Writing the Theoria: Genre occidental, Jean-Luc Nancy and Pascal Quignard, a Footnote to Plato’s Seventh Letter, 344c

The paper describes and contextualizes the scene of thinking in Jean-Luc Nancy's Le poids d’une pensée, l’approche (2008) and Pascal Quignard’s Mourir de penser (2014) in the perspective of the so-called “genre occidental” (term coined by Nancy in Demande, 2015), characterized by the hybridization of literature and philosophy, the overlapping of concept and writing and the mutual conditioning of philosophical achievement (system, architectonics, certitude) and literary pursuit (recitative, recitation, recital). This written philosophy is characteristic of the works of Nancy, Milner, Agamben, Deguy and Quignard, and foreshadowed by the cryptic phrasing of Plato, Seventh Letter, 344c.