‘The Many Worlds of Jean-Luc Nancy’

Abstract

This article explores what the work of Jean-Luc Nancy might offer to an ecological and ontological pluralism, by considering Nancy’s treatment of the relation between the worlds inhabited by beings of all sorts. Situating Nancy’s work in this area in relation to its key reference point, namely Heidegger’s assertion a of pre-eminently human access to ‘world’ in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and through this, to the work of Jakob von Uexküll, the article traces both Nancy’s rejection of Heidegger’s persistent anthropocentrism and his own attachment to human language as a privileged site for the exposure of the nontotalizable plurality of singular beings. It concludes by suggesting that the human exceptionalism evoked by this attachment might, if translated into a minimal anthropocentrism, add a useful edge to ecological notions of pluralist coexistence by recalling that the incommensurability of the many worlds of beings of all sorts may at times shade into antagonistic incompatibility.