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 Nancys 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. Nancys 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 Nancys 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.
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 Tekhnč 115
Acknowledgments 163
Notes 167
Bibliography 197
Index 209
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-Franēois Lyotard and others, and the editor or coeditor of numerous books and journal issues.
