A presentation copy, inscribed by the author ‘À M. de Gandillac, respectueusement J. L. Nancy’ in black ink to the front free endpaper.
The recipient, Maurice de Gandillac (1906-2006), was Professor of History of the Middle Ages and Renaissance philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1946 to 1977, where he exercised considerable influence over an entire generation of French philosophers; indeed, his list of students reads almost as a ‘who’s who’ of post-structuralist philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jean-François Lyotard, amongst others.
A classic study from Jean-Luc Nancy of language-oriented philosophical analysis, this text builds upon a single remark included by Hegel in the second edition of his Science of Logic. As is typical of post-Derridean work from this era, the obsessively close reading of a single phrase offers the opportunity to re-examine an entire philosophical system, such that by the book’s conclusion Nancy has been able to redefine key Hegelian terms such as Aufhebung, mediation and speculation. A book that considers systematic philosophy from an oblique angle, published at a time in which French philosophy was in the midst of its linguistic, poststructuralist turn.
