Lecture
LCCP Colloquium "We, Who, Where to? On Jean-Luc Nancy and Transplantation as a Model for Rethinking History Relationally"
- Date
- Thursday 5 June 2025
- Time
- Series
- Centre for Continental Philosophy 2024-2025
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48
The Centre of Political Philosophy and the Leiden Centre of Continental Philosophy are pleased to announce a lecture by Dr. Aukje van Rooden, researcher at the Philosophy Department, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam. Her area of expertise is contemporary continental, particularly French, philosophy and its applications within literary and cultural studies.
Abstract
In The Intruder (2000, extended and republished in 2024), Jean-Luc Nancy offers a philosophical and autobiographical reflection on his heart transplantation, revealing intrusion—by other organisms, technologies, and ultimately death—as a necessary means of survival. More generally, this experience provides a powerful image of the relational ontology Nancy explores throughout his work. In this paper, I explore the possibility of taking transplantation as a model to rethink the idea of a collective “we” and a shared future. The collapse of modern “grand narratives” may have left humanity without a unifying historical subject, yet ecological peril forces us to rethink existence as a collective affair. Partly in contrast with the postmodern suggestion to mourn the loss of the modern “we,” we can perhaps rethink this “we” as a new form of totality of interconnected bodies that necessarily live, and live on, with each other: not as a linear unfolding, but as the ongoing, bodily transmission of vulnerability.