The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy

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.

Dorothea Olkowski is professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.