Jean-Luc Nancy - The Fragile Skin of the World

1 Cover

2 Title Page The Fragile Skin of the World Jean-Luc Nancy With a poem by Jean-Christophe Bailly and an essay by Juan Manuel Garrido Translated by Cory Stockwell polity

3 Copyright Page

4 Acknowledgements

5 Epigraph Notes

6 Overture 1 2 3 4 Notes

7 I A Time to Come without Past or Future1 2 3 4 5 6 Notes

8 II From Ontology to Technology1 Illogical Technology 2 Automation, Alteration 3 From Ontology to Technology a b c d e f Coda Notes

9 III Juan Manuel Garrido: Not the Universal, but the Unknown1 Life as the Production of Knowledge 2 Carelessness of the Self 3 The Sharing of the Unknown Notes

10 IV Right Here in the Present 1 2 3 4 5 6 Notes

11 V The Accident and the Season1 2 3 4 5 Notes

12 VI Jean-Christophe Bailly: Havâ / Zamân Notes

13 VII The Fragile Skin of the World1 2 3 4 5 6 Notes

14 VIII Taking on Board (Of the World and of Singularity) Notes

15 End User License Agreement

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2 Table of Contents

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Jean-Luc Nancy

With a poem by Jean-Christophe Bailly

and an essay by Juan Manuel Garrido

Translated by Cory Stockwell

polity

Originally published in French as La Peau fragile du monde by Jean-Luc Nancy.

Copyright © Éditions Galilée 2020

This English edition © Polity Press, 2021

Excerpt from Petrolio: A Novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini, copyright © 1997 by Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4915-3 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4916-0 (paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nancy, Jean-Luc, author. | Stockwell, Cory, translator.

Title: The fragile skin of the world / Jean-Luc Nancy ; with a poem by Jean-Christophe Bailly and an essay by Juan Manuel Garrido ; translated by Cory Stockwell.

Other titles: La peau fragile du monde. English.

Description: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2021] | Originally published in French as La peau fragile du monde, c2020. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A leading philosopher reflects on how our experience of the world in changing in these crisis-ridden times”-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021012489 (print) | LCCN 2021012490 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509549153 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509549160 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509549177 (epub) | ISBN 9781509550333 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Fragility (Psychology)

Classification: LCC BF575.F62 N36 2021 (print) | LCC BF575.F62 (ebook) | DDC 177--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012489

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012490

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This book was born out of the desire to join to our worries for tomorrow a welcome for the present, by way of which we move towards tomorrow. Without this welcome, anxiety and frenzy devastate us. Yet we would remain stupid if we didn’t worry. This is the starting point for a proximity or a companionship of texts from diverse regimes and registers, all oriented towards the same concern about what is currently happening to us – we, late humanoids. What happens to us when we ourselves arrive at an extremity of our history, whether this extremity should turn out to be a stage, a rupture or, quite simply, a last breath. The composition of this volume seeks to bear witness to this. It is the result of work undertaken together with Cécile Bourguignon, to whom I would like to express here my affectionate gratitude.

I would also like to thank Jean-Christophe Bailly and Juan Manuel Garrido for having accepted the invitation to join us.

It was more or less at this point that from the shadows, where the people, in safety, were concealed, arose a loud naked cry of ‘Enough!’ It was a demand from the people, peremptory, threatening; there was something cosmic about it.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio , 1997 1

All notes by the translator are placed in square parentheses and preceded by TR. All other notes are Nancy’s.

1 1 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio, tr. Ann Goldstein, New York: Pantheon Books, 1997, p. 449. The text continues thus: ‘In fact, the passing of time, even if it is illusory, determines both the end of a historical period and the end of life. The one who had cried “Enough!” knew that: knew how to do injury, not merely express a just political demand. What again remained uncertain was whether the person who had shouted was simply a tired member of the audience or a Fascist to whom Pound as an intellectual, perhaps with Èvola, seemed more than enough, or even a Marxist extremist, who simply found any proposition reactionary that brought about a crisis in the concept of history’ (ibid.).