The Coexistence of the World: Or the Intertwining of Singularities

Abstract

I would like in the following pages to engage JeanLuc 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 1 Jean-Luc Nancy. Being Singular Plural. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 2000: 5. Hereafter cited as BSP, followed by page number.