Aukje van Rooden, “Eulogy/ Jean-Luc Nancy In Memoriam”: 1/14 LCCP Sharing Finitude Symposium

Aukje van Rooden is an Assistant Professor Philosophy of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She is also co-editor-in-chief of the literary-philosophical publishing house Parrèsia. Van Rooden has published numerous articles and books engaging with contemporary French philosophy and the work of Nancy in particular. Some of her recent books are De nieuwe Franse filosofie (Boom 2011, co-edited), Re-Treating Religion: Deconstruction of Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (Fordham 2012, co-edited) and Literature, Autonomy and Commitment (Bloomsbury 2019). Her latest book L’Intrigue dénouée: Mythe, littérature et communauté dans la pensée de Jean-Luc Nancy will be published by Brill in 2022. ----- Leiden University Centre for Continental Philosophy (LCCP), the University of Amsterdam’s Critical Cultural Theory Seminar (CCT) and Knooppunt Fenomenologie Gent welcome all interested persons to a symposium on Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on 11-12 January 2022.   Jean-Luc Nancy met death definitively in August 2021. One imagines that he had come close to death before, notably at the time when he had to endure a heart transplantation. This personal experience had major philosophical consequences: it did not lead to somber meditations of the shortness of life, but on the contrary to another kind of finite thinking, where finitude is thought as function of the necessary plurality of bodies which are the sense of the world: finitude is the very sharing of finitude. The sense of the world is nothing else than the singular plurality of bodies.   The work of Jean-Luc Nancy radiates a rare joy of life, but it is also very sensitive to what he called the ‘immonde’, the un-worlding that manifests itself as the eco-technical misery that presses the world of bodies. He diagnosed the fundamental philosophical reasons of this un- worlding, but above all he sought philosophical tools to re-world existence. Many of these tools are rooted in the polysemy of "sense," that leads Nancy's work to sensitive and even sensual questions of art, to questions of the sense of the world and of religion, and of course to questions of the way in which philosophy makes sense, word by word, enunciation by enunciation.   Wishing to share the emotion of Jean-Luc Nancy's passing away, we want above all to share the experience of thinking finitude with the help of his unique, singular work. This is why we invite you to a symposium in which all aspects of Nancy's abundant work will be discussed and new openings will be explored.