Rethinking the Concept of World

Rok Benčin is a Research Associate at the Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His research focuses on the relations between aesthetics, ontology and politics in contemporary philosophy. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Paris 8 and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. He has published journal articles in Theory, Culture & Society, European Review and SubStance: A review of theory and literary criticism. He is a member of the International Comparative Literature Association's Research Committee on Literary Theory.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Prose of Worlds1. World According to Contemporary Philosophy: Lost, Obsolete or Multiplied?2. The Leibnizian Turn3. Between Ontological and Transcendental Multiplicity4. From Cosmopolitanism to the Conflict of Worlds5. Worlds as Fictions, Artworks as Monadic Objects6. Proust’s Worlds: From Logic to ProseConclusion: The Multiplicity of Worlds and Inter-Worldly PhenomenaBibliographyIndex

What does it mean to inhabit not a world, but a multiplicity of worlds, how do their scissions and proliferations constitute the contemporary predicament? Rok Bencin’s book, taking its cue from Leibniz, explores this multiplicity through the works of Deleuze, Badiou, Proust, Rancière, confronts their thresholds and overlappings, both in their aesthetic, ontological, and political dimensions. It states anew, with a strong conceptual grip, what has been spared out both by the disqualification of the world by the infinity of science or by its equation with the innate loss of a unified cosmos: the discontinous frameworks our reality is made of.