Extending the Sadler Seminar Series ‘Tunings of the World’, Andrea Gyenge (University of Toronto) addressed the place of the mouth in Jean-Luc Nancy’s work—from his earliest commentaries on Descartes to his last texts—including “Hymne Stomique,” written for her co-authored interview with him in 2020.
In his preface to the English translation of Ego Sum (1979), Jean-Luc Nancy declares his commitment to the mouth: “Since I wrote this book, the mouth is the other motif that never leaves me, even if I have not written much more about it, as if I was waiting (but who, ‘I’?) for a special occasion, the sudden discovery of the opportunity for an epic of the mouth.” Despite Nancy’s own assessment of his oeuvre, Ego Sum marks the first of many texts that pass through the mouth, texts that amount to a clandestine corpus of buccal gestures. This seminar picks up and explores that theme as an opening into Nancy’s work.
Dr Andrea Gyenge is Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto
