Seductive and mercurial Nancy's book has propagated an ecosystem of texts and images all its
own--not least Claire Denis's adaptation (adoption?) one of the crucial films of the
twenty-first century.--Leo Goldsmith film critic and programmer 'I was no longer in me'
Nancy's stunning formula states a truth that threatens every border with a knowledge of its
illusory rigidity and the false homogeneity of what it would protect. Ultimately Nancy tells
us with unsettling lucidity everybody--every body--is an intruder of itself.--Jeff Fort from
the Introduction Complete in English for the first time a major philosopher's most personal
work and the source of an acclaimed film. In 1991 Jean-Luc Nancy's heart gave out. In one of
the first such procedures in France a stranger's heart was grafted into his body. Numerous
complications followed including more surgeries and lymphatic cancer. The procedure and
illnesses he endured revealed to him in a more visceral way than most of us ever experience
the strangeness of bodily existence itself and surviving the stranger within him. During this
same period Europe began closing its borders to those seeking refuge from war and poverty.
Alarmed at this trend and drawn to a highly intimate form of strangeness with which he had been
living for years Nancy set out in The Intruder to articulate how intrusion--whether of a body
or a border--is not antithetical to one's identity but constitutive of it. In 2004 Claire
Denis adapted The Intruder into a film already hailed among the most important of our century.
This edition includes Nancy's and Denis's accounts of turning philosophy into film and the text
of a shorter collaboration between the two of them. Throughout Nancy and Denis push us to
recognize that to truly welcome strangers means a constant struggle against exoticism enforced
assimilation and confidence in our own self-identity.
