Singularities at the Threshold: The Ontology of Unrest

In Singularities at the Threshold: The Ontology of Unrest, Bruno Gullì calls into question the concept of the independent and sovereign individual of the liberal (and neoliberal) tradition from the standpoint of the ontology of singularity, that is, the plural constitution of what appears to be an individual. Singularity is not the result of a process of individuation, but the process itself. He argues that the process of individuation—whereby at each stage everything appears to be individuated as such, to be an individual thing—is in reality always already plural, a process of transindividuation, or better, trans-dividuation. Gullì further examines why singularity is usually confused with individuality; what comes after the sovereign and independent individual, after the subject; and what the role of subversive and liberated singularities is in bringing about a new ethos and a better world.

Table of Contents:
Contents Introduction Part One: Contingency Chapter One: The Open: Ontology of Mystery and Simplicity Chapter Two: Replacing the Individual. The Impossible Individuation Chapter Three: Subject of Fiction: Subjection and Subjugation Part Two: Capture Chapter Four: Borders and Vortices (Life and Work) Chapter Five: Politics of Disposability and Cruelty Chapter Six: Capture and Thresholds: The Politics of Number, the Accidental Glass Part Three: Subversions Chapter Seven: A Passage to Art Chapter Eight: Disaffection and Care Chapter Nine: Relations without a subject Bibliography About the Author

About the Author :
Bruno Gullì teaches philosophy at CUNY-Kingsborough.

Review :
At stake in this book are the fundamental questions of philosophy. The notion of singularity is at the same time the crucial topic addressed here and a lens that allows reframing the conceptual foundations of philosophy as a practice of thought. Challenging the very paradigm of subjectivity, Bruno Gullì opens up new vistas on the way in which we inhabit the world. He sheds light on the materiality of servitude without ever losing sight of the possibility of liberation. Singularities at the Threshold is a major philosophical work, with important implications for the politics of contemporary social movements. In this tour de force, Bruno Gullì throws into question the dominant politics of number and the traditional notions of subjectivity known to the philosophical community. He creatively destroys the concept of the individual through a radical synthetic grounding of the singular not as a result but as an infinite and open-ended process. Giving us a highly original conceptualization of this process as trans-dividuation, Gullì establishes his work as an avant-garde philosophy, one in which new weapons of criticism are imaginatively forged and an extraordinary effort is made to think through our heightened contingencies and necessary subversions. No one is a more novel reader of the most militant lines of European philosophy than Bruno Gullì . This book is a persistent pleasure to read, as Gullì makes his way through his argument with verve and commitment.