The Coexistence of the World: Or the Intertwining of Singularities

Abstract

The Coexistence of the World:Or the Intertwining of Singularities François Raffoul (bio) I would like in the following pages to engage Jean-Luc Nancy's thought of the world, and of what I chose to call "the co-existence of the world," a co-existence exceeding the anthropological enclosure which will have to be understood as an intertwining of singularities. Indeed, as for Nancy the world is not a container or an indifferent milieu, but the very sharing of existence, one would speak of a co-existence of the world, in the subjective genitive, or better, of the world itself as co-existence. Nancy does state that everything takes place between us, but this between "has neither consistency nor continuity;"1 it is not a connective tissue, a cement, a bridge, a "connection." The between of our co-existence is not an indifferent and external milieu: "there is no intermediate and mediating 'milieu.' Meaning is not a milieu in which we are immersed. There is no mi-lieu [between place]."2 Rather, the between is the stretching out of singularities, its spacing, where each singularity touches the others in a singular intertwining [entrecroisement] or interlacing [entrelacement]. Neither exteriority nor separation, but intertwining: "The intertwining of the limit and of the continuity between the several theres must determine proximity not as pure juxtaposition but as composition [End Page 89] in a precise sense, which must rest on a rigorous construction of the com-. This is nothing other than what is made necessary by Heidegger's insistence on the character of a with that cannot be reduced to an exteriority," Nancy writes. This implies that there is a permeability between singularities: "For the being-with-the-there there must be contact, thus also contagion and encroachment, however minimal, and even an infinitesimal derivation of the tangent between the openings in question."3 I will first attempt to explore Nancy's understanding of the world as an event and as creation, as co-existence, which implies that one no longer enframes the thought of the world in the metaphysical categories of substance or principle. Nancy seeks to reappropriate the notion of world through the motif of creation, a term borrowed, he recognizes, from the tradition of monotheism. It is a matter, he explains, of grasping the world "according to one of its constant motifs in the Western tradition—to the extent that it is also the tradition of monotheism—namely the motif of creation."4 However, Nancy argues that creation needs to be understood in a radically non-theological way. Creation "is a motif, or a concept that we must grasp outside of its theological context."5 In fact, we will see how creation points to a deconstruction of monotheism, in the sense of a self-deconstruction of the creator in the world. As Nancy claims, "it is theology itself that has stripped itself of a God distinct from the world."6 Ultimately, the motif of creation gives us access to the world-hood of the world, its being as world and co-existence: "the world is not given," Nancy writes, "the world is its own creation... this is what 'creation' means."7 The Event of the World Nancy argues that though the world as the proper site of human existence was covered and obscured by the classical figures of onto-theology and representational thinking, all the while, paradoxically and silently, it was undermining them from within. The question of the world was or has formed "the self-deconstruction that undermines from within onto-theology."8 The world emerged as a proper philosophical problem against the background of a self-deconstruction of onto-theology, [End Page 90] a disappearance of God in the world that put the world into play as absolute existence. In the classical representation of the world, one finds the supposition of a subject, a position outside of the world, a vantage point from where the world can be seen and represented. The world supposed an observer of the world, a kosmotheoros, that is to say, a subject-of-the-world representing the world in front of itself as an object: the subject keeps the world in its...