Corpus III – Cruor and Other Writings

"This wonderfully economical text gives us Nancy's elaborate arguments regarding the body, touch, plurality, globalization, and worldliness. At stake for Nancy is an urgent reformulation of what it means to live together."--Timothy Murray, Cornell University

"Nancy eloquently and powerfully returns to the nature of bodies and their singularities. This important last volume attests to the violence--physical, psychological, political, economic, and technological--endemic to our times."--Dalia Judovitz, Emory University

A beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of our most consequential philosophers

This landmark volume concludes Nancy's remarkable philosophical reflections on the body. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy's account becomes more vivid, more physical, than ever. This vividness is manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood's intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our world--a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction to mere objects.

The exceptional writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition--on Freud, Nietzsche, and others--with rich poetic language. Nancy's thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of language. Bringing into English the last book Nancy completed before his death, Corpus III offers an evocative meditation by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own--and our--singular survival.

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence.

Jeff Fort is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Davis.