On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores

Translator's Foreword

xiii Translator’s Foreword Thinking Singular Plural david฀wills The French title of Jean-Luc Nancy’s book on books is Sur le commerce des pensées. I found myself obliged to render the plural pensées, with its echoes of Pascal and the rest (although perhaps not all the way to those small, delicate flowers we call “pansies”), as “thinking.” Why, one might well wonder, would English be uncomfortable with a plural such as “thoughts” in the context of an essay on books and the bookstore? Why would that seem to imply an unacceptable crassness, or indeed commodification, of thinking, when that is precisely one of the things Nancy wants to evoke by means of the word commerce? Answers to such questions would have to begin at the level of sonority—in French pensée (singular ) is homonymic with pensées (plural)—and extend as far as the Germanic etymological network xiv from which English thinking and thought emerge, in contrast to the Latinate pensée. Yet another line of resolution would have to investigate the different philologico-philosophical traditions of one or the other culture, a French tradition perhaps more at home with itself and with its pervasiveness, and so requiring less that thought be protected from the banalization or promiscuity of thoughts, an English one precisely nervous about such an assimilation of philosophical reflection to everyday cognitive processes. Yet another, which brings me to my point, would have to raise the question of the book. First of all, obviously, such differences as that between the 1 × 21. cm. format and textured ivory laid paper (“watermarked with parallel lines from the wires on which the pulp was laid in the process of manufacture: opposed to wove”; Websters) of Nancy’s Éditions Galilée text, and the .2 ×  inch trim size of this volume, and by extension the different forms of bibliophilia that are practiced here or there and that give rise to all the different means by which the book is marketed, including, of course, online purchasing, and the success or xv failure of the bookstore—neighborhood or conglomerate —in preserving its niche as the preferred retail outlet for printed and bound texts. But the logic of Nancy’s discussion points to another relation between the Idea and its “delivery ” in a book, namely, that when thinking or thought “reaches” the book it necessarily does so in a form that is the basis for commerce, and hence the importance of his plural. The book, and the bookstore, become the contexts within which quantities of thoughts get passed around, bought, sold, and exchanged: hence commodifiable, commercializable . But those thoughts, now irrevocably plural, are passed around not in some rarefied vacuum but among readers, also necessarily plural : among the members, therefore, of a community . If thoughts become the objects of commerce, it is precisely only because they imply and require such a community of readers. The word community is never once used in Nancy ’s text, where the emphasis is less on readers than on reading. It is, however, common to much of his other writing, so much so that it amounts in his work to a grand philosophical project, asking xvi simply, and complicatedly, what being together means in the wake of the monumental perversions and abortions of mass aspirations in the twentieth century. What community categorically does not mean, can no longer mean, is the sort of fusional melding of singularities that the previous century was witness to, not just because of how a mass came then to be misused, or to misuse itself but, more fundamentally, because the notion of singularity , subject, or individual presumed in numbers to comprise that mass is itself the most fraught of concepts: “What is a community? . . . The common , having-in-common or being-in-common, excludes from itself interior unity, subsistence, and presence in and by itself. Being with, being together, and even being ‘united’ are precisely not a matter of being ‘one.’” In the book from which that quote is taken, and which inspires the title of this foreword, Being Singular Plural, published in France in 1996 in the shadow of a Sarajevo become the earth’s “martyr-name,” one of Nancy’s vaunted words for a community beyond the violence of identitarian politics is mêlée. The word can mean everything from a wrestling match or [3.22.181.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 09...