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.
Table of Contents:
Preface to the English-Language Edition
Introduction: The Subject of the Portrait
By Jeffrey S. Librett
The Look of the Portrait
The Autonomous Portrait
Resemblance
Recall
Look
The Other Portrait
List of Figures
About the Author :
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg and one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century's foremost thinkers of politics, art, and the body. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis.
Sarah Clift is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Studies at the University of King's College, Halifax.
Jeffrey S. Librett is Professor of German at the University of Oregon.
Review :
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
