Ontology is the Greek/classical term for the theory of what exists. Jean-Luc Nancy, however, reinvents ontology as a theory of political contestation, and thereby proposes a model of philosophy as collective practice. The key advance made by Nancy is to link a theory of innovation and meaning to a theory of a contestation of worlds, which for him forms the basic structure of the practices of politics and political analysis.

This book locates the cumulative
emergence of the innovative theorising in Nancy’s writings by setting out a
series of differences between their reception in mainland Europe and in the
transatlantic context. It focuses on what is innovative in
Nancy’s writing itself: retreating the political; being singular plural; as
well as the ideas of inoperativity, comparution, partage and excription. It
goes on to set up the question of context of reception, with a focus on its
differential location in terms of disciplinary boundaries and in the contrast
between European high theory and transatlantic revivalist religiosity, which
give divergent interpretations of the notions of politics and political
theory.

Finally Joanna Hodge rethinks time
and history, examining Nancy’s disruptive relation to the thinking of time: the
time of inheritance, the time of current contestation and the time of
anticipated futures.