Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy (review)

This short introductory volume on Jean-Luc Nancy testifies to a burgeoning interest in the work of this important contemporary French thinker. Although there already exists a substantial body of secondary literature in French and English devoted to Nancy, it has, with the exception of Derrida's seminal work Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris, Galilée, 2000), been largely composed of individual articles and multi-authored collections. This is, therefore, the first of what is likely to be a number of single-authored works which aim to give a critical overview of Nancy's output to date and which will be of interest to those working within a wide variety of disciplines, from political thought and theory, to literary and film studies, aesthetics and, of course, European or 'continental' philosophy. As the title suggests, Hutchens' central claim is that Nancy should be viewed, above all, as a thinker of the future of philosophy and, more specifically, as a philosopher who addresses the concept of the 'future' itself. This claim is pursued via a number of expository engagements with various key aspects of Nancy's thinking: his account of 'trans-immanent sense' and the role it plays in the constitution of a shared and meaningful world, his account of freedom, and his important critical-philosophical engagements with what Hutchens terms 'post-secular theology', or with key issues of community and contractarian thinking within political thought. In each case, Hutchens succeeds in bringing out the originality of Nancy's formulations, carefully distinguishing, for instance, his use of terms such as freedom and community from their usual meanings in order to avoid their recuperation into more traditional forms of either libertarian or communitarian thought. At the same time careful attention is drawn to the mode of Nancy's philosophizing, its fragmentary nature, and the relation of this fragmentary style to the thinking of 'ungrounded singular plurality' which emerges across the body of his works.

If there are significant limitations to this work, the author himself shows an admirable willingness to acknowledge them openly. In the chapter dedicated to a discussion of Nancy's influences, he indicates, for instance, that the treatment given will only be a 'gleaning' rather than a 'detailed engagement'. The drawback of such a cursory approach lies in the fact that Nancy's thinking most often unfolds through a detailed engagement with, or reading of, specific figures (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, amongst others). The decision not to pursue the detail of each engagement risks reducing the account of Nancy given to a systematizing or summary exposition of precisely the kind that the author wishes to avoid. The author also acknowledges that there are important gaps in coverage of Nancy's thought (for instance, his thinking on art). This is less of a problem since, within the context of such a diverse and heterogeneous philosophical corpus, any one critical work is bound to contain some significant gaps or elisions. More seriously, though, the chapter on 'ecotechnics' contains no mention of the important work Corpus in which this term receives its first and perhaps most important elaboration (indeed Corpus like a number of other works does not even appear on the bibliography). Nevertheless this work gives a solid introduction to some of the fundamental aspects of Nancy's thinking and demonstrates its key importance within contemporary French thought and wider philosophical debate. Insofar as certain aspects of this thinking are omitted or elided, this work demonstrates that, as far as the future of critical commentary on Nancy is concerned, much remains to be said.