MINERAL FREEDOM Jean-Luc Nancy’s Ontology of Matter

The essay examines Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology of matter. In the aphorism “the stone is free,” Nancy entangles the oppositional orders of nature and of human historico-political becoming that philosophy still lacks the resources to make converge, even as this convergence becomes imperative in the face of the ecological predicament of the Anthropocene. The essay traces the ways in which Nancy takes on this task across his corpus, recasting the concept of freedom and the figure of the stone—both integral to the history of occidental philosophy. Minerality emerges accordingly as the free spacing and articulation of soul, body, and sense. The essay pursues the ramifications of thinking minerality anew, touching in the process on the limits of Nancy’s gesture and gesturing in turn toward what remains unthought in his thought.