What remains beyond every act of classification?
This study develops the concept of the ontological remainder as a theoretical framework for examining the persistent excess of being over conceptual determination. Every act of classification, interpretation, or representation makes phenomena intelligible through reduction and stabilization. Yet no conceptual system fully coincides with the reality it seeks to describe. Something always remains beyond totalization.
Drawing on phenomenological insights from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the study argues that this remainder should not be understood as an unknown object hidden behind appearances. Rather, it designates the structural impossibility of exhausting being through conceptual forms. What escapes classification is not a failure of knowledge but a constitutive feature of appearance itself.
The theoretical model is explored through literary analyses of Rainer Maria Rilke's Archaïscher Torso Apollos, Mircea Eliade's La țigănci, and Jorge Luis Borges's The Aleph. Through these works, the study investigates residual presence, interpretative undecidability, and the limits of representation as different manifestations of the same ontological structure.
Situated at the intersection of ontology, phenomenology, and literary theory, this book offers a new approach to the relationship between being and classification, arguing that every conceptual order necessarily leaves behind an irreducible remainder.
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- Teofana Eremencu (Autor), 2026, The Ontological Remainder, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1772531
