LISTENING TO PHILOSOPHY, SILENCE & SELF: in conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy

From IIIIXIII Magazine:

The relationship between art and philosophy has a long and troubled history. In his Republic, Plato banished art from his ideal society and invited philosophy to become the sovereign ruler of the state. For Plato, art was a form of illusion, creating a representation of an empirical world that was already one step removed from the truth of his Platonic Ideas. It wasn’t until the the German Idealists, and the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in particular, that art and philosophy came closer to harmony. For Hegel, art too was an expression of truth, albeit in a sensuous and thereby imperfect form.

Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher, who has written works on thinkers from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to Immanuel Kant, René Descartes and Martin Heidegger. Throughout his work, he has challenged and questioned philosophy’s denigration of the sensuous and its privileging of the concept. He first came to prominence with The Inoperative Community (1991) and some of his other most well known work include, The Sense of the World (1993) and Being Singular Plural (2000), which highlights the question of our being together in contemporary society as one of the main themes in his prolific work. Nancy has also published books on film, literature and music, such as on the work of Abbas Kiarostami, On Kawara, Charles Baudelaire and Friedrich Hölderlin.

We talked to Jean-Luc Nancy about the relations of philosophy, art, silence and the self.

More here.