Georges Van Den Abbeele, “Blood in the Streets? Baroque Reflections on the Age of Cruor”
Our contemporary world’s all but ubiquitous surge in cruelty, crudeness, and literal blood in the streets, all encapsulated or signaled by the very word, cruor, would seem to announce a whole new era associated with that term, an era that either renews or continues the “age of cruor” named by the poet, Apollinaire, with regards to the horrors of the First World War and whose citation serves as the epigraph to Nancy’s last book: “And this age wants to be called by / This terrible Latin word cruor / Which means blood spilled” (p. 1).
Cruor in all its gory morbidity appears in opposition to the more life-sustaining properties of sanguis, the blood that remains circulating within the body. There seems something almost wistfully Manichean in this schema, but that would be an error, as I will argue by exploring the curious interrelations of the two terms, as well as Nancy’s extended analogy of language as the circulation of social blood, an analogy further raises the problem of when or what kind of language is sanguis and what cruor in a supposedly “post-sacrificial” world. Some provisional answers will be sought by reconsidering the relevance today of the Baroque aesthetics of excess, trauerspiel, utopian fantasy, for the further elaboration of the kind of “just poetics” and “drives without objects” that can “extinguish” the cruelty and cruor of our times.
Joanna Hodge, “Eros, Thanatos, Cosmos, and the Fate of Beautiful Villages in Derbyshire: Nancy with Marx and Freud”
My title, the sub-title of section twenty-one of Cruor/Corpus III (2024, 2021), takes the two themes, as used by Freud to name opposing principles, here combined by Nancy with a third term, cosmos, through which Nancy invokes a potentiality for a composition of worldly forces, to form a harmonious unity, rewriting cosmos as a space of compossibilities.
The second half of my title invokes Nancy’s citation in his section fifteen, from Marx, Capital, volume One, chapter thirty-one, So-called primitive accumulation, which displays a certain charming, but perhaps misplaced nostalgia for pre-industrial Britain, more usually cited by the indigenous as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Nancy’s citation names Derbyshire, and elides Nottinghamshire and Lancashire, for reasons no doubt of his own.
These remarks will explore a dynamic set up by a conjoining of texts, in the French edition, of Cruor, with the brief and suggestive Nostalgie du pere, itself a translation of Freud’s Vatersehnsucht, in turn translated into English, perhaps not entirely happily, as Longing for the father. ‘Paternal nostalgia’ might better have respected the double genitive.
The myth of the tribe there invoked by Nancy is here again to be disrupted by a certain irony of the tribe, under a supplementary title, ‘Maternal memorials’. This is licensed by the addition in the English translation of Cruor of the poetic sequence, Stoma: hymn and response. There the double affect marked in the opening citation is disrupted by a capacity of the mouth/stoma/memory of maternal expulsion to provide a response to the address of the poet, who seeks to put meanings into circulation, but thereby produces embalmed citation.
My remarks will therefore pivot around three themes: on a strange conjugation of the names Marx and Freud, in Cruor, which retrieves a series of such conjugations important for Nancy: Sartre and Bataille, Bataille and Heidegger, Heidegger and Marx; on a necessary supplement to a Paternal nostalgia, in a staging of Maternal memorials, of various kinds, as marked up by Nancy, in his invocations of maternal/paternal differences, and in a surmised prolongation of Freudian reading; and on this double affectivity, as restaged through a contrast between naturally occurring, and technically formed stomatic supplementations.
Thereby a contrast may be staged between a madness of an ideal ego, as paternal autonomy and detachment, and the entanglements of living out a maternal ambition, both propelling and obstructing the narcissistic satisfactions of an ego ideal.
Irving Goh, “Les corps désoeuvrés”
My intervention brings together the writings on the “use” (or rather, non-use, or even dis-use) of bodies by both Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben. I want to think about “unworked” or “unworking” bodies in light of “postwork imaginaries,” particularly in the wake of the “Great Resignation” and “Lying Flat” movements that we had witnessed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Can the legacies of those movements be found in “unworked” or “unworking” bodies? If so, how do we come to terms with such an “unworking” when it is shared collectively, extended to every single body in the world?
Juli Carson, “The Inoperative Community: Exhibition X Practice, UCI 1965-2025”
This talk will discuss the Inoperative Community—an archival exhibition mounted in UCI’s Contemporary Arts Gallery in 2025— which provided an unprecedented look at the gallery’s evolving curatorial and artistic 60-year legacy. The exhibition took its title from Jean-Luc Nancy’s famed essay from 1986 in which he presents a non-hegemonic, fluid model of community. Through this lens, UCI’s University Art Gallery is understood not as a linear narrative, but as an evolving collective moment(s) where diverse voices and practices converged in both harmony and conflict. Curated by Juli Carson—with co-curators Kevin Appel and Sasha Ussef—the exhibition’s design and publication set out to rhyme with Nancy’s theories of what rethinking community might entail for curatorial and artistic practice.
Divya Dwivedi, "We Legions or the Polynomial Community”
The first-person plural which is the enigma of philosophy and politics – and which is also named “community” – finds another name and problem here: the “nous” as legions. It will be seen here that the “we” as a speaker/subject/agent defies our expectations, for it is the missing subject of enunciation with a unique relation between its symbolicity and iconicity. This gives the embrayeur nous distinct powers as compared to “I” and “you”. Legions is also the name for the way in which “nous” acquires diverse functions as the effect of the literary work according to polynomia, that is, multiple laws of formation and function which are specific to the texts, discourses and regularities that realize them. The passage from this missing enunciator to the polynomial “we” is proposed under the concept of transitivity whereby one can analyze the homological and analogical capacities of “we” activated in both literature and politics.
Eleanor Kaufman, “Shattered Love, Heart, and Cruelty”
This essay attempts to link Nancy’s earlier work in The Inoperative Community, particularly the essay “Shattered Love” (1986) to his late Corpus III/Cruor (2021). In some sense, there is a connection via the figure of the heart, which traverses this period. On the other hand, there is a disconnection between the earlier and late work, captured by the different relation to shattering and by the contrast of Nancy’s “cruor” with Deleuze’s Sadean framework from “Coldness and Cruelty.”
Shaj Mohan, "The Bastard Logic of Nobody”
Ontology is really corpology, which is obviously not a branch of biology. We should approach the works of Jean-Luc Nancy on corpus, the body, or his mode of the question “What is body?” in keeping within the often-hidden question of substance. Every work of Nancy presupposes a philosophical corpus that caries this assumption and is not restricted to a tradition. Today, we will begin through the question, “Who is nobody?”, and what is the meaning of the “no” next to the body. This will also convoke the question of nothing and of identity. There is no such thing as the nothing. It appears to make sense only in one of the statements of the principle of reason, namely, why there is something rather than nothing? The nothing in philosophy presupposes the identity of something, or identity as such. Identity is the primary sense of being in so far as a thing is distinguished as this particular thing and no other, that thing as itself. We will then come to have the de-constitution of the classical laws of thought which can be classically called “bastard reasoning” (λογισμῷ τινι νόθῳ).
Tyler Williams, “Stethoscopic Literature”
In a very brief moment in "Cruor," the central text in his Corpus III, Jean-Luc Nancy aligns the work of literature with the work of a stethoscope. Nancy does not elaborate precisely this what this alignment means, but the grammar of his sentence suggests that something of literature remains at its heart stethoscopic. "Stethoscopic Literature" investigates the contours of this intimate touching of listening and writing in "Cruor" and concludes with a brief commentary on literary censorship as the management or mastered pulsation of sense.
Gabriele Schwab, “Being with Ghosts: Ecological Exposure in Jean-Luc Nancy”
Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology of “being-with” offers a rich framework for understanding our current environmental crises from the perspective of a world marked by loss, remainders and spectrality. His concept of “the fragile skin of the world” highlights exposure, contact, and finitude. Ecological thinking must attend to the ghostly persistence of the traces of extinction and toxic afterlives of global extractive capitalism and environmental catastrophes. Haunting has become an ontological condition in a world of unresolved conflicts between life-forms and their disappearances in which humans and other species are bound together in their shared exposure to vulnerability and the specter of extinction. Conceiving the earth as possessing a skin, Nancy invites us to envision it as a living and sensing body that bears the scars of destruction and loss and to embrace an ethics of mourning and hospitality toward the ghosts that haunt planetary life.
Jérôme Lèbre, « Éteindre la cruauté ? »
On ne peut distinguer chez Nancy l’approche du corps et celle, toujours politique, du monde. Mais alors que l’Intrus se centrait sur le monde du soin, et Corpus sur l’articulation générale corps – monde, Cruor s’oriente vers la question de la violence. « Cruor » (le texte qui donne son titre à ce recueil) se termine ainsi avec l’évocation de la fin de ce monde dans le sang versé : un destin préparé par un Occident qui n’a cessé de convertir les pulsions vitales en objets, donc de les pervertir, autrement dit de détruire la vie par une objectivation dont la réification marchande est le sommet ou bien plutôt l’abîme. Depuis l’écriture de ce texte, violence et cruauté se sont encore fortement intensifiées au niveau mondial, ce qui doit nous rendre d’autant plus attentifs à l’analyse qu’en a fait Nancy, mais aussi à l’issue qu’il a laissée ouverte : « il s’agit moins pour nous de protester contre la cruauté et d’en programmer le dépassement que de l’éteindre, ici, maintenant, au présent… » Éteindre la cruauté ? On comprend que c’est le contraire d’étreindre. Mais encore ? Alors que le texte de Nancy s’achève de cette manière, mais aussi se relance et s’ouvre, que peut vouloir dire pour nous, « ici et maintenant », non pas seulement protester contre la cruauté et ceux qui l’étreignent, mais l’éteindre ?
Timothy Murray, “Sublimation in the Shadow of War: Poetic Expositions of Cosmosis”
How might we think Nancy’s Cruor as we gather in the shadow of the Iran war? How might this text provide a counter-narrative to the brutal domination of globalization on the theater of what Nancy calls the “technoeconomic order”?
In Cruor, Jean-Luc Nancy provides something of a counter-narrative delineating myth as the contrasting pulsive speech of the Cosmos, as the plasmic throbbing of the drive, of the singular/plural. Of value in the narratives of myth and its extension in the multimedial folds of what he calls a “just poetics,” is neither the display of information nor the heuristic explanation of the world but, rather, the primary force of “call, injunction, address, warning, threat, seduction.” Such force is inscribed in Nancy’s narrative in the élan of the sublime and, via his turning to Freud, in the artistic valence of sublimation.
Of interest to me is the broad dynamic of sublimation in this text in the interests of sustaining a “cosmétique.” And how might this stand in relation to the urgency of thinking the cruelty of war in a highly layered global technoeconomy? This text is fascinating not only for Nancy’s rather optimistic hope in a singular plural Cosmos but also in its relative indifference to, perhaps sublimation of, the many “structions” of his earlier texts written with global/techno/eco conflict in mind. The Readers of Cruor might notice the surprising quietude of Nancy’s emphasis on technique and its prepositional play in the text, just as the silence of the emphatic precedence in Nancy’s writing of historical layerings poeisis, let’s think Heidegger’s techne as its fabric. Is something else happening in this text other than “philosopher, c’est penser l’exposition elle-même”? Then there is his emphasis on the (European) compossible in relation to relative indifference to incompossibility in this fraught geopolitical climate, not to mention a curious absence of his crucial distinction between technologie and écotechnie which Nancy articulated in the haze of globalization’s first Gulf War. What might a foregrounding of these “structions” sublimated from Nancy’s oeuvre lend to an understanding, now, today, of a just poetics?
Catherine Malabou, “The Persistence of Sacrifice: Bataille, Nancy, and the Limits of the Unsacrificable”
This paper revisits the critique of sacrifice developed by Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, according to which modernity marks the end of both real sacrifice and its conceptual framework. Against this thesis, I return to Georges Bataille’s troubling fascination with sacrificial violence, not to restore its legitimacy, but to question its supposed disappearance. In a context marked by terrorism, martyrdom, and renewed forms of political and religious violence, can we truly maintain that sacrifice has vanished? Or must we instead recognize its transformation and persistence beyond the limits assigned to it by contemporary philosophy?
