Portrait
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Portrait
（Lit Z）
Fordham University Press, 2018
- : pbk
- Other Title
-
Le regard du portrait
L'autre portrait
Available at / 1 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
On t.p. verso: "The look of portrait" was originally published in French as Jean-Luc Nancy, Le regard du portrait, copyright (c) Éditions Galilée, 2000. Simon Sparks's translation was previously published in English as "The look of portrait", in Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple arts : the muses II, 220-47, copyright (c) 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. "The other portrait" was originally published in French as Jean-Luc Nancy, L'autre portrait, copyright (c) Éditions Galilée, 2014, and appears here for the first time in English
Includes bibliographical references
Description and Table of Contents
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).
Table of Contents
Preface to the English- Language Edition vii
Introduction: The Subject of the Portrait 1
Jeffrey S. Librett
The Look of the Portrait
The Autonomous Portrait 13
Resemblance 21
Recall 29
Look 36
The Other Portrait
L'altro ritratto 47
Character 51
The Eye 54
Visageity 56
Mimesis 59
Withdrawn Presence 63
Ipseity 67
Theophany 72
Revelation 76
Divine Abandonment 81
Dis- figuration 84
Eclipse 89
Infinite Detachment 93
Coda I 99
Coda II 101
Coda III 104
Notes 109
List of Figures 125
by "Nielsen BookData"
