Series are everywhere, unfolding before our eyes like unseen, self-writing lines in all external and internal directions. Or as Clarice Lispector says, “What I’m writing to you is a ‘this’. It won’t stop: it goes on . . .” (Agua Viva). From the vast manifest universe to the invisible center of oneself and beyond, there is nothing that is not, in a whole series of senses, the series of itself. As every number is expressible as a series of numbers, so one sees that seriality, once defined by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as “simultaneous unity and multiplicity,” belongs at every scale to the essence of everything.

Following this idea of the series as a fundamental feature of reality, The Seriality of the One investigates its metaphysical, ontological, and existential significance in dialogue with an open constellation of modern and premodern authors, giving special attention to the way seriality mediates and measures the relation between the individual and the universal, bridging by ellipsis the unbounded interpenetrating unities of the one and the One. Seen through the ongoing perspective of the series, beings, events, and facts are never discrete and definable identities that can ever be counted or discounted as having greater or lesser importance or status than others. Nothing is merely itself or a part of something else. In the infinity mirror of seriality, all are simultaneously equivalent to all or the totality itself.

The implications and parameters of this insight are here explored in five chapters focused on the categories of quality and quantity. First, through a counter-reading of a passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics in which the primacy of substance is established in relation to the specter of a universe of mere succession, seriality is identified as the overflowing unity of one and many. Second, in light of the serial basis of counting and Nietzsche’s critique of enumeration, the nature of quantification is examined as a pervasive limitation of our times, the instrument of a “transparency” that works to obfuscate actuality. Third, paralleling Hegel’s prioritization of quality over quantity, the nature of quality is interrogated as the spiritual core of life’s spontaneous and infinitely evolving question of itself. Fourth, elaborating upon Meher Baba’s figuration of seriality as the interface of reality and illusion, the concept of seriality is examined in its simplicity as the way of moving beyond the opposition or dialectical oscillation between quality and quantity. Last, drawing on the geometric metaphor of divine vision in Dante’s Paradiso, the principle of measure is explicated in order to articulate the poetic and creative nature of seriality as process or activity, this immeasurable reality’s never-ending reckoning of its own indivisibility.

Nicola Masciandaro is Professor of English at Brooklyn College (CUNY) and a specialist in medieval literature and mysticism.

Anthem Series on Radical Theory