Gabriel Catren is a philosopher and a physicist working at the Institut SPHERE—Science
Philosophie Histoire (Université Paris Diderot—CNRS Paris). The great poets and thinkers of
modernity described a situation we still inhabit today: the catastrophic undermining of all
foundations the disorienting relativization 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. Mobilizing a formidable knowledge of the major currents of modern
thought deftly articulating Kantian transcendentalism and Spinozan immanentism
phenomenological reduction and scientific realism Catren 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 program 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.”
