Kim Wagener

Touch, Contradiction, Difference: Aporias of Experimental Writing after Jean-Luc Nancy

In the late 20th- and early 21st-century French Theory, contradictions are not merely obstacles to be overcome, but phenomena that demand description for their own sake. In the name of a radical critique of reason, contradiction is liberated from the binary conception of opposition, and theory itself becomes a contradictory practice. This practice brings sense, the sensual, and the body into play in new, experimental ways, thereby unsettling, undermining, and shifting established disciplinary boundaries.

Against this background, my doctoral project on aporias in experimental writing after Jean-Luc Nancy is based on an expanded concept of theory as an aesthetic-performative practice. Situated at the intersection of philosophy and literature, and informed by difference theory, the project explores a practice of writing in relation to the body, its exposure, vulnerability, and relational condition. It aims to enrich Nancy’s and post-Nancy’s contradiction-affine writing by incorporating queer-feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial approaches. The question of forms of knowledge production that transversally cross to the exclusion of the sensual from the realm of thought as well as of the contradictory from the Western episteme serves as a shared horizon for the approaches discussed.