On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy

Using the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy as an anchoring point, Jacques Derrida in this book conducts a profound review of the philosophy of the sense of touch, from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ground-breaking book Corpus he discusses in detail. Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Didier Franck, Martin Heidegger, Francoise Dastur, and Jean-Louis Chr¿en are discussed, as are Ren¿escartes, Diderot, Maine de Biran, F¿x Ravaisson, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and others. The scope of Derrida''s deliberations makes this book a virtual encyclopedia of the philosophy of touch (and the body).

Derrida gives special consideration to the thinking of touch in Christianity and, in discussing Jean-Luc Nancy''s essay "Deconstruction of Christianity," devotes a section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels. Another section concentrates on "the flesh," as treated by Merleau-Ponty and others in his wake. Derrida''s critique of intuitionism,