The Enunciation of the Subject: Sharing Jean-Luc Nancy’s Singular Plural in the Classroom

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the implications of Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of the subject for educational philosophy by connecting his re-interpretation of Descartes to his later thinking on what he names the ontological singular plural. Nancy’s re-imagining of the Cogito coalesces around the figure of the mouth (la bouche) through which the subject enunciates itself within the world. Reading this extension of the ego through the mouth as an enunciation of ontological singular plurality exposes a speaking subject that communicates via a sharing of its own being with other singular subjects. The article concludes that Nancy’s singular plural holds potential for affirming a substance-less subjectivity that can nevertheless serve as a locus of meaning in the classroom.

Keywords:

• Nancy
• Derrida
• deconstruction
• pedagogy
• subjectivity
• ontology

Notes

1. This interview has been published in a volume entitled Who Comes After the Subject? (1991) which also gathers together several other contemporary French philosophers’ responses to the question of the ‘subject,’ including Badiou, Blanchot, Deleuze, Levinas and Lyotard, among others.

2. Nancy’s thought has not yet been applied to educational philosophy in any sustained fashion, but for examples of the few studies that do touch on the relevance of his thinking for pedagogy see Peim (2009) and Pente (2010).

3. Although I will be highlighting some of the similarities and differences between Nancy’s and Derrida’s thought, this article does not intend to exhaustively explore a relationship that is complex and difficult to define (see Hutchens, 2005; Morin, 2012) but rather to elucidate the position that Nancy occupies within the metaphysical aporia uncovered by Derrida’s deconstruction. For more in-depth studies on their intellectual relationship, see Landes (2007) and Secomb (2006).

4. Although it must be remembered that in Derrida’s thought there are ‘no apriority of absolute truths to be found as could suffice to constitute the operational basis of an ideal model or mode of instruction’ (Trifonas, 2004, p. 1) his radical rethinking of metaphysics has been exploited in diverse areas of educational practice, from environmental education (Gough & Price, 2004), to composition (Weise, 2008) and music (Schmidt, 2012).

5. It should be noted here that Nancy’s analysis of the enunciation of the ego in many respects revolves around an interrogation of the Lacanian subject, a discussion of which exceeds the scope of this article. See James (2002) for a more detailed analysis.

6. Although Derrida (1991) agrees with Nancy’s reading of the subject as ‘fable’ (p. 102), his attitude towards what he sees as Nancy’s ‘quasi-transcendental ontology’ (Derrida, 2000, p. 311) is decidedly more ambivalent.

7. For Nancy (1997b), the ‘sense of sense […] is to exscribe itself’ within material existence (p. 14). Nancy further extends the link between such an exscription of sense and bodily existence in his Corpus: ‘“Ontology of the body” = exscription of being. Existence addressed to an out-side (there, where there’s no address, no destination; and yet (but how?) someone does the receiving: myself, you, us, bodies, finally). Existence: bodies are existence, the very act of ex-istence, being’ (Nancy, 2008a, p. 17). The materiality of the mouth therefore ‘speaks’ the exscription of a bodily subject, becoming a form of sensual writing that could be seen as a type of Derridean arch-écriture inscribed into a material dimension (Watkin (2009, p. 148) in fact describes Nancy’s figure of the mouth as ‘bodily différance’).

8. Ian James (2002) hints at the possibility of a connection between Nancy’s thinking on subjectivity and the singular plural but does not elaborate on this point.

9. The possibilities that Derrida’s thought holds for rethinking the relationship with the Other should certainly not be discarded here (see Tarc, 2005, in particular), but perhaps Nancy’s position towards alterity opens up new questions and tangential avenues of inquiry within educational ethics. Although Nancy’s thinking on the singular plural with of being has been criticized for its lack of appreciation for the Levinasian face of the Other (for example, see Critchley, 1999), Watkin (2007) counters that such a dismissal of the ethical dimension of Nancy’s thought is perhaps too hasty. Thus it could be said that Nancy does not seek to trivialize the importance Derrida (1991) places on the ‘obligation to protect the other’s otherness’ (p. 111) but rather simply to re-inscribe it into a more explicitly ontological mode.

10. See in particular Nancy (2008a).

11. This ontological being-with as touch would be another way to negotiate the uniqueness of the subject that Biesta (2012, p. 588) proposes we must rediscover—in the singular plural, there is no essential subject who then differentiates itself from others, reducing them to a mere economic good necessary to assert the subject’s own uniqueness in the classroom. Rather, singular plural relation is the very space of subjectivity in an originary sense, such that it would be impossible to reduce relationship to an instrumental exchange because the subject is already in relation by virtue of its paradoxical distinctness from other subjects.

12. Perhaps one of the clearest examples of these contemporary educational approaches is actor-network theory (ANT), which shares many characteristics with Nancy’s philosophy and can be used in pedagogy to position the educational exchange within a network of material-semiotic relations. Such a network requires an active participation on the part of both students and teachers, creating an environment of mutual meaning-making based on an anti-foundationalist understanding of reality (see Fenwick & Edwards, 2012). While Nancy’s thinking shares much in common with ANT, at the same time it is differentiated by its primary ontological dimension of being-with.