ABSTRACT
In the past decade or so, we have witnessed an irregular, but recurring dialogue between the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and the fi lmmaker Claire Denis. Nancy has published poetic, thoughtful appreciations of Denis’s fi lms Beau travail (1999) and Trouble Every Day (2001); Denis, in return, has made a short documentary portrait of the philosopher entitled Vers Nancy (2002) and a fi lm inspired by his autobiographical text L’Intrus (2004), which itself gave rise to another long article by Nancy. But the precise nature of the relationship or exchange between the two is rather diffi cult to describe because none of these interventions really constitutes a dialogue: at best it is a kind of dialogue of the deaf, taking place at a distance and with different stakes for each interlocutor. Nancy’s articles on Denis’s work are not so much analyses of the fi lms as occasions for him to expound further on the themes of his late philosophy, in particular the meaning of the body and touch. Denis’s L’Intrus, on the other hand, is, in Nancy’s own words, not so much an adaptation as an adoption of his book,1 in which the conceptual and thematic core of the philosopher’s work merely provides the starting point for one of Denis’s typically elliptical narratives.
