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Reviewed by:
  • Jean-Luc Nancy: Justice, Legality and World ed. by Benjamin Hutchens
  • Michael Syrotinski
Jean-Luc Nancy: Justice, Legality and World. Edited by Benjamin Hutchens. (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy). London: Continuum, 2011. x + 230 pp.

One wonders how many more anthologies of essays explaining Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought are needed before we reach a certain saturation point, or indeed get the point. This recent collection, edited by Benjamin Hutchens, author of the useful and insightful monograph Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy (Chesham: Acumen, 2005), claims to be the first extended discussion of Nancy’s contribution to legal and political theory, and this focus is both a strength and a weakness of the volume. It certainly foregrounds Nancy’s key interventions in this regard (such as The Experience of Freedom, The Sense of the World, The Creation of the World or Globalization, Being Singular Plural, or The Truth of Democracy), and brings us a typically rich and suggestive opening piece written for the volume by Nancy himself. The thirteen essays are subdivided according to the three main themes of the book’s title, but in fact they overlap significantly, and unpredictably. After two sparkling, informative, and nicely paced contributions by Christopher Watkin (‘Being Just? Ontology and Incommensurability in Nancy’s Notion of Justice’) and Ian James (‘The Just Measure’), they soon become repetitive in their exposition of the core concepts of Nancy’s thought and the main articulations and tensions inherent in his antifoundationalist (or postfoundationalist, as Oliver Marchart rightly qualifies it later on) political philosophy. Indeed, so well and so efficiently does Watkin say almost all there is to say about ‘singular plurality’, ‘being-with’, and ‘incommensurability’ as the paradoxical measure of both democracy and justice, and about how Nancy’s understanding of ethics situates him in relation to the radical ontology and communist commitment of a thinker like Badiou, or the apparently less ‘worldly’ deconstruction of Derrida, that the remaining essays (James’s excepted) do little more than restate variations of these same ideas and preoccupations. For his part, James rightly aligns the question of justice with Nancy’s aesthetics, and particularly Nancy’s writing on cinema and photography. Some unexpected intertextual lines are [End Page 278] drawn through the rest of the volume, for example Hutchens’s essay on Nancy and Rawls, and Todd May’s attempt to tease out the commonalities and differences between Nancy’s and Rancière’s notions of justice; but even these contributors — as with those who wear down even further the already well-worn ruts of the distinction between globalization and mondialisation, or the ‘being in common’ of communism —tend to do little more than pit the thought of one against the thought of the other, in a rather limited compare-and-contrast exercise. The volume as a whole seems to suffer from hasty editing (and, at certain points, quite poor copy-editing), and begins with a rather dense Introduction that presumes, perhaps, too much prior knowledge of Nancy’s work. If this volume then went on to do something more original and engaging with Nancy’s writing, this might be excusable, but unfortunately it does not.

Michael Syrotinski
University of Glasgow
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