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    On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores
    On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores
    On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores
    Ebook58 pages44 minutes

    On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores

    By Jean-Luc Nancy

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    About this ebook

    Jean-Luc Nancy's On the Commerce of Thinking concerns the particular communication of thoughts that takes place by means of the business of writing, producing, and selling books. His reflection is born out of his relation to the bookstore, in the first place his neighborhood one, but beyond that any such "perfumery, rotisserie, patisserie," as he calls them, dispensaries "of scents and flavors through which something like a fragrance or bouquet of the book is divined, presumed, sensed."

    On the Commerce of Thinking is thus not only something of a semiology of the specific cultural practice that begins with the unique character of the writer's voice and culminates in a customer crossing the bookstore threshold, package under arm, on the way home to a comfortable chair, but also an understated yet persuasive plea in favor of an endangered species.

    In evoking the peddler who, in times past, plied the streets with books and pamphlets literally hanging off him, Nancy emphasizes the sensuality of this commerce and reminds us that this form of consumerism is like no other, one that ends in an experience-reading-that is the beginning of a limitless dispersion, metamorphosis, and dissemination of ideas.

    Making, selling, and buying books has all the elements of the exchange economy that Marx analyzed--from commodification to fetishism--yet each book retains throughout an absolute and unique value, that of its subject. With reading, it gets repeatedly reprinted and rebound. For Nancy, the book thus functions only if it remains at the same time open and shut, like some Moebius strip. Closed, it represents the Idea and takes its place in a canon by means of its monumental form and the title and author's name displayed on its spine. But it also opens itself to us, indeed consents to being shaken to its core, in being read each time anew.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFordham University Press
    Release dateAug 25, 2009
    ISBN9780823230389
    On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores
    Author

    Jean-Luc Nancy

    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.

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      Book preview

      On the Commerce of Thinking - Jean-Luc Nancy

      On the Commerce of Thinking

      JEAN-LUC NANCY

      On the Commerce of Thinking

      Of Books and Bookstores

      Translated by David Wills

      Copyright © 2008 Fordham University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      This work was originally published in French as Jean-Luc Nancy, Sur le commerce des pensées: Du livre et de la librairie © 2005 Éditions Galilée, Paris.

      This work has been published with the assistance of the National Center for the Book—French Ministry of Culture.

      Ouvrage publié avec le soutien du Centre national du livre—ministère français chargé de la culture.

      Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

      Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      Nancy, Jean-Luc

      [Sur le commerce des pensées. English] On the commerce of thinking : of books and bookstores / Jean-Luc Nancy ; translated by David Wills.

          p. cm.    Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-8232-3036-5 (alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8232-3037-2

      (pbk.: alk. paper)

      1. Booksellers and bookselling—Philosophy. 2. Books and reading. I. Title.

      z278.N3613 2009     381’.4500201—dc22     2009003252

      Printed in the United States of America

      11 10 09      5 4 3 2 1                              FIRST EDITION

      Commerce with books offers, for its part, the constancy and ease of its service. It is at my side throughout my course, and gives me succor wherever I am. It consoles me in old age and solitude. It relieves me of the weight of a tedious idleness, and extracts me at any time from unpleasant company. It dulls the pangs of sorrow, unless it be extreme and overpowering. In order to be distracted from a trouble some imagination, one has only to take refuge in books: they easily divert me toward themselves and remove what is troubling me. Thus it is that they by no means rebel when they see that I seek them out only for lack of other more real, alive, and natural comforts; they always receive me with the same countenance.

      MONTAIGNE, Essays, iii, 3 (Of Three Types of Commerce)

      Bookstore, (Comm.): the bookstore, as a type of commerce, is worthy of consideration, provided that whoever undertakes it possesses the intelligence and enlightenment that it demands. This profession is to be regarded as one of the most noble and distinguished there is. Commerce in books is one of the oldest known trades; as long ago as the year of the world 1816 one witnessed a famous library built under the auspices of the third king of Egypt.

      D’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT, Encyclopédie

      There appeared certain of those rare men who forever deserve mention in the history of printing and letters, those who, motivated by passion for art and full of the noble and courageous confidence that superior talents inspire in them—printers by profession, but people with a profound literary sensibility, capable of confronting every difficulty at once—developed the most daring projects.

      DIDEROT, Historical and Political Letter Addressed to a Magistrate Concerning the Book Trade

      CONTENTS

      Translator’s Foreword: Thinking Singular Plural

      On the Commerce of Thinking Of Books and Bookstores

      The Idea and Character of the Book

      The Book’s End in Itself

      The People of the Book

      Interminable Reading

      The Publication of the Unpublished

      Book Open and Closed

      The Scents of the Bookstore

      The Commerce of Thinking

      The Matter of Books

      Electronic Supplement, Binary Reprise, Digital Counterpoint

      Notes

      Translator’s Foreword

      Thinking Singular Plural

      DAVID WILLS

      The French

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