Peter Engelmann: I’d like to start our conversation with your biography. I’d like to trace the development of your thought and your philosophical positions by looking at your intellectual career. What concrete historical experiences have played a part here, what are your central philosophical reference points? So, you moved to Paris to study philosophy there ...
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, I came to Paris in 1959 and studied at the Sorbonne from 1960 to 1964.
Peter Engelmann: You wrote your thesis under Ricœur’s supervision, and then you became his assistant. What significance did Ricœur have for you?
Jean-Luc Nancy: No, no, Ricœur was my doctoral supervisor but I was never his assistant; things didn’t turn out like that. In 1964 I passed the agrégation, which was the entrance examination for prospective teachers, and, because back then one could choose the city where one wanted to teach, I chose Strasbourg, as I wanted to study theology too. Strasbourg is the only place in France where the public university has a theology department. This is connected with the fact that Alsace-Lorraine didn’t belong to France in 1905, when the strict separation of church and state was implemented there. The concordat of 1801 applies to this day in Alsace. At any rate, I didn’t get a position in Strasbourg, but I did find a very good one in Colmar, and so I started teaching in Colmar in the autumn of 1964 and studied theology in Strasbourg at the same time. But I realized very soon that the theology course was very weak and completely uninteresting, so I soon abandoned it. But I had made connections at the university, and one day I was asked if I’d be interested in giving lectures on structuralism. Structuralism was considered the new thing, but people didn’t know anything about it outside Paris. In addition to that, I also did a seminar on Hegel. And there was actually no one at the university in Strasbourg at the time who was familiar with Hegel, so they asked me, as I’d already occupied myself quite intensively with Hegel’s philosophy; it had also been one of the subjects for the agrégation examination.
Peter Engelmann: So, in terms of your intellectual context, you would have belonged more in Paris than in Strasbourg. What factors led you to stay there?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Well, first of all, as I said, I wanted to study theology; then there were the courses offered at the university; and finally, of course, meeting Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe also played a part. He came to Strasbourg in 1967, we got acquainted through Lucien Braun. Braun had the idea that one should bring Philippe and me together, that something could come about from that. And he was right! As it turned out there were many shared affinities, such as Heidegger, but most of all Derrida. And situationism. In the mid-sixties Strasbourg was the city of the situationists; not the core circle around Guy Debord, but many had come to Strasbourg to attend Henri Lefebvre’s lectures; his critique of bourgeois society was very popular at the time. In 1966 they wrote a little pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student Life,1 which was very well written, in the style of Debord, and handed it out at the official opening of the semester, a ceremony attended by all the professors. There was a scandal! But I didn’t actually witness it directly, as I was doing my military service at the time.
Peter Engelmann: How long did you have to serve in the army?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Just for a year; I taught at the military school in Strasbourg. That was where people went to do their A-levels, or, if they were already in the army, to attend the military academy in Saint-Cyr directly afterwards. Normally the academy only admits candidates who have attended preparatory classes at university, but one can also work one’s way up from the army. I was teaching philosophy to the A-level students and cultural subjects to the officer cadets.
Peter Engelmann: I don’t think there’s any such emphasis on a comprehensive cultural education at higher military schools in Germany or Austria.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Well, in France one expects a certain level of culture, at least from the higher-ranking officers. Certainly, they all had to take A-levels, and philosophy was one of the subjects. Naturally, teaching philosophy at a military school was a slightly peculiar affair. One time I had selected a text by Marx for an examination, and the captain had to be informed of the exam topics in advance. I was promptly summoned by the colonel, who said, ‘Nancy, I can’t allow that. A text by Marx at a military school!’ I replied, ‘But Colonel, read the text, it’s an analysis of society!’ to which he answered, ‘Nonetheless, it’s impossible.’ Another time, Esprit wanted to arrange a discussion between Althusser and me after I published an article about Althusser in that journal. So, I needed permission to travel to Paris for two days. But the colonel said at the time, ‘You see, a discussion with Althusser, a member of the communist party, I can’t allow that.’
Peter Engelmann: Not even a discussion!
Jean-Luc Nancy: A month or two later my grandmother, the mother of my father, passed away. So I went to the colonel again. And this time I naturally received permission to go to Paris for a few days for the funeral.
Peter Engelmann: Let me recapitulate briefly: you went to Colmar in 1964 and taught there, and in 1966 you spent a year at the military school in Strasbourg.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, in 1967 I taught in Colmar again and worked at the university in Strasbourg at the same time, but that was just the course on Hegel.
Peter Engelmann: And you met Philippe that same year.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. Philippe had come to Strasbourg because an influential professor in Bordeaux was well disposed towards him. Georges Gusdorf had taken him along to Strasbourg. That’s how it was back then. In my case, it was Ricœur who wanted me to join him in Nanterre shortly afterwards. Although I must say that I was not very close to Ricœur. I didn’t really have a strong connection to anyone in Strasbourg, so Philippe and I weren’t really tied to Strasbourg. But, as I said, Lucien Braun was also in Strasbourg, and we had the feeling that he was very open and that there might be a possibility of starting something new with him. So we thought about staying in Strasbourg, and I asked Ricœur if he would mind if I didn’t follow him to Nanterre.
Peter Engelmann: You had to ask him for permission because he was your doctoral supervisor?
Jean-Luc Nancy: No, no, there weren’t any strict regulations about that, I just felt I owed it to him. Though I didn’t know at the time that Gusdorf, like Ricœur, was a rather influential personality among French Protestants. Naturally Ricœur was a far more significant philosopher, though Gusdorf wasn’t actually working in the same areas as Ricœur. Only much, much later did it occur to me that maybe Gusdorf relished the fact that a student of Ricœur had come to him. That’s very likely, in fact. Because he knew, of course, that I’d written my master’s thesis on Hegel and religion under Ricœur’s supervision, and my doctoral thesis on Kant from 1967 to 1968. In any case, it was really pure coincidence that I ended up in Strasbourg, a mixture of coincidences.
Peter Engelmann: Well, I wouldn’t only call them coincidences; it came about through several factors in your life.
Jean-Luc Nancy: There was another reason for me to stay in Strasbourg: I didn’t want to return to Paris because the family of my wife, whom I had met in Paris, lived there. My parents had also moved there by then, they’d gone to Paris during my studies.
Peter Engelmann: Where did your parents live before that?
Jean-Luc Nancy: In various cities; we often moved house, because my father was an engineer in the army. After the First World War, his father had said, ‘I want my son to learn German, so that there won’t be another war between Germany and France in the future.’ Many people in France thought that way at the time, maybe in Germany too. So my father was sent to Germany, to Baden-Baden. We lived there from the mid-forties to the early fifties, so I also spoke German during that time. Then we were in Bergerac, in the Dordogne, and from there we moved to Toulouse. There I attended the preparatory classes for the École Normale, because my father wanted to send me to a Grande École, but I never went to the École Normale.
Peter Engelmann: You mentioned before that Philippe, and you too, were influenced by situationism, an artistic and intellectual movement that was very active in Strasbourg at the time.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, naturally the situationists were also a factor. Without realizing it, Philippe and I had a mutual friend, Daniel Joubert; like Philippe, he came from Bordeaux. I had met him in Paris, it was around 1962. He was very close to the situationists but never had a leading function, because he was an anarchist and refused to be integrated into a prescribed order. As you know, Debord was almost a dictator of sorts. Joubert was incredibly clever and a wonderful person, and he acted as a connection between Philippe and me. Because Philippe, like me, had a great deal in common with Daniel – as well as situationism also an interest in Bonhoeffer, for example. Daniel came from a Protestant background, and Bonhoeffer was a central figure for Protestants on the left. I myself came from a Catholic background, but Protestantism was also very important for me. Jacques Ellul was also in Bordeaux during the fifties and sixties, he too was a Protestant, he lectured on the relationship between technology and society and was familiar with Heidegger. That’s somewhat bizarre, Heidegger and Bonhoeffer ... . These different influences created a kind of patchwork, one could say, though the central impulse was probably to conceive of society in a non-Marxist way. Because Marxism, or perhaps more the idea of revolution, was dominant at that time. So we wanted to be, or were supposed to be, revolutionary, but at the same time we knew that there was no longer a political model for a revolution.
Peter Engelmann: But hang on, we’re talking about the late sixties; that was when the French left was still dominated by the Communist Party of France (PCF), and they certainly thought they knew how this revolutionary business works!
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, but we already sensed at the time that the communist party wouldn’t keep that up. It was already clear in 1956. Budapest, the suppression of the Hungarian popular uprising, that was a great shock!
Peter Engelmann: So, you and the others were already criticizing Stalinism around 1956, and you also witnessed the de-Stalinization carried out by Khrushchev, the self-criticism of the communist party?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes.
Peter Engelmann: How old were you then, in 1956?
Jean-Luc Nancy: I was born in 1940. So I was 16 and still in Bergerac, Philippe was in Bordeaux.
Peter Engelmann: So you were already political at a very early age?
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, I was politicized, if one can call it that, through the Catholic left. Philippe was part of the Protestant left. And Algeria was a big issue for all of us. We realized that the French communist party hadn’t taken Algeria’s side decisively enough. That was another factor that distanced us from the party. After the war, we realized that the new Algeria wasn’t quite as we had hoped. Actually, that already became evident shortly before the end of the war. For example, in 1961 or 1962 I took part in a summer academy of the National Liberation Front (FLN) to train teachers for the future Algeria. Most people taught physics or mathematics, but I was to deal with cultural topics. I arrived there with a few books by Algerian writers, I forget which ones, and people from the FLN said to me, ‘No, we don’t want those authors!’ So, the FLN wasn’t that open after all! Along with these experiences, another important event – at least, for those who already saw themselves as philosophers – was the publication of the first books by Althusser. For me, somewhat earlier, another aspect was also a factor: Clarté, a communist magazine for students, once featured a section on the concept of alienation. That’s a very important memory for me, because that was the first time I realized that the notion of alienation presupposes the prior existence of a non-alienated state.
Peter Engelmann: A state of unity, of not being alien.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes. This memory is only a very small piece of the puzzle within a whole process, a gradual questioning of Marxism, revolution and also the notion of progress in history. We weren’t aware that Foucault, around the same time, was giving lectures in which he stated that the epoch of history had given way to the age of space. So, one could say that we were part of that movement without viewing it as a movement. But we certainly understood that the communist party, and anything that called itself communist, was a dead end. Anything that declared itself as being on the extreme left or Maoist was dubious for us. Philippe had been involved in the group Socialisme ou barbarie for a while, he was still living in Bordeaux then. There he met Jean-François Lyotard, but didn’t see him after that until we were in Strasbourg together.
Peter Engelmann: It was a group of undogmatic Marxists.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, but we too went through many internal crises. For my part, I remember that I subscribed to Le Quotidien du Peuple in 1966 and 1967, a Maoist journal, directly from Peking. But I didn’t find those Maoist things so interesting. For a while I was a member of the PSU, the Parti socialiste unifié. The old Parti socialiste had fallen apart; it had split up into the UGS (Union de la gauche socialiste) and the PSA, the Parti socialiste autonome. Then the PSU in turn emerged from these two parties. The PSU struck me as a new way to be neither a communist nor a Maoist nor a Trotskyist. But a year in the party was enough for me. I didn’t like it.
Peter Engelmann: So, the essence of your criticism of the communist or leftist parties was that they were dogmatic, that they were cadre parties which installed themselves as new powers but didn’t bring any freedom?
Jean-Luc Nancy: I think that was just one side, and not the most significant one. The other side was the intellectual or spiritual one. The feeling that there wasn’t really anything new to find here, no new worldview, if you like. In 1962 Esprit had organized a conference dealing with the question: why is the young generation silent? I gave a lecture there and said something like this: ‘We are silent because we have nothing to do with the grand notions of the history of progress. We don’t believe in them any more. We need something different, even if we don’t know what that is yet. And we don’t have any use for religion in its institutionalized form any more either, whether it’s the Protestant or the Catholic Church.’ For a while, we saw the Israeli kibbutz as a model for something new, a new form of coexistence, neither capitalist nor communist, a socialist project, but not tied to the notion of a great historical process. I hardly knew any Jews, but somehow I’d heard about the idea. It was only much later that I saw Chris Marker’s film Description of a Struggle, which shows how Israel resisted the tendency to become a capitalist country, and ultimately failed. So we ended up without any model, any example.