Little Crystalline Seed

Iddo Dickmann is Lecturer in Jewish Thought, Culture, and Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder.

"The book is an excellent contribution to the understanding of several difficult 'post-Heideggerian' thinkers and to an understanding of the current state of continental philosophy. It makes a signal contribution to the understanding of Deleuze's thought and admirably works out the vertiginous logics of various kinds of mise en abyme, which have remained all too obscure and confused in the extant literature." — Andrzej Warminski, author of Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De Man

• IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction 1. The Literary Theory of Mise en abyme and its Philosophical MeaningMise en abyme and mirroringThe double-bind of the mise en abymeStrata and undercurrents in the typology of the mise en abymeMise en abyme in the new New Novel: Reversing mimetologism "in one fell swoop"Mise en abyme in reader-response criticismMise en abyme in analytic and possible-worlds semantics 2. Jacques Derrida: Mise en abyme and the logic of supplementarityMise en abyme and the infrastructural differenceDerrida’s denouncement of mise en abymeIterability and the "lacunal" conception of mise en abymeMisconception of the mise en abyme and its consequencesOn second thoughts: Intentionality and the "invagination" of text 3. Maurice Blanchot: Heading Toward Death as Mise en abyme Death and "ambiguity"Mise en abyme and the "night itself ""Worklessness" and Gide’s mechanism of retroactionWorklessness and Iser’s "acts of fictionalization"Mise en abyme and the "fatality of the day" 4. Gilles Deleuze: Repetition and Time as Mise en abyme Mise en abyme and the ground of differenceMise en abyme and the philosophy of affirmationThe prospective mise en abyme and the synthesis of the presentThe retro-prospective mise en abyme and the synthesis of the pastMise en abyme and "schema" in Kant and BergsonThe Klein-bottle and the synthesis of the future 5. Mise en abyme as a Paradigm Shift I: From Mirror to "Labyrinth of Mirrors"The "mirror of nature" and the principle of adequatio Three paradigms of imaginationDeleuze on Bergson: Crystallines, convex mirrors and double mirrorsGasche on Derrida: The tain of the mirrorBorges and the "monstrosity of mirrors" 6. Mise en abyme as a Paradigm Shift II: From Play to "Divine Play"The play of the world and the play of BeingGadamer: Play and the hermeneutic circleEugen Fink: Play as the "symbol of world"Caillois and Levinas: Play and the other-than-BeingDeleuze: The divine game and the ethics of becoming 7. The Rhizomatic Book and the Centrifugal Mise en abyme "Minor literature" and the semiotics of "expression"The rhizomatic book and its readerThe rhizomatic book as mise en abymeAn empirical example: The Jewish scripture as a rhizomatic book"Diagrammatical" reality and the "sheaf " of transcodation ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex