Beyond the only text (“Rumoration,” in La Ville au loin) that Jean-Luc Nancy has explicitly dedicated to rumor, the latter lurks in the background, under the surface of any discourse on the cum of community, on being-with. Following closely the thinker’s progress in “Rumoration” (he presents himself as walking, wandering in the city), this chapter interweaves the fragments of a genealogy of rumor, from the ancient logopoios to today’s “fake news.” But rumor is precisely what evades any genealogy: if it is a kind of archimedium (pure mediality, as Blanchot suggests), then its floating texture, made of references to references, turns it into an anarchistructure.

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.