Portraits, this book suggests, unlock the paradoxes of subjectivity. Nancy shows how the portrait, far from conveying a sitter’s self-sameness, is suspended between proximity and distance, likeness and strangeness, representation and presentation, the faithful and the forceful. A portrait can identify an individual, but it can also express a more complex double movement of approach and withdrawal.
Portrait comprises two extended essays in close conversation, written a decade apart, in which Nancy considers the range of aspirations articulated by the portrait. Accompanied by three dozen illustrations, it also includes a new preface written for the English-language edition and a substantial introduction by Jeffrey Librett, which situates the work within a range religious, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic accounts of the subject.
Portrait is grounded in a bold and searching engagement with the traditions out of which our thinking about the subject has emerged. It is also a playful series of readings that draws on a wide range of portraits: from carvings on ancient drinking vessels to recent experimental or parodic pieces in which sitters are rendered in the ‘media’ of their own blood, germ culture, or DNA.
Photos are ubiquitous today, but Nancy argues that this in no way makes thinking about the portrait an idle pursuit. On the contrary, the forms of appearing (and disappearing) that mark portraits—old and new—can serve to renew our exploration of the human figure today. At stake is what Nancy calls “the very possibility of our being present.”
This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. He is especially known for works such as The Inoperative Community, The Experience of Freedom, Being Singular Plural, The Sense of the World, and The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translations of his later important works such as the two volumes of The Deconstruction of Christianity, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence have been published by Fordham University Press.

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Sarah Clift is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Studies at the University of King's College, Halifax.

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Jeffrey S. Librett is Professor of German at the University of Oregon.

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Jean-Luc Nancy’s Portrait is a metapicture, a portrait of portraiture itself, in all its paradoxical duplicity. Self and non-self, subject and object, identity and difference, face and sur-face are all made to resonate in the incandescence of Nancy’s prose. If the spaces of contemporary technical image-making are divided between the horizontality of landscape and the verticality of the portrait, this little book will make you stand on your head and look in the mirror in a radically new way.---W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago,