Portrait : Lit Z - Jean-Luc Nancy

Portrait

By: Jean-Luc Nancy, Simon Sparks (Translator), Sarah Clift (Translator)

Paperback | 12 June 2018

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This book examines the practice of portraits as a way in to grasping the paradoxes of subjectivity. To Nancy, the portrait is suspended between likeness and strangeness, identity and distance, representation and presentation, exactitude and forcefulness. It can identify an individual, but it can also express the dynamics by means of which its subject advances and withdraws.
The book consists of two extended essays written a decade apart but in close conversation, in which Nancy considers the range of aspirations articulated by the portrait. Heavily illustrated, it includes a newly written preface bringing the two essays together and a substantial Introduction by Jeffrey Librett, which places Nancy's work within the range of thinking of aesthetics and the subject, from religion, to aesthetics, to psychoanalysis.
Though undergirded by a powerful grasp of the philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition that has rendered our sense of the subject so problematic, Nancy's book is at heart a delightful, unpretentious reading of three dozen portraits, from ancient drinking mugs to recent experimental or parodic pieces in which the artistic representation of a sitter is made from their blood, germ cultures, or DNA.
The contemporary world of ubiquitous photos, Nancy argues, in no way makes the portrait a thing of the past. On the contrary, the forms of appearing that mark the portrait continue to challenge how we see the bodies and representations that dominate our world.

Industry 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

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