Abstract

This article presents a discussion about the thought of mutation in Jean-Luc Nancy, understood as a mutation of traditional philosophical ideas about transformation. It proposes that, facing the untransformed meaning of transformation in the philosophical tradition from Plato to contemporary philosophy, Jean-Luc Nancy opens another path, when comprehending transformation rather as a touch of the soul. Far from subscribing mutation to an arche-teleology of meanings, the thought of mutation, a thought of the touch of the soul, finds the sense of mutation rather in the is-happening than in the search for form and figuration. It is in the mutation of the in-between, understood as the meanwhile of the is-being, that the mutation of senses appears in its own non-figuration. Thereby it is possible to discover in the thought of Nancy not another meaning of the soul but how the soul of the sense touches the world.