Portrait / Jean-Luc Nancy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nancy, Jean-Luc, Author.

Contributor:

Clift, Sarah

Librett, Jeffrey S.

Sparks, Simon

Series:

Lit Z

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Portraits--Philosophy.

Portraits.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This book examines the practice of portraits as a way in to grasping the paradoxes of subjectivity. To Nancy, the portrait is suspended between likeness and strangeness, identity and distance, representation and presentation, exactitude and forcefulness. It can identify an individual, but it can also express the dynamics by means of which its subject advances and withdraws. The book consists of two extended essays written a decade apart but in close conversation, in which Nancy considers the range of aspirations articulated by the portrait. Heavily illustrated, it includes a newly written preface bringing the two essays together and a substantial Introduction by Jeffrey Librett, which places Nancy’s work within the range of thinking of aesthetics and the subject, from religion, to aesthetics, to psychoanalysis. Though undergirded by a powerful grasp of the philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition that has rendered our sense of the subject so problematic, Nancy’s book is at heart a delightful, unpretentious reading of three dozen portraits, from ancient drinking mugs to recent experimental or parodic pieces in which the artistic representation of a sitter is made from their blood, germ cultures, or DNA. The contemporary world of ubiquitous photos, Nancy argues, in no way makes the portrait a thing of the past. On the contrary, the forms of appearing that mark the portrait continue to challenge how we see the bodies and representations that dominate our world.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface to the English-Language Edition

Introduction. The Subject of the Portrait

The Autonomous Portrait

Resemblance

Recall

Look

L’altro ritratto

Character

The Eye

Visageity

Mimesis

Withdrawn Presence

Ipseity

Theophany

Revelation

Divine Abandonment

Dis-figuration

Eclipse

Infinite Detachment

Coda I

Coda II

Coda III

Notes

Figures

Notes:

Translated from the French.

This edition previously issued in print: 2018.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

9780823281466

0823281469

9780823279968

0823279960

9780823279975

0823279979

OCLC:

1038009686