![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
In this article, I put Nancy’s thinking in conversation with contemporary demands for a flat ontology. I show that Nancy does in fact propose an ontology that is flat and in that way undoes the priority of human experience as the producer of sense. At the same time, I show that Nancy avoids two pitfalls other flat ontologies often fall into: a formalism that forgets materiality and falls prey to general equivalence and a depoliticization that removes any agential role for human beings in the creation and destruction of the world.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 If they avoid calling their enemy idealist, it is so as to prevent the pointless rejoinder of the Kantian or the phenomenologist that their position is not a form of subjective idealism. See Meillassoux, “Time Without Becoming” 4.
2 See also Sparrow 19 and Shaviro 1. Here I leave aside the claim that it leads to Nazism as Tim Morton claims:
Correlationism itself only works if there is some kind of phobia of illusion. So one trajectory of correlationism culminates in Nazism. Correlationism itself is a breeding ground for Nazism, because in order to escape its paradoxes one might retreat still further into an extreme form of anthropocentrism. (224)
3 For a thorough engagement with the first point also in relation to Nancy’s ontology, see Ian James, The Technique of Thought, especially chapter 2. In this book, James seeks to connect post-deconstructive thinkers such as Nancy to scientific thinking in order to develop a “post-Continental naturalism.”
4 Human exceptionalism serves as justification for anthropocentrism, but the two claims are distinct. It is possible to imagine an anthropocentric theory that would be (weakly) justified merely by the fact that it is done (contingently) by a human (the theorist) without claiming that the human alone is in a special position within the universe, granting it the privilege of theory (or experience, or truth).
5 As Levi Bryant comes to acknowledge on his blog Larval Subjects. See the post, “I Guess My Ontology Ain’t So Flat.”
6 On the difference between the two kinds of flatness, and between Harman and Garcia in particular, see Graham Harman, “Tristan Garcia and the Thing-in-Itself.”
7 For a critical engagement with Harman and objectification from a feminist phenomenological perspective, see Anna Mudde.
8 Of course, another possibility is radical eliminativism, where we affirm a universe in which anything that appears remotely special to the human is radically eliminated. Pick the thing that is the most foreign to being human (the thing that obviously does not make human beings special or distinct in any way) and assert that that is what all things – including humans – are at bottom ontologically reducible to.
9 See also Bennett 99: “A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations.”
10 “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign.” Talk pronounced at the Freie University in Berlin in June 2012.
11 To use Jeffrey Cohen’s terminology, we could say that Meillassoux’s philosophy goes too far in that rather than being disanthropocentric, it ends up being squarely misanthropic. See Cohen a.o. 25, 63.
12 See Kant A592/B620–A603/B631 and Heidegger §7.
13 Let us dissipate two potential misunderstandings of Nancy’s gloss right from the start: first, the reader of Heidegger will notice the slippage from Being to existence to Dasein. This slippage or equivocation is not innocent and, as I will discuss below, is an essential feature of Nancy’s ontology. Second, when we say that an essence does not exist (or is nothing), we do not mean that ideas, abstract entities, or thoughts do not exist. Yet they exist only insofar as they are not mere significations but are always also exscribed in contact with a material body (lip, pen, neuron, keyboard).
14 An abridged version of the chapter from which I am quoting is translated as “Abandoned Being” in The Birth to Presence, but the paragraph I am referring to is omitted.
15 For a more detailed reading of the relation between Nancy and Heidegger on the abandonment of Being, see Morin, “‘We Must Become’” 23–30.
16 Through a different route, then, Nancy arrives at a position similar to that of new realist Markus Gabriel, who, in Why the World Does Not Exist, argues that, while everything else in the world exists or is real, the world itself does not exist because it is impossible to take on an external perspective on the world as a whole – indeed, if one were to take on such a perspective, it would itself be situated in the world and hence not all-encompassing.
17 Ian James also addresses Harman’s reading of Nancy’s whatever in his review of Shaviro’s Universe of Things. The context is the encounter between Whitehead’s process philosophy and Harman’s object-oriented ontology staged by Shaviro’s book. As James shows, the central debate in Continental philosophy ought not to be one between correlationist and “realist” or “materialist” philosophies but rather between philosophies of relations and “isolationist” philosophies of substance. It is within this context, between Whitehead and Shaviro, that the originality of Nancy’s ontology can be located. Ultimately for James this also aligns Nancy with the ontic structural realism of Ladyman and Ross, a claim he develops later in chapter 2 of his Technique of Thought.
18 Such bodies however should not be too quickly assimilated to the lived body of phenomenology. They are material, but always remain dislocated, partes extra partes, without organic or lived unity, shot through with opacity and foreignness. On the relation between Nancy’s bodily ontology and phenomenologies of the lived body, see Morin, “Corps propre.”
19 For an engagement of Nancy that puts the category of sense at the centre, see James, Technique of Thought, chapter 2, esp. 60–64. Though James does understand sense as material and matter as a principle of differentiation, his reading somewhat underplays the differance at the heart of things. The thing (as an “instance of material differentiation”) is not only constituted by its relation (contact and separation), but also by difference, opening, or spacing in its self (or as itself).
20 On the relation between the decision of existence and the freedom of the world, see Morin, “‘We Must Become’” 34–38.