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David Isaacs
David Isaacs has recently completed a PhD about the ethics of rewriting at UCL. He is coming to the end of a first novel and is at the early stages of a new project about the present tense.


Articles Available Online


Interview with Namwali Serpell

Interview

December 2020

David Isaacs

Interview

December 2020

Namwali Serpell is a rarity: an academic and novelist whose criticism is as vital as her fiction. Since we first spoke, in September 2020,...

Book Review

June 2018

Christine Schutt’s ‘Pure Hollywood’

David Isaacs

Book Review

June 2018

There is a certain kind of American novelist of the late twentieth century whose fiction fetishises plant names. The...

We have a confession to make: we thought it would be easy to interview Jean-Luc Nancy We knew that he was a very experienced interviewee, more than willing to answer questions, and we thought that his work offered enough entry points for a stimulating and prolonged conversation On the first point, we were right: we arranged to meet fairly quickly and his lifelong publisher, Galilée, sent us the proofs of his latest book, Sexistence (published in February 2017), which happens to be one of his best It is an audacious introduction of sex into ontology (or maybe the other way around), merged with psychoanalysis and literature Once we’d read it, we were not so sure interviewing the author would be that easy after all   Of course, we were aware of the importance of Nancy, sometimes named as the most influential French thinker of the generation to come of age just after the great blooming of French Theory His work is extremely varied Rooted in Heideggerian thought and influenced by Derrida’s deconstructionist ideas, Nancy’s philosophy analyses a vast array of concepts: body and nudity, community and democracy, art and creation, Christianity and globalisation He has written over a hundred books since 1973, including three books on the political idea of community (The Inoperative Community, 1983; The Confronted Community, 2001; The Disavowed Community, 2014) partly inspired by his work on Maurice Blanchot; a deeply sensitive memoir of his experience of surviving a heart transplant, (The Intruder, 2000); a contribution to the ongoing debate on Martin Heidegger’s anti-Semitism (The Banality of Heidegger, 2015); and reflections on the political transformations of our time in the aftermath of the Paris attacks of November 2015 (Que Faire?, 2016) He has also written extensively with his closest friend and intellectual soulmate, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe   On a chilly morning in January, we found ourselves in a Haussmanian building in the working-class area of Stalingrad in Paris’s 19th arrondissement – recently made famous by the evacuation of refugees that had settled there – in the apartment where a friend of Nancy, a silver-haired Lacanian psychoanalyst, hosted the interview As the conversation

Contributor

August 2014

David Isaacs

Contributor

August 2014

David Isaacs has recently completed a PhD about the ethics of rewriting at UCL. He is coming to the end...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Pylons

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2017

Once upon a time, Dad would begin, I think, focusing on the road, there was a man called Watt....

Seasickness

Prize Entry

April 2016

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2016

‘How would you begin?’   She puts a finger to her lips, a little wrinkled still from the water, and hesitates. She says, ‘Maybe:...
How things are falling.

Prize Entry

April 2015

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2015

i.   Oyster cards were first issued to members of the British public in July 2003; by June 2015 they will have been replaced...
by Accident

fiction

April 2014

David Isaacs

fiction

April 2014

[To be read aloud]   I want to begin – and I hope I don’t come across as autistic or anything like that (and...

READ NEXT

fiction

January 2014

Textile

Orly Castel-Bloom

TR. Dalya Bilu

fiction

January 2014

It was not only avoiding thoughts of home that helped the good sniper to carry out his mission as...

fiction

December 2016

The Giving Up Game

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

fiction

December 2016

The peculiar thing was that Astrid appeared exactly as she did on screen. She was neither taller nor shorter....

poetry

February 2014

Two Poems from A Finger in the Fishes Mouth

Derek Jarman

poetry

February 2014

To mark the 20th anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death, Test Centre has produced a facsimile edition of his sole,...

 

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