The Inoperative Community

The Inoperative Community

Author: Jean-Luc Nancy

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780816619245

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A collection of five essays of French philosopher Nancy, originally published in 1985-86: The Inoperative Community, Myth Interpreted, Literary Communism, Shattered Love, and Of Divine Places. A paper edition (1924-7) is available for $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


The Disavowed Community

The Disavowed Community

Author: Jean-Luc Nancy

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2016-09-01

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 0823273865

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)—a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “the inoperative community”—Nancy responds in turn with The Disavowed Community. Stemming from Jean-Christophe Bailly’s initial proposal to think community in terms of “number” or the “numerous,” and unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot’s text, Nancy’s new book addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his proximity to and distance from Blanchot’s thinking, from Bataille’s “community of lovers” to the relation between community, communitarianism, and being-in-common; to Marguerite Duras, to the Eucharist. A key rethinking of politics and the political, this exchange opens up a new understanding of community played out as a question of avowal.


Being Singular Plural

Being Singular Plural

Author: Jean-Luc Nancy

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780804739757

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, rethinks community and the very idea of the social. Nancy's fundamental argument is that being is always "being with," that "I" is not prior to "we," that existence is essentially co-existence.


The Unavowable Community

The Unavowable Community

Author: Maurice Blanchot

Publisher: Station Hill Press

Published: 2006-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781581771046

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Unavowable Community is an inquiry into the nature and possibility of community, asking whether there can be a community of individuals that is truly "communal." The problem, for Blanchot, is that the very terms of an ideal community make an "avowal" of membership in it a violation of the terms themselves. This meditation ranges from the problematic effects of a defect in language to actual historical experiments in community. The latter involves the life and work of George Bataille whose concerns (e.g. "the negative community") occupy the foreground of Blanchot's discussion. Taking as his point of departure an essay by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Blanchot appears once again as one of the most attentive readers of what is truly challenging in French thought. His deep interest in the fiction of Marguerite Duras extends this inquiry to include "The Community of Lovers," emerging from certain themes in Duras' recit, The Malady of Death. As Blanchot's first direct treatment of a subject that has long figured in or behind his work, this small but highly concentrated book stands as an important addition to his own contribution to literary, philosophical, social, and political thought, figuring as it does at the center of the emerging concern for a redefinition of politics and community. Readers of Blanchot know not to expect answers to the great questions that move his thought - rather, to live with the questions at the new level to which they have been raised in his discourse.


The Title of the Letter

The Title of the Letter

Author: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1992-04-14

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9780791409626

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is a close reading of Jacques Lacan’s seminal essay, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud, ” selected for the particular light it casts on Lacan’s complex relation to linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. It clarifies the way Lacan renews or transforms the psychoanalytic field, through his diversion of Saussure’s theory of the sign, his radicalization of Freud’s fundamental concepts, and his subversion of dominant philosophical values. The authors argue, however, that Lacan’s discourse is marked by a deep ambiguity: while he invents a new “language,” he nonetheless maintains the traditional metaphysical motifs of systemacity, foundation, and truth.


The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature

Author: Richard Bradford

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 912

ISBN-13: 1119652642

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume set: Includes studies of notable figures such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, as well as more recently influential writers such as Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Covers topics such as LGBT fiction, androgyny in contemporary British Literature, and post-Troubles Northern Irish Fiction Features a broad range of writers and topics covered by distinguished academics Includes an analysis of the interplay between individual authors and the major themes of the day, and whether an examination of the latter enables us to appreciate the former. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature provides essential reading for students as well as academics seeking to learn more about the history and future direction of contemporary British and Irish Literature.


The Sense of the World

The Sense of the World

Author: Jean-Luc Nancy

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780816626106

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Is there a "world" anymore, let alone any "sense" to it? Acknowledging the lack of meaning in our time, and the lack of a world at the center of meanings we try to impose, Jean-Luc Nancy presents a rigorous critique of the many discourses -- from philosophy and political science of psychoanalysis and art history -- that talk and write their way around these gaping absences in our lives. In an original style befitting his search for a new mode of thought, Nancy offers fragmentary readings of writers such as Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze insofar as their work reflects his concern with sense and the world. Rather than celebrate or bemoan the loss of meaning, between objectivity and subjectivity. Nancy's project entails a reconception of the field of philosophy itself, a rearticulation of philosophical practice. Neither recondite nor abstract it is concerned with the existence and experience of freedom -- the actuality of existence as experienced by contemporary communities of citizens, readers, and writers. Combining aesthetic, political, and philosophical considerations to convey a sense of the world between meaning and reality, ideal content and material form, this book offers a new way of understanding -- and responding to -- "the end of the world".


Sexistence

Sexistence

Author: Jean-Luc Nancy

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 0823294013

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sex, more than just a part of our experience, troubles our conceptions of existence. Drawing on a fascinating array of sources, ancient and modern, philosophical and literary, Jean-Luc Nancy explores and upholds the form-giving thrust of the drive. Nancy reminds us that we are more comfortable with the drama of prohibitions, ideals, repression, transgression, and destruction, which often hamper thinking about sex and gender, than with the affirmation of an originary trouble at the limits of language that divides being and opens the world. Sexistence develops a new philosophical account of sexuality that resonates with contemporary research on gender and biopolitics. Without attempting to be comprehensive, the book ranges from the ancient world through psychoanalysis to discover the turbulence of the drive at the heart of existence.


Undoing Work, Rethinking Community

Undoing Work, Rethinking Community

Author: James A. Chamberlain

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-02-15

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1501714872

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. Chamberlain focuses on the regimes of flexibility and the unconditional basic income, arguing that while both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also incur the risk of shoring up the work society rather than challenging it. To transform the work society, he shows that we must also reconfigure the place of paid work in our lives and rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level. Throughout, he speaks to a broad readership, and his focus on freedom and social justice will interest scholars and activists alike. Chamberlain offers a range of strategies that will allow us to uncouple our deepest human values from the notion that worth is generated only through labor.