References
- Don DeLillo, The Names, London: Picador, 1999, 162.
- Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Inoperative Community’ (hereafter ‘IC’), chapter one in The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); hereafter IC. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 16. edition (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986). Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, 13. edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); hereafter BT. As is standard practice, all references here are to the marginal, original German pagination.
- In response to which the character with whom the protagonist has this conversation, says: ‘Terrifying. Not that I know what you're talking about”. The fortuitous eruption of the ontological fundaments of our existence into that existence is both incomprehensible and the object of anxiety.
- In his Foreword to IC, Christopher Fynsk makes the crucial observation that “…the gesture of thought that animates [Nancy's] work…constitutes its true novelty and even its decisive importance for contemporary critical and philosophical thought” (viii), and he characterises this gesture as one of “returning to themes that play a crucial role in all discourses concerned with politics or the grounds of social existence but that have become abstract—the prey of ideology—by virtue of the fact that the philosophical presuppositions defining their meaning…have succumbed to the nihilism that inhabits them.” (ix).
- See BT § 26, 122, where we read about this kind of solicitude that it “takes over for the other that with which he is to concern himself. The Other is thus thrown out of his own position; he steps back so that afterwards, when the matter has been attended to, he can either take it over as something finished and at his disposal, or disburden himself of it completely.”
- A quite separate reason why this is redundant arises from the fact that Fynsk's Foreword to IC provides such a masterful, insightful, and finely judged reconstruction of these moves, and is therefore so much more than an Introduction to Nancy's text, that a less adept reader of Nancy (and of Heidegger and Blanchot) would end up cruelly exposed.
- If such a broad characterisation as ‘the thoughts of difference’ may be applied to a trajectory within Western thought which encompasses—if not exclusively so—the writings of Heidegger, Blanchot, Bataille and Derrida, as well as other exponents of contemporary ‘French’ philosophy, where it is not a matter of a language, much less of a nationality, but of something like a philosophical sensibility. Many of the finest practitioners of ‘French’ philosophy belong geographically elsewhere.
- For a more extensive discussion of the issues which concern us here, one would also, minimally, have to take into account Heidegger's later essays ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (1929), ‘Of the Essence of Truth’ (1930), and ‘The Thing’ (1950). But the present paper can only present these issues in a preliminary manner and leave the inclusion of these and other works into the discussion for another time.
- Or, to give it its full title, ‘Preliminary Sketch of the Existential-ontological Structure of Death’. This is the heading for BT § 50, 249.
- Both the translations by Macquarrie and Robinson and by Stambaugh render ‘unüberholbar’ in a manner which seems unnecessarily ponderous to me, given the unusually ‘straightforward’ German term chosen by Heidegger. This is why I propose ‘unovertakeable’ instead of ‘not to be outstripped’ (Macquarrie and Robinson) and ‘not-to-be-bypassed’ (Stambaugh), although I use the less inelegant ‘insurmountable’ in less technical contexts.
- This is why the translation of Befindlichkeit as ‘state-of-mind’ (Macquarrie and Robinson) has to be rejected out of hand. Stambaugh's translation of it as ‘attunement’ has the most unfortunate effect of eradicating the difference between Befindlichkeit and Gestimmtsein, which is similarly unacceptable.
- To be precise, it should be pointed out, as Werner Marx does, that ‘the nothing’ (das Nichts) does not explicitly appear in Heidegger's oeuvre until after BT, namely in ‘What is Metaphysics?’ which “carries out the step from ‘notness’ [Nichtheit] or ‘nullity’ [Nichtigkeit] to ‘the nothing’ [Nichts]” (Marx, 1983, 92).
- This section will begin to gesture towards this ‘implication’ which nonetheless, in a more profound sense than would admit of it merely being accomplished later on, remains to be thought.
- It must be emphasised that this project has already been gestured towards in a number of recent texts, most notably in Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, trans. John Llewelyn (London: Athlone, 1996), hereafter D; Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 1; Werner Marx, Gibt es auf Erden ein Maß? (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983); especially chapters 1 and 3; but none of them, in my understanding of them, quite makes the connections attempted here.
- Is it going too far to suggest that implicitly Heidegger only accords the other a demise, not an authentic ‘dying’ as being-towards-death? If the latter possibility were to be admitted, the ontologically disclosive possibilities of the death of the other might be considered less remote within BT.
- Both the translations by Macquarrie and Robinson and by Stambaugh render this sentence as “No one can take the other's dying away from him” which, whilst avoiding the Latinate origin of ‘relieve’, also loses the sense of a burden being lifted from the other in this apparent, false ambition. Hence my alternative suggestion.
- Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).
- Solitude does not mean individuality and least of all interiority. Heidegger calls solitude a deficient mode of being-with (BT § 26, 120).
- Nancy formulates this as follows: “…compearance…consists in the appearance of the between as such: you and I (between us)—a formula in which the and does not imply juxtaposition, but exposition.” (‘IC’ 29).
- Heidegger writes: ‘Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualized’, nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be. It is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything, of every way of existing. [It] reveals itself to be such that it knows no measure at all, no more or less, but signifies the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence.’ (BT § 53, 262). And Françoise Dastur comments: ‘Death is a distinctive possibility only if it presents Dasein with nothing to be realised, for it is the possibility of the absence of everything possible…, the possibility of the pure and simple impossibility of Dasein.’ (D, 58) and, ‘Death reveals itself…as pure possibility, which will never see itself annihilated by being realised…’ (D, 59).
- In his Foreword to IC Fynsk comes very close to suggesting the approach taken in this paper, for instance when he states that “The problem of death and community should be explored at much greater length and deserves a separate treatment…I believe that an attentive reading of Being and Time will suggest…that Dasein comes to know its mortality precisely by way of the other's relation to its death. It is through its assumption of mortality that Dasein first encounters the other—but Dasein knows its mortality only by way of the other and what the other communicates of its mortality.” (IC xvi). Heidegger does indeed come very close to saying this (most notably in BT § 47, 238f), but then swerves away from the implications of this insight. But here it is not a question of uncovering how Dasein comes to know its own mortality—it seems to me that Heidegger's analyses of anxiety and anticipation already powerfully accomplish such an uncovering. It is rather a matter of showing that something like a reciprocal being-towards-death is that which, by affirming singularity and finitude, is constitutive of the being-in-common of knowingly finite beings.
- Fynsk also observes that “if authentic being-towards-death is the condition of Dasein's knowing itself as existing…, then it must also be the condition of encountering the other: it is the opening of a relation at the same time that it is the tracing of a singularity. As Heidegger declares explicitly, Mitsein and Dasein are co-originary.” (IC xvi). No doubt this approach is sustainable by a certain reading of BT, but it is not the approach taken here, where it is rather the reciprocal exposure to the death of the other that is constitutive of our Mitsein (especially in section III). And again, it seems to me that Nancy's aim in ‘IC’ is to uncover this finite reciprocity as the ground of being-in-common, rather than to contribute further to an understanding of how each Dasein relates to its own finite existence.
- Cf. BT § 31 on ‘Being-there as Understanding’, for the sense in which this term is being used here.
- Another way in which these thoughts are ‘unworkable’ concerns the difficult question of their political efficacy. In his Foreword to IC Christopher Fynsk observes: ‘…anyone seeking an immediate political application of this thought of community risks frustration…it is exceedingly difficult to define how…one might move from [Nancy's] definition of a…differential articulation of social existence…to any currently existing politics…there is a point at which this move becomes properly unthinkable in the terms of any traditional conception of the relation between theory and practice: one cannot work to institute or realize this thought of community.’ (IC xf).
- “Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with” (BT § 26, 120).
- It would, however, be fruitful to explore the temporality of being-in-common against the background of Heidegger's conception of the temporal-horizonal projection of Dasein's existence. But this would take us beyond the bounds of this paper.
- See also, “Gesellschaft…has taken the place of something for which we have no name…” (‘IC’ 11); and, in “place of the subject—or on its reverse side—…there is indeed ‘something’…: our limit lies in not really having a name for this ‘something’ or for this ‘someone’” (‘IC’ 25), given that the term ‘Dasein’ is too narrowly bound to one configuration of this being, we might add.
- Don DeLillo, The Names, 138. The inclusion of this literary frame reminds us that the exchange of thought between Heidegger and Nancy does not take place in a closed economy but that this exchange is itself in dialogue with other (kinds of) texts.