Jean-Luc Nancy, a Romantic Philosopher? On Romance, Love, and Literature 

The question of romance, that is, the question of passionate interaction, of intrigue, of writing, of dramatization. This quite heterogeneous web of associations already implies a number of age-old philosophical issues: the relation between love and thinking; the relation between love and literature; and, subsequently, between philosophy and literature; the issue of the relation itself. The central figure in this conference on love is the famous child’s play of plucking the petals of a daisy while singing the rhyme “he loves me, he loves me not” or “she loves me, she loves me not.” Set against a somewhat dramatized historical background, the way in which language touches, however, has changed according to Nancy and this is where his philosophical project overlaps with that of the eighteenth-century Jena Romantics. The trouble with the Jena Romantics – highlighted by Nancy – is that they, too, somehow betrayed the love of thinking.