





















































The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies in Contact in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy


Elementa
Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology 
and Empirical Perspectives

1 
(2021) 

1-2

Pierpaolo Limone
Editorial 7

First Section

Slavoj Žižek
The Vagaries of the Superego 13

Ricardo Espinoza Lolas
Nature and Pandemic 33

Paolo Ponzio
Mask and Otherness between Recognition and Concealment: 47 
Notes on the Self and the You

Daniela Savino
“Liquid” Identity and Otherness in the Phenomenon 61 
of Religious Alienation: The Loss of Critical Thinking 
and the “Barter” of the Self in the System of Communion

Francesca R. Recchia Luciani
The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies in Contact 85 
in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy

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Second Section

Martina Rossi
Universal Design for Learning and Inclusive Teaching: 103 
Future Perspectives

Marco Ceccarelli
A Historical Account on Italian Mechanism Models 115

Giusi Antonia Toto - Alessia Scarinci
Cyberfeminism: A Relationship between Cyberspace, 135 
Technology, and the Internet

Luigi Traetta - Federica Doronzo
Super-Ego after Freud: A Lesson not to Be Forgotten 153

Federica Doronzo - Gianvito Calabrese
Functioning of Declarative Memory: Intersection 163 
between Neuropsychology and Mathematics

Giuliana Nardacchione - Guendalina Peconio
Peer Tutoring and Scaffolding Principle for Inclusive Teaching 181

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The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies 
in Contact in the Philosophy 
of Jean-Luc Nancy
Francesca R. Recchia Luciani
Università degli Studi di Bari (Italy)

doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/elem-2021-0102-recc
francescaromana.recchialuciani@uniba.it

Abstract

The philosophy of sexual existence as a mode of expression of the “con-being”, pivotal in 
his book “Sexistence”, occupies a relevant space in Jean-Luc Nancy’s late philosophical 
production. In this text, the body, the touch, the sex are protrusions that dot a concep-
tual map that is the result of a long philosophical militancy marked by an authentic 
“haptic ontology”, a sign of a thought of relationality, interdependence and “sexistencial 
vulnerability” that connotes the bodies in contact that we all are. But Nancy goes so 
far as to elaborate a “trans-ontology” through which the “r-existence (resistance) of 
sexistence” is manifested, that is to say that stubborn rejection of distinct and different 
bodies to the homologation and uniformity of the identical and of the identity shared 
by “trans-feminism” which makes its strong point of the inexhaustible combinatorics of 
the sexes. Thus, both for the sexistencial approach and for the transfeminist one, at the 
heart of every theory are the lives and practices of distinct and different sexual bodies in 
relation. 

Keywords: body; haptic ontology; Jean-Luc Nancy; sexistence.

1. For a philosophy of sexual existence

Insofar as a man exists, he is, insofar as he exists, already transposed into 
other men, even if in fact there are no other men in the vicinity. To be there 
of man, to be there in man means therefore – not exclusively, but among 
other things – to be transposed into other men. To be able to transpose one-

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self into other men as to compete with them, with being-ness in them, has 
always been the case by virtue of man’s being-ness – as being-ness. In fact, 
to be there means: to be with others, and precisely in the manner of being 
there, that is, of existing with. (Heidegger, 1992, p. 265)

The “being-with-others” is for Heidegger the foundation of a philosophy 
of “being-with”, in fact, after this passage, he makes it explicit and precise: 
“‘being-with’ [Mit-sein mit] belongs to the essence of man’s existence, that 
is, of each one as an individual” (Heidegger, 1992, pp. 265-266). This 
peculiar inclination of Dasein, the Heideggerian “being-there”, declined 
according to the instances of the “formation of the world” and of the 
porosity, indeed of the “penetrability” that characterizes human experi-
ence as the “continuous growth of what man relates to” (Heidegger, 1992, 
p. 251), is the distinguishing mark with respect to the “formation of the
world”. 

Also is the distinguishing mark with respect to the animal, since the 
human being appears marked by the ontological relationality of “being-
there” in its constitutive link with other human and non-human alterities 
and with the “world”. 

Co-ontology, or “ontology of the with”, which Jean-Luc Nancy has 
placed at the center of his reflection, focusing on the existential praxis that 
involves humans, decentralizes this “being-with” with respect to the meta-
physical order: in a certain sense, the onto-theoretical fundamentalism of 
the second Heidegger had condemned it. 

Such a shift of co-ontology along with the inclined plane of the 
lived life, which is concrete, acted by the human-beings-in-relationship 
that cohabits the social space is the philosophical figure of Nancy’s most 
recent reflections: this involves a decisive shift, full of consequences, from 
the metaphysical plane to the physical-existential one, just in the sign of a 
porosity and penetrability of the “being-with”. This move is the keystone 
of Sexistence, an essay published in France in 2017 and in Italian transla-
tion two years later (Nancy, 2019), which develops along a trajectory in 
clear continuity with Nancy’s deconstructive positions on the body (Nancy, 
1995) and love (Nancy, 1992, 2009a e 2009b); which are particularly 
relevant and innovative in the context of contemporary thought insofar as 
they represent a further piece of a thought that thinks ontologically about 
human relationships in their concrete factuality, in their giving themselves 
in the lived life of each and all as an experience of “with”: with-living, 
with-being. Thinking about sex as an existential fact boldly pushes itself to 
the elaboration of a sexual ontology (Apter, 2019) that takes seriously the 
“singular plural” erotic vulnerability that human beings experience in their 
existence. 

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In this book, the precise and insistent propensity to investigate the 
“being” of sex precisely as a relationship that invests, crosses and touches 
living beings in the course of their time shared with others, restores philo-
sophical dignity to an object as central to human experience as it has been 
neglected by traditional theoretical thought. Sex here, understood as expe-
rienced and practiced by the “singular plural being” that we are, in the exis-
tential pragmatics that marks the experience of each through the relational 
openness that builds every identity from its encounter with otherness, 
does not suddenly appear in the thought of the Strasbourg philosopher. 
It progressively becomes a relevant object of investigation starting from 
some not negligible interweaving with the centrality of touch and con-
contact in Nancy’s thought, a real leitmotif of a philosophy centered on 
the body and on its worldly and existential disposition. To the point that, 
reread through the lens of a reflection all hinged on the “being-with” and 
on the “in-common” (Nancy, 2001), the body, the touch, the experience of 
the body and the experience of the communal, touching, sex are nothing 
but protrusions, sharp reliefs that punctuate and enliven a conceptual map 
that is the result of a long philosophical militancy marked by an authentic 
haptic ontology. A marking figure of a thought of relationality, interde-
pendence, erotic vulnerability with respect to the being-with-others/and 
that constitutes the singular plural being-ness that we are. 

With respect to her previous reflections on the body and on love, 
Sexistence (Nancy, 2019b) is equivalent to a further stage of a thought that 
travels far and wide, while maintaining the tension between phenome-
nology and ontology, the territory of “sex” not as a mere object of theoretical 
speculation, but rather as an event that owes its importance in human life 
to being practiced, lived, experienced and performed. The theme does not 
appear in Nancy’s bibliography unexpectedly, in fact, the essay dedicated to 
Sexistence is preceded by some relevant reflections that find considerable 
space in various texts scattered in a long theoretical path marked by the 
philosophical commitment aimed at understanding the dynamics of the 
most intimate relationality (from Il c’è del rapporto sessuale to La nascita dei 
seni, to the collection Del sesso, up to the interview granted to A. Van Reeth 
published under the title La jouissance).

A signpost on this journey is the irreducible protagonism of sex in the 
lived experience of living beings, a centrality that returns to be reaffirmed 
in the 2017 book precisely because the sexistential lens (sex understood 
precisely as an essential event of existence) allows the transcendence and 
overcoming of both its biological reduction in function of the reproduction 
of the species, as well as of the sociological: this limits itself to appreciating 
exclusively the quality of instituting social gender roles, but also of the 

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psycho- and sexist one that considers its specificity in the constitution of 
the subjective, bodily and psychic individuality on a conscious and uncon-
scious level. Nancy’s intention is clear and wants to make sex a contempo-
rary object of philosophical thought, bringing into play a sexual ontology 
that fully assumes the value of existential fact, irreducible to disciplinary 
epistemologies or scientistic approaches, in the awareness that sexual rela-
tionships change and transform historically, just as they produce muta-
tions and transformations at the level of individual and collective histories. 
Sexual relations are, in fact, actively transformable, transformed and trans-
formative, the object and subject of radical alterations and changes in the 
“I”, the “we”, and the “with”. 

In the articulation of the philosophy of sexed existence that animates, 
runs through and strikes Sexistence (Nancy, 2019b), Nancy’s successful 
attempt to think of sex as a fundamental and inalienable category of the 
very thinkability in a holistic, complex and multifaceted key of the human 
being-in-the-world as being-with opens new perspectives of meaning that 
can be declined by understanding sexism as a form of r-existence. On 
this side, such a vision, inevitably crossing the conceptual and pragmatic 
outcomes of historical feminism, which has posed a priori and with unprec-
edented radicality the question of the embodied body as a sexed and sexual 
body, opens up to an irremediable question regarding the connections that, 
as a fertile contemporary perspective, an anthropology hinged on sexism 
can have with the current gender, transfeminist and queer (Bernini, 2017) 
philosophies. Nancy’s perspective, however, with respect to this acquired 
kinship with feminism, on one hand centered on the sexed body, on the 
other on the performative dimension that directly invests it and on which 
both insist, is distant from it: as Apter has pointed out, it does not imply an 
explicitly political position, even though its assumption is in fact political 
(Recchia Luciani, 2019); in fact, while it is true that “Sexistence deals 
with bodies in pleasure rather than with bodies demonstrating to demand 
justice in the streets” and moreover “touches only superficially on the long 
history of the debate on sexual difference”, “this does not mean that Sexist-
ence is not political. It contains a politics of recognition – of difference as 
such” (Apter, 2019). 

Recognizing the radical difference of the other is a possibility opened 
up by sex in its making and unmaking between acting subjects, in the 
performative dimension that upsets and overwhelms them, that opens 
up the otherness of the other’s body to the unexpectedness of a recogni-
tion that is given in carnal contact. The body reveals here, precisely in the 
circumstances of the sexual encounter, its multiple characteristics, forcing 
us to abandon the corporeal signifier in order to question ourselves on the 

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meaning of the body in itself and for itself, on its plural singularity, on 
the sense of acting-with that crosses it and that shakes it, shakes it, moves 
it, gives it a performative/transformative action that radiates towards the 
whole of existence. 

What is more common than bodies? “Community” means first and fore-
most the naked exposure of equal, banal, evidence that suffers, that enjoys, 
that trembles. (Nancy, 1995, p. 42)

Being is singular and plural at the same time, indistinctly and distinctly. It is 
singularly plural and plurally singular. (Nancy, 2001, p. 43)

We are the one-the one for the other-the other-each in ourselves and in the 
other, for ourselves and for the other, through ourselves and through the 
other. Neither solitude nor fusion, or one as the other: never so much alone 
as reunited, confused, indistinctly distinct. (Nancy, 2019, p. 97)

The singular and plural being of bodies in contact is the beating heart of 
Nancy’s tactile and sexistential ontology, a singular plural sexuality that is 
beyond any obvious duality or banal binarism, beyond any supposed essen-
tialism of sexual difference as such. For this reason, Nancy’s move to over-
turn Lacan’s assumption according to which “there is no sexual relationship” 
by concentrating, on the contrary, precisely on the instance of meaning 
and on the ontological consistency of that “there is”, and thus vigorously 
asserting that “there is” (Nancy, 2007, 2013) is not a sexual relationship. 
and thus vigorously asserting not only the phenomenological reality of sex, 
but also its powerfully pragmatic, relational and anthropologically perform-
ative/transformative dimension, shows deep affinities, all to be investigated, 
with the radically feminist and then queer approach that focuses on the 
body that performs and on sex acted out as con-being the very meaning 
of its own reflection and action, political and theoretical at the same time. 
This is why the interweaving between these theories and positions and the 
co-ontological posture of the Strasbourg philosopher is so fruitful. In his 
capital text Being singular plural, he has elaborated the idea of an institutive 
“being-with” that binds and connects human beings, generating the “we” 
and giving life to an irreducible dimension of singular plural con-being. 

That being is, absolutely, being-with: this is what we must think. With is the 
first trait of being, the trait of the singular plurality of the origin or origins 
in it. […]
The “with” remains between us and we remain between us: nothing but us, 
but nothing but an interval between us. (Nancy, 2019, pp. 26-27)

The recourse to “being”, here understood in the radicality of a being-in-
common, that is, of a being-with, takes place in the sphere of practiced 

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and performed sexuality, which is the object of Sexistence, mobilizing 
on the philosophical level, as Emily Apter has noted, “a theory of sexual 
ontology”, insofar as that text is, more or less explicitly, dedicated to 
recording “the ‘happening’ of ‘being’ in sexual acts” (Apter, 2019). And 
the kind of “being” which is given, that happens in sexual intercourse is 
originally, ontologically, constitutively the being-with, or the with-being 
of a we without which the being of sex neither gives itself nor happens. 
The sense of a performative inter-relationship that constitutes us as loving 
subjects, in the very act of making love. 

“Sex is an abyss and a violence: through the latter, which we undergo, 
we fall into the former, where we understand nothing” (Nancy, 2016). 
Paraphrasing Kant, Nancy describes in this way the acceleration imposed 
by the uncontrollable and unmotivated drive that pushes individual entities 
to face each other and unite in the common space/interval, to meet on the 
ground of the “with”, to share in the expansion of an “us” the primordial 
condition of being singular plural. Sex happens as the dense and intimate 
form of a relationality that is built starting from the “incommune” that 
it implies, in that area of contiguity and sharing, in that common place, 
where the “we” actively but transiently inhabits. There, the relationship 
takes place in the form of an unreconcilable dialectical tension between 
interiority and exteriority, which is the distinguishing feature of practiced, 
inter-acted sex, itself a territory of interconnection and exchange; an 
(erogenous) zone of the innumerable possible variants of sexual relations 
(beyond and beyond every possible genre), in which those acts occur under 
the species of an oscillation between I and we, between inside and outside, 
between an inside and an outside, always on the threshold of the other’s 
otherness. 

Nancy writes: “Touching the limit, that’s the question of relation-
ship” (Nancy, 2016, p. 40) – in this fulminating phrase, two philosophical 
objects capital in the reflection we are going through are condensed, as in 
the fusion point: touching and relationality. But Nancy goes even further 
and adds immediately afterwards, “And also that of touching as such, and 
sexual intercourse is the epiphany of touching: of kissing, of making love” 
(Nancy, 2016, p. 40). This interweaving, with its palindromic nexuses, 
of relationship and touch, indelibly marks the all-bodily experience of 
con-being with other(s), materializing the carnal thickness of the haptic 
ontology within which sexuality is placed as one of the limits, one of the 
thresholds to which we tend, that flux, that flow in which relationship 
becomes motion and transport in the dynamic tension of desire. 

Why, then, Sexistence? Why a neologism to say what has always 
pushed (a drive, an impulse, a momentum) human beings towards the 

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“we” of “with”, of relationship, of relation? What does that peculiar kind of 
rap-port “bring”? Nancy answers: “Never therefore a support, at the most 
a transport: the relationship is supported only on its transport” (Nancy, 
2013, p. 27). What is implied by this is that action, in that special type of 
rel-action, is above all a movement, a motion “from” and “to” a place; it is 
the action of bodies that are acting, active, moved; it is the performance 
(Nancy, 2016, p. 18; Nancy, 2017, p. 14), the performative of coming 
into contact, of touching and touching. It is good to specify, however, with 
Nancy, that the performative element of making love is analogous to sexual 
performance only and exclusively with respect to a “doing”, that is, to an 
act or a work that induces one to try “to think and to say in some way 
the actuality of this act”; it is this last phrase that describes with a certain 
accuracy the central argument of Sexistence, that is, to think and say sex in 
its making. 

Even when the action in the sexual relationship is only co-action 
to repeat, conditioned reflex, stagnation of the gesture that replicates 
incessantly, it consists in a movement of bodies and between bodies. 
The space of between is an area of tra(n)-site, it inaugurates each time a 
tra(n)-section – and a tra(n)-sation: the between becomes trans – that is, in 
the interval between the bodies one can already in (tra)vidify their meeting, 
the exchange, the union, the overlapping and the tra-sposition, that tra(s)-
port that animates and gives life to the rap-port. In this sense, then, bodies 
“gendered”, and their genderedness is revealed through “distinction” 
(Nancy writes: relationship “is the distinguishing”, the “opening up of 
the between-two through which there is two” [Nancy, 2013, pp. 24-25]) 
and through “difference” (in Nancy’s words, “the difference of the sexes” 
[is] “the difference of sex, insofar as it differs from itself ” in its “relating” 
or again in the “ajar of the between, of the ‘between us’ or intimacy: the 
sex that differs is the spacing of intimacy. Intimacy is the superlative of 
interiority” [Nancy, 2013, pp. 31-32]). Sexistence is therefore between the 
self ’s descent, between the self and an outside that estranges it from itself, 
spacing between interior and exterior, between inside and outside. The 
connection of meaning between sex (a “violence” that drags in the “abyss”) 
and existence (“existence exists in the plural, it is singularly plural” [Nancy, 
2001, p. 79]), which can be given only in their intertwining and reciprocal 
referral, remains unspeakable and indescribable otherwise than as sexuality, 
that is, as the declination of a philosophical eroticism that articulates and 
unravels an ontology of desire, a philosophy that takes charge and focuses 
on sexual existence. Nancy’s theoretical gesture is clear and decisive: the 
sexist questioning forcefully poses the ontological question of, about, 
around sex as a relational experience of con-being on the part of distinct 

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and different bodies that tra(n)sit towards the event that inaugurates for 
them an active contiguity, a becoming proximity in the space-time of the 
encounter and the con-contact, in an “incommune” in which being coin-
cides with singular plural sexism. 

Nancy loves playing with words, dissecting and connecting, in 
order to put them in tension, creating resonance between them, echoes of 
meaning, and the jeu de mots that sums up sexiness is this: “I = sex. I s’it, 
you s’they, we sexist” (“Je = sexe. Je s’exe, tus’exes, nous sexistons”). A whole 
“alchemy precedes this complex montage” (Nancy, 2019, p. 47). Much 
more than a mere calembour, this combination re-takes, that is, re-takes, 
rap-takes, tra(ns)-takes and tra(ns)-duces (echoing here yet another trans-
ition) the intimate pulsation (its internal rhythm) that is needed to conju-
gate, à la Nancy, the newly coined verb s’exister (in Italian “s’esistere” – or 
also, slightly unfaithful but more evocative, “s’es(s)istere”). This is how 
thinking and philosophically speaking about sex lays bare, in the game of 
references and cross-references to words and deeds, the sexistential vulner-
ability that connotes us as human beings: bodies in contact that in the 
exposure to the otherness of others, in which each and every one of us 
experiences the epiphanic giving of the touch of the relationship, come to 
touch the intangible limit of the other. 

2. Trans-ontologies

In the multi-sexual juncture in which we wander, it is an ontology in transit 
that takes the stage (“primary”, Freud would say here); almost a concep-
tual oxymoron since it denies and disavows itself by failing and disowning 
in itself the very stability presumed and claimed by every ontology. In 
fact, an ontology in transit, or that transits by becoming transitology is 
already a post-ontology, an ontology that has gone beyond itself in the 
systematic rejection and reversal of its own stabilization/essentialisation, 
in an unconditional acceptance of its own status of transit, movement and 
crossing, which contrasts ab origine and semel pro semper the static voca-
tion, understood as immobile stability and identical to itself, of traditional 
ontology. Can there be, then, an ontology disseminated, dislocated and 
dynamic? The Greek δύναμις is equivalent to “force”, active energy, and 
such a trans-ontology in the field of genderedness seems to correspond to 
what the “poet, feminist, Black, mother, warrior, lesbian” Audre Lorde calls 
“erotic power”, unstably placed – she writes – “between the beginning of 
our sense of self and the chaos of our deepest feeling” (Lorde, 2014, p. 129) 
a “reserve of strength”, of self-renewing joy, because when it has been expe-

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rienced once, it wants and knows how to re-initiate itself, relaunch itself, 
reiterate itself as a force of con-division. 

It is on this metamorphosing, transformative and instituting erotic 
power of new relationships, each time engaged and put into action by sex, 
that a first decisive encounter takes place between Nancy’s dynamic ontology 
or sexual “trans-ontology” and the “erotic power” declined in the vocabu-
lary of Audre Lorde’s intersectional feminism. On this possible parallelism 
is played the possibility of adopting the sexist view as a hermeneutic option 
and conceptual key also for the contemporary trans-feminism and inter-
sectional feminism r-existence. In Sexistence (Nancy, 2019b), on the other 
hand, a theoretical approach is clearly explained that thinking about sex 
with the “value of an existential” gives it a sense (in the double meaning of 
meaning and perceptual apparatus) that invests everyone, no one excluded, 
indeed it includes, through them, the hetero-sex as the homo-sex, the 
trans-sex as the poly-sex, precisely because it transcends the genders and 
the subjects themselves involved in the sexual relationship and looks only 
at the bodies in the performativity (in turn scattered, dissociated, divided, 
dispersed) of being-with and of the “incommune”, however transitory and 
regardless of any orientation, regardless of its sense or lack of sense. 

This difference from oneself, this dissemination and demultiplication of 
sex constitutes the deepest and most difficult lesson of the study of gender. 
(Nancy, 2019, p. V) 

Remember what Freud says: there is feminine and masculine in each indi-
vidual, biologically and socially determined. This coexistence of feminine 
and masculine in each person, should not be thought of as two chromo-
somes against each other, but as an interrelationship, as a complexity itself 
infinite. (Nancy & Van Reeth, 2014, pp. 38-38)

At stake here is rather a trans-sex as a crossing of sex and the meaning of sex, 
whose vital thrust pulses beyond identity, gender, orientation, sexual pref-
erences, practices and erotic tastes. This path, which connects gendered-
ness to feminist experiences of r-existence (Lonzi’s, Lorde’s, Butler’s and 
Preciado’s, for example) points out not insignificant affinities – first of all, 
the centrality of the gendered body – between the most recent feminist 
orientations (post-binary, trans-gender, gender-fluid, non-heteronorma-
tive) and Nancy’s position with respect to sexual ontology and its purely 
performative dimension. Significant points of overlapping and similarity 
are found in the common propensity to distance from any metaphysical 
hypostatization, including heteronormative and exclusionary binarism, 
and to philosophically take charge of sexual practice; since the set of those 
radically liberating experiences that involve embodied and desiring bodies 

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in rel-actions whose characteristic is the growth and accumulation of trans-
formative and revolutionary “erotic power”. 

Sex is thought of both by feminism (think at least of Carla Lonzi’s 
“clitoral woman” [Lonzi, 1972], Anne Koedt’s [Koedt, 1970] considera-
tions of the “myth of the vaginal orgasm” and, much more recently, Paul B. 
Preciado’s [Preciado, 2018] ideas about the orgasmic revolution and “anal 
terror”) and by Nancy of Sexistence primarily and substantially as a doing, 
a performance, a relational experience of ontological/existential con-divi-
sion, of spacing between con-tiguous bodies that experience individually 
and together, in contingency or continuity; in con-tact and distancing, the 
inside/outside of their inhabiting, positioning and dislocation in the world 
according to their desire. Orientation, positioning, direction, spacing 
and movement open up to a geometric and geographical representation 
of the phenomenological object of the sexual transitology; what comes to 
be drawn is a fluid map in which the crowded landscape of dense, fleshy 
bodies witnesses their mutual tangency, the variations of touching and 
con-contact and the infinite possible intersections as well as transitions, 
crossings, encounters, interlockings, an infinite “dissemination” (to quote 
Derrida) of desire. 

Another affinity between r-existing trans-feminism and s-e(s)sistent-
transontology lies in the reference to that ontological vulnerability which, 
intrinsic to the open and relational nature of the singular plural body, shows 
it for what it is – a place that can be travelled over, crossed and traversed. 
But not in the sense of impoverishing, debilitating a “social vulnerability” 
(so often noted and focused on by J. Butler), but rather as a perspective of 
availability to the intersection that consists precisely in preparing for the 
encounter with the body of others, or the intimacy of crossing and being 
crossed / / and. In the infinitely “disseminated” unfolding of sex as a rela-
tionship of “opening to the world”, the body undertakes the search for an 
unattainable exteriority otherwise than through rel-action – it is the only 
possible action of escape from the self and from its own. It is in this closure 
of the experiential universe of the self to every possible variable, to every 
a-going intersection, to every possible nuance of con-being that the flesh 
becomes vulnerable, takes the risk of intimacy with the otherness of the 
other’s body, of the mutual exposure of nudity, of the double con-contact 
of touching that touches and is touched, to a tactile and haptic experience 
of shared desire. 

In this expansion, sexistential vulnerability comes into play in sexual 
performativity, taking on the risk of eros, love, pleasure, and jouissance 
(Žižek, 2001) – trans-ontological, relational, and intersectional vulner-
ability that, in unfolding in the union of singular plural bodies – separate, 

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distinct, and different – in sexual action, creates the conditions of their 
spacing, within and beyond every possible encounter, within and beyond 
every plausible distance and detachment. 

Intersectionality is then also a method, a theoretical aptitude that 
considers and assumes bodies starting from their carnal thickness, from 
their performative materiality, from their unrepeatable uniqueness and 
from their reciprocal inter-actions through which metamorphoses and 
transforms subjects, rel-actions and the world. Intersectional sexuality is 
connoted, therefore, both as a relational ontology realized in acted and 
performed sexuality, “erotic power” that is triggered between bodies 
through sex and enjoyment (Nancy & Van Reeth, 2014), as a social fact 
and socially relevant that impacts on the human world by modifying it. It 
is yet confirmed, in this way, an element already pointed out by Freud, also 
later by over fifty years of feminism, as well as by Foucault’s monumental 
project, unfortunately unfinished, on the History of Sexuality, that is, the 
sex practiced among living beings is not a private fact. In other words, 
that sex practiced among living beings is not a private, intra-subjective 
and individual fact, but, on the contrary, a very important and influential 
social and political (Bernini, 2017) event that indelibly marks community 
practices, transforming and altering them over time, as well as group inter-
actions, collective ways of acting, precisely because it is an integral part 
of the shared public sphere. In this sense, the “incommune” of sex is the 
“incommune” of the community 1. 

That same powerful tra(n)sformative element, powerful matrix/motor 
of what in the words of Audre Lorde is the “erotic as power”, is specifically 
equivalent to what sexual acts, exchanges and customs, radically changing 
over time, especially as social practices put into being, constituting them-
selves as a specific revolutionary sphere, both individually and collectively 
(for example, being more or less stigmatized and censored, more or less 
accepted and legitimized), depending on the historical periods (here, too, 
the historical Foucault of sexuality remains the cornerstone of a reinter-
pretation of the entire social organism sub specie sexualis). The socially 
relevant element of sexuality, addressed by both psychoanalysis and femi-
nism since the “second wave” of the sixties and seventies, in Europe and 
the U.S., was also articulated around a deep awareness of the diversity of 
drives and desires that drive different subjectivities to sexual encounters, 
to the point that, in a certain sense, it can be said that the philosophical, 
anthropological and political claim of “sexual difference” (starting with 

 1 I am infinitely grateful to Jean-Luc Nancy for discussing this issue with me at length 
while we were revising together the Italian translation of Sexistence (Nancy, 2019b). 

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Irigaray [Irigaray, 1985]) corresponded to a sexual revolution that invested 
the female body, also thanks to the diffusion of contraceptives and legally 
recognized and protected abortion practices. In a changed cultural climate 
we understand how the feminist discovery of the “clitoral woman” by 
Carla Lonzi (Lonzi, 1972; Malabou, 2020) has played a decisive role, 
making explicit the paradigm that has imposed universally that rigid norm, 
all male, of sex and pleasure that has entailed the millenary patriarchal 
deprivation/oppression/negation of female sexuality, basing it on its iden-
tification exclusively with the reproductive sphere, which has deprived 
women of the possibility of experiencing the free power of sex as a deci-
sive experience of self-determination and “empowerment”. In more recent 
times, yet at the heart of the feminist “third wave”, Butler’s “performa-
tivity of gender”, which constitutes the definitive abandonment of sex as a 
category of belonging, triggers an ontological turbulence that reflects the 
relational vulnerability of human beings, allowing a definitive overcoming 
of the essentialism of sexual difference, with all its associated limitations. 
Butler in deconstructing feminist thought by denaturalizing the notions 
of male/female gender intends to deconstruct from inside the patriarchal 
phallologocentric power system, facilitating a proliferation, a dissemina-
tion of gender identities that disarticulates subjectivity by opening it to a 
potentially infinite range of sexual, social, political, discursive choices, etc. 
Homosexuality is, in this logical-political context, a decisive piece of this 
deconstruction of gender, starting from its alleged biological bases, as well 
as binarisms and dichotomies typical of the Western logos that accom-
pany all the traditional narratives regulating sexuality (Butler, 2004, 2006, 
2011). 

In this complex critical horizon, the philosophical task today is also 
that of thinking about sex and the vigorous drive energy that it conveys, 
capable of transforming all of existence with its power, inducing those expe-
riences of metamorphosis that, by crossing separate and distinct individual 
bodies (their surfaces, their folds, their orifices), open up the possibility of 
new experiences of co-division, new declinations of human life as sexuality. 
A condition that is beyond, then, the difference or – better – the sexual 
differences at work in the constitution of subjectivities (undifferentiated 
entities constitutively political), and that invests instead, with the burning 
magma of an incandescent desire and an engendered and irrepressible drive, 
the individual bodies – unique, unrepeatable, scattered and different, in 
their plural pluriversal singularity. Here, embodied and vulnerable bodies 
are caught in the original, primordial, founding experience of “being-in-
common” – when beyond and beyond the endiad interiority/exteriority 
we reach the common place of intimacy, that making/taking of enjoyment, 

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in the pleasure of contact and exchange, in the very act of breaking the 
monadic envelope to meet the split that breaks forever the atomized singu-
larity and founds the dawn of a community. 

Trans-ontology and trans-feminism – as pragmatic experiences and 
philosophical visions of s-e(s)existence and r-existence, but especially as 
approaches that are activated in reality from concrete bodies in action –, 
are characterized by the centrality attributed to tran(s)-formation, singular 
plural, always in progress, on which they draw attention, since, in the 
words of Foucault, “one must understand the ‘flesh’ as a mode of experi-
ence, that is, as a mode of self-knowledge and transformation by oneself ” 
(Foucault, 2018, p. 58). This characteristic allows them to redesign the 
social metamorphoses in which to inscribe future communities without 
constraints and in which desire can inaugurate and open up perspectives of 
liberation and self-determination to-come. 

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Riassunto

Nella più tarda produzione filosofica di Jean-Luc Nancy occupa uno spazio rilevante la 
“filosofia dell’esistenza sessuata” come modalità di espressione del “con-essere”, centrale 
nel suo libro “Sessistenza”. In questo testo, il corpo, il toccare, il sesso sono sporgenze che 
costellano una mappa concettuale frutto di una lunga militanza filosofica contrassegna-
ta da un’autentica “ontologia aptica”, cifra segnante di un pensiero della relazionalità, 
dell’interdipendenza, della “vulnerabilità sessistenziale”, che connota i “corpi in con-
tatto” che tutti e tutte siamo. Ma Nancy si spinge sino ad elaborare una “trans-ontolo-
gia” attraverso cui si manifesta la “r-esistenza della sessistenza”, vale a dire quel rifiuto 
caparbio dei corpi distinti e differenti all’omologazione e all’uniformità dell’identico e 
dell’identitario condiviso dal “trans-femminismo” che della combinatoria inesauribile 
dei sessi fa il proprio punto di forza. Così, tanto per l’approccio sessistenziale che per 
quello transfemminista, al cuore di ogni teoria vi sono le vite e le pratiche di corpi sessuati 
distinti e differenti in rel-azione.

Copyright (©) 2021 Francesca R. Recchia Luciani 
Editorial format and graphical layout: copyright (©) LED Edizioni Universitarie

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to cite this paper:
Recchia Luciani, F. R. (2021). The sexistential vulnerability of bodies in contact in the 
philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and 
Empirical Perspectives, 1(1-2), 85-99.  DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/elem-2021-0102-recc

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	Elementa_1-2021-1-2_00b_Sommario.pdf
	Editorial
	Pierpaolo Limone

	First Section
	The Vagaries of the Superego
	Slavoj Žižek
	Nature and Pandemic

	Ricardo Espinoza Lolas
	Mask and Otherness
between Recognition and Concealment: Notes on the Self and the You

	Paolo Ponzio
	“Liquid” Identity and Otherness
in the Phenomenon of Religious
Alienation: The Loss of Critical
Thinking and the “Barter” of the Self in the System of Communion

	Daniela Savino
	The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies in Contact in the Philosophy
of Jean-Luc Nancy

	Francesca R. Recchia Luciani

	Second Section
	Universal Design for Learning
and Inclusive Teaching: Future
Perspectives
	Martina Rossi
	A Historical Account on Italian
Mechanism Models

	Marco Ceccarelli
	Cyberfeminism: A Relationship
between Cyberspace, Technology,
and the Internet

	Giusi Antonia Toto 1 - Alessia Scarinci 2
	Super-Ego after Freud: A Lesson
not to Be Forgotten

	Luigi Traetta 1 - Federica Doronzo 2
	Functioning of Declarative Memory: Intersection between Neuropsychology and Mathematics

	Federica Doronzo 1 - Gianvito Calabrese 2
	Peer Tutoring and Scaffolding
Principle for Inclusive Teaching

	Giuliana Nardacchione - Guendalina Peconio





