On the Commerce of Thinking

Of Books and Bookstores

Jean-Luc Nancy, David Wills

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780823230372, 9780823230365
• eBook ISBN: 9780823230389
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Publishing

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. His reflection is born out of his relation to the bookstore, in the first place his neighborhood one, but beyond that any such "perfumery, rotisserie, patisserie, " as he calls them, dispensaries "of scents and flavors through which something like a fragrance or bouquet of the book is divined, presumed, sensed." 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. Making, selling, and buying books has all the elements of the exchange economy that Marx analyzed--from commodification to fetishism--yet each book retains throughout an absolute and unique value, that of its subject. With reading, it gets repeatedly reprinted and rebound. For Nancy, the book thus functions only if it remains at the same time open and shut, like some Moebius strip. Closed, it represents the Idea and takes its place in a canon by means of its monumental form and the title and author's name displayed on its spine. But it also opens itself to us, indeed consents to being shaken to its core, in being read each time anew.

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 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 18 × 21.5 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 5.25 × 8 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 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 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 rugby scrummage to a disorganized mélange or pell-mell free-for-all brawl. Nancy considers the risk of such uncontrolled intraand interpersonal mixing, even to the point of forms of violence, to be far smaller than the risk of, and incontrovertibly documented facts of, violence stemming from social and political formations based on subjectivities and identities. What is required is to re-make a culture and thinking that is not “crude or obscene like every thought of purity,” for the simplistic praise of purity “has supported and still supports crimes.”¹

The commerce written of in On the Commerce of Thinking cannot, therefore, reduce to a mercantile exchange, even if that is an element within it. It is, rather, a commingling that has something of the mêlée about it (and indeed the word is used to describe the plurality of worlds that constitute reading), perhaps most evident in the originary contamination (“the mêlée is not accidental; it is originary”²) uncovered at the level of the signifier. If Nancy’s reflection on books, thoughts, and their commerce seems to engender an inordinate attention to etymological nuance, it is because, in following the semantic traces, one finds not some touchstone of meaning but the very unstable mixing at work in the source, what gives rise to meaning as a movement of drift and divergence. Because a word, from the outset, determines its sense in comparison and contrast, in conversation and contact with other words, it begins as a pluralization that is an intercourse and a commerce. The verbal rough and tumble that makes for a book is therefore more than the fact of its being composed of more or less many words; it is similarly a function of each of those words being with itself as a plurality, being with itself as another to the point of being against itself.

Community is obviously not the predominant form of social or political being together that is in play in the case of the book, even if Nancy expresses a profound respect for the guild of professions that produce and sell books, and describes frequenting the bookstore as a profoundly sensual experience, savored even by those who are touched by words without reading them. Rather, the particular form of sharing relevant to the commerce of thinking, a thought’s being with it self and being with others, is called “communication.” And just as community contradicts the self-enclosed entities presumed to constitute it, breaking them open, making singularities plural, so communication is never a simple transmission but also, as Nancy writes below, “resonance, and dissemination—all the way to dispersion, metamorphosis, and reinterpretation.” In being communicated thought disintegrates, becomes a book and hence the possibility of commerce.

Sur le commerce des pensées is Nancy’s main title. His subtitle is Du livre et de la librairie. If stylistic considerations led me to translate pensées into an English singular, a converse operation takes place in the subtitle, where it sounds better for us to hear Of Books and Bookstores, even if the French is in the singular. Logically speaking, that negates much of what I have just argued concerning thought vis-à-vis thoughts, es...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Translator’s Foreword: Thinking Singular Plural
• On the Commerce of Thinking Of Books and Bookstores
• The Idea and Character of the Book
• The Book’s End in Itself
• The People of the Book
• Interminable Reading
• The Publication of the Unpublished
• Book Open and Closed
• The Scents of the Bookstore
• The Commerce of Thinking
• The Matter of Books
• Electronic Supplement, Binary Reprise, Digital Counterpoint
• Notes