Jean-Luc Nancy Knihy

Jean-Luc Nancy patří mezi nejvýznamnější žijící francouzské filosofy. Publikoval přes dvacet knih, mimo jiné na témata současné lidské společnosti (La communauté désoeuvrée, 1983), konečnosti(Une pensée finie, 1990) a těla (Corpus, 1992). Několik knih věnoval známým filosofům (například Marxovi a Heideggerovi). Svým myšlením navazuje zejména na Jacquese Derridu a jeho koncepci dekonstrukce, spolupracoval s Philippem Lacoue-Labarthem. Předkládaný spis Vetřelec popisuje Nancyho zkušenost s transplantací srdce, kterou podstoupil na začátku 90. let. Mezi hlavní témata patří přitakání lidské zranitelnosti a iluzornost představy, že naše tělesná existence je jasně ohraničenou pevností.

Jean-Luc Nancy (* 1940) patří mezi nejvýznamnější současné francouzské filosofy. Jeho stěžejní titul, vydaný poprvé v 80. letech, se snaží pojmenovat a obhájit původní význam pojmu, z něhož se v moderní společnosti stal jen svazek mezi na sobě nezávislými jedinci. V titulním eseji rozvíjí své úvahy v polemice s Georgem Bataillem a Martinem Heideggerem, v dalších textech se věnuje například konstitutivnímu významu mýtu nebo tomu, co je historie. Společnost pro Nancyho není sociální, ekonomický ani politický koncept, uvažuje o společné povaze bytí tak, jako by existence byla neoddělitelná od jejího podílu na tomto „spolu“. V nejlepších tradicích francouzské filosofie 20. století se Nancy pohybuje na samé hranici toho, co je v postmoderně možné formulovat.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 2004) was perhaps the finest and most influential image maker of the twentieth century, and his portraits are among his best-known work. Over a fifty-year period, he photographed some of the most eminent personalities of the era, as well as ordinary people, chosen as subjects because of their striking and unusual features. Originally published to coincide with an exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, this book features both well-known images and previously unpublished portraits: Ezra Pound, Andre Breton, Martin Luther King, Samuel Beckett, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Carl Jung, William Faulkner, Marilyn Monroe, Henri Matisse, and many more. Each photograph was chosen because it perfectly embodies Cartier-Bresson 's description of what he was attempting to communicate in his work: Above all I look for an inner silence. I seek to translate the personality and not an expression. The portraits reproduced here discreet, without artifice confirm once more the singular gift of Cartier-Bresson, who instinctively knew in which revealing fraction of a second to click the shutter.

Originally written for an exhibition Nancy curated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007, the text addresses the medium of drawing in light of form in its formation, of form as a formative force, opening drawing to questions of pleasure and desire.

"A leading philosopher reflects on how our experience of the world in changing in these crisis-ridden times"-- Provided by publisher

Is there a world anymore, let alone any sense of it? Acknowledging the lack of meaning in our own time, and the lack of a world at the centre of meanings we try to impose, Jean-Luc Nancy presents a critique of discourses that talk and write their way around these absences in our lives.

In the past, pandemics were considered divine punishment, but we now understand the biological characteristics of viruses and we know they are spread by social interaction and the movement of people. What used to be divine has become human – all too human, as Nietzsche would say. But while the virus dispels the divine, we are discovering that living beings are much more complex and harder to define than we had previously thought, and also discovering that the nature and exercise of political power are more complex than we may have thought. And this, argues Nancy, helps us to see why the term ‘biopolitics’ fails to grasp the conditions in which we now find ourselves. Life and politics challenge us together. Our scientific knowledge tells us that we are dependent only on our own technical power, but can we rely on technologies when knowledge itself includes uncertainties? If this is the case for technical power, it is much more so for political power, even as it presents itself as guided by objective data and responding to legitimate expectations. The virus is a magnifying glass that reveals the contradictions, limitations and frailties of the human condition, calling into question as never before our stubborn belief in progress and our hubristic sense of our own indestructibility as a species.

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

Coming by Jean-Luc Nancy is a lyrical examination of the French notion of jouissance. How did jouissance evolve from referring to the pleasure of ownership to the pleasure of orgasm? The philosophers Adèle van Reeth and Jean-Luc Nancy engage in a lively dialogue touching on authors as varied as Spinoza, the Marquis de Sade, and Henry Miller, and on subjects ranging from consumerism to mysticism.

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.