Overview

Our contemporary challenge, according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, is that a new world has stolen up on us. We no longer live in a world, but in worlds. We do not live in a universe anymore, but rather in a multiverse. We no longer create; we appropriate and montage. And we no longer build sovereign, hierarchical political institutions; we form local assemblies and networks of cross-national assemblages— and we do this at the same time as we form multinational corporations that no longer pay taxes to the state. In such a time, one of the world’s most eminent philosophers and an emerging astrophysicist return to the ancient art of cosmology. Nancy and Barrau’s work is a study of life, plural worlds, and what the authors call the struction or rebuilding of these worlds. Nancy and Barrau invite us on an uncharted walk into barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, “What’s this world coming to?,” is used to question our conventional thinking about the world. We soon find ourselves living among heaps of odd bits and pieces that are amassing without any unifying force or center, living not only in a time of ruin and fragmentation but in one of rebuilding. Astrophysicist Aurelien Barrau articulates a major shift in the paradigm of contemporary physics from a universe to a multiverse. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Of Struction” is a contemporary comment on the project of deconstruction and French poststructuralist thought. Together Barrau and Nancy argue that contemporary thought has shifted from deconstruction to what they carefully call the struction of dis-order.

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For the last three decades Jean-Luc Nancy has worked at a methodical and vigorous deconstruction of the world, driven by the affirmation that the world is without sense. This gesture insists instead on a return to the world from the neglect imposed on it by our philosophical and theological traditions. The demand emerging from Nancy's thought is that we ask again and again what the world wants of us and what we want of it. --Continental Philosophy Review

For the last three decades Jean-Luc Nancy has worked at a methodical and vigorous deconstruction of the world, driven by the affirmation that the world is without sense. This gesture insists instead on a return to the world from the neglect imposed on it by our philosophical and theological traditions. The demand emerging from Nancy's thought is that we ask again and again what the world wants of us and what we want of it.--Continental Philosophy Review

For the last three decades Jean-Luc Nancy has worked at a methodical and vigorous deconstruction of the world, driven by the affirmation that the world is without sense. This gesture insists instead on a return to the world from the neglect imposed on it by our philosophical and theological traditions. The demand emerging from Nancy's thought is that we ask again and again what the world wants of us and what we want of it. --<em>Continental Philosophy Review</em>

For the last three decades Jean-Luc Nancy has worked at a methodical and vigorous deconstruction of the world, driven by the affirmation that the world is without sense. This gesture insists instead on a return to the world from the neglect imposed on it by our philosophical and theological traditions. The demand emerging from Nancy's thought is that we ask again and again what the world wants of us and what we want of it. --Continental Philosophy Review

Author Information

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg and one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century’s foremost thinkers of politics, art, and the body. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis. Travis Holloway (with Flor Méchain) previously translated What’s These Worlds Coming To? by Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurélien Barrau. He is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY-Farmingdale.

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