Jacques Derrida
Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Accompagné de travaux de lecture de Simon Hantai.
Paris: Galilée, 2000. Collection Incises. First edition. 2718605154 349 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 8.75" x 9.25", shows shelfwear. Binding is sound. Pages 9 and 11 have underlining and annotations to margin. Pages are otherwise clean and bright. Two-page sheet ("Prière d'insérer") is laid in.
"Using the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy as an anchoring point, Jacques Derrida in this book conducts a profound review of the philosophy of the sense of touch, from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ground-breaking book "Corpus" he discusses in detail. Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Didier Franck, Martin Heidegger, Francoise Dastur, and Jean-Louis Chrétien are discussed, as are René Descartes, Diderot, Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and others. The scope of Derrida's deliberations makes this book a virtual encyclopedia of the philosophy of touch (and the body).
Derrida gives special consideration to the thinking of touch in Christianity and, in discussing Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "Deconstruction of Christianity," devotes a section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels. Another section concentrates on "the flesh," as treated by Merleau-Ponty and others in his wake. Derrida's critique of intuitionism, notably in the phenomenological tradition, is one of the guiding threads of the book."