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

Van Den Abbeele, Georges

ISBN 10: 1531503306 / ISBN 13: 9781531503307

Published by Fordham University Press, 2023

About this Item

Seller Inventory # mon0003846654

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Sense and Singularity: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Interruption of Philosophy
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1531503306
• ISBN 13: 9781531503307
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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.