Saturday, July 30, 2011
Kotsko on Nancy
I'm reading his book The Politics of Redemption. It's a little bit eccentric to say that Nancy's theory of being-with is pure relationism. If you look at The Inoperative Community, the term Nancy uses is “singular being.” He doesn't typically speak of “relations,” but he does see singular being as literally constituted by a kind of clinamen, an “inclining” towards others.
Now for that to happen, there needs to be at least a modicum of separation. This is very much how poststructuralist and deconstructive theory critiques structuralism. Structuralism really does hold that things just are their relations. But, it is argued, these sets of relations only operate by including–excluding some opaque entity for which they can't account.
Nancy speaks of singular beings as “ex-posed,” that is posed in exteriority. Whereas traditional models of community understand community as “the transcendence of an immanence” (I am an American; I am part of "America"), Nancy argues for community understood as "the immanence of a transcendence."
In this sense, it would not be wrong to say that people are their relations. But I'm not sure Nancy would say that people are “nothing more” than such relations. If you really want that, look to someone like Lévi-Strauss.
ecology, philosophy, culture, science
Adam Kotsko,
Jean-Luc Nancy
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