ABSTRACT
To say of Jean-Luc Nancy that he is a ‘contemporary philosopher’ is to state the obvious: a prolific author, Nancy has continually taught in the faculté de philosophie at the Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg in France since 1967 and he has consistently sought to situate his work in an explicitly contemporary context-the collapse of communism, the Gulf War, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. However, such an appellation has a much deeper resonance with regard to Nancy, for there is an important sense in which he is also a philosopher of the contemporary. That is to say, of what it means for us, today, to think and write ‘today’, of today, and for today. In answering the question, ‘What does the work or the activity of the philosopher mean today?’, Nancy responds with the formulation, ‘There is something like a general loss of sens. Sens, that is what matters to me today’.2 Sens: sense, meaning, direction, this is what matters to Nancy (and to us) today. Two hundred years after Kant, Nancy’s work might best be regarded as tracing the contours and possibilities of a general disorientation in thinking. But this disorientation is not an occasion for nostalgia or mourning because ‘far from considering the general flight of sens as a catastrophe and loss, I want to think of it as the event of sens in our time, for our time.3 Rather, then, a recognition that this event provides the condition for thinking in and of the present.
