Left in the Dark Sharing Death with Jean-Luc Nancy

Nancy is predominantly a thinker of life in all its forms and expressions. For him, to be, to exist, is always a question of being alive in the most vivacious, intense, and restless way, that is, to be in a relentless relation of exchange with one’s environment and with others. Apart from being a central theme in Nancy’s work, this vivid relationality is also a distinctive feature of his mode of writing. Nancy’s death therefore poses a fundamental challenge to his own thinking and writing. For how to relate oneself to a dead author? How to form a community with the dead? How to share the absence of life, of this specific life: how to share the death of Nancy? In this commemorative essay, Aukje van Rooden investigates these questions in an attempt to make sense of Nancy’s passing.