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Philosophical reflections on the phenomenon of globalization
A beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of
the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental
Europe This landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy’s
last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical
reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years
ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and
destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy’s account becomes
more vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into
language that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is
manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful
circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences
confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described
as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood’s
intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to
highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that
remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside
the cruelty that pervades our world—a world whose very existence
is threatened by its reduction to mere objects. The exceptional
writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work
of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition—on Freud,
Nietzsche, and others—with rich poetic language and an actual
poem. Nancy’s thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable
origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and
its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of
language. Whereas in earlier texts Nancy has referred to this
excess as poetry, here he performs it in the form of a poem, in the
extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While the publication of a poem
by Nancy is a notable event, equally noteworthy is a remarkable
essay entitled “Scandalous Death,” in which Nancy meditated on
a subject that was to come to him too soon after. Above all, the
book is crucial for bringing into English Cruor, the very last book
Nancy completed before his death, an evocative meditation offered
by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own—and
our—singular survival.
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Doing (Hardcover)
Jean-Luc Nancy; Translated by Charlotte Mandell
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R464
Discovery Miles 4 640
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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In Doing, Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most prominent and lucid
articulators of contemporary French theory and philosophy, examines
the precarious but urgent relationship between being and doing. His
book is not so much a call to action as a summons to more vigorous
thinking, the examination and reflection that must precede any
effective action. The first section of the book considers this
matter tersely: Jean-Luc Nancy's quickness of language and grace of
humor lead the reader carefully past the dangers of
oversimplification, toward a general awareness of meaningful being.
In the last section, Nancy examines the realities of terrorist
actions-specifically those that shocked Paris a few years ago, and
more generally the frightening world of politics without
conscience, where conscience is the root of all thinking.
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 'intermedial' approach to social
relations does not focus on the shared identity but instead on the
epistemological, ethical, and political status of inter
(being-in-between). At stake here are the political analyses of new
modes of being in common that transcend national boundaries, the
critique of the new forms of domination that accompany them, and
the search for new emancipatory possibilities. Opening a new
approach to social relations, intermedialities investigates not
only engagements between already constituted positions but even
more the interval, antagonism, and differences that form and
decenter these positions. Consequently, in opposition to the
resurgence of cultural and ethnic particularisms and to the
leveling of difference produced by globalization, the political and
ethical analysis of the 'in-between' enables a conception of
community based on difference, exposure, and interaction with
others rather than on an identification with a shared identity.
Investigations of 'in-betweenness,' both as medium specific and
between heterogeneous 'sites' of inquiry, range here from
philosophical conceptuality to artistic practices, from the
political circulation of money and power to the operation of new
technologies. They inevitably invoke the crucial role of embodiment
in creative thought and collective acting. As a mediating instance
between the psyche and society, matter and spirit, nature and
culture, and biology and technology, the body is another interval
forming and informed by socio-linguistic relations. As these
complex intersections between media, materiality, art, and the
philosophy and politics of the in-between suggest, the project of
intermedialities provides new ways of rethinking relations among
arts, politics, and science.
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 "intermedial" approach to social
relations does not focus on the shared identity but instead on the
epistemological, ethical, and political status of inter
(being-in-between). At stake here are the political analyses of new
modes of being in common that transcend national boundaries, the
critique of the new forms of domination that accompany them, and
the search for new emancipatory possibilities. Opening a new
approach to social relations, intermedialities investigates not
only engagements between already constituted positions but even
more the interval, antagonism, and differences that form and
decenter these positions. Consequently, in opposition to the
resurgence of cultural and ethnic particularisms and to the
leveling of difference produced by globalization, the political and
ethical analysis of the "in-between" enables a conception of
community based on difference, exposure, and interaction with
others rather than on an identification with a shared identity.
Investigations of "in-betweenness," both as medium specific and
between heterogeneous "sites" of inquiry, range here from
philosophical conceptuality to artistic practices, from the
political circulation of money and power to the operation of new
technologies. They inevitably invoke the crucial role of embodiment
in creative thought and collective acting. As a mediating instance
between the psyche and society, matter and spirit, nature and
culture, and biology and technology, the body is another interval
forming and informed by socio-linguistic relations. As these com
In The Deconstruction of Sex, Jean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh discuss
how a deconstructive approach to sex helps us negotiate discourses
about sex and foster a better understanding of how sex complicates
our everyday existence in the age of #MeToo. Throughout their
conversation, Nancy and Goh engage with topics ranging from
relation, penetration, and subjection to touch, erotics, and
jouissance. They show how despite its entrenchment in social norms
and centrality to our being-in-the-world, sex lacks a clearly
defined essence. At the same time, they point to the potentiality
of literature to inscribe the senses of sex. In so doing, Nancy and
Goh prompt us to reconsider our relations with ourselves and others
through sex in more sensitive, respectful, and humble ways without
bracketing the troubling aspects of sex.
This collection of essays presents some of the key issues at the
heart of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's work. This
volume offers perspectives on the relationship between philosophy
and the political. The authors ask if we can talk of an a priori
link between the philosophical and the political; they investigate
the significance of the "figure" - the human being as political
subject - in the history of metaphysics; and they inquire how we
can "re-treat" the political today in the face of those who argue
that philosophy is at an "end". This text brings together some of
their responses to these investigations. We see as a result some of
the key motifs that have characterized their work: their debt to a
Heideggerian pre-understanding of philosophy, the centrality of the
"figure" in western philosophy and the totalitarianism of both
politics and the political.
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Sexistence (Paperback)
Jean-Luc Nancy; Translated by Steven Miller
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R726
R653
Discovery Miles 6 530
Save R73 (10%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Sex, 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 the drive.
Nancy reminds us that we are more comfortable with the drama of
prohibitions, ideals, repression, transgression, and destruction,
which often hamper thinking about sex and gender, than with the
affirmation of an originary trouble at the limits of language that
divides being and opens the world. Sexistence develops a new
philosophical account of sexuality that resonates with contemporary
research on gender and biopolitics. Without attempting to be
comprehensive, the book ranges from the ancient world through
psychoanalysis to discover the turbulence of the drive at the heart
of existence.
"What I love, and those whom I love, you, that is to say us in so
far as we are capable of forming a we, all this I love, and I love
them, and I love you infinitely" (Bernard Steigler April 1952-
August 2020). When Bernard Stiegler writes "I love you" in the
quote above, he openly provokes us to question or experience the
meaning or contact of these words. He also invites us to question
the relationship between a thinker's life and their thought. For
Stiegler, they were inextricable. His life was one that focused on
friendship but not friendships at a purely social level but ones
that produced philosophy, politics, and existential truths.
Bringing together scholars who knew Stiegler, including Shaj Mohan,
Achille Mbembe, Divya Dwivedi, Peter Szendy, and Emily Apter, this
volume provides an original - and personal - insight into his life
and philosophy. Each piece gives a sense of the wide range of
Stiegler’s work and how it affected the praxis of the philosopher
in different parts of the world.
This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging
contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which
the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are
internally related to "Being Singular Plural."
One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is his attempt
to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that
does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or
subjectivity. The fundamental argument of the book is that being is
always "being with," that "I" is not prior to "we," that existence
is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this "being-with" not
as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual
abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the
"I" and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a
"society of spectacle" nor via some form of authenticity.
The five shorter essays impressively translate the philosophical
insight of "Being Singular Plural" into sophisticated discussions
of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity politics, the
Gulf War, and the tragic plight of Sarajevo. The essay "Eulogy for
the Melee," in particular, is a brilliant discussion of identity
and hybridism that resonates with many contemporary social
concerns.
As Nancy moves through the exposition of his central concern,
being-with, he engages a number of other important issues,
including current notions of the "other" and "self" that are
relevant to psychoanalytic, political, and multicultural concepts.
He also offers astonishingly original reinterpretations of major
philosophical positions, such as Nietzsche's doctrine of "eternal
recurrence," Descartes's "cogito," and the nature of language and
meaning.
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Coming (Paperback)
Jean-Luc Nancy; As told to Adele Van Reeth; Translated by Charlotte Mandell
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R522
Discovery Miles 5 220
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French notion of
jouissance. How did jouissance evolve from referring to the
pleasure of possessing a material thing (property, wealth) to the
pleasure of orgasm, from appropriation to dis-appropriation, from
consumption to consummation? The philosophers Adele van Reeth and
Jean-Luc Nancy engage in a lively dialogue, ranging from
consumerism to video games to mysticism and from Spinoza, Hegel,
andAugustine to the Marquis de Sade, Marguerite Duras, and Henry
Miller. Four additional essays are new to the American edition.
Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable
Community (1983)—a book that offered a critical response to an
early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “the inoperative
community”—Nancy responds in turn with The Disavowed Community.
Stemming from Jean-Christophe Bailly’s initial proposal to think
community in terms of “number” or the “numerous,” and
unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot’s text, Nancy’s new
book addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his
proximity to and distance from Blanchot’s thinking, from
Bataille’s “community of lovers” to the relation between
community, communitarianism, and being-in-common; to Marguerite
Duras, to the Eucharist. A key rethinking of politics and the
political, this exchange opens up a new understanding of community
played out as a question of avowal.
The epoch of representation is as old as the West. Indeed,
representation is the West, understood as what at once designates
and expands its own limits. But what comes after the West? What
comes after representation's disclosure of its own limit? The
central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade
of work, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the
coming, the birth that characterizes being. We are now at the limit
of representation, where objects as we experience them have been
show to be merely objects of representation-or rather, of
presentation, since there is nothing to (re)present. The first part
of this book, "Existence," asks how, today, one can give sense of
meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it
comes nude into the world, must now be our "sense." In examining
what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what
presence "is"; rather we should conceive presence as presence to
someone, including to presence itself. This birth is not the
constitution of an identity, but the endless departure of an
identity from, and from within, its other, or others. Its coming is
not desire but jouissance, the joy of averring oneself to be
continually in the state of being born-a rejoicing of birth, a
birth of rejoicing. The second section, "Poetry," asks: What art
exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if
art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe (or rather, "exscribe,"
in a term the book develops) the coming existence as such? The
author's trajectory in this book crosses those of Hegel, Schlegel,
Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, in their comments on
art and politics, existence and corporeality, everyday life and its
modes of existence and ecstasy. An analysis that dares this
crossing involves all the varied accounts of existence, political
as well as philosophical, and all the realms of poverty.
A beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of
the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental
Europe This landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy's
last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical
reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years
ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and
destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy's account becomes more
vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into language
that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is manifest in
blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation,
and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by
countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor,
the two Latin words for blood's intermingled but distinct aspects.
This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense
of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its
manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our
world-a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction
to mere objects. The exceptional writings brought together in
Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries
rigorous erudition-on Freud, Nietzsche, and others-with rich poetic
language and an actual poem. Nancy's thought opens the body onto
its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its
enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are
also the elusive excesses of language. Whereas in earlier texts
Nancy has referred to this excess as poetry, here he performs it in
the form of a poem, in the extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While
the publication of a poem by Nancy is a notable event, equally
noteworthy is a remarkable essay entitled "Scandalous Death," in
which Nancy meditated on a subject that was to come to him too soon
after. Above all, the book is crucial for bringing into English
Cruor, the very last book Nancy completed before his death, an
evocative meditation offered by a great thinker on the complex
conditions of his own-and our-singular survival.
Why is it that the modern conception of literature begins with one
of the worst writers of the philosophical tradition? Such is the
paradoxical question that lies at the heart of Jean-Luc Nancy's
highly original and now-classic study of the role of language in
the critical philosophy of Kant. While Kant did not turn his
attention very often to the philosophy of language, Nancy
demonstrates to what extent he was anything but oblivious to it. He
shows, in fact, that the question of "philosophical style," of how
to write critical philosophy, goes to the core of Kant's attempt to
articulate the limits, once and for all, that would establish human
reason in its autonomy and freedom. He also shows how this properly
philosophical program, the very pinnacle of the Enlightenment,
leads Kant to posit literature as its other by way of what is here
called the "syncope," and how this other of philosophy, entirely
its product, cannot be said to exist outside of metaphysics in its
accomplishment. This subtle, unprecedented reading of Kant
demonstrates the continued importance of reflection on the relation
between philosophy and literature, indeed, why any commitment to
Enlightenment must consider and confront this partition anew.
This book is a rich collection of philosophical essays radically
interrogating key notions and preoccupations of the
phenomenological tradition. While using Heidegger's Being and Time
as its permanent point of reference and dispute, this collection
also confronts other important philosophers, such as Kant,
Nietzsche, and Derrida. The projects of these pivotal thinkers of
finitude are relentlessly pushed to their extreme, with respect
both to their unexpected horizons and to their as yet unexplored
analytical potential. A Finite Thinking shows that, paradoxically,
where the thought of finitude comes into its own it frees itself,
not only to reaffirm a certain transformed and transformative
presence, but also for a non-religious reconsideration and
reaffirmation of certain theologemes, as well as of the body,
heart, and love. This book shows the literary dimension of
philosophical discourse, providing important enabling ideas for
scholars of literature, cultural theory, and philosophy.
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 thought is embedded?
Jean-Luc Nancy poses these questions with the depth and rigor we
would expect from him. In doing so, he does not go lightly on
Heidegger, in whom he finds a philosophical and “historial”
anti-Semitism, outlining a clash of “peoples” that must at all
costs arrive at “another beginning.” If Heidegger’s
uncritical acceptance of prejudices and long-debunked myths about
“world Jewry” shares in the “banality” evoked by Hannah
Arendt, this does nothing to lessen the charge. Nancy’s purpose,
however, is not simply to condemn Heidegger but rather to invite us
to think something to which the thinker of being remained blind:
anti-Semitism as a self-hatred haunting the history of the
West—and of Christianity in its drive toward an auto-foundation
that would leave behind its origins in Judaism.
This work, by one of the most innovative and challenging of
contemporary thinkers, pivots on a "Remark" added by Hegel in 1831
to the second edition of his "Science of Logic." As a model of
close reading applied both to philosophical texts and the making of
philosophical systems, "The Speculative Remark" played a
significant role in transforming the practice of philosophy away
from system building to analysis of specific linguistic detail,
with meticulous attention to etymological, philological, and
rhetorical nuance.
Nancy uses his extended examination of the "Remark" to delineate
certain overall strategies in several Hegelian texts that militate
for language-oriented readings of Hegel, as shown in Nancy's
redefinition of such key terms as "Aufhebung," "mediation," and
"speculation." Nancy's reading progresses from speculative words
and propositions to registering the speculative itself. While he
avoids analyzing Hegel's system as such, Nancy reconstructs the
Hegelian trajectory on a basis of tropes, building from
propositions rather than structures, elements, and cycles.
The overview that emerges in the final chapter and epilogue
constitutes a broad statement about Hegel's practice and
significance, one nuanced by close attention to his deployment of
rhetoric and linguistic play. "The Speculative Remark" thus
furnishes a model for a theoretically aware approach to all
systematic philosophy, while providing a significant historical
contribution to the evolution of contemporary critical theory.
This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers,
begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern
sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts
and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal
tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary
thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the
human senses--to which the plurality of the arts has most
frequently been referred--and sense or meaning in general.
Throughout the five essays, Nancy's argument hinges on the
culminating formulation of this relation in Hegel's Aesthetics and
The Phenomenology of Spirit--art as the sensible presentation of
the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader
of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegel's
historical argument concerning art as a thing of the past, as that
which is negated by the dialectic of Spirit in the passage from
aesthetic religion to revealed religion to philosophy.
This is the most systematic, the most radical, and the most lucid
treatise on freedom that has been written in contemporary
Continental philosophy. Finding its guiding motives in Kant's
second "Critique" and working its way up to and beyond Heidegger
and Adorno, this book marks the most advanced position in the
thinking of freedom that has been proposed after Sartre and
Levinas. One could call it a fundamental ontology of freedom if
freedom, according to the author, did not entail liberation from
foundational acts and the overcoming of any logic that determines,
in the way ontology does, by positing being either as
self-sufficient position or as subjected to strictly immanent laws.
Once existence no longer offers itself as an empiricity that
must be related to its conditions of possibility or sublated in a
transcendence beyond itself, but instead as sheer factuality, we
must think this fact, the fact of existence as the essence of
itself, as freedom. The question is no longer "Why is there
something rather than nothing?" Instead, it becomes "Why these very
questions by which existence affirms itself and abandons itself in
a single gesture?" If we do not think being itself as a freedom, we
are condemned to think of freedom as a pure "Idea" or "right," and
being-in-the-world, in turn, as a blind and obtuse necessity. Since
Kant, philosophy and our world have relentlessly confronted this
scission.
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Being Singular Plural (Hardcover)
Jean-Luc Nancy; Translated by Robert Richardson, Anne O'Byrne
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R2,709
R2,492
Discovery Miles 24 920
Save R217 (8%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging
contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which
the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are
internally related to "Being Singular Plural."
One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is his attempt
to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that
does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or
subjectivity. The fundamental argument of the book is that being is
always "being with," that "I" is not prior to "we," that existence
is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this "being-with" not
as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual
abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the
"I" and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a
"society of spectacle" nor via some form of authenticity.
The five shorter essays impressively translate the philosophical
insight of "Being Singular Plural" into sophisticated discussions
of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity politics, the
Gulf War, and the tragic plight of Sarajevo. The essay "Eulogy for
the Melee," in particular, is a brilliant discussion of identity
and hybridism that resonates with many contemporary social
concerns.
As Nancy moves through the exposition of his central concern,
being-with, he engages a number of other important issues,
including current notions of the "other" and "self" that are
relevant to psychoanalytic, political, and multicultural concepts.
He also offers astonishingly original reinterpretations of major
philosophical positions, such as Nietzsche's doctrine of "eternal
recurrence," Descartes's "cogito," and the nature of language and
meaning.
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 with remarkable nuance and
specificity, but in a language that comes close to that of everyday
life. As Nancy surveys his work, he thinks anew about democracy,
community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts. In the
end, this is a book about the possibility of a world-a world that
must be greeted because it is, as Nancy says, already here.
|
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