Sense and Singularity
Jean-Luc Nancy and the Interruption of Philosophy
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Philosophical thinking is interrupted by the finitude of what cannot be named, on the one hand, and that within which it is subsumed as one of multiple modes of sense-making, on the other. Sense and Singularity elaborates Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical project as an inquiry into the limits or finitude of philosophy itself, where it is interrupted, and as a practice of critical intervention where philosophy serves to interrupt otherwise unquestioned ways of thinking. Nancy’s interruption of philosophy, Van Den Abbeele argues, reveals the limits of what philosophy is and what it can do, its apocalyptic end and its endless renewal, its Sisyphean interruption between the bounds of infinitely replicating sense and the conceptual vanishing point that is singularity.
In examinations of Nancy’s foundational rereading of Descartes's cogito as iterative, his formal experimentations with the genres of philosophical writing, the account of “retreat” in understanding the political, and the interruptive play of sense and singularity in writings on the body, sexuality, and aesthetics, Van Den Abbeele offers a fresh account of one of our major thinkers as well as a provocative inquiry into what philosophy can do.
Sense and Singularity is a scintillating, brilliant assessment of the end and ends of a great thinker and writer. Van Den Abbeele explicates patiently, meticulously and often with a novel take, Nancy’s variegated writings. The manuscript is a labor of love and a tour de force.---Verena Conley, Harvard University
Sense and Singularity is a remarkable study of the complex and original thought of this provocative thinker. Each of its chapters is a model of careful reading deftly carried along by Van Den Abbeele’s central argument that Nancy is a thinker of the interruption of philosophy at the limit of sense. There are few studies as comprehensive as this one, which reads Nancy’s work from the earliest writings to the last publications. But above all Sense and Singularity makes compelling sense of the adventure of Nancy’s thought at the limit of sense.---Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California
This book challenges and inspires its readers, leaving them with a better understanding of one of contemporary philosophy’s central figures, as well as a renewed appreciation for the infinity of philosophical enquiry. For anyone interested in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy or in contemporary philosophy more broadly, Sense and Singularity is an essential and transformative read.---Heythrop Journal
List of Abbreviations | vii
Introduction: From the Interruption of Sense to the Poetics of Finitude | 1
1 Descartes’s Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time | 23
2 Monograms: Writing Singular Plural | 49
3 The “Singular Logic of the Retreat”: Interruptions of the Political | 78
4 Corpus Interruptus: Uncommon Sense and the Singular Crossings
of Eros, Logos, and Tekhnè | 115
Acknowledgments | 163
Notes | 167
Bibliography | 197
Index | 209
