The Little Crystalline Seed

<p><b>Shows how contemporary French philosophy adopted this literary paradigm and argues for its significance for addressing concerns in ethics ontology and aesthetics.</b></p><p><i>Mise en abyme</i> is a term developed from literary theory denoting a work that doubles itself within itself-a story placed within a story or a play within a play. The term flourished in experimental fiction in midcentury France having not only a strong impact on contemporary literary theory but also on post-structuralist philosophy. <i>The Little Crystalline Seed</i> focuses on how thinkers invoke the concept of mise en abyme in order to establish ontologies that deviate from that of Heidegger. Iddo Dickmann demonstrates how the concept served in modeling Jacques Derrida's logic of supplementarity; Maurice Blanchot's mechanism of <i>désouvrement</i>; Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of repetition; Emmanuel Levinas's concept of proximity and in further circuit: the philosophies of Bergson Kant Leibniz Heidegger himself and more. Exploring the interpretative and generative potential of the mise en abyme for continental thought Dickmann reveals new points of resonance between various philosophical topics including aesthetics ethics time logic mirroring play and signification.</p>