Multiple Arts: The Muses II

This collection of writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, the renowned French critic and poet, delves into the history of philosophy to locate a fundamentally poetic modus operandi there. The book represents a daring mixture of Nancy's philosophical essays, writings about artworks, and artwork of his own. With theoretical rigor, Nancy elaborates on the intrinsic multiplicity of art as a concept of "making," and outlines the tensions inherent in the faire, the "making" that characterizes the very process of production and thereby the structure of poetry in all its forms. Nancy shows that this multiplication that belongs to the notion of art makes every single work communicate with every other, all material in the artwork appeal to some other material, and art the singular plural of a praxis of the finite imparting of an infinity which is actually there in every utterance. In the collection, Nancy engages with the work of, among others, François Martin, Maurice Blanchot, and On Kawara.

Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published English translations of a number of his works: A Finite Thinking (2003), The Speculative Remark (2001), Being Singular Plural (2000), The Muses (1996), The Experience of Freedom (1993), and The Birth to Presence (1993).