Description: 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.
Brief description: Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg and one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century's foremost thinkers of politics, art, and the body. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis.