The Fragile Skin of the World. Jean-Luc Nancy
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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
Copyright Page
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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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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Acknowledgements
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.
Epigraph
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, 19971
Notes
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.).
Overture
1
Prophecy: the time will come.
This is not a prediction, since the time will come regardless, if only as the time of the end of time.
It is a prophecy: the word of an other, the word from the elsewhere that we cannot disregard without renouncing our humanity. The interpreter of the outside.
The here and now does not exist without the elsewhere that it shelters within itself and that, in return, shelters and exposes it.
If we’re worried, disoriented, and troubled today, as indeed we are, it’s because we’ve become accustomed to the here and now perpetuating itself by excluding every possible elsewhere. Our future was right there, ready-made: a future of mastery and prosperity. And now everything is falling apart: climate, species, finance, energy, confidence, and even the ability to calculate of which we felt so assured, and which seems doomed to exceed itself of its own accord.
We can no longer count on anything – this is the situation.
But the prophetic voice