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"Offers more recent and more focused reflections on the nature of representation and art, especially painting."—Book Forum 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 the figures of an image—which never does anything but show just exactly
what it is and nothing else? How does the immanence of images open onto
their unimaginable others, their imageless origin?
In this collection of writings on images and visual art, Jean-Luc Nancy
explores such questions through an extraordinary range of references. From
Renaissance painting and landscape to photography and video, from the image
of Roman death masks to the language of silent film, from Cleopatra to Kant
and Heidegger, Nancy pursues a reflection on visuality that goes far beyond the
many disciplines with which it intersects. He offers insights into the religious,
cultural, political, art historical, and philosophical aspects of the visual relation,
treating such vexed problems as the connection between image and violence,
the sacred status of images, and, in a profound and important essay, the
forbidden representation of the Shoah. In the background of all these
investigations lies a preoccupation with finitude, the unsettling forces
envisaged by the images that confront us, the limits that bind us to them,
the death that stares back at us from their frozen traits and distant intimacies.
In these vibrant and complex essays, a central figure in European philosophy
continues to work through some of the most important questions of our time.
| Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université
Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. The most recent of his many books to be published in
English are A Finite Thinking and Multiple Arts. |
| Jeff Fort has translated works by authors such as Jean Genet, Maurice
Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. He is currently a lecturer in the Department
of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. |
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