Corpus

by Jean-Luc Nancy, Richard A. Rand (Translator)

How have we thought “the body”? How can we think it anew? The body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, the “mystical body of Christ”―all these (and others) are incorporated in the word Corpus, the title and topic of Jean-Luc Nancy’s masterwork.

Corpus is a work of literary force at once phenomenological, sociological, theological, and philosophical in its multiple orientations and approaches. In thirty-six brief sections, Nancy offers us at once an encyclopedia and a polemical program―reviewing classical takes on the “corpus” from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Paul to Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, and Freud, while demonstrating that the mutations (technological, biological, and political) of our own culture have given rise to the need for a new understanding of the body. He not only tells the story of this cultural change but also explores the promise and responsibilities that such a new understanding entails.

The long-awaited English translation is a bold, bravura rendering. To the title essay are added five closely related recent pieces―including a commentary by Antonia Birnbaum―dedicated in large part to the legacy of the “mind-body problem” formulated by Descartes and the challenge it poses to rethinking the ancient problems of the corpus. The last and most poignant of these essays is “The Intruder,” Nancy’s philosophical meditation on his heart transplant. The book also serves as the opening move in Nancy’s larger project called “The deconstruction of Christianity.”

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, France, 20th Century, Essays, Bodies

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

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

[Hagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visceral and compelling. One of the best books I've read on the body and its relation to being.

"Sense escapes from the wound, drop by drop, frightfully, derisively-perhaps even serenely, if not joyfully? This question is prompted by a bloodless dawn rising on a world of bodies. Can we deal with a loss of sense, and have a sense of that loss—but without concession or deceit concerning the loss itself? Can we reach what has already been extended and opened by this loss? Namely, the world of bodies, as the gaping end of the organon of sense delivers it, or lets it come?"

"This isn't the philosophico-medical anatomy of dissection, a dialectician's dismembering of organs and functions. An anatomy more of numbering than dismembering. An anatomy of configurations, of the plasticity of what we'd have to call states of body, ways of being, bearing, breathings, paces, staggerings, sufferings, pleasures, coats, windings, brushings, masses. Bodies, to begin with, are masses, masses offered with nothing to be articulated about them, nothing to link them to, whether a discourse or a story: palms, cheeks, wombs, buttocks. Even an eye is a mass, as are tongue and ear-lobe."

[Jason Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly not an easy read (at least, in English) but worth the time and effort. Oh and a quick critique of some of the other reviews: the text seems "meandering" at times because Nancy is not interested in providing another discourse on the body but more of a catalogue. In fact, this is one of the major points of the text, namely, that the body is not an object of knowledge that one can submit to elucidation or explication through language, as if all one had to do was write properly about the body to arrive at adequate knowledge. To suggest that the text is "meandering" is an overly reductive interpretation of what is an incredibly complex and novel treatment of the body.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not coincidental that this is one of the most beautiful books on my shelf.

[Arnau Hurtado Goycoolea · Rating 4 out of 5]

No entendí ni papa

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

• Introduction
• Hoc est enim corpus meum.
 We’re obsessed with showing a this, with showing ourselves that this this, here, is the thing we can’t see or touch, either here or anywhere else, and that this is that, not just in any way, but as its body. The body of that (God)--and the fact that “that” has a body, or that “that” is a body: that’s our obsession
 The presentified “this” of the Absentee par excellence: incessantly, we shall have called, convoked, consecrated, policed, captured, wanted, absolutely wanted it.
 We shall have wanted the assurance, the unconditional certainty of a THIS IS: here it is
• Hoc est enim challenges, allays all our doubts about appearances, conferring, on the real, the true final touch of its pure Idea.
• But we feel anxiety: “here it is” is in fact not so sure, we have to seek assurance for it. Sensory certitude, as soon as it is touched, turns into chaos, a storm where all senses run wild.
• Hoc est enim displays the body proper, serves it up as a meal. THe body proper, or, Being-to-itself embodied.
• But instantly, always, the body on display is foreign, a monster that can’t be swallowed. We never get past it, caught in a vast tangle of images. This is always too much, or too little, to be that
• The anxiety, the desire to see, touch, and eat the body of God, to be that body and be nothing but that, forms the principle of Western (un)reason. That's why the body, bodily, never happens, least of all when it's named and convoked. For us, the body is always sacrificed: eucharist.
• If hoc est enim corpus meum says anything, it’s beyond speech. It isn’t spoken, it’s exscribed–with bodily abandon.
• Strange Foreign Bodies
 The body is our culture’s latest, most worked out, sifted, refined, dismantled, and reconstructed product.
 The body is weight
 Flung from on high by the Highest himself, in the falsehood of senses, the evil of sin.
 We didn’t lay the body bare; we invented the body, and nudity is what it is.
 What it is is something stranger than any strange foreign body (like, non-white he means)
 That “the body”” might serve as a name for the Stranger, absolutely, is an idea we’ve pursued to its successful conclusion
• Writing the Body
 Let there be writing, not about the body, but the body itself. Not bodihood but the actual body. Not signs, images, or ciphers of the body, but still the body.
 Writing (DEF): touching upon extremity. How then are we to touch ipon the body, rather than signify it or make it signify? Surely the body can’t be uninscribable. Surely we can do more than signify the body as absence or presence. Writing isn’t signifying.
• Touching the body happens all the time at the border, the limit, the tip, the furthest edge of writing. Nothing but that happens there, in fact.
 Our bodies are not inscribed things, not anymore (incised, engraved, tattooed, scarred). They are exscribed. So we proceed by using that exscription, by meeting the body where it is, outside the text, the text itself having been abandoned.
• Sense
 We don’t see past the tip of sense. We always assent to sense: beyond sense, we lose our footing.
• What we call “writing” and “ontology” are concerned with just one thing: the place for what remains, here, without place.
 Artaud might protest that we shouldn’t be here; we should be tortured and sacrificed at the stake. I’d answer that it’s not so very different, straining to dislocate the place and the opening of bodies, in the present, and in the midst of the very discourse and space that we occupy.
• Ontology of the body is ontology itself: being’s in no way prior or subjacent to the phenomenon here. The body makes room for existence. The mortal spacing of the body registers the fact that existence has no essence (not even death), but only ex-ists.
• Ontology has yet to be thought out, to the existence that it’s basically an ontology where body=place of existence, or local existence.
• Perhaps we shouldn't think the "ontological body" except where think-
• ing touches on the hard strangeness of this body, on its u~-thinking, unthink¬ able, exteriority. But such touching, or such a touch, is the sole condition for true thought.
• Ontology, then, is affirmed as writing/ Writing is a gesture towards touching upon sense. A writer accomplishes this not by grasping or reaching but by sending himself to the touch. His touch is in principle withdrawn, spaced, displaced.
 The writing “I” is being sent from bodies to bodies.
• Back to hoc est
 This, too, is inscribed in hoc est: if it's not transubstantIation (meaning a generalized mcarnatIon, the Immanence of an absolutely mediated transcendence), then it's the separation of substances or subjects that alone allows them their singular chance. Their chance is neither immanent nor transcendent but lies in the dimension, or the gesture, of an address, a spacing. Thus the bodies of lovers: they do not give themselves over to transubstantiation, they touch one another, they renew one another s spacing forever, they displace themselves, they address themselves (to) one another.
• Ontology of the body=exscription of being. Existence addressed to an out-side. Bodies are being
• Freud
 “The psyche’s extended: knows nothing about it.” Here the psyche is the body, and this is precisely what escapes it (that it constitutes a psyche in a dimension of not being able/wanting-to-know-itself.
 Psyche’s body, the being-extended and outside-itself of the presence-to-the-world. Freud is right to obsess over the topical: the unconscious is the being-extended of the Psyche, and the thing that some (per Lacan) have called the subject is the uniqueness of local color or carnation.
 Psychoanalysis goes so bad when they try to ectopize, or make the body signify. It makes no more body, makes the body a piece, incorporeality, a zone, a-significance.
• He is pursuing concentration and extension, en-topic and ex-topic.
 But aren’t these already interpretations? Aren’t all bodies caught up in network of signification? There is no free body, you might say!
 His A: Sense itself will float, in order to stop or start at its limit. This limit is the body, and not as a pure and simple exteriority of sense, or as some unknown, intact, untouchable matter, thrust into some improbably transcendence closed in the densest immediacy–not then, finally, a “the body” but instead as the body of sense. This is what we’re pursuing: THE BODY OF SENSE
 The body exposes a breakthrough of sense, constituted absolutely and simply by existence.
 This is why we will not speak of it as anterior or posterior, exterior or interior to the signifying order–but AT THE LIMIT.
 The body is neither a signifier nor a signified. It’s exposing/exposed, an extension of the breakthrough that existence is. An extension oof the there, a sire of a breakthrough through which it can come in from the world
 This is how two kinds of "hoc est enim ..." get interwoven: the one that appropriates hoc into a "body of sense" effects a transubstantation and equates sense with the achieved totality of the world; the other is exposed to the archi-tectonic burial and displacement of that very hoc.)
• Ego
 Ego sum owes its truth to the circumstance, the “each time” of its statement. It needs a one time, a discrete quantity providing articulation with a space of time or a place.
 Here, in Cartesian ego’s articulation, mouth and mind are the same: it’s always the body. Not the body of the ego but CORPUS EGO, ‘ego’ being ‘ego’ only when articulated, articulating itself as a spacing or flexion, even the inflection of a site. The enunciation of ego doesn’t just take place, IT IS PLACE.
 The corpus ego is not a signifying order but the timbre of the place where a body exposes and proffers itself.
 At the opening of the body and the ego, is the body and the ego.
 Ego also forms an absolute obstacle to the body, to the coming of the body. Ego as identity withdrawn. The ob-jected matter of the sub-ject.
 I ob-ject my body against myself, as something foreign, something strange, the exteriority to my enunciation (“ego”) from the enunciation it-self.
• Expeausition (Skin-show)
 Bodies are always about to leave, on the verge of a movement, a fall, a gap, a dislocation.
• Thought
 With thoughts about the body, the body always forces us to think farther, always too far: too far to carry on as thought, but never far enough to become a body.
• Corpus: Another Departure
 A corpus isn’t a discourse, and it isn’t a narrative. So a corpus is what we’d need here.
 I’ve already stopped talking about bodies: I haven’t started.
• God is dead means God no longer has a body.
• The Glorious Body
 The body of God was the body of man himself: man’s flesh was the body God gave himself. God had made himself body, he had been extended and molded: out of the fat, smooth, deformable extension of clay, the raw matter, consisting entirely of modalizing, or modification, rather than substance. EX LIMON TERRAE
 Bodies are the exposition of God
 This is the way God's glory is shared: Death, the World. Rotting as Mystery, mud as the manner and ductus of places. All ontotheology is traversed and worked through by this ambivalence about the truth of the body as a glorious body. A single gesture, or almost-a gesture whose doubling and redoubling we certainly won't ever be done with-erects God as the Body of Death: and delivers space to the multiplication of bodies. A single gesture betrays disgust with bodies as well as a taste for them.
 HIS ONTOTHEOLOGY: GODS GLORY IS BODIES IN EXTENSION
• What is coming happens to a presence that hasn’t taken place, and won’t take place elsewhere, and is neither present, nor representable, outside of what is coming.
• Thus, the coming itself never ends, it goes as it comes, it’s a coming-and-going, a rhythm of bodies being born, dying, open, closed, delighting, suffering, being touched, swerving.
• Glory is the rhythm, the plasticity, of this presence–local, necessarily local
• Incarnation
 This is one version of that COMING. The Logos and Sarx division needs to be disposed of.
 his Mystery reveals itself. This spirit says of its flesh: hoc est enim corpus meum; it articulates it- self from every sensory presence. What the Mystery reveals, therefore, is the body as revealed mystery, the absolute sign of self and the essence of sense, God withdrawn into flesh, flesh subjectivized to itself, which, finally, is called "the resurrection," in the full radiance of the Mystery.
• THE SOUL
 The Soul is the form of a body, and therefore the body itself (PSYCHE EXTENDED). In the soul the body comes
 SPIRIT is the nonform or ultra-form of the hole into which the body throws itself. Spirit is the body of sense, of the sense in body.
• What in Writing is Not to be Read
 Writing the anatomical sign of "self," which doesn't signify, but cuts, sepa- rates, exposes.
 That we write, no doubt, is the body,but absolutely not where we write,nor is a body what you write-but a body is always what writing exscribes.
 There is only exscription through writing, but what's exscribed remains this other edge that inscription, though signifying on an edge, obstinately continues to indicate as its own-other edge. Thus, for every writing, a body is the own-other edge
• A corpus of tact: skimming, grazing, squeezing, thrusting, pressing, smooth- ing, scraping, rubbing, caressing, palpating, fingering, kneading, massag- ing, entwining, hugging, striking, pinching, biting, sucking, moistening, taking, releasing, licking, jerking off, looking, listening, smelling, tasting, duck- ing, fucking, rocking, balancing, carrying, weighing. ALL ABOUT WEIGHING.
• There is not "the" body, there is not "the" touch, there is not "the" res extensa. There is that there is: creation of the world, techne of bodies, weighing with- out limits of sense, topographical corpus, geography of multiplied ectopias- and no u-topia.
• No place beyond place for sense. If sense is "absent," it's by way of being here-hoc est enim-and not by way of being elsewhere and nowhere. Ab- sence-here, that's the body, the extent of psyche.
• BETWEEN-BODIES: how bodies are offered to one another
• On the Soul
• The body is the opening of closure itself. The body is the open. To be open we must have had touched closure.
• When we posit body against soul we think of the body as the closure. Closed-up body does not exist. That would not be a body, it would be a MASS.
 Mass is called by the Greeks SUBSTANCE.
 Mass is called by Augustine (who didn’t much like extension and bodies–perhaps for having loved them too much in his early years--a tumor, an excrescence.
• Yet the body is a thing of extension. Of exposition. It is not that the body is exposed but that the body consists of being exposed.
• Wary of anything—including and especially discourse—that is ex-corporated. Discourse on the body should touch the body.
• But when discourse—an incorporeal thing—touches the body, a rupture happens. The soul has rupture, too, hence the title.
• When he refers to soul he means THE BODY OUTSIDE THE SELF. When the body is NOT-MASS, it is this: outside itself. This soul is not platonic or Christian.
• Soul=/= another spiritual body. Not a little person with wings exiting the mouth of the dead
• Soul=a something-else body. “On the soul” means “on the body’s relation with itself, a relation to the outside, being out. The soul is the body’s difference from itself, the relation to the outside that the body is for itself. I only gain access myself via this, from the outside. SELF-TOUCHING (touche-touche) in phenomenology is spoken of wrt a primary interioirty. NOT POSSIBLE. I have to be in exteriority to touch myself.
• Descarte’s wax: it is wax when a candle, and wax when it melts, and we know this because we are touching it.
• Speaking of Descartes: his ego is only an ego by virtue of being outside itself, by touching the wax. He’s claiming to show that for Descartes, the res cogitans is a body. Ego is being outside with reference to the ego. Ego is also being a body.
• Body means the soul that feels its’ a body. Self being is necessarily being outside, on the outside, being exposed or extended. Dasein is da (being the there). Body is a unity of a being outside itself.
• ABANDON THE WORD DUALISM, and I also don’t say that this is the unity of a duality. The provocative recourse to the word dualism lasts only for a second.
• To Exist Is to Exit the Point by Antonia Birnbaum
• Nancy’s thought worries about the outside.
• Outside: exteriority doesn't derive from an alterity that would divide the self on the inside, even if such a division were primary and constitutive. Because it's not a question of keeping on

[Matt]

Ok had to read this as like poetry, and hope that I’ve subliminally absorbed some meaning from it because it was SO tricky and I suspect is meant to be read after having read a lot of other philosophy. Lowkey enjoyed it anyway!

[Anetxu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yo sé que Nancy es la leche, lo sé, pero no termino de conectar con su escritura, lo siento.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not going to review this in French since I'm not near fluent enough to know the specific philosophical terms I want, or to communicate the concepts clearly. Also, between my starting&finishing the book, Nancy died, so Requiescat in Pace . . . .

The main text here, the 'Corpus', is an Arcades-Project-like deconstruction effort, 64 sections each playing on a certain turn of phrase or philosophic motif. The main idea is that we can rephrase our entire metaphysical philosophy of mind (or phenomenology&its-consequences, as the continentals call it) in terms of purely the body. Most of the time Nancy uses the fact that most of our ways of speaking about the mind use physical metaphors, and we can therefore choose to understand this as a sort of true meta-physics, without the notion of mental substance or its successors. It's essentially a rough translation of old frameworks into a new Body-centric outlook, although by virtue of its deconstructive method, and all the evasive linguistic quipping that entails, it cannot really claim to be asserting much more than plausible ways of speaking in contexts where Hard-Minded analysis is irrelevant - although a devout Merleau-Pontyian could probably get really far by using Nancy as a list of tricks to pull (Nancy distinguishes himself from M-P, but I dunno the latter well enough to explain why, here). I regret the analytic-continental divide here, for this book is pretty helpful in showing that such a divide is less philosophical than anthropological - Nancy's ideas would naturally extend into the Eliminativist school, which was in full blossom at the time, and he would no doubt have interesting things to say had Chalmers' load of panpsychic stoner drivel been published at the time, and by the 21st century analytic philosophers were already writing such Merleau-Pontyian, body-centric revisions of the conception of mind (influenced, perhaps, by Nancy? I can't say). Other interesting sources to integrate jump at the ready - Goethean color theory, which I was reading about at the time, would be useful, and probably anything to do with mind could be happily integrated and help to break up the crippling obsession with Freud, Heidegger, Descartes that all these (and ONLY these, at this point) continentals have. This book is saved, nevertheless, by Nancy's cleverness, not only philosophically but in terms of style: by virtue of being purely edifying philosophy (to use a Rortyism), this book gets to indulge in tonnes of linguistic punning and surprising, cinematic sentences, and even gets to resembling poetical prose in the vein of Rabelais, Rimbaud or Cendrars. Such books are only written in France and in French, I suppose.

Also in this pdf was his essay, "De l'âme" (translated "On The Soul", but 'ame' is a more neutral term than the more provocative/philosophic 'esprit'), featuring a more straightforward argumentation. Nancy tries to break with the identification of Soul with Mind and instead proposes (again) a Merleau-Ponty-esque identification of the Soul with Subject, which gets relegated first to senses and then a slew of his characteristically snakelike body-puns around Self, Other etc. This is again in service of tentative and primarily ironic/creative new guiding linguistic theory of Soul, although it (rightly) calls attention to the dubious conflations between Soul and Mind that tend to result from the consequences of errors of translation in the Greek-Scholastic-Modern pipeline (as Rorty exposes cleverly in the Mirror of Nature book). It makes for an interesting agitation of ideas, but one wonders what the lasting purpose is of such deliberately relativist, detached philosophizings

[Cristina Chițu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hegel:,,Der Geist ist ein Knochen”

Die Grenze des Schmerzes stellt eine intensive Evidenz dar, wo sich, weit davon entfernt, Objekt zu werden, der Körper im Schmerz absolut als Subjekt exponiert wird.

kommt seht her, lasst uns gehen, kommen, aufbrechen, bleiben—, Stimmen, die aus dem Bauch kommen, Chöre, zahlreiche, und der Gesang, einfach—geht, schaut, ich lache, ich weine, ich lebe, ich sterbe. So schreiben und so denken, mit offenem Mund, Opus-Corpus.

Wir stellen uns nur Körper völliger Hysterie vor, gelähmt von der Repräsentation eines anderen Körpers—eines Sinn-Körpers—, zudem als hier-ruhende, ganz einfach verlorene ,,Körper”. Der Krampf der Bedeutung entreißt dem Körper den ganzen Körper.

Literatur (…) Fleischwerdung der Philosophie.

was ihn wirklich zum Körper des Geistes macht: er ist eine Wunde, dieser Körper ist in seine Wunde übergegangen.(…) Hier, am gleichen Punkt des Nicht-Ortes des Geistes, bietet sich der Körper als eine Wunde dar (…) Der Geist konzentriert das, was die Wunde ausblutet.

Zunächst nicht die Vervielfältigung der Körper, sondern ihre Einzigkeit, die Uniformität der Wunde, Elendskörper, Hungerkörper, geschlagene Körper, prostituierte Körper, verstümmelte Körper, infizierte Körper, aufgedunsene Körper, überernährte Körper, zu body-builded, zu sexy, zu orgasmische Körper. Sie bieten nur eine Wunde dar: Sie ist ihr Zeichen, ebenso wie ihr Sinn, die andere und dieselbe Gestalt der Auslöschung im Zeichen-von-sich.

Porno-graphie: der Nackte, der von Wundmalen gezeichnet ist, von Verletzungen, Rissen, Schwielen der Arbeit, von der Muße, der Dummheit, den Demütigungen, der schlechten Nahrung, den Schlägen, der Angst, ohne Pflaster, ohne Narben, eine Wunde, die sich nicht wieder schließt.

Werden wir zum Beispiel erst einmal verstehen, dass dieser Verlust des Körpers-des-Sinns—der eigentlich unsere Zeit ausmacht und ihr ihren Raum gibt—auch wenn er uns Schmerzen bereitet, dennoch nicht in Angst umschlägt? Denn gerade vor der Abwesenheit des Sinns ängstigt sich die Angst. Sie ist ihre melacholische Inkorporation oder ihre hysterische Fleischwerdung, doch verleiht sie ihr ihren Sinn von Angst. Die Angst gibt vor, Sinn zu sein, aber sie ist selbst noch eine Form der extremen Konzentration, diese Grenz-Form, an der man sich den verängstigten Heiligen Geist (seine Heiligkeit verloren?) vorstellen muss. Doch der Schmerz gibt nicht vor, Sinn zu sein. Wir sind im Schmerz, weil wir für den Sinn organisiert sind, und sein Verlust verletzt uns, schneidet sich in uns ein.

Und sei es nur, um zu existieren und diese Körper zu sein, und um die Körper dieser Welt zu sehen, zu berühren und zu spüren. Was können wie erfinden, um ihre Zahl zu feiern? Können wir überhaupt daran denken, wir, die von der Wunde erschöpft, und nichts als erschöpft sind?

[nonegloga]

Questo è il duplice retaggio della gloria di Dio: la Morte, il Mondo. La putrefazione come mistero, l’argilla come maniera, come ductus dei luoghi. Tutta l’ontoteologia è attraversata, tormentata da quest’ambivalenza della verità del corpo come corpo glorioso. Un unico gesto, o quasi – un gesto che continueremo sempre a scindere e a ripetere – erige Dio a Corpo della Morte e libera lo spazio alla moltiplicazione dei corpi. Un unico gesto afferma il disgusto e il gusto per i corpi. Il corpo glorioso è la trasfigurazione del corpo esteso o ne costituisce l’estensione stessa, la figurazione nel fango plastico. O... o, al tempo stesso.

[Caley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite a hodge-podge collection of essays and general meanderings on the human body. Pretentious, per Nancy, especially in the sections where he anticipates the reader's reactions (hmm) and takes the liberty to clear up these supposed misunderstandings by haughtily adding more context to his argument. Exteriority, limits, and exposure are discussed as usual, but I couldn't get pass the weightiness of his ramblings this time; they seemed almost misguided and out of place.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like your philosophy served up as poetry, this is the metaphysical text devoted to contemplating the body for you. "From its prison-wall thickness, say, or its earthy mass piled up in a tomb, or its clingy burden of cast-off clothing, or, finally, its own weight of water and bone - but always, first and foremost, sinking under the weight of its fall, dropping out of some either, a black horse, a bad horse."

[jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The anxiety, the desire to see, touch, and eat the body of God, to be that body and be nothing but that, forms the principle of Western (un)reason. That's why the body, bodily, never happens, least of all when it's named and convoked. For us, the body is always sacrificed: eucharist."

[Chris Nagel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deconstruction. Whattayagonnado?

[Mattia Agnelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Il corpo che se ne va porta con sé il suo spaziamento, se ne va come spaziamento e in qualche modo si mette da parte, si ritrae in sé - lasciando, però, questo spaziamento «dietro di sé», cioè al posto suo, e questo posto resta il suo, assolutamente intatto e assolutamente abbandonato. Questo spaziamento, questa partenza, è la sua stessa intimità; è l'estremità del suo ritrarsi (della sua distinzione, della sua singolarità, della sua soggettività).”

“Il nostro mondo è l'erede del mondo della gravità: tutti i corpi pesano gli uni sugli altri e gli uni contro gli altri, i corpi celesti e i corpi callosi, i corpi vitrei e i corpuscoli. Ma qui la meccanica gravitazionale viene corretta in un punto: i corpi pesano leggermente. Ciò non significa che essi pesino poco: anzi, si può dire che un corpo da sorreggere nell'abbandono dell'amore o dello sconforto, nella sincope o nella morte, pesa ogni volta il peso assoluto.”

[Pierre-Luc Landry · Rating 2 out of 5]

D'une écriture dense et, il faut le dire, qui s'observe écrire — Nancy s'inscrit après tout dans une certaine tradition intellectuelle française qui cherche à complexifier le langage (mais à quel prix? celui de la lisibilité, un peu sacrifiée). Il y a des passages fort intéressants, plusieurs même, mais qui pour moi ont été noyés dans une prose difficile et rébarbative. Vers la fin : quelques fragments qui m'ont rendu mal à l'aise, à propos de la race et de l'ethnicité par exemple, et aussi par rapport au sexe et au genre — que Nancy ne déconstruit pas, ne différencie pas. Ce n'était certainement pas l'objectif de cet ouvrage, mais je le signale tout de même puisqu'il s'agit il me semble d'une des limites de ce livre sur le corps et sur l'âme, pensé et écrit depuis une conception binaire et très occidentale du monde.

[Alejandro Sierra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pensar el cuerpo más allá de lo físico. El vacío que generamos, también es parte de nuestro cuerpo. La capacidad de ser signo y significado, como un agujero negro que crea su propio Vortex de emociones sin fin y siempre en cambio.

Jean Luc Nancy desarrolla las ideas con un constante brainstorming en prosa. No fue fácil, tuve que desarrollar la lectura en voz alta para conectarme más; en algunos capítulos me dejó suspendido en un vapor viscoso sin un panorama claro, pero en otros me emocionó su forma de ver el cuerpo como mapa y mundo. Tocar - nos, sentir - nos.

[Sekhmet · Rating 1 out of 5]

Incomprensibile e senza senso.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title essay is dense and difficult; I might suggest reading the other five essays first (or at least "On the Soul") as a means of orienting before tackling "Corpus."

[Lu Barcenilla Román · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gusta demasiado Nancy para lo poco que entiendo lo que dice.

[Kendra Drischler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the French edition, which certainly had its moments but was sometimes too free-associative for my taste.

[Quentin Kemna · Rating 5 out of 5]

You will never think about the human body the same way.