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Converting the Limit: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Infinite in the Act of Difference

  • Massimo Villani
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Mind the Gap: Borders, Limits and Frontiers
This chapter is in the book Mind the Gap: Borders, Limits and Frontiers

Abstract

In our contemporary world, the concepts of limit and border have an ambiguous status. On the one hand, they are devices of exclusion and violence; on the other hand, they are constantly being erased to allow capital to accumulate limitlessly. The increasingly pervasive rhetoric of being in relation, along with communicative hypertrophy and the sensation, due to new media, of being inside decision-making processes, support this destructive infinity: a spiral in which the erasure of all distance between subjects, and between subjects and the world, nullifies any possibility of an authentic experience of the other, and true responsibility towards the world. In the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, we seek the resources to think not of a negation of the limit but of its conversion: starting from mutual separation, and only from it, it is possible to rethink coexistence. Being-together will mean recognising mutual separation but transforming it from a tool of exclusion into an opportunity for the experience (of the other).

Abstract

In our contemporary world, the concepts of limit and border have an ambiguous status. On the one hand, they are devices of exclusion and violence; on the other hand, they are constantly being erased to allow capital to accumulate limitlessly. The increasingly pervasive rhetoric of being in relation, along with communicative hypertrophy and the sensation, due to new media, of being inside decision-making processes, support this destructive infinity: a spiral in which the erasure of all distance between subjects, and between subjects and the world, nullifies any possibility of an authentic experience of the other, and true responsibility towards the world. In the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, we seek the resources to think not of a negation of the limit but of its conversion: starting from mutual separation, and only from it, it is possible to rethink coexistence. Being-together will mean recognising mutual separation but transforming it from a tool of exclusion into an opportunity for the experience (of the other).

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Acknowledgements V
  3. Contents VII
  4. Part I
  5. Borders as Translation Spaces 1
  6. Border Narratives: Crossing Lines and Telling Tales 9
  7. Geophilosophy of the Border: Beyond Immunitarian Politics 21
  8. Borders and Neo-Nationalism: A Geophilosophical Approach 37
  9. We Fight for this Land 51
  10. Converting the Limit: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Infinite in the Act of Difference 63
  11. Liminal Places and Non-Places 77
  12. Border Brushstrokes: The Ulster Arts Club and the Post-Partition Nation 91
  13. Bordering as the Breaking Force of Border Subjects 101
  14. Frontiers of Sexual Difference: The Phantasm of Gender 115
  15. Borders and Language: Hermeneutic-Philosophical Issues 129
  16. ‘Thou wenest Ich be a beggere’: Borders and the Habitus in Middle English Romance 145
  17. Funes the Arboreous: Borderless Ecologies in Borges’s Ficciones 157
  18. Part II
  19. Borders and Barbed Wire: Cahir Healy’s Memoirs from the Argenta Prison Ship 171
  20. A Residue of Boundary Correspondence 183
  21. Two Years on an Ulster Prison Ship 189
  22. Contributors and Editors 307
  23. Index 311
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111448473-006

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Acknowledgements V
  3. Contents VII
  4. Part I
  5. Borders as Translation Spaces 1
  6. Border Narratives: Crossing Lines and Telling Tales 9
  7. Geophilosophy of the Border: Beyond Immunitarian Politics 21
  8. Borders and Neo-Nationalism: A Geophilosophical Approach 37
  9. We Fight for this Land 51
  10. Converting the Limit: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Infinite in the Act of Difference 63
  11. Liminal Places and Non-Places 77
  12. Border Brushstrokes: The Ulster Arts Club and the Post-Partition Nation 91
  13. Bordering as the Breaking Force of Border Subjects 101
  14. Frontiers of Sexual Difference: The Phantasm of Gender 115
  15. Borders and Language: Hermeneutic-Philosophical Issues 129
  16. ‘Thou wenest Ich be a beggere’: Borders and the Habitus in Middle English Romance 145
  17. Funes the Arboreous: Borderless Ecologies in Borges’s Ficciones 157
  18. Part II
  19. Borders and Barbed Wire: Cahir Healy’s Memoirs from the Argenta Prison Ship 171
  20. A Residue of Boundary Correspondence 183
  21. Two Years on an Ulster Prison Ship 189
  22. Contributors and Editors 307
  23. Index 311
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