Un entretien avec Jean-Luc Gleyze, président du Conseil départemental de la Gironde, qui porte avec une vingtaine de départements français un projet d’expérimentation d’un revenu de base d’un montant suffisant, d’au moins mille euros, automatique, inconditionnel, mais dégressif, c’est-à-dire dépendant des revenus de chacun.

This paper is not an article in a regular sense. It is a dialogue between François-David Sebbah, one of the two editors of this topical collection, and Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most eminent representatives of the contemporary French Thought. This dialogue took place in the first half of 2022 in a written form, because of the sanitary restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and because Nancy was heavily sick. Sebbah sent to Nancy a text, corresponding to Section 2.1, (...) and Nancy responded to it with another text, corresponding to Section 2.2. Unfortunately, Nancy died on August 23, 2022, and could not revise his own text nor pursue the dialogue, as it was originally planned. For this reason, an introductory clarification by Sebbah, corresponding to Section 1, has been added. The purpose of such clarification is to introduce the reader to Nancy’s philosophy of technology—although technology never had a central role in Nancy’s reflections. In Section 2.1, Sebbah proposes a distinction between “French Theory,” “French Thought,” and “French Philosophy.” He also proposes a list of twelve possible intersections between the French Thought and the philosophy of technology. In Section 2.2, Nancy criticizes the use of expressions such as “French Thought.” He also insists, in a Heideggerian vein, on the fact that Technology (with a capital “T”) does not depend on human ends but has its own ends. (shrink)

In _The Deconstruction of Sex_, Jean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh discuss how a deconstructive approach to sex helps us negotiate discourses about sex and foster a better understanding of how sex complicates our everyday existence in the age of #MeToo. Throughout their conversation, Nancy and Goh engage with topics ranging from relation, penetration, and subjection to touch, erotics, and jouissance. They show how despite its entrenchment in social norms and centrality to our being-in-the-world, sex lacks a clearly defined essence. (...) At the same time, they point to the potentiality of literature to inscribe the senses of sex. In so doing, Nancy and Goh prompt us to reconsider our relations with ourselves and others through sex in more sensitive, respectful, and humble ways without bracketing the troubling aspects of sex. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Marion advances a controversial argument for a God free of all categories of Being. Taking a characteristically postmodern stance, Marion challenges a fundamental premise of both metaphysics and neo-Thomist theology: that God, before all else, must be. Rather, he locates a "God without Being" in the realm of agape, of Christian charity or love. This volume, the first translation into English of the work of this leading Catholic philosopher, offers a contemporary perspective on the nature of God. "An (...) immensely thoughtful book. . . . It promises a rich harvest. Marion's highly original treatment of the idol and the icon, the Eucharist, boredom and vanity, conversion and prayer takes theological and philosophical discussions to a new level."--Norman Wirzba, Christian Century. (shrink)

In 1978, just before his return to the international stage, the world’s most renowned art-film director Jean-Luc Godard improvised a series of fourteen one-hour talks at Concordia University in Montreal. These talks, part of a projected video history of cinema, were published in French in 1980. In this definitive English-language volume, translator Timothy Barnard has worked from the original footage to carefully revise and correct the faulty French transcription. The result is the most extensive and revealing account of Godard’s (...) own work, his methods, and his critical opinions. Never has Godard been as loquacious, lucid, and disarmingly frank as he is here. This volume, by the wittiest and most idiosyncratic genius cinema has known and available for the first time in English, is certain to become one of the great classics of film literature. Distributed exclusively worldwide, excluding Canada, by Rutgers University Press for caboose books, Montreal. (shrink)

The last and most poignant of these essays is The Intruder, Nancys philosophical meditation on his heart transplant.

Successful biomedical data mining and information extraction require a complete picture of biological phenomena such as genes, biological processes, and diseases; as these exist on different levels of granularity. To realize this goal, several freely available heterogeneous databases as well as proprietary structured datasets have to be integrated into a single global customizable scheme. We will present a tool to integrate different biological data sources by mapping them to a proprietary biomedical ontology that has been developed for the purposes of (...) making computers understand medical natural language. (shrink)

In Being and Time, Heidegger affirms that being-with or Mitsein is an essential constitution of Dasein but he does not submit this existential to the same rigorous analyses as other existentials. In this essay, Jean-Luc Nancy points to the different places where Heidegger erased the possibility of thinking an essential with that he himself opened. This erasure is due, according to Nancy, to the subordination of Mitsein to a thinking of the proper and the improper. The polarization of Being-with (...) between an improper face, the Anyone, and a proper one, the people, which is also, as Nancy shows, a polarization between everydayness and historicity, between a being-together in exteriority (indifference and anonymity) and a being-together in interiority (union through destiny), between a solitary dying and the sacrificial death in combat, leaves the essential with unthought. This essay shows not only the tensions that arise out of Heidegger’s own analyses of Mitsein and affect the whole of Being and Time but also underlines in the end a “shortfall in thinking” inherent not only to Heidegger’s work but, as Nancy claims, to our Western tradition, a shortfall which Nancy has attempted to remedy in his Being Singular Plural. (shrink)

The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, the birth that characterises being. The first part of this book, 'Existence' asks how, today, one can give sense or 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 as presence to someone, including to presence itself. The second section, 'Poetry', asks: What if art exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe the coming of 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 and philosophical, as well as all the realms of poetry. (shrink)

This is the most systematic, the most radical, and the most lucid treatise on freedom that has been written in contemporary Continental philosophy. Finding its guiding motives in Kant's second Critique and working its way up to and beyond Heidegger and Adorno, this book marks the most advanced position in the thinking of freedom that has been proposed after Sartre and Levinas. If we do not think being itself as a freedom, we are condemned to think of freedom as a (...) pure 'idea' or 'right', and being-in-the-world, in turn, as a blind and obtuse necessity. Since Kant, philosophy and our world have relentlessly confronted this schism. To combat this renunciation of freedom, one must think the experience of freedom in thought itself: what it is that, simply in order for there to be thinking, must partake of freedom. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy provides an analysis of the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger's recently published Black Notebooks. Nancy refers to a philosophical or "historial" anti-Semitism marked, nonetheless, by the "banality" of ordinary anti-Semitism pervading Europe. Heidegger's thought is placed in the broader context of the European (especially Christian) impulse toward new beginnings.

Christian parables have retained their force well beyond the sphere of religion; indeed, they share with much of modern literature their status as a form of address: "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear." There is no message without there first being--or, more subtly, without there also being in the message itself--an address to a capacity or an aptitude for listening. This is not an exhortation of the kind "Pay attention!" Rather, it is a warning: if you do not (...) understand, the message will go away.The scene in the Gospel of John in which the newly risen Christ enjoins the Magdalene, "Noli me tangere," a key moment in the general parable made up of his life, is a particularly good example of this sudden appearance in which a vanishing plays itself out. Resurrected, he speaks, makes an appeal, and leaves."Do not touch me." Beyond the Christ story, this everyday phrase says something important about touching in general. It points to the place where touching must not touch in order to carry out its touch (its art, its tact, its grace). The title essay of this volume is both a contribution to Nancy's project of a "deconstruction of Christianity" and an exemplum of his remarkable writings on art, in analyses of "Noli me tangere" paintings by such painters as Rembrandt, Dürer, Titian, Pontormo, Bronzino, and Correggio. It is also in tacit dialogue with Jacques Derrida's monumental tribute to Nancy's work in Le toucher--Jean-Luc Nancy.For the English-language edition, Nancy has added an unpublished essay on the Magdalene and the English translation of "In Heaven and on the Earth," a remarkable lecture he gave in a series designed to address children between six and twelve years of age. Closely aligned with his entire project of "the deconstruction of Christianity,'" this lecture may give the most accesible account of his ideas about God. (shrink)

Along with Husserl's Ideas and Heidegger's Being and Time, Being Given is one of the classic works of phenomenology in the twentieth century. Through readings of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and twentieth-century French phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Henry), it ventures a bold and decisive reappraisal of phenomenology and its possibilities. Its author's most original work to date, the book pushes phenomenology to its limits in an attempt to redefine and recover the phenomenological ideal, which the author argues has never (...) been realized in any of the historical phenomenologies. Against Husserl's reduction to consciousness and Heidegger's reduction to Dasein, the author proposes a third reduction to givenness, wherein phenomena appear unconditionally and show themselves from themselves at their own initiative. Being Given is the clearest, most systematic response to questions that have occupied its author for the better part of two decades. The book articulates a powerful set of concepts that should provoke new research in philosophy, religion, and art, as well as at the intersection of these disciplines. Some of the significant issues it treats include the phenomenological definition of the phenomenon, the redefinition of the gift in terms not of economy but of givenness, the nature of saturated phenomena, and the question “Who comes after the subject?” Throughout his consideration of these issues, the author carefully notes their significance for the increasingly popular fields of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Being Given is therefore indispensable reading for anyone interested in the question of the relation between the phenomenological and the theological in Marion and emergent French phenomenology. (shrink)

At once an introduction to Hegel and a radically new vision of his thought, this work penetrates the entirety of the Hegelian field with brevity and precision, while compromising neither rigour nor depth.

This collection of writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, the renowned French critic and poet, delves into the history of philosophy to locate a fundamentally poetic modus operandi there. The book represents a daring mixture of Nancy’s philosophical essays, writings about artworks, and artwork of his own. With theoretical rigor, Nancy elaborates on the intrinsic multiplicity of art as a concept of “making,” and outlines the tensions inherent in the faire, the “making” that characterizes the very process of production and thereby (...) the structure of poetry in all its forms. Nancy shows that this multiplication that belongs to the notion of art makes every single work communicate with every other, all material in the artwork appeal to some other material, and art the singular plural of a praxis of the finite imparting of an infinity which is actually there in every utterance. In the collection, Nancy engages with the work of, among others, François Martin, Maurice Blanchot, and On Kawara. (shrink)

Written in a direct and accessible, almost manifesto-like style, The Truth of Democracy presents a forceful plea that we rethink democracy not as one political regime or form among others but as that which opens up the very experience of ...

One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is an 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 this book is that being is always 'being with', that 'I' is not prior to 'we', that existence is essentially co-existence. He thinks this being together, 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'. (shrink)

This book is a rich collection of philosophical essays radically interrogating key notions and preoccupations of the phenomenological tradition. While using Heidegger’s Being and Time as its permanent point of reference and dispute, this collection also confronts other important philosophers, such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Derrida. The projects of these pivotal thinkers of finitude are relentlessly pushed to their extreme, with respect both to their unexpected horizons and to their as yet unexplored analytical potential. A Finite Thinking shows that, paradoxically, (...) where the thought of finitude comes into its own it frees itself, not only to reaffirm a certain transformed and transformative presence, but also for a non-religious reconsideration and reaffirmation of certain theologemes, as well as of the body, heart, and love. This book shows the literary dimension of philosophical discourse, providing important enabling ideas for scholars of literature, cultural theory, and philosophy. (shrink)

Does Descartes belong to metaphysics? What do we mean when we say "metaphysics"? These questions form the point of departure for Jean-Luc Marion's groundbreaking study of Cartesian thought. Analyses of Descartes' notion of the ego and his idea of God show that if Descartes represents the fullest example of metaphysics, he no less transgresses its limits. Writing as philosopher and historian of philosophy, Marion uses Heidegger's concept of metaphysics to interpret the Cartesian corpus--an interpretation strangely omitted from Heidegger's own (...) history of philosophy. This interpretation complicates and deepens the Heideggerian concept of metaphysics, a concept that has dominated twentieth-century philosophy. Examinations of Descartes' predecessors (Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Suarez) and his successors (Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel) clarify the meaning of the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. Expertly translated by Jeffrey Kosky, this work will appeal to historians of philosophy, students of religion, and anyone interested in the genealogy of contemporary thought and its contradictions. (shrink)

While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of love itself. Marion begins his profound and personal (...) book with a critique of Descartes’ equation of the ego’s ability to doubt with the certainty that one exists—“I think, therefore I am”—arguing that this is worse than vain. We encounter being, he says, when we first experience love: I am loved, therefore I am; and this love is the reason I care whether I exist or not. This philosophical base allows Marion to probe several manifestations of love and its variations, including carnal excitement, self-hate, lying and perversion, fidelity, the generation of children, and the love of God. Throughout, Marion stresses that all erotic phenomena, including sentimentality, pornography, and even boasts about one’s sexual conquests, stem not from the ego as popularly understood but instead from love. A thoroughly enlightening and captivating philosophical investigation of a strangely neglected subject, The Erotic Phenomenon is certain to initiate feverish new dialogue about the philosophical meanings of that most desirable and mysterious of all concepts—love. (shrink)

En este texto Jean-Luc Marion ofrece una lectura crítica de la interpretación derridiana de Dionisio, aclarando su propia posición respecto de la teología mística. A partir de un análisis de cada una de las cuatro objeciones presentadas por Derrida, Marion presenta la tercera vía, la vía de la de-nominación; analiza el estatus de la alabanza y de la plegaria; distingue la mística de la metafísica de la presencia y de la ontoteología; y delinea los rasgos del fenómeno de la (...) revelación. (shrink)

Marked sharply by its time and place (Paris in the 1970s), this early theological text by Jean-Luc Marion nevertheless maintains a strikingly deep resonance with his most recent, groundbreaking, and ever more widely discussed phenomenology. And while Marion will want to insist on a clear distinction between the theological and phenomenological projects, to read each in light of the other can prove illuminating for both the theological and the philosophical reader - and perhaps above all for the reader who (...) wants to read in both directions at once, the reader concerned with those points of interplay and undecidability where theology and philosophy inform, provoke, and challenge one another in endlessly complex ways." "In both his theological and his phenomenological projects Marion's central effort to free the absolute or unconditional (be it theology's God or phenomenology's phenomenon) from the various limits and preconditions of human thought and language will imply a thoroughgoing critique of all metaphysics, and above all of the modern metaphysics centered on the active, spontaneous subject who occupies modern philosophy from Descartes through Hegel and Nietzsche. (shrink)

Adoration is the second volume of the Deconstruction of Christianity, following Dis-Enclosure. The first volume attempted to demonstrate why it is necessary to open reason up not to a religious dimension but to one transcending reason as we have been accustomed to understanding it; the term "adoration" attempts to name the gesture of this dis-enclosed reason. -/- Adoration causes us to receive ignorance as truth: not a feigned ignorance, perhaps not even a "nonknowledge," nothing that would attempt to justify the (...) negative again, but the simple, naked truth that there is nothing in the place of God, because there is no place for God. The outside of the world opens us in the midst of the world, and there is no first or final place. Each one of us is at once the first and the last. Each one, each name. And our ignorance is made worse by the fact that we do not know whether we ought to name this common and singular property of all names. We must remain in this suspense, hesitating between and stammering in various possible languages, ultimately learning to speak anew. -/- In this book, Jean-Luc Nancy goes beyond his earlier historical and philosophical thought and tries to think-or at least crack open a little to thinking-a stance or bearing that might be suitable to the retreat of God that results from the self-deconstruction of Christianity. Adoration may be a manner, a style of spirit for our time, a time when the "spiritual" seems to have become so absent, so dry, so adulterated. -/- The book is a major contribution to the important strand of attempts to think a "post-secular" situation of religion. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy has worked substantially from, or maybe with, Bataillian thought. This interview touches specifically on his rapport with Bataille and the links that exist between the later thinker’s œuvre and Nancy’s own.

Givenness and Revelation represents both the unity and the deep continuity of Jean-Luc Marions thinking over many decades. This investigation into the origins and evolution of the concept of revelation arises from an initial reappraisal of the tension between natural theology and the revealed knowledge of God or sacra doctrina. Marion draws on the re-definition of the notions of possibility and impossibility, the critique of the reification of the subject, and the unpredictability of the event in its relationship to (...) the gift in order to assess the respective capacities of dogmatic theology, modern metaphysics, contemporary phenomenology, and the biblical texts, especially the New Testament, to conceive the paradoxical phenomenality of a revelation. This work thus brings us to the very heart and soul of Marions theology, concluding with a phenomenological approach to the Trinity that uncovers the logic of gift performed in the scriptural manifestation of Jesus Christ as Son of the Father. Givenness and Revelation enhances not only our understanding of religious experience, but enlarges the horizon of possibility of phenomenology itself. With a Foreword by Ramona Fotiade, Senior Lecturer in French, and David Jasper, Professor of Literature and Theology, both at the University of Glasgow. (shrink)

Arguing for a cognition theory that radically rejects the passivity Aristotle attributes to the soul with regard to material things, Olivi has to assume that the soul is always on the alert, that is, that its attention to the body never disappears, even in deep sleep. This is for him the only way to explain why an intense sensation wakes us up without acting on the soul. He thus exposes himself to possible criticism from Aristotelians: his hypothesis is counter-intuitive and (...) seems to be contradicted by our experiencing eclipses of our awareness. I propose a defense of Olivi based on a ‘retort’, showing that Aristotelians must themselves postulate either, like Albert the Great, that the agent intellect is constantly in act, or, like Thomas Aquinas, that it exercises a continual surveillance of phantasms, even when we are not conscious of it. So they cannot deny Olivi the right to hypothesize a permanent attention of the soul. (shrink)

In the third book in the trilogy that includes Reduction and Givenness and Being Given. Marion renews his argument for a phenomenology of givenness, with penetrating analyses of the phenomena of event, idol, flesh, and icon. Turning explicitly to hermeneutical dimensions of the debate, Marion masterfully draws together issues emerging from his close reading of Descartes and Pascal, Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas and Henry. Concluding with a revised version of his response to Derrida, In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking (...) of It, Marion powerfully re-articulates the theological possibilities of phenomenology. (shrink)

This is the first English translation published of Jean-Luc Nancy's acclaimed consideration of the law's most pervasive principles in the context of actual systems and contemporary institutions, power, norms, laws.

Jean-Luc Nancy discusses his life's work with Pierre-Philippe Jandin. As Nancy looks back on his philosophical texts, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts.

Painting, according to Jean-Luc Marion, is a central topic of concern for philosophy, particularly phenomenology. For the question of painting is, at its heart, a question of visibility—of appearance. As such, the painting is a privileged case of the phenomenon; the painting becomes an index for investigating the conditions of appearance—or what Marion describes as “phenomenality” in general. In The Crossing of the Visible, Marion takes up just such a project. The natural outgrowth of his earlier reflections on icons, (...) these four studies carefully consider the history of painting—from classical to contemporary—as a fund for phenomenological reflection on the conditions of (in)visibility. Ranging across artists from Raphael to Rothko, Caravaggio to Pollock, The Crossing of the Visible offers both a critique of contemporary accounts of the visual and a constructive alternative. According to Marion, the proper response to the “nihilism” of postmodernity is not iconoclasm, but rather a radically iconic account of the visual and the arts that opens them to the invisible. (shrink)

Il m’est agréable de pouvoir m’appuyer sur ce que Claudia Serban vient de dire, non seulement parce qu’elle l’a peut-être mieux exposé que je ne l’avais moi-même fait, mais parce qu’elle me dispense, en partie du moins, de me répéter. Gratitude de la paresse, plus encore que de la vanité. Revenons pourtant un instant sur cette salle où se tient notre séminaire. Apparemment, réellement donc, il s’agit d’une salle de cours, une salle de conférence, comme tant d’autres à l’École et (...) dans tous les... (shrink)

This text is based on the lecture held by Jean-Luc Marion at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, on December 4., 2015. By thematizing the?limits of phenomenality?, Marion analyzes what exceeds the horizon of objectivity and the framework of subjectivity. By relying on some of the most important philosophers of the history of metaphysics, Marion offers an alternative way, namely, a phenomenology of givenness that focuses on saturated phenomena. nema.

In a sequence of aphorisms, Jean-Luc Nancy interrogates the speculative suture between the sacred and truth. The sacred is indexed to an encounter or a point of intensity via which the subject approaches what cannot be grasped in itself, but solely in and as this unfinishable approach. The chance of this encounter is accorded to every subject and no longer confiscated by a religion or an exclusive regime of thought. In parallel, the sacred enters into a novel matrix with (...) the ordinary wherein neither supersedes the other. These aphorisms demonstrate that the ordinary supplies a point of access to the sacred because the sacred is itself one of the nomadic folds of the ordinary. (shrink)

On the one hand, freedom is said to be the property of a subject. On the other, freedom only happens in the space of being-in-common. Freedom, then, is the place of a conflict between the “self” and the “with,” between independence or autonomy and dependence or sharing. Resolving this apparent antinomy requires showing how the with ontologically constitutes the self. This, in turn, allows for a rethinking of freedom beyond what liberal democracy and political economy have to offer, as the (...) renewed opening of existence onto nothing, or onto an “outside” that the opening itself constitutes. (shrink)

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community--a book outlining a critical response to Jean-Luc Nancy's early proposal for thinking an "inoperative community"--The Disavowed Community offers a close reading of Blanchot's text.

La solution de Thomas d’Aquin au problème de l’intensification des qualités souffre d’une certaine instabilité et, dans la génération suivante, a été disloquée par les différentes contraintes qu’elle tentait de concilier. Cet article explore les réponses apportées par Gilles de Rome, Godefroid de Fontaines, Pierre d’Auvergne et Thomas de Sutton. Introduite par Godefroid, mais développée par Sutton, la notion de mode va jouer un rôle très important. La solution de Sutton, particulièrement, invite à une comparaison avec la théorie des modes (...) intrinsèques chez Duns Scot. (shrink)

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. In this collection of writings on images and visual art, the author explores this through an extraordinary range of references.

Jean-Luc Nancy'sOn the Commerce of Thinkingconcerns the particular communication of thoughts that takes place by means of the business of writing, producing, and selling books. His reflection is born out of his relation to the bookstore, in the first place his neighborhood one, but beyond that any such "perfumery, rotisserie, patisserie," as he calls them, dispensaries "of scents and flavors through which something like a fragrance or bouquet of the book is divined, presumed, sensed."On the Commerce of Thinking is (...) thus not only something of a semiology of the specific cultural practice that begins with the unique character of the writer's voice and culminates in a customer crossing the bookstore threshold, package under arm, on the way home to a comfortable chair, but also an understated yet persuasive plea in favor of an endangered species. In evoking the peddler who, in times past, plied the streets with books and pamphlets literally hanging off him, Nancy emphasizes the sensuality of this commerce and reminds us that this form of consumerism is like no other, one that ends in an experience-reading-that is the beginning of a limitless dispersion, metamorphosis, and dissemination of ideas. Making, selling, and buying books has all the elements of the exchange economy that Marx analyzedfrom commodification to fetishismyet each book retains throughout an absolute and unique value, that of its subject. With reading, it gets repeatedly reprinted and rebound. For Nancy, the book thus functions only if it remains at the same time open and shut, like some Moebius strip. Closed, it represents the Idea and takes its place in a canon by means of its monumental form and the title and author's name displayed on its spine. But it also opens itself to us, indeed consents to being shaken to its core, in being read each time anew. (shrink)