Marie-Eve Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy, Polity Press, London, 2012, 224 pages, $24.95, ISBN 9780745652412.

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940) is one of the leading continental philosophers in the world today. Despite (or perhaps because of) a heart transplant at the end of the 1980s and a subsequent battle with cancer, over the years Nancy has written a vast and vivid philosophical oeuvre. He became known to a larger public through the publication of La Communauté désœuvrée (1983, with an English translation in 1991) in which he engaged the work on community of Georges Bataille. His works span a variety of topics however: globalization, politics, religion, ontology, modern art and film, and he has written extensively on Heidegger, Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Lacan and others. The seemingly eclectic character of his works poses a tough challenge to whomever tries to study his work and maybe even more to the one who is asked to provide a comprehensive overview of his thinking. It is all the more difficult since Nancy's corpus is still growing.

Marie-Eve Morin has accepted this challenge and succeeded excellently well with her contribution to Polity's Key Contemporary Thinkers Series. Although there have been other introductory works on Nancy's philosophy, Morin's take on Nancy distinguishes itself in its systematic and lucid approach. Apart from the fact that the book is exemplary in its scholarship and aside from Morin's transparent and comprehendible style, the reason why this work excels in introducing the major themes and moves in Nancy's thinking, is because of its specific outline. Not only does Morin divide Nancy's work in distinct and recognizable themes, she also gives a tangible framework as to how one should understand Nancy's sometimes unobvious and difficult argument and rationale. Let me expand a bit on this last point. Indeed, Nancy is often associated with Derridean deconstructivism. This leads some to (mistakenly) conclude that his style is needlessly complex and refers to prosaic scripture rather than to so-called sound and simple scientific craftsmanship. However, as Morin aptly summarizes, “Nancy's ideas make sense but this sense arises more from moving across sentences than from the internal signification of any one particular sentence taken in isolation” (page 2). If one is to immerse oneself into the philosophy of Nancy, he might do best, as Morin suggests, not to get bogged down by every detail and every sentence. In this sense, Morin's introduction offers an enlightening manual on how to read and understand the French philosopher. She comprehensively explains Nancy's affirmative style by contrasting his writing and argumentation to that of Derrida and clarifies how Nancy brings concepts into movement and in what way he displaces their traditional meaning without succumbing to aporetic conclusions.

Aside from an introduction and a conclusion, the book is divided into 5 chapters: Ontology, Christianity, Community, Politics and From Body to Art. The choice to single out those themes turns out to be very fruitful (dare I say more fruitful than divisions used in other introductory books?) and captures the general scope of Nancy's thinking very well. Throughout the different chapters the reader not only gets acquainted with Nancy's specific understanding of these various important themes of his work, but also becomes familiar with the subtleties of Nancy's general mode of thinking. As such, Morin has done a very transparent job in systematically penetrating into the thought of a non-systematic thinker. As a minor critique, one could argue, that the last chapter could have benefited more from a further elaborated division between body and art. It indeed includes a comprehensive explanation of how one should interpret the Nancian understanding of the body, nevertheless, embodiment for Nancy might just as well be the figure that gives his ontology its weight. In this sense, it would have been interesting to learn about his understanding of the body without it being crammed together with another theme.

The various chapters are coherently written and make extensive use of Nancy's own work and draw seldom, if ever, on secondary works. A lot of credit should be given especially for the first chapter. Morin gives a detailed account on how we should understand Nancy's reworking of ontology. Referring to his rewriting of Heidegger's Being and Time, she gives an outline of Nancy's major leitmotiv that is more or less present in almost all of his works: thinking being as singular plural or as being-with. The reader gets a cross-section of how Nancy, in his various studies, displaces traditional concepts like sense, world, relation and finitude in order to describe the way in which we are to this world. What unfolds is at first an intricate play of Heideggerian and Derridean vocabularies in which Morin retains a sharp overview for the sake of arriving at Nancy's specific nuances. The result is a clear and luminous understanding of Nancy's view on ontology.

In the second chapter, the focal point is Nancy's deconstruction of monotheism or of Christianity. Nancy announced such a project already in the mid 1990s, but we had to wait until 2005 and 2010 for the publication of corresponding philosophical treatises. Although thus a rather late (and still ongoing) concern in Nancy's oeuvre, this theme plays an important role in Morin's introduction. This should not to be considered a mistake. Morin is aware of the fact that the overall gesture and context of Nancy's deconstruction of monotheism contribute heavily to a better grasp on his general modus operandi. In addition, it forms a good opportunity to put his work in perspective with Heidegger's account of Destruktion and Derrida's labour of deconstruction, which offers a good framework to appreciate Nancy's specific thinking.

The third and fourth chapters describe the themes Nancy is probably best known for: community and politics. Although very difficult to separate them in Nancy's oeuvre – his work on community has been considered as his “most important contribution to a philosophical thinking about the political” (James, 2005: 333) – Morin has done well to discuss them in two separate chapters. Nancy's understanding of community and his work on the political are both way too dense and complex. His political thinking does not limit itself to a rethinking of community. Rather, his interpretation of community follows from the earlier work on the political which he did together with Lacoue-Labarthe. Chapter 3 gives a comprehensive outline of Nancy's inoperative community and, in conjunction with this, his engagement with the works of Bataille and Blanchot. Morin meticulously retraces Nancy's rethinking of community and (literary) communism and their relation to myth. Chapter 4 starts off with Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's re-treatment of the political and moves on to Nancy's later work on politics (democracy, justice, globalization...). In doing so, Morin not only succeeds in clarifying in a detailed way how we should understand the political in the light of Nancy's philosophy, but because of the direct socio-political relevance of this account, she also offers a reading of Nancy's significance for contemporary politics.

As already stated, the chapter From Body to Art might have had a bit more flesh (pun intended) but does nonetheless succeed in what it aims for: excellent scholarship and a comprehensive introduction to Nancy's thinking on body and art. The reader first learns how Nancy tries to use Descartes against Cartesian dualism in order to displace the meanings of body and soul or of matter and ideas. Morin subsequently uses this displacement to pave the way for an elaboration of Nancy's engagement with art and artists. In this sense then, the combining of body and art in one chapter does indeed work very well to explain Nancy's gesture towards art.

Morin has written a very comprehensive and exemplary overview of Nancy's philosophy. As far as introductory texts go, this book excels in explaining the general outline and modus operandi of a difficult philosopher without losing sight of his nuances and subtleties. It is a must-read for Nancy scholars and has every potential to introduce the layman with one of the most important philosophers of our century. 

References

Armstrong P (2009) Reticulations. Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hutchens B (2005) Jean-Luc Nancy and the future of philosophy. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

James I (2005) On interrupted myth. Journal for Cultural Research 9(4): 331-349.

James I (2006) The Fragmentary Demand. An introduction to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Meurs P (2009) This world without another. Jean-Luc Nancy and la mondialisation. Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies 1: 31-46.

Nancy J (1983) La Communauté désœuvrée. Paris: Christian Bourgois.