What’s in a voice? And if the echoes a voice generates are neither singular nor plural but singular plural, what shared voices are at play in Jean-Luc Nancy’s untimely reflections on the affective participation, or methexis, animating the agonistic confrontation between philosophy and literature? As Nancy made clear in one of his last interviews: “methexis…is intrinsic to the mimetic rapport” (Nancy and Lawtoo, 2021). In order to continue the dialogue from the affective perspective of a philosophical-literary life in common, this chapter considers the relation of methexis that ties Nancy’s reflections on “shared voices” [partage des voix] (Nancy 1982) to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s account of a “mimesis without model” (Lacoue-Labarthe 1989) that generates echoes of the subject. Plato’s rhapsodic dialogue, Ion, sets the stage to hear Nancy-Lacoue’s shared voices affirming a mimetic methexis that was once constitutive of the art of interpretation and is now informing the re-turn to a literary-philosophical conception of homo mimeticus.

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.