Sense and Singularity: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Interruption of Philosophy

by Georges Van Den Abbeele

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781531503291
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	10/03/2023
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Georges Van Den Abbeele is Professor of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine. He is the author of Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau, the translator of five books by Jean-François Lyotard and others, and the editor or coeditor of numerous books and journal issues.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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.

University of Southern California Peggy Kamuf

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.

Universityof Southern California Peggy Kamuf

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.

Harvard University Verena Conley

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"

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"

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