The Sense of the World

1. Introduction

The Sense of the World (Le sens du monde, 1993) is a philosophical treatise by the French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy that reworks the notions of sense (sens) and world (monde) after the proclaimed “death of God” and the “end of metaphysics.” Rather than seeking a new ultimate foundation—whether divine, historical, or subjective—Nancy examines what it means for the world to be “without sense” in the traditional grounding sense, while still being saturated with sense as shared existence.

The work proposes that sense is not a hidden content behind appearances, but the very exposition of existence: the way beings are exposed to one another in a common world. This world is not a closed totality or a metaphysical order; it is the open, finite co-existence of singularities, structured by what Nancy calls being-with (l’être-avec). In this perspective, meaning is inseparable from sharing (partage): sense appears only in the relational spacing where beings touch, interact, and differentiate themselves.

Situated within late-20th‑century continental philosophy, The Sense of the World intervenes in debates about nihilism, community, politics, and globalization. It addresses how sense can be thought once grand teleological narratives of history or salvation have been discredited, without either re-establishing transcendental guarantees or collapsing into relativism and indifference.

Throughout the book, Nancy mobilizes the polysemy of sens—meaning, direction, and sensation—to articulate an ontology of sense: a way of thinking being as inherently meaningful because it is always already exposed, shared, and oriented in a world. This ontology underlies the work’s discussions of community, political forms, and the open-ended character of historical and global processes, which are treated as different configurations of the sharing of the world.

2. Historical and Philosophical Context

The Sense of the World emerges from a dense network of post–World War II European debates about metaphysics, language, and community. Its central concerns are shaped by several converging contexts.

Post-Heideggerian and post-structuralist debates

Nancy’s project develops within the wake of Martin Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and his analyses of world and being-in-the-world. From Heidegger he inherits questions about the end of metaphysics, finitude, and the ontological priority of being-with. At the same time, Nancy writes after Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of presence and of metaphysical foundations, and alongside French post-structuralists such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard, who had challenged unified subjects and teleological histories.

Where some post-structuralist currents emphasize the dispersal or instability of meaning, Nancy focuses on how sense nonetheless takes place—as the exposed sharing of existence—once classical guarantees have been deconstructed.

The “death of God,” nihilism, and the end of grand narratives

A further background is the reception of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God” and 20th‑century discussions of nihilism (Heidegger, Jaspers, and others). In the late 20th century, these concerns are folded into talk of the “end of history” (e.g., in Alexandre Kojève and, later, Francis Fukuyama) and of the exhaustion of revolutionary or salvationist projects.

Nancy’s text participates in these debates by interrogating what remains of “sense” when no transcendent ground, historical destiny, or metaphysical subject can guarantee it. Rather than affirming or denying nihilism, he analyzes it as the condition in which the world’s own non-foundational sense must be thought.

Debates on community and the political

In the 1980s and 1990s, French and European thought saw renewed interest in community and political ontology, often in response to totalitarian pasts and to perceived social fragmentation. Nancy’s earlier work La communauté désœuvrée (The Inoperative Community) had already intervened in this field. The Sense of the World extends these concerns, situating community and politics within an ontology of being-with and world, rather than in substantive identities or collective subjects.

Emergent discourse on globalization

Finally, the book appears amid expanding discussion of globalization and emerging “world society.” Philosophers and social theorists were asking whether economic and technological integration yields a unified world, a fragmented one, or something else. Nancy’s reflections on world-formation (mondialisation) in this text feed directly into later works, offering an ontological counterpoint to socio‑economic analyses by figures such as Habermas or Hardt and Negri.

3. Author and Composition

Jean-Luc Nancy’s intellectual profile

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was a French philosopher associated with so‑called “post‑Heideggerian” and “deconstructive” currents. Educated in philosophy in the 1960s, he engaged early with Hegel, Heidegger, and contemporary French thought. His collaborations with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and his dialogues with Derrida and others helped position him at the intersection of deconstruction, phenomenology, and political philosophy.

By the early 1990s, Nancy was already known for major works on community (La communauté désœuvrée), finitude and singularity (L’expérience de la liberté), and for essays on literature, art, and religion. The Sense of the World consolidates and systematizes motifs from these writings into an explicit ontology of sense and world.

Genesis and period of composition

The book was composed in the early–mid 1990s, at a time when Nancy was critically rethinking metaphysics, community, and worldhood under conditions often described in terms of:

• the end of metaphysical foundations,
• the crisis of political ideologies after 1989,
• and intensifying global interconnection.

While precise drafting stages are not fully documented, scholars infer from Nancy’s lecture courses, essays, and interviews that Le sens du monde emerged from sustained teaching and seminars on Heidegger, being-with, and politics, together with ongoing reflections on globalization that later surface clearly in The Creation of the World or Globalization.

Relation to Nancy’s broader corpus

Within Nancy’s oeuvre, The Sense of the World occupies a pivotal place:

Subsequent writings revisit and elaborate its theses, but The Sense of the World is often treated by commentators as the central systematic statement of Nancy’s understanding of world, sense, and co‑existence.

4. Publication and Textual History

Initial publication

Le sens du monde was first published in French in 1993 by Éditions Galilée, a Parisian press known for works in contemporary philosophy and theory. The volume appears as a self-contained treatise rather than as a compilation of previously published papers, although its arguments draw on earlier essays and lectures.

The English translation, The Sense of the World, translated by Jeffrey S. Librett, appeared in 1997 with the University of Minnesota Press in its “Theory Out of Bounds” series. This series aimed to make key works of contemporary continental thought available to Anglophone readers, and Librett’s translation became the standard English reference.

Manuscript and textual status

There is no complex manuscript tradition in the classical philological sense. The work was composed in the late 20th century, and the authorial typescript and publisher’s files are understood to survive in Nancy’s archives or publisher holdings, though not widely consulted as separate textual witnesses. No major variant editions or competing “authoritative” French texts are reported.

The available translations (notably English and German) involve interpretive decisions around Nancy’s terminological innovations—especially sens, partage, and mondialisation. Commentators sometimes compare translations with the French original to clarify nuances, but there is no documented history of substantial revisions by Nancy of the core French text itself.

Subsequent editions and circulation

Le sens du monde has been reprinted in French and incorporated into bibliographies of Nancy’s principal works. The English edition has remained in print in scholarly formats, used in university courses on continental philosophy, political theory, theology, and aesthetics.

Later works by Nancy, such as La création du monde ou la mondialisation, frequently presuppose or explicitly recall arguments from Le sens du monde, but they do not retroactively alter its published text. Instead, they function as companion pieces that extend its themes into more specific discussions of globalization, creation, and contemporary world-formation.

5. Structure and Organization of the Work

The Sense of the World is not divided into formally titled “books” in the manner of a traditional treatise, but it exhibits a discernible progression that commentators often group into thematic parts. The work moves from the problem of sense after the end of metaphysics to a positive account of world, being-with, and sharing, then to implications for community, politics, and history.

A schematic outline, reflecting this progression, can be reconstructed as follows:

Within these broad segments, Nancy proceeds through short, dense sections rather than long chapters. His argument unfolds by repeatedly returning to central motifs—sense, world, being-with, finitude—and elaborating them through variations and semantic displacements, rather than through linear, stepwise deduction.

This organization results in a text that readers often experience as spiral or helical: earlier themes (e.g., the world as “without sense”) are revisited from new angles as Nancy develops the notions of exposition, sharing, and co-existence. The later discussions of community, politics, and history thus remain tightly tethered to the ontological analyses put forward in the earlier segments, and they presuppose the prior reconceptualization of sense as worldly exposure rather than hidden foundation.

6. Central Arguments about Sense and World

At the core of The Sense of the World is a redefinition of sense and world under post-metaphysical conditions.

World “without sense” and non-nihilistic meaning

Nancy begins from the claim that the world is “without sense” if sense is understood as a transcendent ground or final purpose. Traditional metaphysics, theology, and philosophy of history sought such a ground in God, Spirit, Reason, or History. For Nancy, these figures have lost credibility as ultimate sources of meaning.

However, he argues that this does not entail nihilism in the sense of a sheer absence of meaning. Rather, sense must be reconceived as immanent to the world itself: the world has no sense beyond itself, but it is full of sense as the site where beings expose and relate to each other.

Sense as exposition

Nancy’s central thesis is that sense is exposition: meaning does not lie behind appearances, but consists in the being-exposed, being-toward, and being-in-contact of existents. Sense is not an inner content but the articulation, spacing, and orientation (all connotations of sens) by which beings stand in relation—forming a world.

This leads to an ontology of sense: being itself is nothing other than the event of sense, the ongoing exposing and sharing of singular existences.

World as shared openness

The world is thereby understood not as a container or total sum of entities, but as the open, finite spacing of co-existence. World is the “with” in which singularities appear and interact. To say that there is a world is to say that there is exposed plurality—no solitary being, no closed totality.

Nancy contrasts this with teleological or totalizing conceptions of world (e.g., as the realization of a rational plan). For him, the world has no overarching teleology; its “sense” is precisely its open-ended, plural, and finite character.

Post-foundational implications

From these arguments, Nancy concludes that any attempt to re-establish a single principle of sense—whether religious, philosophical, or political—misrecognizes the world’s structure. Instead, the world’s sense consists in its ongoing, non-totalizable sharing of meanings among singular beings, without a final word that would close or complete this process.

7. Being-With and Ontology of Co-Existence

A key argument in The Sense of the World is that being is essentially being-with (l’être-avec). This claim gives Nancy’s ontology a relational and co‑existential structure.

Being-with as originary

Against views that treat relations as secondary properties of pre‑given individuals or substances, Nancy proposes that co-existence is originary: there is no being that is not always already with others. The “with” is not an external addition to prior isolated entities; it is an ontological condition.

In this framework, singularities exist only in a mode of exposure to one another, and this exposure is the place where sense arises. Being-with is thus inseparable from world: to be is to be in a world, and to be in a world is to be with others.

World as the space of being-with

Nancy defines world as the open spacing in which being-with takes place. World is neither the sum of beings nor a metaphysical whole; it is the configuration of relations—the “between”—that makes beings appear as singular and co-present.

This leads to a conception of co-existence where:

• there is no underlying substance or subject unifying beings from within;
• there is instead a network of exposures, where each singularity is both distinct and constituted in relation.

Ontological implications

The ontology of being-with has several consequences:

• It displaces individualist ontologies that posit self-contained entities.
• It also resists holistic ontologies that posit an organically unified totality (e.g., a People, Spirit, or historical Subject).

Instead, Nancy describes an ontological field in which singularities share the world without being fused into a higher unity. Being-with is thus the condition for any community, politics, or ethics, understood not as added layers but as expressions of co-existence’s basic structure.

By situating sense at the level of this being-with—rather than in a hidden metaphysical principle—Nancy presents co-existence itself as the locus of meaning: sense is what happens between beings in their finite, worldly exposure.

8. Key Concepts: Sens, Exposition, and Sharing

Three interrelated concepts organize the argument of The Sense of the World: sens, exposition, and sharing (partage).

Sens

The French term sens has multiple meanings—sense/meaning, direction, and sensation. Nancy exploits this polysemy to argue that meaning is not an abstract, purely conceptual content but is tied to:

• orientation (a direction or “toward”),
• and sensation (a tactile, affective dimension).

For Nancy, sense is always an oriented, sensible exposure in the world, not a detached ideal signification.

Exposition

Exposition names the way existence is exposed—brought to the outside, to the surface—rather than hidden in an interior essence. Nancy uses images of touch, surface, and spacing to describe this:

"

“Sense is nothing other than existence in so far as it is exposed.”

— Paraphrase of Nancy’s thesis in Le sens du monde

Exposition is not a secondary event affecting pre‑formed beings; it is the very mode of being. To exist is to be exposed to others, to the world, and to oneself. This exposure is where sense happens.

Sharing (partage)

Sharing (partage) for Nancy has a double meaning: it signifies both division and participation. Sharing the world does not mean possessing a common property that is identically the same for all; it means:

• that the world is divided among singularities (no one occupies the whole),
• and that it is in this division that they participate together in sense.

Sense is thus distributed, not centralized. It circulates among singular beings, without a single point of origin or a final synthesis.

Conceptual interrelation

These three concepts are tightly linked:

Together, they articulate a view in which sense is the exposed sharing of finite singularities in a world, rather than a transcendent order or an interior content hidden behind appearances.

9. Community, Politics, and Finitude

Within The Sense of the World, analyses of community and politics are derived from the ontology of being-with and the finitude of world.

Community as sharing without fusion

Nancy redefines community not as an organic totality or substantial identity (People, Nation, Race, Class), but as the sharing of finitude among singular beings. Community is:

• the exposure of singularities to one another,
• the co-presence in which they share a world without becoming one.

This conception continues and systematizes arguments from The Inoperative Community, where Nancy had criticized both totalitarian and nostalgic communitarian models that seek a lost or future substantial unity.

Politics as configuration of sharing

On this basis, politics is approached as the set of practices and institutions that configure the sharing of the world. Political forms do not actualize a pre-given essence of the community; they articulate how singularities relate, distribute resources, and expose themselves to one another within a finite world.

Nancy engages critically with political theories that posit:

• a teleological destiny of humanity or history,
• or a foundational Subject (e.g., the proletariat, the nation-state) as bearer of world-historical meaning.

In his view, politics cannot be grounded in such figures without betraying the finitude and plurality that characterize sense as worldly.

Finitude as condition of community and politics

Finitude—mortality, limitation, non-self-enclosure—is not an unfortunate limitation on otherwise self-sufficient individuals. It is the condition under which sense, community, and politics are possible. Because beings are finite:

• they must relate and depend on others,
• they cannot occupy the whole of the world,
• and they are exposed to contingency and conflict.

Community and politics are therefore responses to finitude: ways in which the sharing of limited resources, spaces, and times is organized, contested, or transformed. Nancy emphasizes that no political order can overcome finitude or produce a completed community; attempts to do so risk closing the open plurality of sense and sliding into totalizing projects.

10. Famous Passages and Pivotal Formulations

Several formulations in The Sense of the World have been widely cited in discussions of Nancy’s philosophy.

The world “without sense” that is full of sense

Early in the text, Nancy distinguishes between the absence of a transcendent foundation and absolute meaninglessness. He characterizes the world as:

"

“without sense” (sans sens) if sense is sought as a final ground,
yet as “nothing but sense” when sense is understood as its own exposition.

Although wording varies by translation, this formulation encapsulates his post‑foundational position: the world lacks a final meaning beyond itself, but it is replete with sense as the site of exposed coexistence.

Being-with as originary co-existence

In the central chapters, Nancy gives definitive formulations of being-with:

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“There is no being that is not being-with.”

— Reconstructed from central claims in Le sens du monde

Such statements condense the thesis that co-existence is ontologically primary. They are frequently quoted in discussions of relational ontology, community, and political theory.

Critique of “end of history” and closure of sense

Later in the book, Nancy confronts narratives of the “end of history” and of completed meaning. He critically reformulates these discourses to argue that:

"

any proclaimed end of history presupposes a closure of sense that is incompatible with the world’s finite, exposed plurality.

These passages have been important in debates on post‑Cold War political theory and the future of modernity.

Sense as touch, exposure, and spacing

Throughout, Nancy uses figurations of touch and surface to define sense. A characteristic motif presents sense as:

"

“contact, spacing, and the between of singularities,”

implicitly rejecting any interior, hidden essence.

Such phrases capture his view that sense is nothing other than the exposed relation of beings in the world. Commentators often refer back to these formulations when explicating his key concepts of exposition and sharing.

11. Philosophical Method and Style

Method: post-foundational, deconstructive, ontological

Nancy’s method in The Sense of the World combines deconstructive analysis with ontological reconstruction:

• He first deconstructs traditional notions of sense and world—God, subject, history, teleology—showing how they relied on unexamined assumptions of foundation.
• He then proposes a non-foundational ontology of sense, not as a new grounding principle but as a description of how being occurs as exposition and sharing.

This method is neither purely negative nor purely systematic: it works through critical dismantling and positive rearticulation, often within the same passage.

Use of language and wordplay

Nancy’s style is marked by:

• intensive use of etymology and semantic resonance (especially around sens, monde, partage, avec),
• and a preference for neologisms or unusual syntax to register conceptual shifts.

As a result, the text can appear dense and elliptical. Proponents argue that this style is methodologically necessary: it allows Nancy to displace inherited conceptual structures and to think sense as movement, spacing, and relation rather than as a fixed content. Critics contend that it sometimes risks obscurity or ambiguity.

Non-linear exposition

The work proceeds non-linearly, through repetitions, variations, and returns rather than a simple deductive order. Concepts introduced early—such as the world “without sense” or being-with—are revisited multiple times in light of new distinctions. This has led some readers to describe the method as “spiraling” or “fragmentary”.

Intertextuality and references

Nancy engages implicitly and explicitly with a range of thinkers—Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, Hegel, Marx, Kant, and theological traditions—but often without extended, systematic exegesis. References are:

• sometimes allusive, relying on readers’ familiarity,
• sometimes explicit, especially where he distances his position from teleological or substantialist conceptions of world and history.

This intertextual method situates the book within ongoing debates, while maintaining its own distinctive vocabulary and argumentative trajectory.

12. Relation to Globalization and World-Formation

While The Sense of the World is primarily an ontological work, it was written amid intensified discussion of globalization and makes frequent reference to processes of world-formation (mondialisation).

Distinguishing world and globalization

Nancy differentiates between:

He argues that globalization is one historical configuration of world-formation, but that the ontological fact of world—being-with in a shared openness—precedes and exceeds any particular global order.

Critique of homogeneous global sense

Nancy notes tendencies within globalization toward:

• homogenization of culture and meaning,
• economization of value,
• and technological enclosure of the world.

He questions interpretations of globalization that assume it yields a unified, coherent “global sense” (such as a final stage of history or a universal civilization). From the perspective of The Sense of the World, such views risk imposing a teleological narrative on a fundamentally non-teleological, plural world.

World-formation as ongoing sharing

Instead, Nancy treats globalization as a contingent, historical mode of sharing the world—one that reshapes distances, proximities, and exposures between singularities. It is a process in which:

• new forms of being-with emerge (e.g., mediated communication, transnational interdependence),
• while older forms are transformed or disrupted.

Later, in The Creation of the World or Globalization, he develops these ideas more explicitly, but The Sense of the World supplies the ontological framework: any globalization must be understood as a partial, conflictual articulation of the more fundamental fact that there is a world, that beings are exposed together without a final, overarching sense.

This approach underpins interpretations that see Nancy as offering neither an affirmation nor a rejection of globalization as such, but an analysis of how global processes intersect with the irreducible plurality and finitude that constitute the world’s sense.

13. Reception, Critique, and Debates

Initial reception

Upon its French publication in 1993, Le sens du monde was received as a major statement in Nancy’s evolving thought, particularly by philosophers already engaged with his writings on community and being-with. It attracted attention within Francophone continental philosophy for its ambitious attempt to rethink sense and world after the end of metaphysics.

The 1997 English translation extended its impact to Anglophone debates, where it became a key reference in discussions of post-foundationalism, political ontology, and globalization.

Supportive interpretations

Sympathetic commentators emphasize:

• the originality of Nancy’s ontology of sense,
• his nuanced response to nihilism,
• and his rethinking of community beyond substantialist or identitarian models.

Some view the book as a decisive move beyond both classical metaphysics and strong relativism, providing resources for non-totalizing ethics and politics.

Main lines of criticism

Criticism has focused on several points:

Ongoing debates

Debates surrounding the book often center on how to interpret Nancy’s post-foundationalism:

• One line of interpretation reads his account of exposition and sharing as offering immanent normative implications (e.g., respect for plurality, rejection of totalization).
• Another line remains skeptical, viewing these implications as relying on unstated or insufficiently justified value commitments.

Discussions also continue regarding the book’s relation to Heidegger, Derrida, and political theory more broadly, with differing views on how far Nancy departs from or extends these predecessors.

14. Legacy and Historical Significance

The Sense of the World holds a significant place in late 20th‑ and early 21st‑century continental philosophy.

Consolidation of Nancy’s position

The book is widely seen as consolidating Nancy’s status as a major post-Heideggerian thinker. It gathers themes from his earlier works on community, freedom, and finitude into a more explicit ontology of sense and world, making it a central reference point for subsequent scholarship on his philosophy.

Influence on relational and post-foundational ontology

Nancy’s notion of being-with and his post-foundational redefinition of sense have influenced:

• debates on relational ontology and social ontology,
• discussions of community in political and social theory,
• and philosophical approaches that foreground exposure, sharing, and plurality over substance and identity.

His vocabulary of exposition, sharing, and singularity has been taken up and reworked by thinkers in political theory, theology, aesthetics, and phenomenology.

Contribution to debates on globalization and worldhood

In combination with The Creation of the World or Globalization, The Sense of the World has contributed to philosophical reflections on globalization, world-formation, and cosmopolitics. Its distinction between world as ontological condition and globalization as historical process has informed critical analyses of global integration that avoid both celebratory and purely negative narratives.

Place in the history of philosophy

Historically, the book is situated at a crossroads where:

• the deconstruction of metaphysics (Heidegger, Derrida),
• critiques of grand narratives (Lyotard and others),
• and reflections on post-totalitarian politics and globalization

converge. It offers one of the more systematic attempts to think meaning and world without recourse to transcendental guarantors, thereby shaping ongoing conversations about nihilism, secularization, and post-metaphysical thought.

While assessments vary regarding its clarity and practical import, The Sense of the World is generally regarded as a landmark text for understanding contemporary debates on world, sense, and co-existence, and it continues to be a touchstone for work exploring non-totalizing conceptions of community and politics.