Books by Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh discuss how a deconstructive approach to sex helps us negotiate discourses about sex and reconsider our relations to ourselves and others through sex.

In eleven talks originally broadcast on French public radio, this book offers a philosopher's account of some of the pressing questions and addresses issues within philosophical inquiry.

"A leading philosopher argues that anti-Semitism is rooted in the structures of Western thought"--

What does it mean to judge when there is no general and universal norm to define what is right and what is wrong? Can laws be absent and is law always necessary?This is the first English translation published of Jean-Luc Nancy's acclaimed consideration of the law's most pervasive principles in the context of actual systems and contemporary institutions, power, norms, laws. In a world where it is impossible to imagine the realisation of an ideal of justice that corresponds to every person's ideal of justice, Nancy probes the limits of legal normativity. Moreover, the question is asked: how can legal normativity be legitimised? A legal order based on performativity and formal validity is questionable and other forces than juridical normativity are at the heart of Dies Irae. Such leads inevitably to the processes of inclusion and exclusion that characterise contemporary juridical systems and those issues of identity, hostility and self-representation central to contemporary political and legal debates.

How have we thought 'the body'? How can we think it anew? This title incorporates the body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, and the 'mystical body of Christ'. It offers us an encyclopedia and a polemical program - reviewing classical takes on the "corpus" from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Paul to Descartes.

What powers lie hidden in images? Nancy explores the complicated effects of the visual on culture, truth, and meaning. Writings on the power hidden in the depth of an image.

Philosophy holds an ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication, this excess that both fascinates and questions philosophy's sober ambitions for conceptual clarity and appropriate behavior. Displacing established dualities-mind and body, reason and desire, logic and eros-Nancy's subject becomes intoxicated: Ego sum, ego existo ebrius-I am, I exist-drunk.

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community-a book outlining a critical response to Jean-Luc Nancy's early proposal for thinking an "inoperative community"-The Disavowed Community offers a close reading of Blanchot's text.

The renowned philosopher contemplates the medium of drawing in ';a book full of dazzling insights, imaginative curves and provocative renewals' (Sarah Clift, University of King's College). In 2007, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy curated an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon. This book, originally written for that exhibition, explores the interplay between drawing and formviewing the act of drawing as a formative force. Recalling that the terms ';drawing' and ';design' were once used interchangeably, Nancy notes that drawing designates a design that remains without project, plan, or intention. His argument offers a way of rethinking a number of historical terms (sketch, draft, outline, plan, mark, notation), which includes rethinking drawing in its graphic, filmic, choreographic, poetic, melodic, and rhythmic senses. For Nancy, drawing resists any kind of closure, and therefore never resolves a tension specific to itself. Drawing allows the gesture of a desire that remains in excess of all knowledge to come to appearance. Situating drawing in these terms, Nancy engages a number of texts in which Freud addresses the force of desire in the rapport between aesthetic and sexual pleasure, texts that also turn around questions concerning form in its formation. Between sections of his text, Nancy includes a series of ';sketchbooks' on drawing, composed of quotations on art from different writers, artists, or philosophers.

Corpus II is a collection of recent essays by Jean-Luc Nancy dealing with embodiment, sexuality, pleasure and the crossing of borders and boundaries. It is both a celebration of our sexual existence and an unflinching philosophical reflection on all our ways of being together.

Offers an investigation into what is left of a monotheistic religious spirit - notably, a minimalist faith that is neither confessional nor credulous. Articulating this faith as works and as an objectless hope, this book deconstructs Christianity in search of the historical and reflective conditions that provided its initial energy.

This book uses a deconstructive method to bring together the history of Western Monotheism (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) and reflections on contemporary atheism. It develops Nancy's concepts of sense, world, and exposure.