as it emerges in teaching and learning situations. Finally, with his focus on Being Singular Plural, Hansen places Nancy's conception of being with next to his own — a conception that has emerged from decades of studying teaching.

In what follows, we introduce Nancy's “first philosophy” — the ontological principles with which his philosophy begins. These principles are explored by the symposium authors, where they all embrace Nancy's account of our ontological condition — namely that we exist in relation to one another. From there they characterize relations we live out with one another, whether these relations be political, as in the case of Arcilla; artistic, as in the cases of Higgins and Duarte Bono; or educational, as in the cases of Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty, and Hansen.

The symposium begins with René V. Arcilla's article, “Educating We the People: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Spirit of 1968,” because it takes from Nancy his fundamental departure from the solipsism of René Descartes.²⁵ According to Arcilla, Nancy begins with the ontological claim that we exist in relation to others — a relation which Nancy characterizes as providing “an alternative community and counterculture of ‘being in common.’” As Arcilla reads Nancy, “being-in-common” is not an essence common to all the community's members. On the contrary, our being-in-common refers to that which we do for each other and cannot do for ourselves, namely announce our death and thereby call us to confront our mortality. That we each expose one another to death is what makes human beings a community and calls us to live meaningful and worthwhile lives. Arcilla builds on Nancy's ontology to argue that our common bond of mortality opens us to a new vision of democracy and humanistic education.

In his article, “Formation and Finitude: Jean-Luc Nancy on the Arts as Ontological Doorways,” Chris Higgins asks, “Why are there several (liberal) arts and not just one?”²⁶ He observes the tradition in Western education that “liberal learning refuses to be captured by any single discipline's image of human being, knowing, and doing. Its formative principle is to learn something of this multiplicity of formative principles.” Thus, it is common for students to be introduced to painting, music, sculpture, history, and literature, including poetry and prose, not to mention mathematics and sciences. These are “angles” on the world that human beings inhabit. Higgins asks: Is the plural approach to education followed because it has value, or is it a preference arising out of historical accident? To address the question, he turns to Nancy, beginning with a quotation from the preface of Nancy's Being Singular Plural: “This text does not disguise the ambition of redoing the whole of ‘first philosophy’ by giving the singular plural of Being its foundation.”²⁷ Higgins argues that according to Nancy, all humans are unique beings. However, from their inception, their fundamental mode of being is “being with,” that is, they always exist in relation to others.²⁸ Higgins goes on to argue, however, that Nancy has not identified the principle that relates the arts to one another — the principle according to which they are “with” one another. We talk more about the principle of “being with” below.

Eduardo Duarte Bono, like Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty, takes up the topic of listening in his article, “‘to be all ears’ [être à l'écoute], to be listening”: Listening to Music with Jean-Luc Nancy (parts a, b, e).”²⁹ He asks, “Where are we when music takes us away?,” by which he means: Where are we when the experience of listening to music takes us completely away from our intentions and conscious preoccupations? He argues that Nancy's Listening “offers an attempt to describe a ‘listening subject,’ … an alternative to the ‘philosophical subject’ [presented by Descartes].” Like Arcilla and Higgins, Duarte Bono maintains that Nancy offers a “first philosophy” that does not begin with the individual quest for certainty. Rather, the “listening subject” is one who seeks to hear, not to prove or persuade. “Musical listening calls for the willing of non-willing, a letting-go of ‘my’ existence (ego, identity), a momentary living without why.” Thus, as Duarte Bono reads Nancy, the “moment when music takes us away” is the moment when “the self-identifying ‘I’ is evacuated” and “dwells” in “a letting-be of the movement of sound, the work of music.” As Duarte Bono reads Nancy, listening to music can occur only when one gives up the quest for certainty and lets the sounds take one away.

Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon and Megan Jane Laverty look at the topic of listening more broadly than does Duarte Bono, who is focused on listening to music when it “draws us into its depths.… In those unexpected moments there is only the music, and we are present and exist within its dynamic landscape.” Drawing upon Nancy, Duarte Bono argues that at such moments, listening is what one might call “non-cognitive,” that is, it does not try to make meaning of the experience using concepts and intentions. In addition to discussing listening to music, Nancy's Listening is concerned with listening to “sound in general.”³⁰ Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty argue that the title of Nancy's text, À l'écoute,³¹ could be translated literally as To the Listening, because he presents a story of how human beings get drawn into listening, be it listening to music or listening to sound.³² That story begins with the assertion that human beings exist in relation to one another and in relation to things. In those relations, they encounter sound, and the encounter with sound can draw them into cognitive and non-cognitive meaning-making. Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty present instances of listening and non-listening that arose in actual teaching/learning situations. The instances illustrate aspects of Nancy's philosophical account of how people get drawn into experiences of listening. They show how the relationship between teacher and student draws out listening that has both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects.

Like the other authors in the volume, David Hansen understands Nancy's ontological starting point to be the singular/plural nature of the human condition.³³ Each human being is unique while dwelling ontologically in relation with other human beings (and, indeed, with all entities in the world, in Nancy's view). Each person emerges through their own history, which depends vitally upon the particular relations to others with whom they are in “lived juxtaposition.” Hansen argues that Nancy's notion of “being with” means “being-in-common” with others — not to be confused with homogeneity or “commonality” — so that at each moment, the relations between individuals “trigger” the coming into being of new relations, and thus the coming into being of new beings always separate from one another yet all part of humanity. Nancy's first philosophy “relocates” the ethical dimension in “the very instant of singular plural encounter.” The nature of that encounter is that of “reception,” says Hansen, so that according to Nancy, the “very image of being with … calls each human being to account, if not in so many words nor in a pre-specified manner.” For Nancy, Hansen says, “Being with is not some ‘thing,’ but only that which happens between things.”³⁴

Nancy's conception of “being with,” Hansen tells us, is not a model for his vision of being with in teaching. Rather, it draws attention to some important aspects of human interaction, particularly gestures, forms of expression, and looks that can indicate how students and teachers are addressing and being addressed by others. Nancy's conception of being with can help teachers and students to focus on the responses of people to one another and perhaps come to respond to one another as persons, not simply role players.

Thus, we leave the reader to explore the articles in this symposium. Perhaps they will inspire exploration of the Nancy corpus in the quest to better understand the education of human beings.