Description:

“Of the Extraordinary”

A Roundtable Discussion upon the Release of Eduardo Sabrovsky’s Modernity as Exception and Miracle (SUNY University Press, 2021)

Eduardo Sabrovsky is Professor of Philosophy at the Instituto de Filosofía at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile.

Panelists Include:

Peter Fenves (chair): Professor of German, Jewish Studies, and Comparative Literature Studies, Northwestern; he wrote the introduction to Modernity as Exception and Miracle.

Avery Goldman: Associate Professor of Philosophy, De Paul University, author of Kant and the Subject of Critique (Indiana University Press, 2012)

Javier Burdman: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Strasbourg; he translated Modernity as Exception and Miracle.

Brief description of Modernity as Exception and Miracle:  

Translated from the Spanish De 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 novel The 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.