JEAN-LUC NANCY’S ETHICS OF FINITUDE

Abstract

Against a certain contemporary style of thinking that wishes to go beyond finitude entirely, I propose a finite praxis modeled after Jean-Luc Nancy’s finite thinking. I argue that the desire to immunize life against death by postponing indefinitely the moment of demise radically misunderstands the nature of death as a limit and the meaning of finitude thereby implied. Starting from the intuition developed by Simone de Beauvoir in All Men Are Mortal that the meaning of existence does not come from an extended future but from human relations, I subsequently turn to Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology of the singular plural. Nancy arrives at this ontology by developing Heidegger’s concept of being-towards-death and Derrida’s notion of differance in such a way as to emphasize the inherently relational nature of existence. While finite existence is always singular for Nancy, it is also always exposed to and affected by all there is. A Nancyan ethics of finitude then, does not advocate that we limit or curtail our existence and its enjoyments, but rather that we experience the contingent or mortal nature of our existence in the full extent of its relationality.

Keywords:

• Jean-Luc Nancy
• Martin Heidegger
• finitude
• Simone de Beauvoir

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I would like to thank Júlia Diniz, Spencer Hayden, Markéta Jakešová, Felix Mürrle, and Jay Worthy for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay.

1 Others have also attempted to show the potential connections between Beauvoir and posthumanism. See Sonia Kruks’s Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity, where she argues that Beauvoir in fact proposes what she calls an “ambiguous humanism” rather than a posthumanism that would “erase” the human. See also Christine Daigle’s “Can Existentialism Be a Posthumanism?,” where she takes issue with Kruks’s claim regarding posthumanism and the erasure of the human, and proposes to reassess Beauvoir’s connection to posthuman material feminism on this basis.

2 See Mulhall for an interpretation of death as mortality and Carel for a summary of the death surrounding the notion of possibility.

3 On the relation between the understanding of being and the finitude of the human being, see Heidegger, Kant §§40–41.

4 See Derrida 70–71.

5 Since the publication of Derrida’s seminar on life-death much has been written about it, but the focus is often on Derrida’s reading of French biologist François Jacob and the link between Derrida’s concept of life-death and the biological sciences (see, e.g., Francesco Vitale, Dawne McCance). For a text that traces the relation between Derrida’s idea of life-death from its origin in the notions of trace and arche-writing in the early works up to the late seminars on sovereignty and the death penalty, see Trumbull, in particular chapter 1.

6 Of course, this claim is much too quick and much too broad. Differance is precisely what precludes the opposition of space to time and Derrida is clear that differance does not merely mean “postponement” or “delay,” something that Nancy is also keenly aware of. All I mean here is that when Nancy describes the effect of differance, he does so less in terms of an “event” or “a future worthy of the name,” and more in terms of worldly relations. For a more spatial reading of Derrida’s to-come, see my “The Spacing.”

7 For a discussion of the notion of finitude in Nancy, and its relation not only to Heidegger, but also Kant and Sartre, see my interview with Anthony Morgan, “The Task of a Finite Thinking” in Kantian Catastrophe? The two chapters on Heidegger by Stephen Mulhall and Joseph Shear, are also worth looking at. Nancy engages with Heidegger in many of his writings, including in The Experience of Freedom and “Originary Ethics” (in A Finite Thinking). While both texts are important when it comes to understanding how Nancy displaces Heidegger’s thinking of Being, neither engages directly with beings-towards-death.

8 See also Nancy’s “Originary Ethics” in A Finite Thinking. For a more detailed reading of Nancy’s ontology as ethos and praxis in relation to Heidegger, see my “‘We Must Become What We Are.’”

9 Though here I have focused on the critique of posthumanism’s understanding of death as the limit of life, for a Nancyan critique of speculative realism, see Gratton.