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.