This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the human senses--to which the plurality of the arts has most frequently been referred--and sense or meaning in general. Throughout the five essays, Nancy's argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation...

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.

If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. Mistrusted by philosophy, forbidden and embraced by religions, manipulated as "spectacle" and proliferated in the media, images never cease to present their multiple aspects, their paradoxes, their flat but receding spaces. What is this power that lies in the depths and recesses of an image--which is always only an impenetrable surface? What secrets are concealed in the ground or in...

Christian parables have retained their force well beyond the sphere of religion; indeed, they share with much of modern literature their status as a form of address: Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.There is no message without there first being-or, more subtly, without there also being in the message itself-an address to a capacity or an aptitude for listening. This is not an exhortation of the kind Pay attention Rather, it is a warning: if you do not understand, the message will go away.The scene in the Gospel of John in which the newly risen Christ enjoins the Magdalene, Noli me tangere,...

Philosophers have largely ignored sleep, treating it as a useless negativity, mere repose for the body or at best a source for the production of unconscious signs out of the night of the soul.In an extraordinary theoretical investigation written with lyric intensity, The Fall of Sleep puts an end to this neglect by providing a deft yet rigorous philosophy of sleep. What does it mean to fallasleep? Might there exist something like a reasonof sleep, a reason at work in its own form or modality, a modality of being in oneself, of return to oneself, without the waking selfthat distinguishes Ifrom...

The four talks collected here transcribe lectures delivered to an audience of children between the ages of ten and fourteen, under the auspices of the little dialoguesseries at the Montreuil's center for the dramatic arts. Modeled on Walter Benjamin's Aufklrung for Kinderradio talks, this series aims to awaken its young audience to pressing philosophical concerns.Each talk in God, Justice, Love, Beauty explores what is at stake in these topics as essential moments in human experience. (Indeed, the book argues that they are constitutive of human experience.)...

Adoration is the second volume of the Deconstruction of Christianity, following Dis-Enclosure. The first volume attempted to demonstrate why it is necessary to open reason up not to a religious dimension but to one transcending reason as we have been accustomed to understanding it; the term "adoration" attempts to name the gesture of this dis-enclosed reason.

Adoration causes us to receive ignorance as truth: not a feigned ignorance, perhaps not even a "nonknowledge," nothing that would attempt to justify the negative again, but the simple, naked truth that there is...

Gandhi and Philosophy presents a breakthrough in philosophy by foregrounding modern and scientific elements in Gandhi's thought, animating the dazzling materialist concepts in his writings and opening philosophy to the new frontier of nihilism. This scintillating work breaks with the history of Gandhi scholarship, removing him from the postcolonial and Hindu-nationalist axis and disclosing him to be the enemy that the philosopher dreads and needs. Naming the congealing systematicity of Gandhi's thoughts with the Kantian term hypophysics, Mohan and Dwivedi develop his ideas through a...