Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Art Criticism & Theory

Portrait

by (author) Jean-Luc Nancy

translated by Sarah Clift & Simon Sparks

introduction by Jeffrey S. Librett

Publisher
Fordham University Press
Initial publish date
Jun 2018
Category
Criticism & Theory, Deconstruction, Semiotics & Theory
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780823279951
    Publish Date
    Jun 2018
    List Price
    $25.00 USD
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780823279944
    Publish Date
    Jun 2018
    List Price
    $116.99

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Portraits, this book suggests, unlock the paradoxes of subjectivity. Nancy shows how the portrait, far from conveying a sitter’s self-sameness, is suspended between proximity and distance, likeness and strangeness, representation and presentation, the faithful and the forceful. A portrait can identify an individual, but it can also express a more complex double movement of approach and withdrawal.
Portrait comprises two extended essays in close conversation, written a decade apart, in which Nancy considers the range of aspirations articulated by the portrait. Accompanied by three dozen illustrations, it also includes a new preface written for the English-language edition and a substantial introduction by Jeffrey Librett, which situates the work within a range religious, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic accounts of the subject.
Portrait is grounded in a bold and searching engagement with the traditions out of which our thinking about the subject has emerged. It is also a playful series of readings that draws on a wide range of portraits: from carvings on ancient drinking vessels to recent experimental or parodic pieces in which sitters are rendered in the ‘media’ of their own blood, germ culture, or DNA.
Photos are ubiquitous today, but Nancy argues that this in no way makes thinking about the portrait an idle pursuit. On the contrary, the forms of appearing (and disappearing) that mark portraits—old and new—can serve to renew our exploration of the human figure today. At stake is what Nancy calls “the very possibility of our being present.”
This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

About the authors

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. He is especially known for works such as The Inoperative Community, The Experience of Freedom, Being Singular Plural, The Sense of the World, and The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translations of his later important works such as the two volumes of The Deconstruction of Christianity, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence have been published by Fordham University Press.

Jean-Luc Nancy's profile page

Sarah Clift is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Studies at the University of King's College, Halifax.

Sarah Clift's profile page

Simon Sparks' profile page

Jeffrey S. Librett is Professor of German at the University of Oregon.

Jeffrey S. Librett's profile page

Editorial Reviews

Jean-Luc Nancy’s Portrait is a metapicture, a portrait of portraiture itself, in all its paradoxical duplicity. Self and non-self, subject and object, identity and difference, face and sur-face are all made to resonate in the incandescence of Nancy’s prose. If the spaces of contemporary technical image-making are divided between the horizontality of landscape and the verticality of the portrait, this little book will make you stand on your head and look in the mirror in a radically new way.---W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago,