<div>The renowned philosopher contemplates the medium of drawing in &ldquo;a book full of dazzling insights, imaginative curves and provocative renewals&rdquo; (Sarah Clift, University of King&rsquo;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 form&mdash;viewing the act of drawing as a formative force. Recalling that the terms &lsquo;drawing&rsquo; and &lsquo;design&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;sketchbooks&rdquo; on drawing, composed of quotations on art from different writers, artists, or philosophers.</div>

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The Pleasure in Drawing

<div>Three renowned philosophers discuss the work of Martin Heidegger, and the moral quandary of engaging with a major philosopher who was also a Nazi. In February 1988, philosophers Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger&rsquo;s thought. Heidegger&rsquo;s involvement in Nazism has always been an unsettling stain on his legacy. But what is its real relation to his work in phenomenology or hermeneutics? What are the responsibilities of those who read, analyze, and elaborate this thought? And what is at stake should this important but compromised philosopher be completely dismissed? The reflections presented by three of the most prominent of Heidegger&rsquo;s readers, spoken in French and transcribed here, were an attempt to approach these questions before a broad public while maintaining a nuanced view of the questions at issue. Ranging over two days and including exchanges with one another and with the audience, the discussions pursued by these major thinkers remain highly relevant today. Also included are a forward by Jean-Luc Nancy and a preface by Reiner Wiehl.</div>

Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics

<div>The renowned philosopher offers &ldquo;a powerful reflection on our times . . . and the fate of our civilization, as revealed by the catastrophe of Fukushima&rdquo; (Fran&ccedil;ois Raffoul, Louisiana State University). In 2011, a tsunami flooded Japan&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;natural&rdquo; catastrophe when all of our technologies&mdash;nuclear energy, power supply, water supply&mdash;are 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.</div>

After Fukushima

<div>“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 to philosophy. Nancy pursues such questions as literature’s claims to truth, the status of narrative, the relation of poetry and prose, and the unity of a book or of a text, and he addresses a number of major European writers, including Dante, Sterne, Rousseau, Hölderlin, Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot. The final section offers a number of impressive pieces by Nancy that completely merge his concerns for philosophy and literature and philosophy-as-literature. These include a lengthy parody of Valéry’s “La Jeune Parque,” several original poems by Nancy, and a beautiful prose-poetic discourse on an installation by Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani that incorporates the Faust theme. Opening with a substantial Introduction by Jean-Michel Rabaté that elaborates Nancy’s importance as a literary thinker, this book constitutes the most substantial statement to date by one of today’s leading philosophers on a discipline that has been central to his work across his career. “Among Nancy’s many distinguished writings, Expectation demands recognition.” —Choice</div>

Expectation

<div>From one of France’s leading contemporary thinkers, “an astutely reasoned philosophical text, offering a revolutionary analysis of theistic religion” (The Midwest Book Review). This book is a profound and eagerly anticipated 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, Nancy deconstructs Christianity in search of the historical and reflective conditions that provided its initial energy. Working through Blanchot and Nietzsche, re-reading Heidegger and Derrida, Nancy turns to the Epistle of Saint James rather than those of Saint Paul, discerning in it the primitive essence of Christianity as hope. The “religion that provided the exit from religion,” as he terms Christianity, consists in the announcement of an end. It is the announcement that counts, however, rather than any finality. In this announcement there is a proximity to others and to what was once called parousia. But parousia is no longer presence; it is no longer the return of the Messiah. Rather, it is what is near us and does not cease to open and to close, a presence deferred yet imminent. In a demystified age where we are left with a vision of a self-enclosed world—in which humans are no longer mortals facing an immortal being, but entities whose lives are accompanied by the time of their own decline—parousia stands as a question. Can we venture the risk of a decentered perspective, such that the meaning of the world can be found both inside and outside, within and without our so-immanent world?</div>

Dis-Enclosure

<div>The eminent philosopher and an emerging astrophysicist return to the ancient art of cosmology in a study of plural worlds and their rebuilding. Our contemporary challenge, according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, is that a new world has stolen up on us. We no longer live in a world, but in worlds. We do not live in a universe anymore, but rather in a multiverse. We no longer create; we appropriate and montage. And we no longer build sovereign, hierarchical political institutions; we form local assemblies and networks of cross-national assemblages—and we do this at the same time as we form multinational corporations that no longer pay taxes to the state. Nancy and Barrau 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. We soon find ourselves living among heaps of odd bits and pieces that are amassing without any unifying force or center, living not only in a time of ruin and fragmentation but in one of rebuilding. Astrophysicist Aurelien Barrau articulates a major shift in the paradigm of contemporary physics from a universe to a multiverse. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Of Struction” is a contemporary comment on the project of deconstruction and French poststructuralist thought. Together Barrau and Nancy argue that contemporary thought has shifted from deconstruction to what they carefully call the struction of dis-order.</div>

What's These Worlds Coming To?

<div>The renowned philosopher provides “noteworthy contributions to themes connected with images, imagination, representation, aesthetics, and . . . religion.” —Journal of American Academy of Religion What is this power that lies in the depths and recesses of an image—which is always only an impenetrable surface? What secrets are concealed in the ground or in the figures of an image—which never does anything but show just exactly what it is and nothing else? How does the immanence of images open onto their unimaginable others, their imageless origin? In this collection of writings on images and visual art, Jean-Luc Nancy explores such questions through an extraordinary range of references. From Renaissance painting and landscape to photography and video, from the image of Roman death masks to the language of silent film, from Cleopatra to Kant and Heidegger, Nancy pursues a reflection on visuality that goes far beyond the many disciplines with which it intersects. He offers insights into the religious, cultural, political, art historical, and philosophical aspects of the visual relation, treating such vexed problems as the connection between image and violence, the sacred status of images, and, in a profound and important essay, the forbidden representation of the Shoah. In the background of all these investigations lies a preoccupation with finitude, the unsettling forces envisaged by the images that confront us, the limits that bind us to them, the death that stares back at us from their frozen traits and distant intimacies. In these vibrant and complex essays, a central figure in European philosophy continues to work through some of the most important questions of our time.</div>

The Ground of the Image

<div>“A book of philosophy very much captivated with music . . . an acoustemological elaboration of [Nancy’s] theorization of difference.” —Journal of the American Musicological Society In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy examines sound in relation to the human body. How is listening different from hearing? What does listening entail? How does what is heard differ from what is seen? Can philosophy even address listening, écouter, as opposed to entendre, which means both hearing and understanding? Unlike the visual arts, sound produces effects that persist long after it has stopped. The body, Nancy says, is itself like an echo chamber, responding to music by inner vibrations as well as outer attentiveness. Since “the ear has no eyelid” (Pascal Quignard), sound cannot be blocked out or ignored: our whole being is involved in listening, just as it is involved in interpreting what it hears. The mystery of music and of its effects on the listener is subtly examined. Nancy’s skill as a philosopher is to bring the reader companionably along with him as he examines these fresh and vital questions; by the end of the book the reader feels as if listening very carefully to a person talking quietly, close to the ear. “Listening adds a much needed poetic register to the philosophy of music and sonic culture.” —Parallax “In Charlotte Mandell’s splendid translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s brief but passionate À L’Écoute, the French philosopher gives us a glimpse of this completely different philosophy of music.” —Current Musicology</div>

Listening

<div>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.</div>

Jean-Luc Nancy
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Books By Jean-Luc Nancy (8 Books)

The Pleasure in Drawing

After Fukushima

Expectation

Dis-Enclosure

What's These Worlds Coming To?

The Ground of the Image

Listening

Sexistence

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Jean-Luc NancyFollow this author