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.

What does it mean to 'fall' asleep? Might there exist something like a 'reason' of sleep, a reason at work in its own form or modality, a modality of being in oneself, of return to oneself, without the waking 'self' that distinguishes 'I' from 'you' and from the world? This book attempts to answer these questions.

Suspended between likeness and strangeness, portraiture can identify an individual only at the moment of its advancementand withdrawal. Examining 36 portraits across two millennia, Nancy shows how, despite photograph's ubiquity, the forms of appearing that define the portraitcontinue to mark the bodies and representations that dominate our world.

Jean-Luc Nancy provides an analysis of the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger's recently published Black Notebooks. Nancy refers to a philosophical or "historial" anti-Semitism marked, nonetheless, by the "banality" of ordinary anti-Semitism pervading Europe. Heidegger's thought is placed in the broader context of the European (especially Christian) impulse toward new beginnings.

Our contemporary challenge, according to the authors, is that a new world has quietly cropped up on us and is, in fact, already here. In this book, the authors invite us on an uncharted walk into barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, "What's this world coming to?," is used to question our conventional thinking about the world.

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.

Ego Sum proposes a provocative and unprecedented reading of Descartes. By paying attention to mode of presentation of Descartes's philosophy, Nancy challenges our common understanding of the Cogito and shows how Descartes's ego is not the self-certain, self-transparent Subject of metaphysics but a mouth that opens to utter: ego sum.

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.

Jean-Luc Nancy discusses his life's work with Pierre-Philippe Jandin. As Nancy looks back on his philosophical texts, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts.

The renowned philosopher offers ';a powerful reflection on our times... and the fate of our civilization, as revealed by the catastrophe of Fukushima' (Franois Raffoul, Louisiana State University). In 2011, a tsunami flooded Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear meltdowns, the effects of which will spread through generations and have an impact on all living things. In After Fukushima, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy examines the nature of catastrophes in the era of globalization and technology. He argues that in today's interconnected world, the effects of any disaster will spread in the way we currently associate only with nuclear risk. Can a catastrophe be an isolated occurrence? Is there such a thing as a ';natural' catastrophe when all of our technologiesnuclear energy, power supply, water supplyare necessarily implicated, drawing together the biological, social, economic, and political? In this provocative and engaging work, Nancy examines these questions and more. Exclusive to this English edition are two interviews with Nancy conducted by Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Yuji Nishiyama and Yotetsu Tonaki.

26 reflections on nude images from the history of Western art including Rembrandt, Goya, David Hockney and Nan Golden. The authors, both philosophers, develop an approach to the nude that involves shedding preconceived concepts and exposing ourselves to the fleeting sense that passes over the surface of the nude's skin and over the surface of the image.

A powerful essay on identity and its fate in our contemporary world. Against various attempts to cling to established identities, Nancy shows that an identity is always open: to alterity and its transformations. Ultimately, one does not have an identity but has to become what one is, without ever returning to a same but solely to difference and singularity.

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.

Celebrates the particular communication of thoughts that takes place by means of the business of writing, producing, and selling books. This book features a semiology of the cultural practice that begins with the character of the writer's voice and culminates in a customer's crossing the bookstore threshold, package under arm, on the way home.

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 collection of philosophical essays interrogates key notions and preoccupations of the phenomenological tradition. While using Heidegger's "Being and Time" as its point of reference and dispute, the book also confronts other philosphers, such as Kant, Nietzche and Derrida.

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.

Nancy's classic study of the role of language in Kant demonstrates why the question of how to write philosophy, of philosophical style, is not just ancillary to critical philosophy but goes to the heart of the project of establishing human reason in its autonomy and freedom.

Nancy's The Speculative Remark played a significant role in transforming the practice of philosophy away from system building to analysis of specific linguistic detail.