Sobre el comercio de los pensamientos

by Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Segui (Illustrator)

"This book by one of France's leading contemporary philosophers celebrates the particular communication of thoughts that takes place by means of the business of writing, producing, and selling books. Nancy's 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 a brilliant semiology of the cultural practice that begins with the unique character of the writer's voice and culminates in a customer's crossing the bookstore threshold, package under arm, on the way home to a comfortable chair. It's also an understated yet persuasive plea in favor of an endangered species.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, France, Nonfiction, Books About Books

104 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Jean-Luc Nancy is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published English translations of a number of his works, including The Muses (1996), The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Birth to Presence (1993), Being Singular Plural (2000), The Speculative Remark (2001), and A Finite Thinking (2003).

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very French. A love song to books, bookstores and booksellers. But so very French, not a bad thing, but a fact. There are the distinctions made between things based on the subtleties of language that sound really cool in the confines of the text itself, but that will be difficult to ever explain to another person. For example, I don't know how it would play if I went to the third floor and told the booksellers there that they are not booksellers, but manual sellers, that the paper marked with ink on their floor are not Books, but something different, something that instructs and guides but that doesn't open itself up to the exchange and commerce of ideas, of thought, that doesn't open up a space for the mysterious allusiveness of the text to live and breath. And then tell them that I will be taking the Freud and Lacan books with me, they might not be welcomed as books here surrounded by all these manuals.

He does say some very very very nice things about booksellers though, things that make this bookseller feel like he's actually doing something important, even if it goes unnoticed by most.

[Mehrnaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The reader in a bookstore doesn’t read, or reads very little, but he leafs through, inspects by groping his way, almost in the dark. He doesn’t devour, but tastes, inhales, sniffs, or licks the substance.The bookstore is a perfumery, rotisserie, patisserie: a dispensary of scents and flavors through which something like a fragrance or bouquet of the book is divined, presumed, sensed. It is where one gives oneself or finds an idea of the book’s Idea, a sketch, an allusion, a suggestion. Perhaps it speaks of what one was looking for, what one was hoping for.

[Antonio Gallo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il commercio delle idee: del libro e della libreria

Liber: pellicola situata tra la corteccia e il legno, tra il cortex e il lignum, tra il pensiero esposto e l’intimità nodosa, interfaccia del fuori e del dentro, essa stessa né fuori né dentro, volta verso l’uno come verso l’altro, mentre volge l’uno verso l’altro, rivolta l’uno nell’altro. Qualunque cosa il libro possa diventare – digitalizzato, smaterializzato e virtualizzato così come rilegato in cuoio e foglie d’oro – non è possibile che non rimanga, per quanto sottile possa diventare, “per il lettore blocco puro – trasparente” attraverso il quale non accediamo ad altro che a noi stessi, gli uni agli altri ma in ciascuno come in geroglifico.

La vera proprietà del libro, la sua “virtus operativa” o la sua “vis magica”, ciò che si potrebbe chiamare la sua “librarietà”, si trova solamente nel rapporto che esso stabilisce e mantiene tra la sua apertura e la sua chiusura. A differenza della porta del proverbio, non è necessario che un libro sia aperto o chiuso: è sempre tra i due stati, passa sempre da uno all’altro.

Questo passaggio continuo e incessantemente reversibile – il libro aperto infatti si richiude proprio mentre il libro chiuso si apre – dipende dal fatto che il libro non può essere considerato né semplicemente come un “contenente” né propriamente come un “contenuto”. Il libro non è l’oggetto che è possibile riporre su uno scaffale o posare su un tavolo, e non è nemmeno il testo che risulta stampato sulle sue pagine. Ma va piuttosto dall’uno all’altro, o meglio si mantiene nella tensione tra i due: apre questa tensione, la suscita e non smette di alimentarla con il susseguirsi delle sue pagine, affidandola al suo volume come ad una sorta di repositorio…

Un omaggio al libro, a questo strano oggetto, o merce, a al luogo in cui esso viene messo in vendita, la libreria, affidato alle cure di quel singolare commerciante che è il libraio, a cui spetta non solo vendere, ma innanzitutto scegliere, esporre, offrire il libro alla curiosità del lettore. Una curiosità che si rivolge in prima battuta alla “materia” del libro, che si manifesta nel contatto sensibile con le sue pagine, la sua copertina, il suo formato. Solo qui si espone l’Idea del libro: un’idea o un “senso”, inseparabili dalla materialità. Il libro è per Jean-Luc Nancy l’elemento distintivo della nostra cultura, in quanto privo di un senso giò dato, di una verità assoluta e unitaria, che precede la sua esposizione, sempre particolare e finita e quindi sempre plurale.

Parlando del libro, Nancy riprende così i temi fondamentali del suo pensiero: la materialità o la corporeità del “senso”, il suo darsi sempre in una superficie, nelle pieghe e nelle aperture che la attraversano, nella sua costitutiva impurità. E lo fa con una scrittura singolare che nella sua straordinaria densità, contamina linguaggio filosofico e poetico, termini tecnici e gergali.

L’autore del libro Jean-Luc Nancy è uno dei filosofi contemporanei più originali ed innovativi. Insegna all’università di Strasburgo.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a paean to the book than anything else, this slim volume is best understood through its paratext. The book was commissioned in honor of the 20th anniversary of a Strasbourg bookshop, which wanted to provide it as a gift to its clients. It was then reissued with illustrations by Editions Galilee in France. Its English version (Fordham University Press) contains none of these illustrations (which I'd very much like to see). It does, however, contain a long introduction from the translator who notes the difficulty of translating many of Nancy's key terms into English vernacular, a trouble he goes so far as to partially attribute to the form of the book in which they were originally contained. As for the text itself, Nancy is a French scholar, who writes in typically elliptical style -- affecting, but often contradictory. Here he muses on the book, its sellers, its readers. He's not attempting to pin down anything, really, about any of them. He's far more interested in summoning up emotions. Theoretically, many of the insights might be fruitful if taken to their (il)logical ends. For instance, he talks about how books are always, metaphorically, open. He calls them Moebius strips and has other nice metaphors that call attention their simultaneous presences as texts and objects. He also dwells (though not as much as he might) on the form of the book. In the end, snippets of his text are reprinted, juxtaposed by text (presumably still written by Nancy, but printed in another font) contrasting the experience of reading on/using screens from that of books themselves. This book was short enough to not regret any of the time it took to read, but I would have been happier to receive it as a gift in either of its more aesthetically-pleasing French editions. This edition seems to aspire to being more academic (something Nancy suggests unmakes, rather than makes a book -- he calls academic writings "works" not "books).

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"As a matter of principle, the book is illegible, and it calls for or commands reading in the name of that illegibility. Illegibility is not a question of what is too badly formed, crossed out, scribbled: the illegible is what remains closed in the opening of the book, what slips from page to page but remains caught, glued, stitched into the binding, or else laboriously jotted as marginalia that attempt to trip over the secret, that begin to write another book. What is illegible is not for reading at all, yet only by starting from it does something then offer itself to reading....
For that reason every book, inasmuch as it is a book, is unpublished, even though it repeats and replays individually, as each one does, the thousands of other books that are reflected in it like worlds in a monad. The book is unpublished, and it is that "unpublishedness" that the publisher publishes. The editor is one who brings to the light of day, exposes to the outside, offers to view and to knowledge. That doesn't, however, mean that once it is published the book is no longer unpublished; on the contrary, it remains that, and even becomes it more and more. It offers in full light of day, in full legibility, the insistent tracing of its illegibility" (28).

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 3 out of 5]

"L'idea del libro è in fondo quella di una perfezione, di un compimento in sé. In questo modo, ogni libro nega che il libro santo sia unico, e ciascuno si afferma al contrario come un esercizio di santità, se la santità consiste nell'abbandonarsi all'occasione insensata del senso. Alla possibilità che ogni volta, nel confezionamento di un volume, nella rilegatura di un quaderno, un lampo di senso brilli e si eclissi, e così di tanto in tanto, di libro in libro - ta biblia sempre indefinitamente rinviati gli uni agli altri e ogni volta unici." (p. 24)

"Ogni libro è nastro di Moebius, in se stesso dunque finito e infinito, infinitamente finito da tutte le parti, poiché apre a ogni pagina un nuovo margine, e ogni margine diviene più largo, più capace di senso e di segreto." (p. 25)

"L'Idea del libro è l'Idea che non c'è affatto fine a questa Idea stessa." (p. 54)

[Leigh Kaisen]

Jean-Luc Nancy’s On the Commerce of Thinking offers a flowery and philosophical peek into the business of book publishing. While some of the author’s soliloquy got a little carried away at times, I did appreciate the examination of the physical book as not just object but a dialog that is never truly open or closed, but existing in the in-between state of ongoing possibility. I also appreciated the overall reminder that putting books out into the world is a personal type of business, where the bookstore serves as a threshold of potential and the bookseller a liaison to opening new worlds for readers.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

"All the same, it is only by always reading anew that one can discard books one by one. Throw them not on the pyre or into oblivion, but launch them further and more profoundly into what should, with just cause, be called the bookstore of the soul, the free space of a devouring of and by the pure Idea, the labyrinth of books that are read, jotted on, forgotten, and dust-covered, the books learned and forgotten by heart, the creasing of the edges of pages whose image always comes back becasue they contain certain precious words." pg 42.

[Sophia Nuñez · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love books about books and was excited to see that Nancy wrote one because I appreciated his dense but useful Corpus. There were many beautiful passages in On the Commerce of Thinking, but I kept wanting more evidence to support the assertions.

[A YOGAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jean-Luc Nancys (1940 - 2021) Text ist die ultimative metaphysische Rechnungsprüfung des intellektuellen Marktplatzes, die die fundamentale Frage stellt: Was passiert, wenn die reine, freie Idee zur handelsüblichen Ware degradiert wird? Nancy seziert die Spannung zwischen der immateriellen Zirkulation der Gedanken („commerce des pensées“) und ihrer notwendigen, kommodifizierten Gestalt im Buch ("du livre et de la librairie"). Das Werk beleuchtet auf brillante Weise die Absurdität, dass ein einzelner, unwiederholbarer Gedanke massenhaft produziert, eingepreist und in einem Regal einsortiert werden muss, und feiert dabei den „Duft oder das Bouquet des Buches“, das in der „Parfümerie, Rotisserie, Patisserie“ der Buchhandlung erahnt wird. Es ist die philosophische Inventur des Schicksals der Philosophie in der Ära der Reproduktion, die als ein unaufdringliches Plädoyer für die immer stärker gefährdete Spezies Buch und Buchhandel endet.