Modernity as Exception and Miracle

Translated from the SpanishDe lo extraordinario: Nominalismo y Modernidad, this book argues that a defining aspect of modernity is an ever-increasing pursuit of, and need for, what Eduardo Sabrovsky calls "the extraordinary," a term that encompasses both the exception and the miraculous. Sabrovsky shows the degree to which Robert Musil's novelThe Man without Qualities functions as a paradoxical paradigm of the extraordinary, and he extends the theoretical insights drawn from Musil's magisterial work through a series of inquiries into cardinal elements of modern literature, material culture, historiography, physical science, psychoanalysis, and political theory. Sabrovsky demonstrates how the extraordinary condition of modernity emerges from the debates conducted by the last representatives of medieval scholasticism in which nominalism defeated realism, and he resituates the results of this triumph of nominalism in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille, among others.

Preface to the English Edition

Preface to the Spanish Edition

Introduction: From the Transcendental, through the Extraordinary, to "Perpetual Peace"
Peter Fenves

1. Musil's Death

2. The Extraordinary, History

3. The Extraordinary, Myth

4. The Works of Science

5. Nietzsche: The Incombustible in Reason

6. The Truth Is That There Is No Truth

7. The Endless Sacrifice: Art and the Production of the Extraordinary

8. Outline for an Ethics of Immortality

9. Politics of Space and of the Gaze

10. Notes on the Spectrality of Objects

11. Psychoanalysis: The Future of an Illusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index