We Must Become What We Are: Nancy’s Ontology as Ethos and Praxis

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Morin, Marie-Eve

• Jean-Luc Nancy often asserts that his ontology is also an ethos and praxis. I seek to develop this affirmation with a view to understanding the role and place of ‘another politics’ or ‘another of politics’ in Nancy's work. I start by unfolding Nancy's understanding of existence as abandonment, freedom, and decision, and underline the shifts in emphasis in his reappropriation of Heidegger's thought: from ‘es gibt’ to ‘il y a’, from gift to freedom, from guarding and sheltering, to opening and exposing. This is in an effort to show how the decision of existence is entwined with the praxis of inhabiting the world. Such praxis is a struggle for the world as an ungrounded, untotalisable plurality of existences, co-existing and co-appearing to themselves and each other.

• Date created

  2015

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Ontology
  • Nancy, Jean-Luc
  • Politics
  • Heidegger, Martin
  • Freedom
  • World
  • Decision

• Type of Item

  Chapter

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R33X84126

• License

  © 2015 M.-E. Morin et al. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.