4 - Politics in-Common
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2017
Summary
Ego sum expositus: The Originary Exposure
Nancy's work is marked by dominant and recurrent themes, even though these are not always treated systematically. In the light of these themes, Nancy's project may be characterised as a recasting of existence as exposure. By making ‘being-in-common’ – singularity in a context of plurality – the ontological structure of existence, Nancy rethinks community, politics, the body, the world and art in the absence of a transcending essence or a given foundation, and in the presence of others. Existence is coexistence, and our ontological condition is that of a constitutive exposure to others. He develops this ontology notably in Being Singular Plural, but it is also at play in his earlier writings on community, finitude and freedom (The Inoperative Community and The Experience of Freedom). It is also from this ontological position that follows Nancy's emphasis on sense, which, as we have seen in Chapter 2, is produced through encounters between existing beings (The Sense of the World).
A central theme in Nancy's ontology then is the theme of the ‘common’. Being is always already in-common in so far as it depends on being exposed to others. Being-in-common is the originary exposure and irreducible condition of existence. Indeed, being is being-in-common for Nancy; it is marked by relation and encounters, though not by unity or fusion. The idea of relation and encounters behind this ‘ontology of the common’ signals a politics, but, as Nancy's response (2000b) in an interview suggests, the link is not straightforward:
I should engage in self-criticism myself: by writing on ‘community’, on ‘co-appearance’, and then on ‘being-with’, I do believe that I rightly emphasised the importance of the theme of the ‘common’ and the necessity to re-think it anew – but I was wrong to think it could come under the heading of ‘politics’ … Politics is therefore for me, from now on, the object of a questioning that has to do first with the relation and the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘being-in-common’. If you like, the ontology of the common is not immediately political.
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- Space, Politics and Aesthetics , pp. 61 - 81Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015