ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the question, or status, of force in Jean-Luc Nancy. In The Experience of Freedom, Nancy argues that freedom, essentially, is beyond all human determinations of living, beyond all human efforts at governing living, where limits to freedom might be imposed either supposedly benevolently for the common good or malignantly in order to annihilate others whose differences are intolerable to the dominant group. The idea of re-opening, re-exposure, or re-exposition is a force of thought that insists throughout Nancy’s writings, and it is undoubtedly a resilient force, as suggested not just by the thinking of resistance against the wave of populist sentiments but also by the thinking of freedom beyond all human determinations, of existence that blunts the horrors of sacrifice, and of community that undoes or disavows all insular communitarian projects.
