• Napoleon holds a crown and stands above a kneeling Josephine in Notre Dame Cathedral. They are surrounded by a large crowd of people and all are dressed similarly in bright colors.

Jean-Luc Nancy and Paragraph

By Peggy Kamuf In tribute to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose death was announced in August, Peggy Kamuf looks back on a landmark special issue of Paragraph (‘On the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy’, Paragraph, Vol. 16, Issue 2) which she edited in…

A fur rug is draped over a globe

The dignity of pointing

by Hilan Bensusan Pointing is a thoroughly situated activity. One points at what is somehow around – even when one needs complex language devices for the exercise. Maybe because thinking often aims to be indifferent to where one is, pointing…

Photograph of the Breton coast, showing sky with sunlight through clouds on a grey sea with distant mountains on the horizon

Kenneth White on the Breton Coast (The Fundamental Field)

William Sharp evokes ‘those wild Breton coasts of the Tréguier headland’ with the ‘grey, muttering waste’ of the sea. Little did I realise, when I must have read these phrases at the age of 14 on a cliff overlooking the north end of the village of Fairlie, in Ayrshire, Scotland that years later I would be living in that self-same area.