About

Georges Yves-Francois Van Den Abbeele is a professor in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, with appointments in Comparative Literature, English, and European Languages and Studies. He holds a B.A. from Reed College and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, specializing in Romance Studies. His research interests encompass French and European philosophical literature, travel narrative and tourism/migration studies, critical theory and aesthetics, francophone literature, history of cartography, media history and theory, the fable as a genre, history of the French intellectual, European studies, Western American literature and history, site interpretation and preservation, and humanities and public policy. Van Den Abbeele has made significant contributions through numerous publications, including books, edited volumes, and translations, notably on Jean-François Lyotard and other key figures in philosophy and critical theory. His work explores early modern to postmodern philosophical literature, with a focus on figures such as Montaigne, Descartes, Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida, among others. He has been recognized with distinctions such as the Blaise Pascal Medal from the European Academy of Science. Van Den Abbeele's scholarly output includes articles, book chapters, and edited special issues that examine themes like travel, colonialism, cultural theory, and the history of ideas, contributing to a broad understanding of European intellectual history and critical theory.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Communication
• Linguistics
• Cognitive psychology
• Law

Selected publications

• The “Singular Logic of the Retreat”

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-10-03

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  This chapter follows the germination of Nancy’s political thinking by analyzing the sense of one of Nancy’s guiding philosophical tropes, the critical and contradictory French word <italic>retrait</italic>, which is usually translated as withdrawal, but which also implies a re-drawing or re-inscribing of a trait or trace. Deriving the concept of “retreat” from its unconventional use in Derrida’s discussion of metaphor, Nancy and his collaborator Lacoue-Labarthe are shown to develop the concept into a powerful engine of political critique articulated with Hannah Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism, on the one hand, and Freud’s analysis of mass psychology, on the other. The “retreat of the political” thus comes to designate an essence of the political that is not actually political, something before or behind the <italic>polis</italic> that underwrites a form of being together that seeks something more than mere life. Remarkably, it is the figure of the mother that appears in Nancy’s thinking as the very modelling of the retreat, as the sense of a withdrawal that is also the singularity of birth, the very corporeal interruption that defines the ethos of being both together and apart.

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• Sense and Singularity

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-10-06

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• 2. Monograms: Writing Singular Plural

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-10-31

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• Monograms

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-10-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter critically details Nancy’s experiments, as a philosopher, with an interruptive genre of short, occasional writings that model an engagement with the current context or “actuality” of their composition. The term “monogram” derives from Kant’s concept of the schema as a hinge between the sensible and the intelligible. Nancy explicitly takes up the term, expands upon its implications, and galvanizes it into a thinking that tries to make sense of the singular, including the singular events of our time. This is a claim that goes to the heart of Nancy’s career-long reflection on the form as well as the content of philosophical writing as a mode of critical intervention. As such, the monograms propose a genre of philosophical writing that is punctual, fragmented, and interrupted, corresponding to a thinking inhabited and shaped by its finitude, a thinking that effectively questions the sense of philosophy’s singular engagement with the world, with the unheard-of in philosophy. Nancy’s philosophical monograms thus model the interventionist, interruptive style found in much of his later writings on topics as diverse as the disaster of Fukushima, the COVID pandemic, or the foibles of French president Macron. They figure the interruption of philosophy in its actuality.

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• Corpus interruptus

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-10-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter addresses the differential treatment of sense in Nancy by analyzing <italic>Corpus</italic> and his writings on the body, aesthetics, and sexuality, notably <italic>Sexistence,</italic> as well as <italic>Corpus II</italic> and <italic>III,</italic> and then revisiting his pivotal early writings on art and aesthetics. Nancy’s expansive definition of sense is shown to guide his broader analyses of sensation in his definition of the body as the “interval between two senses,” that is, the body as itself a space of interruption. Not the locus of some “common sense” but sense itself as uncommon. What he provocatively terms “sexistence,” in the work by that title, matters, then, less for the analysis of sexuality per se, than for Nancy’s uncommon positioning of <italic>eros</italic> in relation to <italic>logos</italic> and <italic>tekhnè.</italic> All three categories reinscribe for him the fundamental transcendence of existence or ek-sistence, literally standing outside oneself as what defines oneself as such. It is Nancy’s triangulation of sex, language, and technology (including art) as mutually interruptive that brings the analysis of sense and singularity to a conclusion as the foundational articulation of the world we find ourselves in and whose patency remains the task of philosophy, and of the arts, to disclose as such.

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• Descartes’s Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-10-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explicates Nancy’s radical and foundational rereading of Descartes, first in the 1978 monograph, <italic>Ego sum,</italic> then over the course of the rest of Nancy’s work. Nancy reads Descartes’s <italic>cogito</italic> as singularly interrupted, or “iterative.” He urges us to grasp the foundational statement, <italic>ego sum</italic>, <italic>ego existo</italic>, as necessarily iterative, as having to be repeated in its singularity, “each time.” Far from the continuity of a self-actualizing subjectivity, we encounter the endless interruption of self-evidence, of self-sensing, that can never be fully evident beyond the singular event of its utterance. The analysis enabled by this perspective opens a set of figures that will stake out the senses of the scene of writing, of philosophy’s self-presentation, of world-making or “fabling,” and of corporal areality. All of these emerge in later works as prominent concerns of Nancy’s philosophical attention. Most importantly, Nancy’s subsequent deconstruction of the opposition between body and mind (or the sensible and the intelligible) derives from this same thesis of interrupted consciousness while revealing that relation as an <italic>unum quid,</italic> or “as-if one,” that unravels the ways in which thinking and perceiving, meaning and sensation, are differing but interrelated forms of cogitation, differing kinds of sense-making.

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• 1 The Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time (Reading Descartes with Jean-Luc Nancy)

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-02-17

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• Introduction: From the Interruption of Sense to the Poetics of Finitude

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-11-01

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• Notes

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-10-03

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• 4. Corpus Interruptus: Uncommon Sense and the Singular Crossings of Eros, Logos, and Tekhnè

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-11-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Jean-François Lyotard

  Telio (Norway)

  3 shared

• Ranjan Ghosh

  2 shared

• Dean MacCannell

  University of California System

  1 shared

• Tom Conley

  1 shared

• Arthur Kirsch

  1 shared

• Patrick Moser

  Borealis (Austria)

  1 shared

• Éliane DalMolin

  1 shared

• Gregory de Rocher

  1 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Reed College

  1976

• Ph.D., Romance Studies

  Cornell University

  1981

Awards & honors

• Blaise Pascal Medal, European Academy of Science Research