Jean-Luc Nancy, the French philosopher who warned against globalization and nationalism, has died

Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, one of today’s most influential thinkers based on his research on globalization, nationalism and modernity which he has condensed into works such as The inoperative community O Prohibited representation, died at the age of 81, according to the French newspaper The world.

Disciple and friend of Jacques Derrida, was born in Bordeaux in 1940 and began to publish his first works in the early seventies, based on the reflection of Jacques Lacan on psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Side, Hegel and Heidegger. His philosophical work addresses a wide field that goes from romanticism and the philosophy of art to the end of meaning and reflection on the body.

Nancy was considered one of the most influential thinkers in her country for her way of thinking about globalization, democracy, ideologies and in particular the meaning of the word community. In addition to his contact with the work of the post-structuralist thinker, he built his reputation through decades of reflection on the fringes of the ideas of Heidegger O Battle.

His best-known work is The inoperative community, where he posits a theory of the community as “resistance to immanence”, a being who opposes voluntary attempts to shape it according to a project or a plan.

“If we no longer know what democracy is, it is because this word no longer has any meaning. We know what the rule of law is, human rights, fundamental freedoms, the principle of equality … but democracy meant something else: a society where these formal definitions are real and where power is able to apply them for the people and by the people. He wrote a few years ago.

His intense curiosity for aesthetics and art led him to collaborate with filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami and Claire Denis, he even dedicated the first test The proof of the film. He also knew how to make personal experience an object of collective reflection.

In titles like Corpus and The intruder He started with his own open-heart operation to talk about the social dimension of the body: “The body is our anxiety laid bare,” he wrote then and this is because, for the French, philosophy has never been an abstract theory, but a force linked to our intellectual and bodily being.

Professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg and member of the International School of Philosophy, Nancy had also excelled with texts such as Prohibited representation, Desire, Why do we obey?, The possibility of a world and Too human a virus, where he reflected on the pandemic.

The text, published in Argentina last December by La Cebra in co-edition with the Chilean label Palinodia, specifies, among other things: “The coronavirus as a pandemic is truly, from all points of view, a product of globalization. He specifies his features and his tendencies, he is an active, bellicose and efficient free trader ”. For Nancy, the pandemic has revealed that the world is experiencing “the bewilderment of a profound mutation”.

For the philosopher, the pandemic meant the fall of the Western dogma of infallibility and at the same time the advance of a pathology built by globalization, by displacement, exchanges, human interactions accelerated by technological mediations and borders. flexible, which give the plague the appearance of a “too human, active, bellicose and efficient virus”.

Source: Telam

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