Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher and current Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, holding the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair. He graduated from the Sorbonne in 1962 and earned his doctorate in 1973. Nancy taught at the Université des Sciences Humaines in Strasbourg until his retirement in 2002 and has been a guest professor at many universities including Freie Universität Berlin, University of California, Irvine, and University of California, Berkeley.

• Doctorate on Kant's philosophical discourse (1973)
• Doctorate in Toulouse (1987) with dissertation published as The Experience of Freedom
• Professor at EGS
• Guest professor at numerous international universities

Jean-Luc Nancy's research covers diverse philosophical topics including community, politics, European thinkers (Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger), French contemporaries (Lacan, Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida), German Romanticism, psychoanalysis, literature, technology, hermeneutics, and a deconstruction of Christianity. His work challenges modern ideas of systematicity and engages with questions about existence, freedom, and the political.

His recent publications include philosophical explorations of Heidegger, discussions of self-reference, philosophical fiction, and examinations of literature and philosophy. He has also written about portraiture, aesthetic experience, drawing, sexuality, and responses to technological disasters. Nancy has collaborated with artists and written on contemporary art, including works on On Kawara, Jean Michel Atlan, and Abbas Kiarostami's films.

Notable works include Being Singular Plural (2000), The Inoperative Community (1986), and his deconstruction of Christianity in books like Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (2008) and Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II (2012). In the 1990s, he experienced a serious illness and received a heart transplant, which inspired his text The Intruder (2000).