This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are internally related to “Being Singular Plural.” One of the strongest strands in Nancy’s philosophy is his attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of the book is that being is always being with,” that “I” is not prior to “we, that existence is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this “being-with” not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the “I ’ and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a “society of spectacle” nor via some form of authenticity. The five shorter essays impressively translate the philosophical insight of Being Singular Plural into sophisticated discussions of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity politics, the Gulf War, and the tragic plight of Sarajevo. The essay Eulogy for the Mêlée,” in particular, is a brilliant discussion of identity and hybridism that resonates with many contemporary social concerns. As Nancy moves through the exposition of his central concern, being-with, he engages a number of other important issues, including current notions of the “other” and “self” that are relevant to psychoanalytic, political, and multi­ cultural concepts. He also offers astonishingly original reinterpretations of major philosophical positions, such as Nietzsches doctrine of “eternal recurrence, Descartes s “cogito,” and rhe nature of language and meaning. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WWW.SUP.ORC Cover Illustration: Daniel Richardson, 1999, Counseled Ascent (left) and Conseil de Cental). Reproduced by permission of the artist. Covei design: James P. Brommer, using the series concep Cope Cumpston and the art of Jean Evans. BEING SINGULAR PLURAL MERIDIAN Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery Editors Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne Stanford University Press Stanford California 2000 BEING SINGULAR PLURAL ]ean-Luc Nancy Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Being Singular Plural was originally published as Etre singulier pluriel © 1996, Editions Galilee. Assistance for the translation was provided by the French Ministry of Culture. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nancy, Jean-Luc. [Etre singular pluriel. English] Being singular plural / Jean-Luc Nancy ; translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne p. cm. — (Meridian, crossing aesthetics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8047-3974-9 (alk. paper) — isbn 0-8047-3975-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) i. Ontology. 2. Philosophical anthropology. I. Title. II. Meridan (Stanford, Calif.) B2430.N363 E8713 2000 194—dc2i 00-057326 Original printing 2000 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 Typeset by James P. Brommer in 10.9/13 Garamond and Lithos display Contents Preface xv § Of Being Singular Plural i § War, Right, Sovereignty—Technê toi § Eulogy for the Mêlée 14s § The Surprise of the Event 159 § Human Excess 177 § Cosmos Baselius 185 Notes 193 Lead, as I do, the flown-away virtue back to earth— yes, back to body and life; that it may give the earth its meaning, a human meaning! May your spirit and your virtue serve the meaning of the earth. . . . Man and man’s earth are still unexhausted and undiscovered. —Nietzsche This epigraph is chosen quite deliberately. I run the risk of its seeming to lend itself to a certain Christian, idealist, and humanist tone, a tone in which it is easy to recognize those well-meaning virtues and values that have loosed upon the world all the things that have driven the humanity of our century to despair over itself, where these values are both blind to and complicit in this letting loose. In his own way, Nietzsche himself would have undoubtedly participated in this dubious, moralizing piety. At any rate, the word “meaning” rarely appears in his work, and still more rarely in any positive sense. One would do well, therefore, not to give any hasty interpretations of it here. The above excerpt appeals to a “human meaning,” but it does so by affirming that the human [l'homme] remains to be discovered.1 In order for the human to be discovered, and in order for the phrase “human meaning” to acquire some meaning, everything that has ever laid claim to the truth about the nature, essence, or end of “man” must be undone. In other words, nothing must remain of what, under the title of meaning, related the earth [la terre] and the human to a specifiable horizon. Again, it is Nietzsche who said that we are now “on the horizon of the infi­ nite”; that is, we are at that point where “there is no more ‘land,’” and where “there is nothing more terrible than the infinite.”2 Are we finally going to learn this lessonf Are we perhaps finally able to hear it, or is it now impossible for us to learn anything