The Contingent Universality

A radical intervention into contemporary philosophical debates on what is universal and what is contingent and whether life can truly be both.

There may exist something like the most unbearable of all philosophical thoughts.
It is the thought of contingency and universality converging, intersecting, and being one and the same thing, approached from two different perspectives. Indeed, hardly anything is as unsettling as the realisation of the absolute contingency of the emergence of universals – and the correlative realization that the only true universality is the contingency of everything.
Against the entire tradition of Western thought, which has sought to anchor universal truth in transcendent laws and eternal forms, The Contingent Universality proposes a radical inversion. Jure Simoniti thinks the unbearable thought through to the end, facing up to its most binding and disconcerting consequences, and sets forth a bold new ontology – an ontology of continent universality.
The philosophy of Slavoj Žižek is central to this project, and The Contingent Universality sets out to finally accomplish the ontology of negative logical space that is implicit throughout his work. Tracing a sweeping intellectual arc from Plato and Aristotle through Kant, Fichte, and Hegel to contemporary thinkers such as Derrida, Badiou, the book reconstructs the hidden history of this idea: that every universal was once a contingent singularity. In doing so, it provides new answers to questions on the nature of contingency, necessity, predictability of the future, the validity of the laws of nature, the role of singularity in relation to universality, chaos and order, reality and truth.