Taking up the line of Jean-Luc Nancy’s turn to the world, enacted in the early 1990s, the article proposes an attempt to mobilize Nancy’s philosophy of the world in the perspective of a modal ontology. The modal ontology implies the transition from a necessary Being to being by necessity. The world-to-come is a necessary world, a world emerging out of an irreducible contingency and yet necessarily affirmed by its own power—a power that must express itself, thus transforming the world in itself into a world for itself—by the free affirmation of the struggle for the world. Nancy’s philosophy of the world—the world as sense—extends the modal horizon of philosophy opened up by Kant, the Romantic philosophers, Marx and Nietzsche—and by Spinoza before them all: philosophy’s task before the world is a task for the world—a desire and a struggle for the possibility of a world and for the necessity of the world. Jean-Luc Nancy persisted in this task with a breathtaking imagination and exemplary courage, creating a body of philosophy as intense as can be the promise of the just world to come.

With this book, we would like to resume the passionate conversation that Jean-Luc Nancy was engaged in throughout his life, with philosophers and artists from all over the world. Now that he has passed away, it is not enough for us to simply reflect on his work: we would like to stay true to the stance to which his thought invites us, in a pluralistic and communal way. Jean-Luc Nancy takes up the old philosophical question of truth as a praxis of a with — understanding truth without any given measure or comparison as an articulation of a with. It is a thinking responsible for the world from within the world, a language that seeks to respond to the ongoing mutation of our civilization.

With contributions by Jean-Christophe Bailly, Rodolphe Burger, Marcia Sá Calvacante Schuback, Marcus Coelen, Alexander García Düttmann, Juan-Manuel Garrido, Martta Heikkilä, Erich Hörl, Valentin Husson, Sandrine Israel-Jost, Ian James, Apostolos Lampropoulos, Nidesh Lawtoo, Jérôme Lèbre, Susanna Lindberg, Michael Marder, Artemy Magun, Boyan Manchev, Dieter Mersch, Hélène Nancy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Aïcha Liviana Messina, Ginette Michaud, Helen Petrovsky, Jacob Rogozinski, Philipp Stoellger, Peter Szendy, Georgios Tsagdis, Marita Tatari, Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Aukje van Rooden.