Turning to Nancy's conception of things, and more specifically focusing on his statement about the stone, we will see how Nancy also uses a strategy similar to Shaviro's and Cohen's cautious anthropomorphism. Indeed, in his statements about the stone, Nancy attributes to stone properties normally restricted to human beings – most remarkably freedom – but not before dehumanising or de-subjectivising these properties. Because Nancy is working against the Heideggerian paradigm here, he will also attribute to the stone everything that Heidegger refuses it – existence, touch, sense, worldliness – in such a way that radically challenges and displaces Heidegger's still humanist or human-centred understanding of these terms. At the same time, Nancy will do so in a way that is – let us claim in a preliminary way, even though these terms will have to be clarified – more materialist and less vitalist than Merleau-Ponty’s. In the end, we will see how Nancy departs from phenomenology by radically detaching sense-making from any form of intentional givenness, even the givenness to a living sentient body.

1. The freedom of the stone and the creation of the world

The first set of statements about the stone is found in a fragment at the end of The Experience of Freedom. In the book, Nancy has operated a radical de-subjectivisation of freedom, which will lead him to affirm, in the fragment that interests us, not only the ‘freedom of the world’, but the freedom of each thing, including the stone (EF, 158–60). Traditionally, freedom is supposed to be the property of a subject or the structure of subjectivity itself. To be free means not to be subjected to any external determination. In this sense, I can be free only if I absolve myself from any contact with what is other and find the reason or determination of my existence within myself. The free being is the self-founding entity absolved from any relation with exteriority. Thought in this way, freedom becomes a ground. For example, in Kant, freedom becomes uncaused causality, the ability to be the absolute origin of a causal chain; similarly, in Sartre, it becomes the ability to be the origin of one's own life-project, one's own meaning.