The Gravity of Thought

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by Jean-Luc Nancy,

Translated by François Raffoul and Gregory Recco

Humanity Books

Due/Published March 1997, 108 pages, cloth

ISBN 0391039857

These essays represent Nancy's meditation on the changing role of philosophy in a postmodernist context. Challenging the neomodernist projects of a "return" to Enlightenment, Nancy argues that these attempts ignore the true task of philosophy, which is not to manipulate or reactivate past significations, but to expose itself to the essential opening of meaning, to its event. This exposure reveals the finitude of thought, its "weight." Table of Contents: Translator's Preface; Gravity: Introductory Remarks; The Forgetting of Philosophy; Prefatory Note; Introduction; The Schema of the Return; The Will to Meaning; The Displacement of Meaning; The Project of the Subject; Meaning Signified; The Exhaustion of Signification; The West at Its Ends; Being Exposed to the Limit; The Simple Truth; We Are Meaning; On Wonder; On Passivity; The Weight of a Thought.