The question of community is one of Jean-Luc Nancy’s fundamental themes. According to him, the historical realization of the community led to its self-destruction in the “work of death” of the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century. However, he refuses to give up the promise of the community and its name, which distinguishes his position from that of Derrida. Indeed, Nancy wants to deconstruct the community while preserving its possibility. This involves dissociating the cum (the with) from the munus (debt) to focus on being-with, being-together. However, he tends to consider the cum as a dis, as a dis-sociation, and we can wonder if this primacy of the gap over the contact that he reaffirms in his ontology of the body does not prevent him from thinking about the possibility of the self-constitution of a community.

With this book, we would like to resume the passionate conversation that Jean-Luc Nancy was engaged in throughout his life, with philosophers and artists from all over the world. Now that he has passed away, it is not enough for us to simply reflect on his work: we would like to stay true to the stance to which his thought invites us, in a pluralistic and communal way. Jean-Luc Nancy takes up the old philosophical question of truth as a praxis of a with — understanding truth without any given measure or comparison as an articulation of a with. It is a thinking responsible for the world from within the world, a language that seeks to respond to the ongoing mutation of our civilization.

With contributions by Jean-Christophe Bailly, Rodolphe Burger, Marcia Sá Calvacante Schuback, Marcus Coelen, Alexander García Düttmann, Juan-Manuel Garrido, Martta Heikkilä, Erich Hörl, Valentin Husson, Sandrine Israel-Jost, Ian James, Apostolos Lampropoulos, Nidesh Lawtoo, Jérôme Lèbre, Susanna Lindberg, Michael Marder, Artemy Magun, Boyan Manchev, Dieter Mersch, Hélène Nancy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Aïcha Liviana Messina, Ginette Michaud, Helen Petrovsky, Jacob Rogozinski, Philipp Stoellger, Peter Szendy, Georgios Tsagdis, Marita Tatari, Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Aukje van Rooden.