Henry Carter Hull

"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...

From Plato's Symposium to Hegel's truth as a "Bacchanalian revel," from the Bacchae of Euripedes to Nietzsche, philosophy holds a deeply ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication. At the same time, from Baudelaire to Lowry, from Proust to Dostoyevsky, literature and poetry are also haunted by scenes of intoxication, as if philosophy and literature share a theme that announces and navigates their proximities and differences. For Nancy, intoxication...

This book examines the practice of portraits as a way in to grasping the paradoxes of subjectivity. To Nancy, the portrait is suspended between likeness and strangeness, identity and distance, representation and presentation, exactitude and forcefulness. It can identify an individual, but it can also express the dynamics by means of which its subject advances and withdraws. The book consists of two extended essays written a decade apart but in close...

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:...