To browse Academia. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives. Thus, both for the sexistencial approach and for the transfeminist one, at the heart of every theory are th This article carries out a systematic exposition of the concept of the body in Jean-Luc Nancy, with all the risks of reduction that such an exposition entails.
The article continues with an analysis of touch and the self and concludes with an elaboration of the idea of the body within the general program of the deconstruction of Christianity. The current thesis discusses the being and sense of the body in Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy. Nancy criticizes the metaphysical tradition which wishes always that the body makes sense outside of itself.
The representational logic inherent in the Western metaphysics reduces the body into a sign. Therefore, the body loses its corporeality and its materiality. Instead, Nancy seeks to think the sense of the body without appropriating it. The relation between the corporeal and the incorporeal can be thought as a touching instead of an appropriation of the corporeal by the incorporeal. This touching happens in writing which touches upon the body without signifying it.
At this point, the sense of the body is not the sense that the body has, but it is shared out among bodies. This thesis argues that the body doesn't have any determinate sense but it is the sense itself as a relation to the outside. The body doesn't exist, but bodies are always singular and plural. Nancy, therefore, brings forward a local bodily ontology which corresponds to the ontology as such. In the last chapter, the relationality of bodies is considered through the figures of community, of being singular plural and of being with.
This questioning involves a close reading of Nancy's texts and of the commentaries and critiques related to them. Hence, this thesis discusses the bodily ontology through Nancy's various texts instead of focusing on a determinate text. Nancy is known and renown as a philosopher that dealt with a series of different phenomena, but if there is a fil rouge in his work, from the very first writings to the more recent works, than it is precisely the issue of touch.
