Jean-Luc Nancy passed away on August 23, 2021 at the age of 81.
Nancy had been generously active and present on the international cultural scene until the end, and his collaboration with our journal (EJP) and webinar on Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in its centenary, were perhaps the last initiatives he participated in, and for which he wrote.
His contributions range from philosophy to psychoanalysis, to art, to politics. Nancy studied the meaning of otherness, of difference and of its being constituted as discreet reality and horizon, of the possibilities of collective life and of democracy today. And he noted the distance that separates us from a true knowledge and practice of democracy, and the impossibility of a community that does not recognize the distance and difference between individuals. The existence of the community is not given out of its actual realization, the community cannot be invoked as an abstract ideal.
In psychoanalysis, his sharp and in-depth readings of Freud open new interpretative possibilities, while his comparison with Lacan reveals the ductility of his psychoanalytic knowledge and the function of language. The immediacy of participation, the giving the word in a cosmos of singular complexity even to the body that feels, to the fragile and invaded body, to the body that represents and speaks itself in art and radiates towards the other in eros, are one of his original characteristics, which led him to always look for the other in life and to study the drama and depth of human relationships with a careful look at poetry, painting, and writing pushed to the limits of common reality
His loss is unbridgeable. But we will continue to study and keep aloft his many contributions. Through this column we will host interventions, observations, memories, theories, fantasies, writings concerning his work of investigation and creation of new ideas.
