On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores
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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.
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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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