The tactile origin as “between” in Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract

Deconstruction suspends the philosophical pretension of fully mastering its own limits—and, along with them, what those limits exclude, aufheben, or subjugate: the Other, the non-identical, the heterogeneous, the restance. It was the demand to give a “body” to difference—to sense it—combined with the desire to move beyond the shifting sands of deconstruction and its phantoms toward a thinking of struction as the continuous birth and drive of the world, that led us to Jean-Luc Nancy. Thus, this article aims to show how, following the deconstruction of the classical concept of origin in Western metaphysics, Nancy presents us not with an origin serving as the foundation of the existential chain, but with an origin as a constantly renewed impetus and impulse that constitutes our archivida. It is an origin understood as an entre (an in-between) that spaces us out and exposes us to the limit we share. We will examine how the concreteness of each subject emerges solely through its relational being—fostering a “transcendental curiosity” regarding the other—and, finally, how language becomes the medium that exposes bodies to the circulation of meaning.