The Break In and With History: Nancy‘s Thinking of History in the Light of the Disruptive Condition

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The chapter reconstructs a far-reaching reflection of Nancy’s on the theory of history that lays bare the signature of our present: the suspension of history. “Getting out of history,” the break of and in history, and the stepping into something other than history come into view as the fundamental movement that has been happening to us for at least half a century. The determination of our epochality as the time of suspended history is traced by the mutations of sense, of community, and the world that this philosophical oeuvre works through so powerfully. Nancy’s thinking of suspension, as it may be called against this background, ultimately testifies to a new socio-historical experience by which, to a certain extent, it seems itself to be written: the disruption. Shock, break, interruption, discontinuity without any sublation in a modern history of progress, improvement, emancipation are the structural characteristics of this now dominant experience that can be summarized as the pure immanence of the interruptive, at whose bidding we live today. Being-now means Being-in-the-disruption.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThinking With – Jean-Luc Nancy
EditorsSusanna Lindberg, Artemy Magun, Marita Tatari
Number of pages16
Place of PublicationZürich
PublisherDiaphanes Verlag
Publication date06.2023
Pages185-200
ISBN (Print)978-3-0358-0552-9
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-0358-0638-0
Publication statusPublished - 06.2023