Margins
On the Commerce of Thinking book cover
On the Commerce of Thinking
Of Books and Bookstores
2005
First Published
3.78
Average Rating
84
Number of Pages
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. 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.
Avg Rating
3.78
Number of Ratings
54
5 STARS
26%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
33%
2 STARS
7%
1 STARS
0%
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Author

Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy
Author · 41 books
Jean-Luc Nancy is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published English translations of a number of his works, including The Muses (1996), The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Birth to Presence (1993), Being Singular Plural (2000), The Speculative Remark (2001), and A Finite Thinking (2003).
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