Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg and one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century's foremost thinkers of politics, art, and the body. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis.Robert Bononno has translated more than two dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction, and numerous shorter pieces. His translation of René Crevel's My Body and I was a finalist for the 2005 French-American Foundation Prize. He received NEA grants in 2002 and 2010 and has taught translation and terminology at New York University and the City University of New York Graduate Center.

"Expectation stages a courtship between philosophy and literature that has never been presented with such wit, grace, and finesse. What's more, this intense courtship leads to a marriage blessed with specific offspring: Nancy's book offers both an epithalamium and a pregnant poetics, a poetics of awakening and emergence-poetics as obstetrics ushering in new 'senses' in and of the world, plus strong and luminescent poems never seen in English before." -- from Jean-Michel Rabate's Introduction

• Introduction Cornerstones 1: Cone 2: Baldwin 3: Mbembe 4: Derrida, Agamben, Wynter Questions 5: What is Black Tradition? 6: What is Black Organizing? 7: For What Are Blacks to Hope? 8: For What Are Whites to Hope? Exempla 9: The Revelation of Race: On Steve Biko 10: The Racial Messiah: On Huey P. Newton 11: The Post-Racial Saint: On Barack Obama 12: The Race of the Soul: On Gillian Rose Afterword: The Birth of the Black Church Bibliography