Jean Luc Nancy

”Psyche ist ausgedehnt: weiß nichts davon”. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy characterized this posthumous note as Sigmund Freud’s “most fascinating and perhaps most decisive statement”. „The psyche, in other words, is body, and this is precisely what escapes it, and its escape (we may suppose), or its process of escape, constitutes it as ‚psyche,’ in a dimension of not (being able/wanting)-to-know-itself.“

Relating to probably the most insistent tension in modern philosophy, the one between body and mind, Freud’s sentence „Psyche ist ausgedehnt“ is also highly relevant for the ICI and its current core project “Tension/Spannung”. Nancy’s meditation “Psyche ist ausgedehnt” from his book “Corpus” and other texts by Nancy (“Spanne” and “Freud – so to Speak”) formed the textual basis of an internal colloquium with Nancy on 13 Feb 2009, which was dedicated to the topic of tension in general and the tension between psyche and body in particular.