In Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy asserts that the ontology of being-with, or the thinking of the ‘we’ he is developing in this book, is at the same time an ethos and a praxis. Nancy goes so far as to say that: ‘There is no difference between the ethical and the ontological: the “ethical” exposes what the “ontological” disposes.’ From a cursory reading of various passages, we can glean Nancy's reasons for affirming this equivalence. His ontology is an ethos and a praxis because there can be no appropriation of the meaning of the ‘with’, no representation of the ‘we’. More than ten years later, in a text about democracy the aim of which is more specifically to carve out the respective spaces of the political and the ontological, Nancy affirms: ‘“communism” must … be posited as a given, as a fact: our first given. Before all else, we are in common. Then we must become what we are: the given is an exigency, and this exigency is infinite.’ This affirmation echoes another one found in Nancy's earlier book on community, where we can read: ‘Community is given to us with being and as being, well in advance of all our projects, desires, and undertakings. At bottom, it is impossible for us to lose it … We cannot not compear … Community is given to us … it is not a work to be done or produced. But it is a task, which is different– an infinite task at the heart of finitude.’

In Being Singular Plural, the understanding of our being-incommon as ethos and praxis, as task and exigency, is developed explicitly against what Nancy calls philosophical politics or political philosophy– that is, against the reciprocal determination of philosophy and politics. In this reciprocal determination, each is the subject of the other. The polis, as the place where the logos is articulated, makes possible philosophy in its metaphysical institution, as the science that provides a ground for beings. At the same time, philosophy, insofar as it produces a common reason, makes possible the polis as the gathering of rational men (anthropos logikos).