This work, by one of the most innovative and challenging of contemporary thinkers, pivots on a Remark added by Hegel in 1831 to the second edition of his Science of Logic. As a model of close reading applied both to philosophical texts and the making of philosophical systems, The Speculative Remark played a significant role in transforming the practice of philosophy away from system building to analysis of specific linguistic detail, with meticulous attention to etymological, philological, and rhetorical nuance.

Nancy uses his extended examination of the Remark to delineate certain overall strategies in several Hegelian texts that militate for language-oriented readings of Hegel, as shown in Nancy's redefinition of such key terms as Aufhebung, mediation, and speculation. Nancy's reading progresses from speculative words and propositions to registering the speculative itself. While he avoids analyzing Hegel's system as such, Nancy reconstructs the Hegelian trajectory on a basis of tropes, building from propositions rather than structures, elements, and cycles.

The overview that emerges in the final chapter and epilogue constitutes a broad statement about Hegel's practice and significance, one nuanced by close attention to his deployment of rhetoric and linguistic play. The Speculative Remark thus furnishes a model for a theoretically aware approach to all systematic philosophy, while providing a significant historical contribution to the evolution of contemporary critical theory.

This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are internally related to ?Being Singular Plural.”

One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is his attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of the book is that being is always ?being with,” that ?I” is not prior to ?we,” that existence is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this ?being-with” not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the ?I” and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a ?society of spectacle” nor via some form of authenticity.

The five shorter essays impressively translate the philosophical insight of ?Being Singular Plural” into sophisticated discussions of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity politics, the Gulf War, and the tragic plight of Sarajevo. The essay ?Eulogy for the Mêlée,” in particular, is a brilliant discussion of identity and hybridism that resonates with many contemporary social concerns.

As Nancy moves through the exposition of his central concern, being-with, he engages a number of other important issues, including current notions of the ?other” and ?self” that are relevant to psychoanalytic, political, and multicultural concepts. He also offers astonishingly original reinterpretations of major philosophical positions, such as Nietzsche's doctrine of ?eternal recurrence,” Descartes's ?cogito,” and the nature of language and meaning.

?A truly exhilarating set of philosophical reflections on art and aesthetics. From the caves of Lascaux to Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin to the postmodern question of the marketplace and the ?end' of art, Nancy masterfully explicates the threshold role art plays in the philosophical distinctions between the sensory and the sensible, life and death, presentation and representation. Art is also compellingly shown to be the foundational category for any concept of religion, technology, or even ?humanity.'”

?Georges Van Den Abbeele, University of California, Davis

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 in Hegel's Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit?art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegel's historical argument concerning art as a thing of the past, as that which is negated by the dialectic of Spirit in the passage from aesthetic religion to revealed religion to philosophy.

In the book's second essay, Nancy reads what he calls Hegel's ?secret” (a secret even from Hegel): the emergence of art as presentation rather than representation. This intricate and compelling reading is key to the remaining essays: a virtuoso reading of Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin; an analysis of a traced hand in the grotto of Lascaux as the essential mimetic gesture, the monstration of self outside of self; and an account of the contemporary situation of art, including the question whether art today is still art. Nancy is among the very few present-day thinkers who ask rigorous and sustained questions about art and the practice of thinking about art.

Meridian: Crossing Aesthetic

The most systematic, radical, and lucid treatise on freedom that has been written in contemporary Continental philosophy, this book combats the renunciation of freedom attested in modern history by articulating the experience of freedom at work in thought itself.

The epoch of representation is as old as the West. Indeed, representation is the West, understood as what at once designates and expands its own limits. But what comes after the West? What comes after representation's disclosure of its own limit?

The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade of work, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, thebirth that characterizes being. We are now at the limit of representation, where objects as we experience them have been show to be merely objects of representationor rather, of presentation, since there is nothing to (re)present. The first part of this book, "Existence," asks how, today, one can give sense of meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it comes nude into the world, must now be our "sense."

In examining what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what presence "is"; rather we should conceive presence aspresence to someone, including to presence itself. This birth is not the constitution of an identity, but the endless departure of an identity from, and from within, its other, or others. Its coming is not desire butjouissance, the joy of averring oneself to be continually in the state of being borna rejoicing of birth, a birth of rejoicing.

The second section, "Poetry," asks: What art exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe (or rather, "exscribe," in a term the book develops) the coming existence as such? The author's trajectory in this book crosses those of Hegel, Schlegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, in their comments on art and politics, existence and corporeality, everyday life and its modes of existence and ecstasy. An analysis that dares this crossing involves all the varied accounts of existence, political as well as philosophical, and all the realms of poverty.