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

Online ISBN:
9781531504229
Print ISBN:
9781531503291
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
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Sense and Singularity: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Interruption of Philosophy

Van Den Abbeele Georges
Van Den Abbeele Georges
University of California, Irvine
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
3 October 2023
Online ISBN:
9781531504229
Print ISBN:
9781531503291
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Sense and Singularity analyzes key moments in Jean-Luc Nancy’s signature philosophy of “finite thinking,” explicating at once his expansive understanding of sense to include every sense of the word (sensation, perception, meaning) against the restrictive definition of singularity as what necessarily eludes every possible sense. He thus proposes a radical revision of the core philosophical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. Not that all the varieties of sense come down to the same but that they all partake differently of the same fundamentally replicative structure whereby every sense, every sensing, is also a reiterative sending inherently repeating what it senses. At the same time, singularity, while omnipresent (literally, everything can be registered as singular), is what resists conceptualization by definition and thus describes a fundamental limit to sense, its insuperable end as senselessness. 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. Nancy’s philosophical contribution takes place then both as an enquiry into the limits or finitude of philosophy itself, that is, 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 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.

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