"A courtship between philosophy and literature that has never been presented with such wit, grace, and finesse" from one of France's leading thinkers (Jean-Michel Rabaté, from the Introduction).Expectation is a major volume of Jean-Luc Nancy's writings on literature, written across three decades but, for the most part, previously unavailable in English.More substantial than literary criticism, these essays collectively negotiate literature's relation...

Heidegger and Nazism: Ever since the philosopher’s public involvement in state politics in 1933, his name has necessarily been a part of this unsavory couple. After the publication in 2014 of the private Black Notebooks, it is now unambiguously part of another: Heidegger and anti-Semitism.What do we learn from analyzing the anti-Semitism of these private writings, together with its sources and grounds, not only for Heidegger’s thought, but for the history of the West in which this ...

In this series of interviews, Jean-Luc Nancy reviews his life’s work. But like Schlegel’s historian—“a prophet facing backwards”—Nancy takes this opportunity to rummage through the history of art, philosophy, religion, and politics in search of new possibilities that remain to be thought.This journey through Nancy’s thought is interspersed with accounts of places and events and deeply personal details. The result is at once unpretentious and encyclopedic: Concepts are described wit...

"[From] our preeminent living philosopher of being-with. . . . A profound―and profoundly necessary―meditation on sex and being." —Tim Dean, author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of BarebackingSex, more than just a part of our experience, troubles our conceptions of existence.Drawing on a fascinating array of sources, ancient and modern, philosophical and literary, Jean-Luc Nancy explores and upholds the form-giving thrust of t...

Jean-Luc Nancy's On the Commerce of Thinking concerns the particular communication of thoughts that takes place by means of the business of writing, producing, and selling books. His reflection is born out of his relation to the bookstore, in the first place his neighborhood one, but beyond that any such "perfumery, rotisserie, patisserie," as he calls them, dispensaries "of scents and flavors through which something like a fragrance or bouquet of the book is divined, presumed, sensed."

In the past, pandemics were considered divine punishment, but we now understand the biological characteristics of viruses and we know they are spread through social interaction. What used to be divine has become human – all too human, as Nietzsche would say.But while the virus dispels the divine, we are discovering that living beings are more complex and harder to define than we had previously imagined, and also that political power is more complex than we may have thought. And thi...

Complex, haunting, imaginative and profoundly literary, Didactic Poetries is Beck’s response to Schiller’s statement: “We are still waiting for a didactic poem where thought itself would be and would remain poetic,” and Hegel’s claim that, “strictly speaking, didactic poetry isn’t poetry.”For the acclaimed French poet, Philippe Beck, Schiller’s task of attempting a didactic poetry remains as vital today as it was for Schiller’s time. Is there a way to construct a poetry bu...

This volume focuses on the relational aspect of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking. As Nancy himself showed, thinking might be a solitary activity but it is never singular in its dimension. Building on or breaking away from other thoughts, especially those by thinkers who had come before, thinking is always plural, relational. This “singular plural” dimension of thought in Nancy’s philosophical writings demands explication.In this book, some of today’s leading scholars in the theoretical hu...

Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics is a comprehensive collection devoted to the new field of research called "intermedialities." The concept of intermedialities stresses the necessity of situating philosophical and political debates on social relations in the divergent contexts of media theories, avant-garde artistic practices, continental philosophy, feminism, and political theory.The "i...

24 conversazioni apparse su Fata Morgana con grandi figure della contemporaneità, studiosi e artisti che parlano del cinema facendone un luogo del pensiero e una forma di vita. Un viaggio in cui il cinema e l’immagine, più di ogni altra forma d’arte, si riscoprono indissolubilmente legati alla complessità del nostro presente. Per la prima volta riunite e tradotte in inglese in un’unica pubblicazione, queste conversazioni offrono al lettore una costellazione unica di autori e temi per pensa...

When Jean-Luc Nancy first encountered the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, he knew he was hearing something new, a voice genuinely of its time. Thinking with and against each other over the course of their long friendship, the two thinkers reshaped the European intellectual landscape. Nancy’s writings on Derrida, collected in this volume, reflect on the elements of their shared concerns with politics, the arts, religion, the fate of deconstruction, and the future of sense. Rather than...

First published in 1979 but never available in English until now, Ego Sum challenges, through a careful and unprecedented reading of Descartes’s writings, the picture of Descartes as the father of modern philosophy: the thinker who founded the edifice of knowledge on the absolute self-certainty of a Subject fully transparent to itself. While other theoretical discourses, such as psychoanalysis, have also attempted to subvert this Subject, Nancy shows how they always inadvertently reconstit...