Identity: Fragments, Frankness is a rich and powerful essay on the notion of identity and on how it operates in our contemporary world. In contrast to the various attempts to cling to established identities or to associate identity with dubious agendas, Nancy shows that an identity is always open to alterity and its transformations. Against cynical initiatives that seek to instrumentalize the question of identity in an attempt to manipulate sentiment...

This second volume in Nancy's The Deconstruction of Christianity explores the stance or bearing that would be appropriate for us now, in the wake of the dis-enclosure of religion and the retreat of God: that of adoration. Adoration is stretched out toward things, but without phenomenological intention. In our present historical time, we have come to see relation itself as the divine. The address and exclamation--the salut!--that constitutes adoration...

From Plato's Symposium to Hegel's truth as a "Bacchanalian revel," from the Bacchae of Euripedes to Nietzsche, philosophy holds a deeply ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication. At the same time, from Baudelaire to Lowry, from Proust to Dostoyevsky, literature and poetry are also haunted by scenes of intoxication, as if philosophy and literature share a theme that announces and navigates their proximities and differences. For Nancy, intoxication...

Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French notion of jouissance. How did jouissance evolve from referring to the pleasure of possessing a material thing (property, wealth) to the pleasure of orgasm, from appropriation to dis-appropriation, from consumption to consummation? The philosophers Adèle van Reeth and Jean-Luc Nancy engage in a lively dialogue, ranging from consumerism to video games to mysticism and from Spinoza, Hegel, and Augustine...