Jean Luc Nancy Livres

« On ne cesse de répéter que notre époque manque de sens, et qu’elle est en quête de sens. Ce livre essaie de dire que ce diagnostic n’est peut-être pas le bon. Nous avons perdu, en effet, le “sens” que les religions et les philosophies proposaient comme une “vision du monde”, avec ses valeurs et ses buts. Cette époque est révolue. Cela veut dire qu’il nous reste à découvrir comment le monde lui-même, en tant que l’espace de nos existences, et selon la dimension mondiale qui devient la sienne, est le sens. Mais on ne peut le reconnaître comme tel qu’à la condition de reconnaître aussi qu’il n’y a pas à s’approprier ce sens comme une signification. Le sens de l’existence, c’est précisément qu’elle ne puisse pas maîtriser son sens. Ce qui, après tout, a peut-être toujours été le savoir fondamental de toute philosophie.» J.-L. N.

Banal, oui, lantismitisme ltait dans les annes 1930. Aussi ordinaire que la dtestation de la vermine. Eide dun complot mondial des juifs navait pas besoin dtre argumente : elle allait de soi. Cette banalit pour reprendre le mot de Hannah Arendt - soutenait une haine, une condamnation, bientt une extermination. Heidegger a repris les formules les plus violentes de cette doxa en les intgrant un systme de pense : les juifs accomplissaient leffondrement de lOccident. Ctait vident. On savait quil tait, comme tant dautres, antismite. On navait pas lu les notes de ces Cahiers noirs qui entranent dans linfamie tout un pan de sa pense. Non pas la pense de ltre, mais celle dune histoire-destin et du dsir farouche dun nouveau commencement. Inaugurer, fonder, tre dans linitial, vieux prurit mtaphysique... Il faut reprendre la lecture. Il faut affronter ce que recouvre cette banalit hideuse. Non seulement chez Heidegger mais partout.

Desirer, qu'est-ce que c'est ? Quelle difference entre desirer, vouloir ou avoir besoin ? Jean-Luc Nancy, auteur fidele de la collection, s'attache a percevoir comment le desir travaille en nous, et comment nous vivons avec cette force toujours a l'oeuvre, quels que soient nos ages et nos situations.

< > : la conjonction doit être comprise simultanément et alternativement dans ses valeurs disjonctive, substitutive ou conjonctive

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

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.