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...

First published in 1979 but never available in English until now, Ego Sum challenges, through a careful and unprecedented reading of Descartes' writings, the picture of Descartes as the father of modern philosophy: the thinker who founded the edifice of knowledge on the absolute self-certainty of a Subject fully transparent to itself. While other theoretical discourses, such as psychoanalysis, have also attempted to subvert this Subject, Nancy shows...

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:...