BEING SINGULAR PLURAL
being singular plural
community as first philosophy
According to different versions, but in a predominantly uniform manner, the tradition put forward a representation according to which philosophy and the city would be (would have been, must have been) related to one another as subjects. Accordingly, philosophy, as the articulation of logos, is the subject of the city, where the city is the space of this articulation. Likewise, the city, as the gathering of the logikoi, is the common subject of philosophy, where philosophy is the production of their common logos. Logos itself, then contains the essence or meaning of this reciprocity: it is the common foundation of community, where community, in turn, is the foundation of Being.
It is within this uniform horizon, according to different versions (whether strong or weak, happy or unhappy) of this predominant mode of inquiry, that we still understand the famous ‘political animal’ of Aristotle: it is to presume that logos is the condition of community, which, in turn, is the condition of humanity; and/or it is to presume that each of these three terms draws its unity and consistency from [its sharing] a communication of essence with the other two […]
[…]
‘Philosophy and politics’ is the exposition [enonce] of this situation. But it is a disjunctive exposition, because the situation itself is disjunctive.
The city is not primarily ‘community’, any moe than it is primarily ‘public space’. […] It is ‘community’ without common origin. That being the case, and as long as philosophy is an appeal to the origin, the city, far from being philosophy’s subject or space, is its problem […]
[…]
Once this horizon is deconstructed, however, the necessity of the plural singular of the origin comes into play – and this is already underway. But I do not plan to propose an ‘other politics’ under this heading. I am no longer sure that this term (or the term ‘political philosophy’) can continue to have any consistency beyond this opening up of the horizon which comes to us both at the end of the long history of our Western situation and as the reopening of this situation. I only want to help to bring out that the combination philosophy-politics, in all the force of its being joined together, simultaneously exposes and hides the dis-position of the origin and co-appearance, which is its correlate. [25]
[…]
[…] the urgent demand […] is not another political abstraction. Instead, it is a reconsideration of the very meaning of ‘politics’ – and, therefore, of ‘philosophy’ – in light of the originary situation: the bare exposition of singular origins. This is the necessary ‘first philosophy’ […]. It is an ontology. Philosophy needs to recommence, to restart itself from against itself, against political philosophy and philosophical politics.
In order to do this, philosophy needs to think in principle about how we are ‘us’ among us, that is, how the consistency of our Being is in being-in-common, and how this consists precisely in the ‘in’ or in the ‘between’ of its spacing.
mitsein
The last ‘first philosophy,’ if one dare say anything about it, is given to us in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. It is that which has put us on the way [chemin] to where we are, together, whether we know it or not. But it is also why its author was able to, in a sort of return of Destruktion itself, compromise himself, in an unpardonable way, with his involvement in a philosophical politics that became criminal.
This very point, then, indicates to us that place from which first philosophy must recommence: it is necessary to refigure fundamental ontology (as well as the existential analytic, the history of Being, and the thinking of Ereignis that goes along with it) with a thorough resolve that starts from the plural singular of origins, from being-with.
I want to return to the issue of ‘first philosophy in order to push it even further, but without claiming to be toie one who can fully accomplish such an undertaking. […] For the moment, I only want to indicate the principle of its necessity.
Heidegger clearly states that being-with (Mitsein, Miteinandersein, and Mitdasein) is essential to the constitution of Dasein itself. Given this, it needs to be made absolutely clear that Dasein, far from being either ‘man’ or ‘subject’, is not even an isolated and unique ‘one’, but is instead always the one, each one, with one another [l’un avec l’autre].
If this determination is essential, then it needs to attain to the co-originary dimension and expose it without reservation. [26]
[…]
[…] in revealing itself as what is at stake in the meaning of Being, Dasein has already revealed itself as being-with and reveals itself as such before any other explication. The meaning of Being is not in play in Dasein in order to be ‘communicated’ to others; its putting into play is identically being-with.
Or, again: Being is put into play as the ‘with’ that is absolutely indisputable. From now on, this is the minimal ontological premise. Being is put into play among us; it does not have any other meaning except the dis-position of this ‘between’.
[…]
That which exists, whatever it might be, coexists because it exists. The co-implication of existing [l’exister] is the sharing of the world. A world is not something external to existence; it is not an extrinsic addition to other existences; the world is the coexistence that puts these existences together […].
[…] there is for the whole of philosophy what is exemplified in Hegel’s statement ‘the I is in essence and act the universal: and such partnership (Gemeinschaftlichkeit) is a form, though an external form, of universality.’ (Logic, p.31). It is well known that dialectical logic requires the passage through exteriority as essential to interiority itself. Nevertheless, within this logic, it is the’interior’ and subjective form of the ‘Me’ that is needed in order to finish the project of finding itself and posing itself as the truth of the universal and its community. As a consequence, what is left for us to hold onto is the moment of ‘exteriority’ as being of almost essential value, so essential that it would no longer be a matter of relating this exteriority to any individual or collective ‘me’ without also unfailingly attaining to exteriority itself and as such.
NB. read in this connection the passage on external sovereignty in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (starting para 321)
Being singular plural means the essence of Being in only as co-essence. […] Coessentiality signifies the essential sharing of essentiality, sharing in the guise of assembling, as it were.
This could also be put in the following way: if Being is being-with, then it is, in its being-with, the ‘with’ that constitutes Being; the with is not simply an addition. This operates in the same way as a collective [collegial] power: power is neither exterior to the members of the collective [college] nor interior to each one of them, but rather consists in the collectivity [collegialite] as such.
[Federalism]
[…] it is absolutely necessary to reverse the order if philosophical exposition, for which it has been a matter of course that the ‘with’ – and the other that goes along with it – always comes second, even though this succession is contradicted by the deep logic in question here.
Even Heidegger preserves this order of succession in a remarkable way, in that he does not introduce the co-originarity of Mitsein until after having established the originary character of Dasein.
[…]
[…] in proposing to reverse the order of ontological exposition, I am only proposing to bring to light a resource that is more or less obscurely presented throughout the entire history of philosophy […]. philosophy begins with and in ‘civil’ [‘concitoyenne’] coexistence as such […]. Or rather, the ‘city’ is not primarily a form of political institution; it is primarily being-with as such.[31]
the with
What is known as ‘society’, therefore, in the broadest and most diffuse sense of the word, is the figure [chiffre] of an ontology yet to be put into play. Rousseau presented [a glimpse of] it by making the poorly named ‘contact’ the very event that ‘made a creature of intelligence and a man… from a stupid, limited animal,’ and not simply an arrangement between individuals. (Nietzsche confirms this presentation in a paradoxical way when Zarathustra says, ‘human society: that is an experiment… a long search… and not a ‘contract’.) Marx saw it when he qualified humanity as social in its very origin, production, and destination, and when the entire movement and posture of his thinking assigned Being itself to this social being. Heidegger designated it in positioning being-with as constitutive of being-there. No one, however, has radically thematised the ‘with’ as the essential trait of Being and as its proper plural singular coessence.
[…] what is at stake is no longer thinking:
- beginning from the one, or from the other,
- beginning from their togetherness, understood now as the One, now as the Other,
- but thinking, absolutely and without reserve, beginning from the ‘with’, as the proper essence of one whose Being is nothing other than with-one-another.
The one/the other is neither ‘by’, not ‘for’, nor ‘in’, nor ‘dspite’, but rather ‘with’. This ‘with’ is at once both more and less than ‘relation’ or ‘bond’, especially if such relation or bond presupposes the preexistence of thee terms upon which it relies; the ‘with’ is the exact contemporary of its terms; it is, in fact, their cotemporaneity.
‘With’ is the sharing of space-tiem; it is at-the-same-time-in-the-same-place as itself, in itself, shattered.
It is the instant scaling back of the principle of identity: Being is at the same time in the same place only on the condition of the spacing of an indefinite plurality of singularities.
[…]
what becomes of sovereignty?
What is the being-with of Being?
In one sense, this is the original situation of the West that is always repeating itself […]
Today, this repetition produces itself as a situation in which the two major elements compose a sort of antinomy: on the one hand, there is the exposure of the world and, on the other, the end of representations of the world. This means nothing short of a transformation in the relation [that we name] ‘politico-philosophy’: it can no longer be a matter of a single community, of its essence, closure, and sovereignty; by contrast, it can no longer be a matter of organising a community according to the decrees of a sovereign Other, or according to the telos [fins] of a history.
It can no longer be a matter of treating sociability as a regrettable and inevitable accident, a constraint that has to be managed in some way or another.
Community is bare, but it is imperative.
On the one side, the concept of community or the city is, in every sense, diffracted. It is that which signifies the chaotic and multiform appearance of the infranational, supranational, para-national and, moreover, the dislocation of the ‘national’ in general.
On the other side, the concept of community appears to have its own prefix as its only content: the cum, the with deprived of substance and connection, stripped of interiority, subjectivity, and personality. Either way, sovereignty is nothing. Sovereignty is nothing but the com- as such, it is always and indefinitely ‘to be completed’, as in com-munism or com-passion. [36]
This is not a matter of thinking the annihilation of sovereignty. It is a matter of thinking through the following question: If sovereignty is the grand, political term for defining community (its leader or its essence) that has nothing beyond itself, with no foundation or end but itself, what becomes of sovereignty when it is revealed that it is nothing but a singularly plural spacing? How is one to think sovereignty as the ‘nothing’ of the ‘with’ that is laid bare?
At the same time, if political sovereignty has always signified the refusal of domination (of a state by another or by a church, of a people by something other than itself), how is one to think the bare sovereignty of the ‘with’ and against domination, whether this is the domination of being together by some other means or the domination of togetherness by itself (by the regulation of its ‘automatic’ control)?
In fact, one could begin to describe the present transformation of ‘political space’ as a transition toward ’empire’, where empire signifies two things: 1. domination without sovereignty (without the elaboration of such a concept); and 2. the distancing, spacing, and plurality opposed to the concentration of interiority required by political sovereignty.
The question then becomes: How is one to think the spacing of empire against its domination?
The retreat of the political does not signify the disappearance of the political. It only signifies the disappearance of the philosophical presupposition of the whole politico-philosophical order, which is always an ontological presupposition. This presupposition has various forms; it can consist in thinking Being as community and community as destination, or, on the contrary, thinking Being as anterior and outside the order of society and, as such, thinking Being as the accidental exteriority of commerce and power. BUt, in this way, being-together is never properly [brought to the fore as an explicit] theme and as the ontological problem. The retreat of the political is the uncovering, the ontological laying bare of being-with.
co-originarity
being singular plural [37]
Because none of these three terms precedes or grounds the other, each designates the coessence of the others. This coessence puts essence itself in the hyphenation – ‘being-singular-plural’ – which is a mark of union and also a mark of division, a mark of sharing that effaces itself, leaving each term to its isolation and its being-with-others.
In such an ontology, which is not an ‘ontology of society’ in the sense of a ‘regional ontology’, but ontology itself as a ‘sociality’ or an ‘association’ more originary than all ‘society’, more originary than ‘individuality’ and every ‘essence of Being’.
[NB. an origin that precedes society – this sound much like an interpretation of radical title: land appropriation which founds the law and therefore precedes society, constituting it in this gesture. the spatial ordering of the world, geometrization and technics before technics]
Being is with; it is as the with of Being itself(the cobeing of Being), so that Being does not identify itself as such (as Being of the being), but shows itself [see pose], gives itself, occurs, dis-poses itself (made event, history, and world) as its own singular plural with. In other words, Being is not without Being, which is not another miserable tautology as long as one understands it in the co-originary mode of being-with-being-itself.
[…]
The co– itself and as such, the copresence of Being, is not presentable as that Being which ‘is’, since it is only in the distancing. It is unrepresentable, not because it occupies the most withdrawn and mysterious region of Being, the region of nothingness, but quite simply because it is not subject to a logic of presentation.
Neither present nor to be presented (nor, as a result, ‘unpresentable’ in the strict sense), the ‘with’ is the (singular plural) condition of presence in general [understood] as copresence.
[…]
Being-many-together is the originary situation; it is even what defines ‘situation’ in general. Therefore, an originary or transcendental ‘with’ demands, with a palpable urgency, to be disentangled and articulated for itself. But one of the greatest difficulties of the concept of the the with is that there is no ‘getting back to’ or ‘up to’ this ‘originary’ or ‘transcendental’ position; the with is strictly speaking contemporaneous with all existence, as it is with all thinking. [41]
coexistence
[…]
The traditional sovereignties (the theologico-political order) did not lose power (which only ever shifts from place to place), but lost the possibility of making sense. As a result, meaning itself – that is, the we – demanded its due […].
[…]
If a brief summary is allowed here, I would say that, because there has been no ‘socialist economy’ (but only state capitalism), just as there has been no ‘collective psychoanalysis’ […], there lies between economics and psychoanalysis the bare space of a ‘being-together’ whose theologico-political presupposition has been exhausted, and which reappears only in reactive spurts. This space has become global, which does not simply mean it has spread out over the entire surface of the planet and beyond, but that it has emerged as the surface of what is at play in the depths: the essence of being-with.
originary anarchy
The retreat [of the political] presents itself in two ways at once: on the one hand, the theologico-political withdraws into the realm of Law; on the other, it withdraws into a self-representation that no longer refers to an origin, but only to the void of its own specularity.
[…]
Law as such is necessarily the Law of an Other, or the Law as Other. The Other implies nonrepresentability. IN the theological realm, this can give rise to an ‘interdiction of representation’ that supposes the sacred nature of the Other […] Access to presence, and even to a ‘super-presence’, is always preserved.
But within an theological realm, this interdiction becomes a denial of representation; the alterity of the law either retrieves, represses, or denies its origin, and ends up in the singular presence of each one to the others.
In this sense, something ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘unfigurable’ runs the risk of revealing itself as completely oppressive and terrifying, if not terrorist, open to the anguish of an originary Lack. In contrast, the ‘figure’ proves itself to be capable of opening onto the ‘with’ as its border, the very limit of its outline.
[…]
So it is not so much a question of denying law itself, it is more a question of ‘doing right’ by the singular plural of the origin. As a result, it is a matter of questioning law about what we might call its ‘originary anarchy’ or the very origin of the law in what is ‘by all rights without any right’: existence unjustifiable as such.
[NB RADICAL TITLE]
considering radical title: is there missing in Nancy something that binds the social being to the earth? is there a degree to which it (while admittedly constituting the spacing of the earth) is untethered from the material concrete actuality of existence. radical title founds the law in its materiality, opening the possibility of community in a non-temporal time, as the origin of the spatiotemporal world.
symbolic misery
Situationism is not wrong to discern at the very heart of abundance, a symbolic misery that does not exclude sustained material misery and certain people’s deprivation, in particular the misery of much of the southern hemisphere…. The misery of the ‘spectacle’ names that coexistence where the co- ends up referring to nothing by which existence could symbolise itself according to itself. […] At that very moment when the only other thing that is given along with existence is existence-with as the space for deployment and appropriation, the co- is nothing that can make sense. Being together is defined as being-together-at-the-spectacle, and this being-together understands itself as an inversion of the representation of itself, which it believes to be capable of giving itself as originary (and lost).
[…]
Both the theory and praxis of critique demonstrate that, from now on, critique absolutely needs to rest on some principle other than that of the ontology of the Other and the Same: it needs an ontology of being-with-one-another, and this ontology mist support both the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’; it must be an ontology for the world, for everyone – and if I can be so bold, it has to be an ontology for each and every one an for the world ‘as totality’, and nothing short of the whole world, since this is all there is […].
[…]
At the very heart of the tradition, it must be said that ‘intelligible reality’ can only be the reality of the sensible as such – and that the ‘intelligible reality’ of the community can only be the reality of being-in-common as such.
What comes to us today is the demand to give the meaning of being-in-common according to what it is – in common or with – and not according to a Being or essence of the common.
As such, it is the demand to give the meaning of being-with right at the with, and in ‘making sense with’ (a praxis of meaning-with) where the opposition of a Meaning (horizon, history, community) and a simple ‘with’ (spacing, exteriority, disparity) would dissolve or break apart. In short, it ii becoming a matter of urgency to know whether social critique is to be made by virtue of a presupposition that is not at all social (an ontology of Being tout-court, as it were) or by virtue of an ontology of being-in-common, that is, of the plural singular essence of Being.
co-appearing
In a general way, indeed in an absolutely general way, the primordial requirement of ontology or first philosophy must now be that Being not be presupposed in any way or in any respect, and, more precisely, that every presupposition of Being must consist in its nonpresupposition.
Being cannot be pre-sup-posed if it is only the Being of what exists, and is not itself some other existence that is previous or subjacent to existence by which existence exists. [56]
Its being singular is plural in its very Being.
It follows then that not only must being-with-one-another not be understood starting from the presupposition of being-one, but on the contrary, being-one (Being as such, complete Being or ens realissimum) can only be understood by starting from being-with-one-another.
That question which we still call a ‘question of social Being’ must, in fact, constitute the ontological question.
[…]
Co-appearing does not simply signify that subjects appear together. In that case (which is the ‘social contract’), it would still need to be asked from where it is that they ‘appear’, from which remote depth do they come into being-social as such, from what origin.
We must also wonder why they appear ‘together’ […]
The very meaning of the word ‘together’. just like the meaning of the word ‘with’, seems to oscillate indefinitely between two meanings, without ever coming to a point of equilibrium:
- it is either the ‘together’ of juxtaposition partes extra parts, isolated and unrelated parts
- or the gathering totum intra totum, a unified totality [unitotalite] where relation surpasses itself in being pure.
[…] together is neither extra nor intra. IN fact, the pure outside, like the pure inside, renders all sorts of togetherness impossible. They both suppose a unique isolated pure substance […]
[so neither communism nor individualism]
Togetherness and being-together are not equivalent.
Togetherness, in the sense of being a substantive entity, is a collection (as in the theory of togetherness [ensembles]). Collection assumes a regrouping that is exterior and indifferent to the being-together (‘in common’) of the objects in a collection.
It could be said, then, that the ontological togetherness which we must think through is never substantive; it is always the adverb of a being-together. But this adverb is not a predicate of ‘Being’; it brings to it no particular and supplementary qualification. Like all adverbs, it modifies or modalizes the verb, but here modalization is of the essence and of the origin. Being is together, and it is not a togetherness.
‘Together’ means simultaneity (in, simul), ‘at the same time’ Being together is being at the same time (and in the same place, which is itself the determination of ‘time’ as ‘contemporary time’).
SPACETIME
‘Same time/same place’ assumes that ‘subjects’, to call them that, share this space-time, but not in the extrinsic sense of ‘sharing’; they must share it between themselves; they must themselves ‘symbolize’ it as the ‘same space-time’ without which there would not be time or space.
The space-time itself is first of all the possibility of the ‘with’.
Very long analyses are called for here. Cutting them far too short, let me say that time cannot be the pure moment [instant], or pure succession, without being simultaneity ‘at the same time’. Time itself implies ‘at the same time’.
Simultaneity immediately opens space as the spacing of time itself. Starting from the simultaneity of ‘subjects’, time is possible, but above all, it is necessary. FOr in order to be together and to communicate, a correlation of places and a transition of passages from one place to another is necessary.
Sharing and passage control each other reciprocally. Husserl writes, ‘It is essentially necessary that the togetherness of monads, their mere co-existence, be a temporal co-existence...’ [Cartesian Meditations].
The passage from one place to another needs time. And moving in place as such needs time: the time for the place to open itself as place, the time to space itself.
Reciprocally, originary time, appearing as such, needs space, the space of its own dis-tension, the space of the passage that divides [partage] it.
Nothing and nobody can be born without being born to and with others who come into this encounter, who are born in their own turn. This ‘together’, therefore, is an absolutely originary structure. What is not together is in the no-time-no-place of non-Being.
nb. this passage with reference to the notes above on radical title. being-together is presupposed. community, territory, law, technics are presupposed in the anarchy of the origin.
Co-appearance, then, must signify – because this is what is now at stake – that ‘appearing’ (coming into the world and being in the world, or existence as such) is strictly inseparable, indiscernible from the cum or the with, which is not only its place and its taking place, but also -and this is the same thing – its fundamental ontological structure.
The with is the most basic feature of Being, the mark of the singular plurality of the origin or origins in it. [62]
Undoubtedly, the with as such is not presentable. […] The with is not ‘unpresentbale’ like some remote or withdrawn presence, or like an Other. […] The ‘with’ is or constitutes the mark of unity/disunity, which in itself does not designate unity or disunity as that fixed substance which would undergird it; the ‘with’ is not the sign of a reality, or even of an ‘intersubjective dimension’.
It really is, ‘in truth’, a mark drawn out over the void, which crosses over it and underlies it at the same time, thereby constituting the drawing apart and drawing together of the void.
[…] if the unpresentability of ‘with’ is not that of a hidden presence, then it is because ‘with’ is the unpresentability of this pre-position, that is, the unpresentability of presentation itself. ‘With’ does not add itself to Being, but rather creates the immanent and intrinsic conditions of presentation in general.
The co- of copresence is the unpresentable par excellence, but it is nothing other than – and not the Other of – presentation, the existence which co-appears.
[…]
We are this in a suspension of history where an enigma is gathering anew; we are contemporaries of ourselves, contemporaries of the stripping bare of the being-in-common.
the spectacle of society
If being-with is the sharing of a simultaneous space-time, then it involves a presentation of this space-time as such.
In order to say ‘we’, one must present the ‘here and now’ of this ‘we’.
‘We’ always expresses a plurality, expresses ‘our’ being divided and entangled: ‘one’ is not ‘with’ in some general sort of way, but each time according to determined modes that are themselves multiple and simultaneous (people, culture, language, lineage, network, group, couple, band, and so on).
A ‘we’, even one that is not articulated, is the condition for the possibility of each ‘I’.
[…]
This stage – this ‘theatre of the world’, as Descartes also liked to call it, using the persistent image of his time – is not a stage in the sense of an artificial space of mimetic representation. It is a stage in the sense of the opening of a space-time for the distribution of singularlties, each of whom singularly plays the unique and plural role of the ‘self’ or the ‘being-self’.
The stage is the space of a co-appearing without which there would be nothing but Being pure and simple, which is to say, all and nothing, all as nothing.
Being gives itself as singular plural and, in this way, organises itself as its own stage.
In this sense, there is no society without spectacle; or more precisely, there is no society without the spectacle of society. […] This claim must be understood as ontologically radical. There is no society without spectacle because society is the spectacle of itself.
As a concept of being-together, co-appearance consists in its appearing, that is in its appearing to itself and to one another, all at once. There is no appearing to oneself except as appearing to one another.
[…] ‘appearing’, and appearing to oneself as well as to one another, is not on the order of appearance, manifestation, phenomena, revealing, or some other concept of becoming-visible. This is because of what that order entails regarding the invisible origin of such appearance, and what it entails regarding the relation of appearance to this origin either as an expression or an illusion, as resemblance or semblance.
So co-appearing is not ‘appearing’.
It is to be in the simultaneity of being-with, where there is no ‘in itself’ that is not already immediately ‘with’.
But ‘immediately with’ does not refer to an immediacy in the sense of an absence of exteriority. On the contrary, it is the instantaneous exteriority of space-time (the instant itself as exteriority: the simultaneous).
a thought on the simultaneous in radical title: radical title grounds the community, the spatio-temporal origin of community (see above). spacing and temporising as also, simultaneously, the opening of technics. it is not that there is technics and then there is spacing/temporising – this opening (differance) is technics in the origin. each technics instrumentalises this differance. check notes on the origin of geometry. the problem in schmitt is that he sees no problem in radical title. it is like a fable or some kind of myth. the group (already constituted at least in some minimal way) appropriates the territory and in this gesture founds the law. but there can be no group without law and without territory. it only exists as the concrete expression of itself. in schmitt the group must move in on a territory, but radical title says nothing about the constitution of the group – does he miss out a step? this must be present in the thinking of the ‘commons’.
is the problem noted above in nancy symmetrical with the problem in schmitt? nancy thinks the constitution of the group in a radical sense, but he doesn’t account for its territorial expression. schmitt accounts for the territorial expression, but misses the radicality of group constitution (as being with, etc.). So radical title would have to be rethought in its true radicality… in both cases, the group is severed from its territorial being.
And this is how co-appearance forms a stage that is not a play of mirrors – or rather, how the play of mirrors must be understood as the truth of the ‘with’. In this sense, ‘society’ is ‘spectacular’.
[…]
[…] the spontaneous knowledge of society – its ‘preontological comprehension’ of itself – is knowledge about Being itself, absolutely, and not about the particular and subordinate region of beings, which would be the ‘social’ region of Being. Being-with is constitutive of Being, and it is [constitutive] for the totality of beings; ‘social’ co-appearance os itself the exposing of the general co-appearance of beings.
[…]
who is it that says ‘we’, and what are we told about ourselves in the technological proliferation of the social spectacle and the social as spectacular, as well as in the proliferation of self-mediatised globalisation and globalised mediatisation?
We are incapable of appropriating this proliferation because we do not know how to think this ‘spectacular’ nature, which at best gets reduced to a discourse about the uncertain signs of the ‘screen’ and of ‘culture’. The same applies to ‘technological’ nature, which we regard as an autonomous instrument. We do so without ever asking ourselves if it might not be ‘our’ comprehension of ‘our-selves’ that comes up with these techniques and invents itself in them, and without wondering if technology is in fact essentially in complete agreement with the ‘with’.
Anterior to all thought – and, in fact, the very condition of thinking – the ‘thought’ of ‘us’ is not a representational thought (not an idea, or notion, or concept). It is, instead, a praxis and an ethos: the staging of co-appearance, the staging which is co-appearing. […] [71]
[…]
The Athenian theatre, both the institution itself and its content, appears to us as the political 9civil) presentation of the philosophical (the self-knowledge of the logical animal) and, reciprocally, as the philosophical presentation of the political. That is, it appears to us as the ‘one’ presentation of being-together […]. The Athenian theatre appears to us as the conjunction of logos and mimesis, but when we see it in this way, we systematically efface the moment of mimesis in favour of logos.
[…]
the origin of the world
[…] there are two different measures of the incommensurable to be found within the very depths of our tradition, two measures that are superimposed, intertwined and contrasted. One is calibrated according to the Other; the other is calibrated according to the with. Because the intimate and the proximate, the same and the other, refer to one another, they designate a ‘not being with’ and, in this way, a ‘not being in society’. They designate an Other of the social where the social itself –the common as Being or as common subject – would be in itself, by itself, and for itself: it would be the very sameness of the other and sameness as Other. In contrast, being-with designates the other that never comes back to the same, the plurality of origins.
The just measure of the with or, more exactly, the with or being-with as just measure, as justness and justice, is the measure of dis-position as such: the measure of the distance from one origin to another. [81]
[…]
If the world does not ‘have’ and origin ‘outside of itself’, if the world is its own origin or the origin ‘itself’, then the origin of the world occurs at each moment of the world. It is the each time of Being, and its realm is the being-with of each time with every [other] time. The origin is for and by way of the singular plural if every possible origin. The ‘with’ is the measure of an origin-of-the-world as such, or even of an origin-of-meaning as such. To be with is to make sense mutually and only mutually. Meaning is the fullest measure of the incommensurable ‘with’. The ‘with’ is the fullest measure of (the) incommensurable meaning (of Being).
The plurality of origins essentially disseminates the Origin of the world.
The world springs forth everywhere and in each instant, simultaneously. This is how it comes to appear out of nothing and ‘is created’.
From now on, however, this being created must be understood differently: it is not an effect of some particular operation of production; instead, it is, insofar as it is, as created, as having arisen, come, or grown (cresco, creo); it has always already sprung from all sides, or more exactly, it is itself the springing forth and the coming of the ‘always already’ and the ‘everywhere’.
As such, each being belongs to the (authentic) origin, each is originary (the springing forth of the springing forth itself), and each is original (incomparable, undeliverable). Nevertheless, all of them share originality and originality; this sharing is itself the origin.
What is shared is nothing like a unique substance in which each being would participate; what is shared is also what shares, what is structurally constituted by sharing, and what we call ‘matter’.
The ontology of being with can only be ‘materialist’, in the sense that matter does not designate a substance or a subject (or an antisubject), but literally designates what is divided of itself, what is only as distinct from itself, parts extra parts, originarily impenetrable to the combining and sublimating penetration of a ‘spirit’ [or ‘mind’] understood as the dimensionless, indivisible point beyond the world.
The ontology of being with is an ontology of bodies, of everybody, whether they be inanimate, animate, sentient, speaking, thinking, having weight, and so on. [84]
[…]
The relation of singular origins among themselves, then, is the relation of meaning. (That relation in which one unique Origin would be related to everything else as having been originated would be a relation of saturated meaning: not really a relation, then, but a pure consistency; not really a meaning, but its sealing off, the annulment of meaning and the end of the origin.)
Language is the exposing of plural singularity.
In it, the all of being is exposed in its meaning, which is to say, as the originary sharing according to which a being relates to a being, the circulation of a meaning of the world that has no beginning or end.
This is the meaning of the world as being-with, the simultaneity of all presences that are with regard to one another, where no one is for oneself without being for others.
[…] I would say nothing about myself if I were not with myself as I am with numerous others, if this with were not ‘in’ me, wight at me, at the same time as ‘me’, and, more precisely, as the at-the-same-time according to which, solely, I am.
At this precise pint, then, one becomes most aware of the essence of singularity: it is not individuality; it is, each time, the punctuality of a ‘with’ that establishes a certain origin of meaning and connects to an infinity of other possible origins.
Therefore, it is, at one and the same time, infra-/intraindividual and transindividual, and always the two together. The individual is an intersection of singularities, the discrete exposition of their simultaneity, an exposition that is both discrete and transitory.
[…] exposed as ‘gifted’ with language, humanity is, above all, essentially ex-posed in its Being. It is ex-posed to and as this incorporeal outside of the world that is at the heart of the world, that which makes the world ‘hold’ or ‘consist’ in its proper singular plurality.
without reason
It is not enough to say that the ‘rose grows without reason’.
The whole of being is its own reason; it has no other reason, which does not mean that it itself is its own principle and end, exactly because it is not ‘itself’.
It is its own dis-position in the plurality of singularities. This Being ex-poses itself, then, as the between and the with of singulars. [86]
coexistential analytic
The existential analytic of Being and TIme is the project from which all subsequent thinking follows, whether this is Heidegger’s own latter thinking or our various ways of thinking against or beyond Heidegger himself.
[…]
The analytic of Mitsein that appears within the existential analytic remains nothing more than a sketch; that is, even though Mitsein is coessential with Dasein, it remains in a subordinate position.
As such, the whole existential analytic still harbours some principle by which what it opens up is immediately closed off.
It is necessary then to forcibly reopen a passage somewhere beyond that obstruction which decided the terms of being-with’s fulfilment, and its withdrawal, by replacing it with the ‘people’ and their ‘destiny’.
This is not a matter of saying that it is necessary ‘to complete’ the merely sketched-out analysis of Mitsein, nor is it a matter of setting up Mitsein as a ‘principle’ like it deserves. ‘In principle’ being-with escapes completion and always evades occupying the place of a principle. [93]
What is necessary is that we retrace the outline of its analysis and push it to the point where it becomes apparent that the coessentiality of being-with is nothing less than a matter of the co-originarity of meaning – and that the ‘meaning of Being’ is only what it is (either ‘meaning’ or primarily, its own ‘precomprehension’ as the constitution of existence) when it is given as with.
[…]
Prior to ‘me’ and ‘you’, the ‘self’ is like a ‘we’ that is neither a collective subject nor ‘intersubjectivity’, but rather the immediate mediation of Being in ‘(it)self’, the plural fold of the origin.
Mediation without a mediator mediates nothing: it is the mid-point [mi-lieu], the place of sharing and crossing through [passage]; that is, it is place tout court and absolutely.
This would be the summit and the abyss of a deconstruction of Christianity: the dis-location of the West.
war, right, sovereignty - techne
war & technology
What follows is a response to a request that came from the United States for some reflectoions on ‘war and technology’.