Sharing Antagonisms: A Reelaboration of Nancy’s Political Philosophy
摘要
According to Nancy, intelligibility of human existence (or singularity) takes the form of spacing, i.e., opening up of a meaningful situation where entities and singularities are ‘discretely’ gathered together, i.e., where they both limit and disclose one another as belonging to the same space. For Nancy, spacing presupposes sharing it with others since ‘singularities’ are nothing but communicable attempts at spacing the world; as such, spacing is “public or political” in nature because there is no universal law of singularities other than their free communication and their ability to gather a situation together. The main goal of this article is to look at the notion of antagonism from the standpoint of Nancy’s political philosophy; namely I will argue that the contingent world gives rise to antagonistic sharings, which cannot “essence” together but which can be shared only at the expense of one another. This would achieve two goals. First, the article will explicate a number of problematic assumptions that Nancy remains committed to, especially his one-sided emphasis on the importance of transformation. Second, it will develop his approach by accounting for the productive role that the ontic dimension of everyday politics plays in spacing without undermining the significance of the ontological difference around which his account is built. This will arrive at an account of an ecosystem of the “space[s] of meaning” with a fragile balance between differentiation and taking for granted. An ecosystem of sharing presupposes not only something that is to be shared but also the normative expectation regarding what is ought to be shared and what is not.