Sense and Singularity: Jean‐Luc Nancy and the Interruption of Philosophy. By GeorgesVan DenAbbeele. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. Pp. viii, 213. $31.99.

In Sense and Singularity, Georges Van Den Abbeele takes on the challenge of elucidating the complex and original thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, through the lens of its interruption of philosophy at the limit of sense. Crucial to this enquiry is Van Den Abbeele's contention that ‘the very sense and singularity of Nancy's own philosophical enterprise’ (p. 21) lies in his exploration of sense in its various forms—sensation, perception, and meaning—alongside singularity, conceived as that which resists conceptualisation. Through a remarkably nuanced and rigorous analysis, Van Den Abbeele demonstrates that this dual focus prompts Nancy to probe the limits of philosophy, questioning what it is and can do, as it navigates between the possible infinity of sense-making and the conceptual disruption represented by singularity. Following a dense and thought-provoking introduction, the book is structured around four distinct yet interconnected essays. Rather than offering a comprehensive survey of Nancy's corpus, each essay hones in on selected features of his philosophical thinking, aiming ‘to highlight philosophy's interruption in and through them’ (p. 18). Each chapter, therefore, can be viewed as a singular entry point into Nancy's philosophical enterprise, understood as an interruption of philosophy in both objective and subjective senses of the genitive—‘an interruption of philosophy that is also a recognition of philosophy as interruption’ (p. 2). The first chapter, entitled ‘Descartes's Iterative Cogito, the Sum of Each and Every Time’, critically unpacks the various ways in which Nancy engages with Descartes's philosophy over nearly five decades. Through meticulous close readings, Van Den Abbeele highlights that Nancy reads Descartes's cogito ‘against the grain of tradition’ (p. 18), as a site of interruption rather than a source of stability. Breaking with the notion of coherent, self-actualising subjectivity, indeed, Nancy views the cogito as ‘iterative’, that is to say, as a gesture of self-affirmation that must be repeated in its singularity with each instance of thought. Van Den Abbeele argues that this reading of the cogito as interrupted consciousness disrupts the Cartesian dualism of body and mind, as well as, by extension, that between sensing and thinking as distinct modes of sense-making. In Nancy's thinking, sensing and thinking partake of the same iterative structure: ‘a thinking/sensing singular plural’ (p. 48). Chapter 2, ‘Monograms: Writing Singular Plural’, turns to Nancy's experimentations with philosophical writing. Van Den Abbeele draws attention to Nancy's short, interventionist texts—his monograms, but also his philosophical chronicles and many newspaper articles—as the formal actualisation of the iterative structure of sense and interruptive character of philosophy understood as ‘finite thinking’. According to Van Den Abbeele, Nancy's short texts function as philosophical fragments that resist subsumption into a unified system. They each correspond to a singular instance of sense and testify to a singular engagement with the world, thus gesturing simultaneously towards the singularity of the events they address and the infinity of sense. Nancy's monograms, Van Den Abbeele insists, are ‘a singularly plural philosophical practice’ (p. 78), the tracing of philosophical reflection with wavering contours. The third chapter, ‘The “Singular Logic of the Retreat”: Interruptions of the Political’, shifts focus to Nancy's concept of retrait (or ‘retreat’, in English), ‘as it informs the expansion of his philosophical project to embrace the social and political’ (p. 79). Van Den Abbeele traces this concept—which evokes, in French, both a gesture of withdrawing and the redrawing of a trait—back to Derrida's ‘The Retreat of Metaphor’. Moving beyond the latter's linguistic concerns, Nancy highlights the significance of this concept for political critique, by building on Arendt's theory of totalitarianism and Freud's analysis of mass psychology. The ‘retreat of the political’, as conceived by Nancy with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, implies a rethinking of the very conditions of the political through withdrawal from established political frameworks. It even challenges historical views of community as a stable and unified entity. As the being-together of singular beings, community is inherently singular-plural: a singular reality that is endlessly challenged and reconstituted through acts of interruption and withdrawal. The fourth and final chapter, titled ‘Corpus Interruptus: Uncommon Sense and the Singular Crossings of Eros, Logos, and Tekhnè’, expands on preceding discussions of community and the political to explore another key theme in Nancy's thinking: namely, the body as the very site where ‘the sense of singularity and the singularity of sense’ (p. 161) intersect. Van Den Abbeele highlights that Nancy's writings on the body, aesthetics, and sexuality present the body not only as the locus of ‘sense in every possible sense’ (p. 116)—sensation, perception, and intellection—but also as the embodiment of existence's fundamental transcendence, that is to say, its constitution as ek-sistence through endless interruption. In Nancy's view, the body is inherently fragmented, expeaused, ex-scribed. Hence Van Den Abbeele's claim that Nancy's approach to the body as corpus interruptus ‘defines an ethics and aesthetics of exteriority in line with a finite thinking that is open to both the singular and plural’ (p. 161). Van Den Abbeele's Sense and Singularity is an impressive work of scholarship that offers a deep and nuanced exploration of Nancy's thinking. Drawing on a broad range of texts from across Nancy's œuvre, both major works such as Being Singular Plural and The Sense of the World, as well as lesser-known essays, Van Den Abbeele maps out Nancy's interpretation of philosophy from his earliest writings to his last publications. Crucially, in so doing, he does not only skilfully clarify Nancy's sophisticated thinking, but also enacts the philosophical interruption central to Nancy's project: Van Den Abbeele follows Nancy's thinking to its own limits, attending to the points of tension where sense is disrupted and, therefore, reopened. One striking example is Van Den Abbeele's attention to Nancy's reflections on the maternal body. He astutely observes that the figure of the mother appears throughout Nancy's work—from early texts through to later works such as Coming and Cruor—as ‘the very modelling of the retreat, as the sense of a withdrawal that is also the singularity of birth, which is the very corporeal interruption that defines the ethos of being both together and apart’ (p. 20). Yet he also points out that Nancy's approach is somewhat constrained by residual patriarchal assumptions, resulting in unresolved contradictions. Nancy's depiction of birth as a process of physical separation, in which the child essentially ‘births itself’ (p. 159), not only sidelines the mother's body, reducing it to a mere vessel, but also contradicts his own understanding of the body as singular-plural, the locus of our being-the-ones-with-the-others. Van Den Abbeele's subtle observation suggests that this theme holds untapped potential for further exploration, thus repeating Nancy's twofold interruptive and opening gesture at the limits of his own thought. That said, Van Den Abbeele's commitment to the infinity of sense can become a source of frustration. One occasionally wishes more paths had been explored beyond the ones guiding the four essays of this book. Nancy's reflections on Christianity and religion, central themes of his later work, are notably absent. The omission of the two volumes of The Deconstruction of Christianity even feels like a missed opportunity, as their central themes could easily have been woven into the book's discussion of sense and singularity, Nancy's engagement with religion being characteristic of the deconstructive desire to take on the sense of tradition while fostering openness to the singularity of what remains to come. However, omissions are perhaps inevitable in a study of this breadth. Besides, incompletion—or inachèvement, in Georges Bataille's terms—may be said to add to the book's strengths. By resisting systematicity—a choice echoed in the book's fragmented, four-chapter structure, itself reminiscent of Nancy's monograms—Van Den Abbeele embraces the openness that lies at the heart of Nancy's thought: as if acknowledging, in turn, the possible infinity of sense, the book leaves space for further enquiry, rather than foreclosing it. While such radical openness, along with the book's density and depth, may appear daunting at times, particularly to new readers of Nancy, those willing to engage with its sophisticated analyses and elaborate arguments will find it a highly rewarding experience. 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.