Pir-ating the Given

Abstract

It is the task of this article to explore the status of experience within Jean-Luc Nancy’s exposition of freedom in order to discover his positioning of “the empirical” within philosophical discourse. It is my intention to (a) determine the coherence of the etymological work relating experience to the various manifestations of the sense of pir- (PIE base per-), (b) survey the role of “experience” in Nancy’s work on freedom, and (c) propose a reading of “the empirical” within Nancy’s work and, by extension, philosophical discourse generally. Interested in “the empirical” in philosophy, not empiricism as a philosophy, Nancy seeks to revise empiricist notions of experience and freedom by means of what he refers to as “empirico-transcendentalism.” I shall argue that, in raising empirical concepts (givenness, seizing, testing, self-evidence, factuality, etc.) up to a “transcendental” level of inquiry, Nancy’s “empirico-transcendentalism” bears no fruitful relationship with “classical empiricism” itself.

Keywords:

• empiricism
• experience
• freedom
• pirating
• givenness

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These etymologies are derived from a comparison of the Lidell and Scott Greek–English Lexicon and Nancy’s own usage of the terms.

2 A similar presentation of the etymologies of experience, peril, and piracy is to be found in Claude Romano’s Event and World.

3 It should be clear that my position is quite different from Peter Fenves’, whose excellent foreword to The Experience of Freedom remains the window into the subject outlined here. For Fenves, Nancy is a “good empiricist” because he understands that neither language nor experience can ever be secured (Experience xxxi). For Fenves, the point where Nancy encounters empiricism most clearly is in Hume’s notion of the imagination, which enables the self to conceive of states of affairs beyond the limits of experience. Nancy does not follow Hume in trying to make the frighteningly specific into something familiar, but wants to retain a sense of its uncanny specificity (Experience xxi).