Research On Jean-luc Nancy's Writing Thought

This dissertation is an exploration to Jean-Luc Nancy's writing thought.Jean-Luc Nancy is one of the most influential philosophers in the world today.His works has covered a wide range of topics,including religion,sense,existence,writing,body,community,freedom,politics,ethics,uncertainty,art,poetry and globalization,etc.,which greatly enrich and expand the scope of deconstruction theory.Nancy has made unique contributions in the field of the universalization of sense(sens),the touching of writing,the reconstruction of ontology and other aspects;meanwhile,his thinking has more and more far-reaching influences in contemporary world.He also has integrated his thoughts of being-with,body,touching and art into his thinking of writing,which expand the field of writing theory and thus result in great academic values.This dissertation takes Nancy's writing ideology as the research subject,aims to deeply analyze his ideological origin,philosophical basis,main propositions and theoretical connotation,as well as to explore its academic significance in constructing the discourse system of writing with Chinese characteristics.This dissertation takes Nancy's writing thought as the research subject,aims to deeply analyze his ideological origin,philosophical basis,main propositions and theoretical connotation,as well as to explore its academic significance in constructing the discourse system of writing with Chinese characteristics.Thus,it involves explaining and responding to Nancy's writing theories on such questions of how to write,what is writing,who is writing,what kind of writing and what it means to writing and so on.Only by making a theoretical comprehension of Nancy's reflections of the origin of writing,the essence of writing,the characteristics of writing and the form of writing,can we fully excavate the academic value of Nancy's writing thought.In addition to the introduction,the main body of the dissertation consists of five chapters that intend to answer those questions above respectively.Introduction.This part explains the significance of the topic of Nancy's writing thought based on discussing of Nancy's philosophy briefly,summarizes the current research status of Nancy's philosophy and writing ideology,proposes the research methods,and innovations.Chapter 1,Tradition and transcendence: the background of Nancy's writing thought.This chapter is to historically present the ideological tradition of writing,to reveal the starting point and philosophical foundation of Nancy's writing thought,besides to analyze the main concerns of Nancy.For a long time in metaphysics,since Plato,writing had been regarded as a secondary derivative of spirit or language(especially speech/phonetics),whose function was to avoid forgetting.Writing had thus been repressed to a subordinate position.In Jewish-Christian tradition,the “Incarnation” also had indicated a cognitive tendency that pronunciation took precedence over writing.Even in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Ferdinand de Saussure,writing was understood as a substitute for the phonetics.It was not until Jacques Derrida and others who launched the “Writing Revolution” that writing was considered as the intrinsic nature of thinking.Nancy's writing thought is based on this tradition.Nancy sets his starting point at the theory of sense and the philosophy of being-with.Nancy's theory of sense is a reflection on the general loss or suspension of meaning.He develops multiple concepts of sense including meaning,direction and sensation.Nancy takes writing as an important way to reconstruct the world of meaning and avoid falling into the abyss of nihilism.Nancy's writing does not only refer to the behavior as an act,nor does it refer to an art or a style of a certain kind of writing,but is directly related to the sense and the existential thinking.Therefore,writing forms a symbiotic and tautological relationship with us,world and sense.At the same time,Nancy develops Martin Heidegger's concepts of Dasein and MitDasein,regarding Dasein as being-singular-plural that always exists in “being-in-common”.Writing is the proper opening of sense,which is constantly taking place toward the limit,exposing to the outside of sense,existing as spacing and differences.Therefore,writing is endowed by Nancy with the sense of ontology.In this sense,Nancy's thought of writing is also a kind of ontology.Chapter 2,Writing and sense: Nancy's thought of writing essence.This chapter is to discuss Nancy's thought on the essence of writing by combining the analysis of his theory of sense and ontology of being-with.Nancy understands the essence of writing as the coappearance of meaning.He has established a relationship of tautology among world,us and meaning under the basis of the ontology of being-with.The being-with,common or co-are understood as the fundamental mode of sense and even of all existence.The making of sense is not derived from any presupposition given in advance.It also excludes all representations or signification of the prior meaning.In this way,the making of sense is only the proper autoappearance of being-singular-plural.Writing is the main form of co-appearance of sense.Nancy has developed the concept of “Exscription” to explain the essence of writing.Exscription is the overflow of sense itself.Writing is always the possible condition for the origin of sense,and the unfinishable “coming-toward-there”.Therefore,Writing gets rid of the limitation of signification or representation.It always exposes itself to the outside and birth to presence.This indicates that writing or sense will never come to an end.The theory reflects the realistic and ethical concerns of Nancy.Writing isn't only about the expressing or overflowing of sense,it also means the creation of sense,but this is a unique form of “creatio ex nihilo” which means creating everything from nothing.Nancy introduces the concepts of no-thing and no-meaning to explain this “nihilo”,which mark the initiative and creativity of the being-singular-plural itself and the eternal opening to the future.Nancy believes that writing reveals nothing except the opening of nihilo with the analysis of Gustave Flaubert's novel The Temptation of Antony.Chapter 3,Areality and touching: Nancy's thought on characteristics of writing.This chapter aims to elucidate Nancy's understanding of the characteristics of writing,with a basic analysis of Nancy's theory of corpus and touching.Here the “who” is to respond to the possibilities of body as the “subject” of writing.Since Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes,“author” as the subject of writing has been placed in a position of “death”.Nancy abandoned the category of “author” and turned to explore the possibility of the body as the subject of writing,so as to make a survival analysis of the characteristics of writing from the body dimension.In the metaphysical tradition,body,as well as writing,has been relegated to the status of a non-substantial and unvalued substance.Based on the phenomenology of body,Nancy takes body as one of the central issues of philosophical thinking,and then discovers the areality and touching of writing.He believes that writing is essentially an opening of areality,a touching of body,and that writing is closely related to the tactile sensation of reading.Writing always takes place at the limit,and constructs an areality of sense with the touching of body,which breaks through and surpasses the absolute limit of immanence;writing thus has some characteristics of areality.At the same time,as the co-appearance of sense,writing is always closely related to sensation.For Nancy,as the exposure of body,touching is a more fundamental sensory mechanism,and constitutes the starting point of the sense-world.In the sense of touching,writing and reading are not only in the state of co-existence,but are also sharing,touching and exposing to each other.By thinking about the areality and touching of writing,Nancy highlights the importance of body in the concept of writing,and deepens the ontological significance of writing.Chapter 4,Literature and painting: Nancy's thought on forms of writing.This chapter combines writing with Nancy's theory on art closely,and aims to explore Nancy's thinking about the forms of writing.In addition to literary writing,which is the common form of writing,Nancy generally understands writing as the behavior of making sense or exposing oneself,and thus painting is also considered as a special form of writing.As far as literature is concerned,Nancy integrates the ontology of being-with and the theory of community into his understanding of literary writing.In his view,the community of literary writing is firstly performed as the form of myth,but the crisis of meaning in modern society has revealed the basic fact that myth has been interrupted.This is not to say that literary writing has come to its end,but rather that literary community can only play in a “inoperative” way and can only be understood in the sense of common or being-with.Nancy also uses the idea-writing as the co-appearance of sense-in the analysis of Christian painting.In his point of view,painting,as the carrier of depicting traces and expressing meaning,is a kind of exscription that condenses the touching of body.In this kind of writing,the dialectic between the visible and the invisible,the exposure of the painting itself from its immanence to the infinite outside,is the truth of Christian painting.Nancy also finds that writing could achieve the reconstruction of such basic propositions as the diversity of art.These ideas provide new enlightenment to re-examine the autonomy of art and “the end of art”.Chapter 5,Significance and limitation: an evaluation of Nancy's writing thought.“What it means to writing” is not to answer the question of what is the purpose of writing.For Nancy,any given purpose is totalitarianism which he has criticized severely.“What it means to writing” aims to answer what are the academic significance and theoretical limitations that Nancy's writing thought has provided for today's theory and practice.This chapter generally summarizes the basic characteristics and core ideas of Nancy's writing thought,analyses its significance for Chinese literary theory from the perspective of concept,discourse and practice of criticism.Nancy's writing is based on the dimension of otherness and relationship firstly.The related concepts,such as co-existence,body,exscription,touching and community,all emphasize the infinite opening of sense to the outside,with the basic characteristics of exposure,communication and sharing.This explains that Nancy's writing thought is existential ontology.Nancy's criticism of anthropocentrism,identity and essentialism,as well as the dimension of otherness and ecological thought included in his concepts of being-with,singularity,exposure and sharing,can promote the construction and development of ecological aesthetics,ecological literary theory and ecological criticism.His revelation of the areality and touching characteristics of writing opens the eternal possibilities of writing,which is regarded as the coappearance of sense,and enables us to re-understand and reconstruct the discourse system of writing with Chinese characteristics from the perspective of sense and body.However,the universalism of being-with,sharing,touching,body and even western discourse are integrated into the category of writing,at the same time expands the scope of thinking and raising writing to the height of existentialism.Thus,there are some shortages of Nancy's writing thought such as the paradox or utopianism of writing,and the isolation of writing from daily experience,etc.By exploring the traditional origin,starting point and philosophical basis of Nancy's writing thought,this dissertation integrates the basic propositions of Nancy's philosophy into his thought on writing,and probes its theoretical significance for constructing Chinese discourse system of writing.It theoretically answers the questions of how to write,what is writing,who is writing,what kind of writing and what it means to writing,and has made a dialectical comprehension of Nancy's reflections on the origin,the essence,the characteristics,and the form of writing.To some extent,this dissertation constructs the theoretical system of Nancy's writing thought.