Abstract

The article defines being and emergency in terms of sense and what exceeds sense: the sense of being implies an excess over sense; an emergency is a clash between sense and excess. The article then argues deductively that, as entities for whom being is an issue, we depend on greater and lesser emergencies thanks to which entities become accessible. Emergencies reshape the possible, the past, and the present; they call for emergent thinking, or thinking that is itself undergoing an emergency.