The work of Jean-Luc Nancy is driven by a three-part exigency that is at once political, ethical, and aesthetic. Over the past forty years, his work has been equally exacting in thinking the relation between these three spheres and registers of praxis. While no single essay can ever do proper justice to this work in terms of its scope, diversity, and precision, and while my own contribution to this collection of essays will primarily focus on questions of aesthetic praxis, nonetheless I am guided by the conviction that when reading almost any text written by Nancy, one must remain attuned to the political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions that shape it. Together they point to the innumerable decisions and actions in which nothing less than a sense of the world is created. As the three ‘principles’ for a shared sustaining in (and of) the separated spacing– between, amongst, and around bodies, places, and things– the political, the ethical and the aesthetic are the prepared conditions and distinct affirmations of the sense of existence as incommensurable and immeasurable.

Even when seemingly solely devoted to questions of sovereignty and community, or art and assemblage, or decision and justice– or when written without any one or more of these signifying markers of politics, aesthetics, and ethics, few texts by Nancy are devoid of thinking the political, aesthetic, and ethical together. This is because these three spheres, which Nancy himself understands to be separate and non-determinative of each other, are, nonetheless, also understood as coextensive in their mutual heterogeneity. It is this relational tension without resolution between the political, aesthetic and the ethical– of being at once inextricably tied to each other and yet irreducible and incommensurable to each other– that is, for Nancy, the very spacing of sense as shared-separation, or to appropriate terms central to his thinking: le frayage du partage (the frayed path, passage, edge and opening of sharingout).

The task set for us by the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, then, is to think this infinite rapport and never-to-be-finalised relation between the spheres of the political, the aesthetic and the ethical, in terms of what he has referred to as ‘the condition of nonequivalent affirmation’.