Undying Faces

This is a new release of the original 1929 edition.

Leading international scholars consider the socio-economic history of Classical and Romantic musicians.

Arkhalla There cannot be a world without a Queen. The Undying may be no more – the few of them left hunted and with a price on their heads – but the darkness of their legacy still lives on. Shamath, the hero who saved humanity, roams the earth a man lost, his life turned into a hunt with little purpose. Far across the sea, in the deserts of Egypt, Bel and Narama, both shades of their former selves, struggle to build a new life, yet even the bond between them seems broken. But out of nowhere comes a new chance at life for hero and foe alike. A call from the beyond sends Shamath on a desperate quest, his routing out the Undying now infused with dread urgency. Meanwhile, a miracle brings Narama and Bel promise of peace. Yet the same hopes that revive the three of them threaten to tangle them once more into a fight to the death. The secret Shamath seeks that will lead to the domain of the dread demon Asag lies with his enemies, and he will spare no effort to find it. But if Shamath succeeds in his quest, the world may end in blood and fire, fulfilling, at last, the Dark God’s plan. To bring back to life the Undying Queen herself.

Arkhalla. She was the most powerful woman on earth. A cruel, undying queen feasting on blood, she ruled a nation feared across the ancient lands of Sumer, her only weakness a still all-too human heart. And now she is dead. In the wake of the almighty queen’s death, the Sumerian kingdoms are rocked by chaos as Bel, Arkhalla’s lover-turned-betrayer, goes to war against the ambitious councilor Lord Sin, who is allied with Nimrod, the vengeance-seeking human king of Akkad. Around them revolve characters both familiar and new, from Narama, the Undying huntress of men, to Nimrod’s daughter Aisyah, reared to be the scourge of the Undying, while Shamath, the young slave who both loved the dead queen and caused her doom, now finds his destiny as the humans of Sumer rise at last against the Undying. The second chapter of the trilogy begun in The Undying Queen of Ur crafts an epic tale of war, intrigue and a tangled skein of characters in a world forever haunted by the one who gave meaning to all their lives. A World Without Arkhalla.

If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. Mistrusted by philosophy, forbidden and embraced by religions, manipulated as “spectacle” and proliferated in the media, images never cease to present their multiple aspects, their paradoxes, their flat but receding spaces. What is this power that lies in the depths and recesses of an image—which is always only an impenetrable surface? What secrets are concealed in the ground or in the figures of an image—which never does anything but show just exactly what it is and nothing else? How does the immanence of images open onto their unimaginable others, their imageless origin? In this collection of writings on images and visual art, Jean-Luc Nancy explores such questions through an extraordinary range of references. From Renaissance painting and landscape to photography and video, from the image of Roman death masks to the language of silent film, from Cleopatra to Kant and Heidegger, Nancy pursues a reflection on visuality that goes far beyond the many disciplines with which it intersects. He offers insights into the religious, cultural, political, art historical, and philosophical aspects of the visual relation, treating such vexed problems as the connection between image and violence, the sacred status of images, and, in a profound and important essay, the forbidden representation of the Shoah. In the background of all these investigations lies a preoccupation with finitude, the unsettling forces envisaged by the images that confront us, the limits that bind us to them, the death that stares back at us from their frozen traits and distant intimacies. In these vibrant and complex essays, a central figure in European philosophy continues to work through some of the most important questions of our time.