The Intruder
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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. Alarmed at this trend and drawn to a highly intimate form of strangeness with which he had been living for years, Nancy set out in The Intruder to articulate how intrusion—whether of a body or a border—is not antithetical to one’s identity but constitutive of it.
In 2004, Claire Denis adapted The Intruder into a film already hailed among the most important of our century. This edition includes Nancy’s and Denis’s accounts of turning philosophy into film and the text of a shorter collaboration between the two of them. Throughout, Nancy and Denis push us to recognize that to truly welcome strangers means a constant struggle against exoticism, enforced assimilation, and confidence in our own self-identity.
Startlingly intimate.
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
‘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
Foreword
Claire Denis | ix
Introduction
Jeff Fort | 1
The Intruder | 9
Toward Nancy | 47
The Intruder according to Claire Denis | 57