Afterword: In-finishing Nancy

Abstract

In choosing this word, ‘in-finishing’, I wish to stress just how unseemly it would be to expect an Afterword to provide a conclusion or ‘last word’ to the texts that make up this collection. Instead, I would rather give precedence to this word’s force of opening, with its echoes of Joyce, to ‘in-finishing’ as an act of thinking in Jean-Luc Nancy’s work. It is a precedence to which each of these texts does justice in its own right, by exploring the poetics of exscription through the – philosophical, ethical, political, aesthetic – senses it sets forth. It also bears noting that these texts are not so much about Nancy’s work (nor do they simply take it up as their object) as they start and depart from it in order to open and unfurl their questions, which would no doubt be to Nancy’s liking, since he is wary of overbearing commentary or exegesis of any kind. ‘In-finishing’ would thus be the cardinal proposition here, or perhaps one should speak of preposition instead, with reference to Irving Goh’s essay, which argues that ‘there is only such a thing as pre-positions, which are always impelled by the force of the preposition “ a”’ in Nancy’s work, and that this ‘ a’ – more so than ‘with’ [‘avec’], – lies at the heart of his co-ontological thought and is the very source of the idiom that gives us access to his philosophy of existence: