ABSTRACT
The question of romance, that is, the question of passionate interaction, of intrigue, of writing, of dramatization. This quite heterogeneous web of associations already implies a number of age-old philosophical issues: the relation between love and thinking; the relation between love and literature; and, subsequently, between philosophy and literature; the issue of the relation itself. The central figure in this conference on love is the famous child’s play of plucking the petals of a daisy while singing the rhyme “he loves me, he loves me not” or “she loves me, she loves me not.” Set against a somewhat dramatized historical background, the way in which language touches, however, has changed according to Nancy and this is where his philosophical project overlaps with that of the eighteenth-century Jena Romantics. The trouble with the Jena Romantics – highlighted by Nancy – is that they, too, somehow betrayed the love of thinking.
