Description:
This volume focuses on the relational aspect of Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking. As Nancy himself showed, thinking might be a solitary activity but it is never singular in its dimension. Building on or breaking away from other thoughts, especially those by thinkers who had come before, thinking is always plural, relational. This "singular plural" dimension of thought in Nancy's philosophical writings demands explication.
In this book, some of today's leading scholars in the theoretical humanities shed light on how Nancy's thought both shares with and departs from Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Weil, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Lyotard, elucidating "the sharing of voices," in Nancy's phrase, between Nancy and these thinkers. Contributors: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Emily Apter, Rodolphe Gasché, Werner Hamacher, Eleanor Kaufman, Marie-Eve Morin, Timothy Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John H. SmithBrief description: Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature, and Chair of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at New York University. Her books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (coedited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). Her current project, What Is Just Translation? takes up questions of translation and justice across media. Her essays have appeared in Public Culture, diacritics, October, PMLA, Comparative Literature, Art Journal, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum, and Critical Inquiry. In 2019 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017-18 she served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association. In fall 2014 she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University, and in 2003-4 she was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. She edits the Translation/Transnation book series at Princeton University Press.
Review Quotes: This is an excellent and erudite collection of well-written essays on a philosopher whose output continues to have timely relevance for wider social, political, and cultural issues. The chapters are organized to form a coherent arc with successive pairs of chapters providing elegant supplements to one another and bringing out certain thematic issues in Nancy's work (worlding, his relation to phenomenology, metaphysics). The topics are also carefully chosen, adding new dimensions on Nancy and extending previous scholarship on him in novel and thought-provoking ways.---Naomi Waltham-Smith, Author of Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life