![]() ![]() Nancy would argue that these are not separate entities, nor in fact are they distinct – only thinking makes them so. ![]() The other dualism he sought to break down was that of the community and the individual. How we are ‘in the world’, how we interrelate with all the other things that are (on a personal or collective level), and how the body operates in this milieu are of paramount interest to Nancy and drive his often ferocious and passionate deconstruction on some of our most common sense ideas about the relationship between mind and body. In philosophy, the split between analytic and continental philosophy often (although not always) breaks down fault lines centred around ideas of dualism, with analytic tending to privilege the idea of a separation between mind and body. More than that, the human body – the body as human, the human as body – was the location where he carried out some of his most profound, controversial and revelatory work. His work always sought to engage with contemporary issues – to him, this was a part of philosophy’s job. As he himself noted, it was this strangeness which drove a career of thought not only onwards but outwards – over 200 books, in some of the most scintillating prose gifted to us by a philosopher, covering subjects as diverse as philosophy, literature, politics, film, sexuality, contemporary art, history, and most recently the coronavirus pandemic, that ‘all too human virus.’ It is no surprise that Nancy would explore the complications and implications of the pandemic, as a medical, cultural and political question. For the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who died on August 23 at the age of 81, this was no platitude. Despite his incredible wide range of interests and prolific output, two key ideas always remained at the centre of his thought: The individual is meaningless without a community, and the self only makes sense as an embodied, social being, writes Peter Salmon. ![]() Jean Luc Nancy who died on August 23, aged 81, made it his mission to overcome them. The dualisms of mind and body, individual and community, have troubled Western philosophy for centuries. ![]()
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