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 humanities shed light on how Nancy’s thought both shares with and departs from Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Weil, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Lyotard, elucidating “the sharing of voices,� in Nancy’s phrase, between Nancy and these thinkers. Contributors: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Emily Apter, Rodolphe Gasché, Werner Hamacher, Eleanor Kaufman, Marie-Eve Morin, Timothy Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John H. Smith

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 humanities shed light on how Nancy's thought both shares with and departs from Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Weil, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Lyotard, elucidating "the sharing of voices," in Nancy's phrase, between Nancy and these thinkers. Contributors: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Emily Apter, Rodolphe Gasche, Werner Hamacher, Eleanor Kaufman, Marie-Eve Morin, Timothy Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John H. Smith

Jacques Ranciere's work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the "politics of aesthetics" and the "aesthetics of politics"? Specifically, the book explores the implications of Ranciere's rethinking of the relationship of aesthetic to political democracy from a wide range of critical perspectives. Distributions of the Sensible contains original essays by leading scholars on topics such as Ranciere's relation to political theory, critical theory, philosophical aesthetics, and film. The book concludes with a new essay by Ranciere himself that reconsiders the practice of theory between aesthetics and politics.

Gilles Deleuze is considered one of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century. Eleanor Kaufman situates Deleuze in relation to others of his generation, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and Claude Levi-Strauss, and she engages the provocative readings of Deleuze by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.

"Deleuze, The Dark Precursor" is organized around three themes that critically overlap: dialectic, structure, and being. Kaufman argues that Deleuze's work is deeply concerned with these concepts, even when he advocates for the seemingly opposite notions of univocity, nonsense, and becoming. By drawing on scholastic thought and reading somewhat against the grain, Kaufman suggests that these often-maligned themes allow for a nuanced, even positive reflection on apparently negative states of being, such as extreme inertia. This attention to the negative or minor category has implications that extend beyond philosophy and into feminist theory, film, American studies, anthropology, and architecture.

During their lives, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were two of France's most prominent thinkers, and their work continues to be a vital and influential part of critical theory. The essays in this collection, written by prominent scholars, offer a new approach to their work. Unique in its emphasis on Guattari, both in conjunction with Deleuze and independently, this volume features an essay by Deleuze himself and includes a comprehensive bibliography of Guattari's and Deleuze's work.

The body of work explored here spans three decades and cuts across the lines of philosophy, political theory, geography, literature, aesthetics, and even the applied sciences. Readers unfamiliar with Deleuze and Guattari will gain a broad sense of their work from these pages; specialists will discover new and different methods of understanding the contributions of these writers.

The essays map out a set of applications that, rather than explain Deleuze and Guattari, aim to extend and reinvent their thought in new and "real life" domains, from cinema to the Gulf War, from quantum mechanics to the L.A. riots, and from Israel's deportation of Palestinians to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's masochism. Overall, the collection demonstrates the wide range of potential applications of Deleuze's and Guattari's theories and expands current readings of their work.

The laudatory essay, in which one author praises the work of another, is frequently characterized as an unimportant, even uncritical mode of writing. But as Eleanor Kaufman argues in "The Delirium of Praise, " this mode of exchange is serious and substantial enough to merit scholarly attention. By not conforming to standard practices of critical discourse, laudatory essays give new status to supposedly inferior forms of communication and states of being--including chatter, silence, sickness, imbalance, and absence of work--and emphasize affective states or emotions such as joy, friendship, and longing.

"The Delirium of Praise" examines a group of five twentieth-century French intellectuals--Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Klossowski--and their laudatory essays about each other. Structured as a circular series of exchanges, the book examines pairings of two thinkers with respect to a given theme. The exchange between Bataille and Blanchot takes up the themes of chatter and silence with regard to the novelist Louis-Rene des Forets; the Blanchot-Foucault exchange explores friendship and impersonality through the lens of Jacques Derrida; the Foucault-Deleuze exchange considers "absence of work" ( "desoeuvrement") and the obscure French philosopher Jacques Martin; the Deleuze-Klossowski exchange revolves around the question of the sick body and the person of Nietzsche; and the final exchange between Klossowski and Bataille focuses on imbalanced economies and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Where the praise is most excessive, approaching delirium, Kaufman locates a powerful thought-energy that pushes the laudatory essay to its limits. In her conclusion, she presents this unique mode of thought exchange as a form of intellectual hospitality.

Kaufman uncovers a suspension of subjectivity, of personality, even of place and time, that is both articulated in the laudatory essays and enacted by them. Her examination of this neglected mode as practiced by five important French thinkers offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century intellectual history.