Abstract

These three intense passages, which constitute the opening of one of the most important works by Jean-Luc Nancy, titled “The Sense of the World,” reveal the fundamental point on which his reflection is centered: the expression “sense of the world” has lost its founding meaning. It is with this loss that we are confronted today. If the search for a sovereign truth, bearing the character of absolute certainty, inaugurates all modern philosophy from Descartes until the early 1900s, and if in such an order of truth the subject becomes the place where this sovereignty is given—the end of metaphysics is now accomplished. Along with it, the end of philosophy. This fulfillment is the very space of our present. Moreover, this is—as well known—the question around which, or rather perhaps it would be better to say from which, the whole of twentieth-century reflection originates. This is where Nancy starts from again. He re-examines this question in the precise awareness that on, it in a certain sense, depends not only and not so much the fate of philosophy, but—as we shall try to see along the analysis below—the very fate of what we have so far called the West. Not surprisingly, this Nancy is a keen and acute reader of Nietzsche and Heidegger, that is, of those who first and most radically addressed and contemplated the end of philosophy.