In 1991, Jean-Luc Nancy's heart gave out. In one of the first such procedures in France, a stranger's heart was grafted into his body. Numerous complications followed, including more surgeries and lymphatic cancer. The procedure and illnesses he endured revealed to him, in a more visceral way than most of us ever experience, the strangeness of bodily existence itself and surviving the stranger within him. During this same period, Europe began closing its borders to those seeking refuge from war and poverty. Having been asked to write something on the question of the foreigner who arrives, Nancy was inevitably drawn to a highly intimate form of strangeness with which he had been living for years. The Intruder compares the intrusion into his body to the intrusion across a border and how the welcoming of strangers is not antithetical to a sense of identity but constitutive of it. In 2004, Claire Denis adapted (or, as Nancy later put it, adopted) The Intruder into a film that a poll of international critics has named one of the greatest two-hundred fifty films of all time. This edition of Nancy's text includes comments on the adaptation of a philosophical reflection into a feature film by both Denis and Nancy, as well as the text of a further cinematic collaboration between the two of them. Together, the collaborations between Nancy and Denis insist on the imperative to welcome strangers and push us to recognize that to truly welcome strangers means a constant struggle against impulses of exoticism, enforced assimilation, and confidence in our own self-identity.
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universite 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. Claire Denis is the director of fifteen films, including Beau Travail, Chocolat, 35 Shots of Rum, White Material, and High Life. Her most recent film, Stars at Noon, won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.
Foreword Claire Denis ix Introduction Jeff Fort 1 The Intruder 9 Toward Nancy 47 The Intruder according to Claire Denis 57
Startlingly intimate.-- "Artforum" 'I was no longer in me' Nancy's stunning formula states a truth that threatens every border with a knowledge of its illusory rigidity and the false homogeneity of what it would protect. Ultimately, Nancy tells us with unsettling lucidity, everybody--every body--is an intruder of itself.---Jeff Fort, from the Introduction Seductive and mercurial, Nancy's book has propagated an ecosystem of texts and images all its own--not least Claire Denis's adaptation (adoption?), one of the crucial films of the twenty-first century. At last, the different phases of this porous encounter between philosophy and cinema are available in a single volume.---Leo Goldsmith, film critic and programmer
