In this outstanding new collection, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy take up his perennial themes--community, embodiment, being-with, literature, politics, sense and meaning--as part of a deep and mature appreciation of the fact that we are richly, joyfully, and thoroughly sexual beings.

In a concise but extremely important essay, "The 'There Is' of the Sexual Relation," Nancy responds to Lacan's dictum that "there is no sexual relation" and makes a radical argument for the central place of the sexual relation as our originary mode of being with one another. "The Birth of Breasts" is a...