What's These Worlds Coming To?

Our contemporary challenge, according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, is that a new world has quietly cropped up on us and is, in fact, already here. We no longer live in a world, but in worlds. We do not live in a universe anymore, but rather in a multiverse. We no longer create; we appropriate and montage. And we do not build sovereign, hierarchical political institutions anymore; we form local assemblies and networks of cross-national assemblages and we do this at the same time as we form multinational corporations that no longer pay taxes to the State. In such a time as this, one of the world's most eminent philosophers and an emerging astrophysicist return to the ancient art of cosmology. Nancy and Barrau's work is a study of life, plural worlds, and what the authors call the struction or rebuilding of these worlds.

Nancy and Barrau invite us on an uncharted walk into barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, "What's this world coming to?," is used to question our conventional thinking about the world. Astrophysicist Aurelien Barrau articulates a major shift in the paradigm of contemporary physics from a universe to a multiverse. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy's essay, "Of Struction," is especially memorable as a contemporary comment on the project of deconstruction and French post-structuralist thought. We soon find ourselves living among heaps of odd bits and pieces that are amassing without any unifying force or center, living not only in a time of ruin and fragmentation, but of rebuilding. In the time of this rebuilding, Barrau and Nancy argue that contemporary thought has shifted from deconstruction to what they carefully call the struction of dis-order.

Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. Among the most recent of his many books to be published in English are Corpus; Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity; Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body; The Truth of Democracy; and Adoration: The Destruction of Christianity II (all Fordham).

Aurelien Barrau is a French astrophysicist who specializes in astroparticle physics, black holes, and cosmology. He works in the CNRS Laboratory for Subatomic Physics and Cosmology and is Professor of Physics at the Joseph Fourier University.

Travis Holloway is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook, a fellow in poetry at New York University, and a former Fulbright Scholar to Germany.

Flor Mechain holds an MA in literary translation from the University of Paris VII and is a translator of English, Spanish, and French. She has worked on a wide variety of topics in the liberal arts from art history (Hokusai, editions de la Martiniere, 2011) to political science (International Colloquium on The Operation Condor at the French Senate)