Senza riserva. Note dopo il sacrificio

Abstract

My essay is focused on the question of love in Jean-Luc Nancy, linked to the question of sacrifice. The point of departure is the reading of Bataille’s writings on sacrifice and thinking, which is central in Nancy’s text L’Insacrifiable. Then I move on the strong relationship with Heidegger.

For Nancy, as for Heidegger, thought does not master its object; rather, it “undergoes an experience, and lets the experience inscribe itself”. In Heidegger Sein und Zeit, Nancy found the very idea of being in the world, being-there (Dasein) as being-with-other, being exposed to the other. A singularity which is not a substance or an atom, one and indivisible, closed upon itself, absolved from any contact with others, but rather a being is singular not because it is enclosed within a limit that would separate it from other beings, but because it exists on the limit, on the edge. It is neither inside nor outside, but it is essentially ex-posed, turned inside out. This existence-as-exposition or this being-at-the-limit is an 'offering,' Being’s multiplicity is not the result of its lacking unity; it is absolute in its plurality, and existence in this sense is ‘infinitely finite.’ Nancy wants to undermine the idea of pure presence that runs through the early Levinas; he invokes love in order to show that being is never a brute totality, and that in love, even the self finds itself to be broken, shattered, and intruded into, since Being has been always already shattered, exploded.