Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism. Edited by Cosmin Toma

The book under review is the latest in a series of Bloomsbury anthologies that seek to enrich scholarly understandings of the work of influential philosophical and literary figures by reflecting on the influence and relevance of modernism upon and to their work. From this perspective, there is a subtle hermeneutic gesture behind the addition of Jean-Luc Nancy’s name (more readily associated with post-structuralism, post-phenomenology, or post-deconstruction) to a list which already features many of his contemporaries, begetting the question: was Nancy a modernist? As Cosmin Toma explains, this is something that Nancy likely never asked himself, as ‘Modernity for him was a given —our given —at the furthest possible remove from the polemical claim such as We Have Never Been Modern, to quote a well-known title of Bruno Latour’ (p. 1; original emphasis). Nancy’s assumption is best understood in light of the distinction in French that Toma flags between modernisme as ‘the doctrine of modernity, one that actively furthers all things modern’, and ‘the far more common (and commonplace) modernité [which] belies a vaster state of affairs, like the English modernity, yet with an eye resolutely turned toward art and aesthetics’ (p. 5). If modernité is a given within Nancy’s writings it is because the word denotes the very sense of the world within which his thought was unavoidably immersed, suggesting that his commentaries on ‘writings and artists canonically deemed “modernist” in English’ (p. 5) are underlaid with problematics more pressing than artistic canons and generic taxonomy. Housing contributions from both seasoned Nancy experts and new voices in Nancy scholarship, Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism carefully teases out a multitude of (dis)continuities that are woven into Nancy’s writings on modern(ist) art and philosophy. The book is divided into two partitions plus a glossary of Nancy’s key concepts. Its first section, ‘Conceptualizing Nancy’, comprises close (re)readings of some of Nancy’s texts —including L’Absolu littéraire (1978), Les Muses (1994), À l’écoute (2002), L’Adoration (2010), and Demande (2015) —interrogating Nancy’s relationship to everything from modernist literature to music, Christianity, botany, and ‘the mouth’. The second section, ‘Nancy and Modernity’, features illuminating meditations on some of Nancy’s recurring philosophical motifs (for example, technics and surfaces) as well as critical commentaries on some of Nancy’s interlocutors (including Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, and Achille Mbembe) as they concern modernity. The section ends with a brief yet significant interview with Nancy himself where he questions the coherence of the very idea of modernity by complaining that ‘we cannot detach ourselves from this sign of demarcation because we are too conscious of coming after’ (pp. 252–53); indeed, modernity is a notion of such ubiquity that, Nancy writes, ‘We could almost even get rid of the word modern altogether: it no longer constitutes a subject of interrogation or discussion; it is only the index of a situation’ (p. 253). While this may seem to undermine the anthology’s goal of understanding modernism, as there could be no part of Nancy’s thought untouched by modernity, it by no means undermines its fruitfulness for understanding Nancy.