The Intruder

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. Having been asked to write something on the question of the foreigner who arrives, Nancy was inevitably drawn to a highly intimate form of strangeness with which he had been living for years. The Intruder compares the intrusion into his body to the intrusion across a border and how the welcoming of strangers is not antithetical to a sense of identity but constitutive of it.

In 2004, Claire Denis adapted (or, as Nancy later put it, adopted) The Intruder into a film that a poll of international critics has named one of the greatest two-hundred fifty films of all time. This edition of Nancy's text includes comments on the adaptation of a philosophical reflection into a feature film by both Denis and Nancy, as well as the text of a further cinematic collaboration between the two of them. Together, the collaborations between Nancy and Denis insist on the imperative to welcome strangers and push us to recognize that to truly welcome strangers means a constant struggle against impulses of exoticism, enforced assimilation, and confidence in our own self-identity.