Pleromatica, or Elsinore's Trance
Pleromatica, or Elsinore's Trance
Gabriel Catren
Translated by Thomas Murphy
July 2023
Urbanomic/Sequence
Paperback 210 x 148mm, 528pp.
ISBN 978-1-7336281-4-3
The great poets and thinkers of modernity described a situation we still inhabit today: the catastrophic undermining of all foundations, the disorienting relativisation of all reference points, the prospect of abandonment to chance and contingency alone—the shipwreck of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés.
In this precise and poetic work of philosophy, Gabriel Catren sketches out a new “phenoumenodelic” solution to this momentous ungrounding, defiantly refusing both unrestrained contingency and arbitrary refoundation. Mobilising a formidable knowledge of all the major currents of modern thought, deftly articulating Kantian transcendentalism and Spinozan immanentism, phenomenological reduction and scientific realism, Pleromatica argues that the projects oriented by the infinite ideas of reason (Truth, Beauty, Justice, Love) need not be abandoned in the face of the ‘exquisite crisis’ of modernity. Instead, the “shipwreck” is to be understood as a suspension of finite subjectivity in the fullness of a “phenoumenodelic pleroma,” an atonal milieu ringing with unheard-of possibilities.
Announcing an ambitious programme for the renewal of transcendental philosophy, in Pleromatica Catren recomposes the primary elements of modern thought into a startling new configuration, introducing a vivid constellation of new concepts with which to map out and navigate the vast space of this “worldless daydream.”
Gabriel Catren is a philosopher and a physicist working at the Institut SPHERE—Science, Philosophie, Histoire (Université Paris Diderot–CNRS, Paris).
TransLatin Diagonals
Conversation with Gabriel Catren, Amy Ireland, Maya B. Kronic, and Thomas Murphy
Casa São Roque – Centro de Arte, Porto
Sunday, June 18, 2023PRESS RELEASE
On 'Pleromatica' and its Harmonics
Gabriel Catren
