Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible)

The Universal (In the realm of the sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy proposes a radical, new philosophical system that moves from ontology to ethics. Dorothea Olkowski develops the concept of an ontological unconscious, a connection arising from our sensible relation to the world that conditions encounters with the environment and with others. This fundamental ontology rethinks the space-time relations opened by Irigaray's notion of the 'interval,' Bergson's 'recollection,' Merleau-Ponty's idea of the 'flesh' and Deleuze's 'plane of immanence'. Writing in an original style, inspired by literature and the arts, Olkowski locates a 'realm of the senses', a field of vulnerability, felt as pleasures and pains. This presents an aesthetic sense of something universal to all human kind, as well as to the organic and inorganic world. In addition to this proposal for a wider ontology, the relation between traditional ontologies and politics is examined as a means of opening politics beyond a no exit or limit cycle.Instead a multiplicity of self-organized, emergent perspectives emerges, eliminating the need for the connections, conjunctions, and disjunctions of the Kantian paradigm at work in contemporary continental philosophy. This is a timely, controversial and important book that will contribute enormously to the study of Deleuze and Continental Philosophy.

Dorothea Olkowski is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She is the author of Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, University of California Press, 1999 and is co-editor with Constantin Boundas of Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy (Routledge, 1994). She has been at the forefront of North American Deleuze studies ever since. She has also edited books on Gilles Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and French Feminism and has a forthcoming volume on Rereading Merleau-Ponty.