Corpus II - (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) by Jean-Luc Nancy (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- In this outstanding new collection, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy takes 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.
- About the Author: Jean-Luc Nancy (Author) Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg.
- 160 Pages
- Psychology, Human Sexuality
- Series Name: Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
Description
About the Book
Corpus II is a collection of recent essays by Jean-Luc Nancy dealing with embodiment, sexuality, pleasure and the crossing of borders and boundaries. It is both a celebration of our sexual existence and an unflinching philosophical reflection on all our ways of being together.Book Synopsis
In this outstanding new collection, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy takes 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 beautiful reflection on human anatomy and the image and reality of the breast that draws on literature and poetry from Sappho to Beckett.
In "Strange Foreign Bodies," Nancy revisits the philosophical territory of the relation between mind or spirit and body but reminds us that bodies are at once familiar to us and also irredeemably strange. "The Body of Pleasure" explores the body as the site of essentially finite pleasure, "finite because it reaches the end, the limit where the body tends to lose all form, becomes matter, an impenetrable mass. But this end also forms the touch of the outside and with it the joy of the world."
Finally, "The Sexual Relation--and Then" builds on the insight into the central place of the sexual relation by considering specifically the generative possibilities of sex and the fact that we all came to be as the product of sexual relations.
Nancy's Corpus, published in English in 2008, was the philosopher's most sustained consideration of embodiment to date. Now, in Corpus II, he carries that work in new directions which constantly remind us that human bodies are sexed and sexual bodies.
Review Quotes
"A collection of dense and beautifully written and composed essays. . . .
Rich, powerful, and stunningly original."
About the Author
Jean-Luc Nancy (Author)Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including The Literary Absolute, Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Listening, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. Anne O'Byrne (Translator)
Anne O'Byrne is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Doctoral Program Director at Stony Brook University. Her work focuses on the political and ontological questions that arise from gendered embodiment and labor, including translations of Jean- Luc Nancy and writings ranging across the major Continental thinkers of the twentieth century and Julia Kristeva, as well as a sustained investment in Irish studies. She is currently working on a book on genocide and generation.
