ABSTRACT
The etymologies to which Nancy alludes in the passage above deserve a quick glance. Experience in English and experience in French both derive from the Latin experior, meaning to try, prove, or put to the test. The notion of peril frequently arises in conjunction with venturing out and testing oneself in Nancy’s work. For Nancy “freedom” is understood only derivatively as empirical instances of agency and much more commonly as a matter of “access,” “availability,” “passage,” “traversal,” “trying,” and “testing.” Freedom is neither a matter of rationally determined essence nor of a description of significant existence, but of the “chiasmus” of these concepts. Nancy approaches experience in terms of the givenness of being and the seizure that makes it accessible to philosophical discourse.
