Heesok Chang

Department of English
Vassar College
hechang@vaxsar.vassar.edu

 

Vattimo, Gianni. The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

 

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

 

I. Philosophical Homelessness

 

Readers of the young Georg Lukacs may recall this memorable citation from The Theory of the Novel: “‘Philosophy is really homesickness,’ says Novalis: ‘it is the urge to be at home everywhere.'”

 

According to Lukacs that is why “integrated civilizations”–where the soul feels at home everywhere, both in the self and in the world–have no philosophy. Or “why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy. For what is the task of true philosophy if not to draw that archetypal map?”¹

 

Needless to say (especially in the [virtual] pages of the present journal) this endorsement of philosophy’s “utopian aim” would not find many adherents today. If anything, the “task” of contemporary philosophy would be to debunk the notion of its universalizing, “archetypal” vocation. The subsumptive mapping of the world by reason is no longer an unquestioned telos of occidental thought.

 

Today, especially in France, philosophy has addressed itself to a nonappropriative understanding of exteriority, a “thought from the outside.”² Modern thought has deterritorialized its claims to dialectical resolution; it has become homeless, so to speak, once and for all. Against the grain of philosophy’s utopian memory–its nostalgic stance in being, its nostalgia for Being–the philosophers of our moment urge a “nomadic” thinking.

 

This sort of generalization about “postmodern” philosophy (such as it is) is well known. Like journalism, it is useful up to a certain point–let’s say until the end of the day. But like all more or less accurate journalistic descriptions it tries to say too much in one breath. Decisive opinions about “postmodern” or “poststructuralist” thought “today” leave the philosophical terrain largely undifferentiated. For example, we might be overly hasty to isolate “poststructuralism” from a certain “homesickness.” This philosophical “malady” (maladie du pays) need not be grounded in a Judaeo-Christian or Romantic nostalgia for lost origins; it might point to a more urgent need to rethink the social constitution of our being. I am thinking here not only of Richard Rorty’s recent attempts to imagine a “contingent” community (a sense of human solidarity not founded on an essentialist understanding of the human, but on an expanding recognition of human sufferance).³

 

I am thinking particularly of those thinkers (again, largely French) who write explicitly “within” a Heideggerean idiom–or rather, those writers who continue to stage a critical confrontation, an Auseinandersetzung, with Heidegger’s thought. I am thinking, for example, of Jacques Derrida’s recent meditations on spirit, friendship, and today’s Europe; or Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe’s exemplary work on the aesthetic assumptions informing modern national identity formation (National Socialism). And I am thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy’s extended research on the finitude of our daily, nightly existence–our “being-in-common”–which has given new rigor and new impetus to thinking about what community actually means.

 

Nancy’s appeal to rethink community could not really be characterized as nostalgic (quite the contrary). Nevertheless, something of the philosopher’s “transcendental homelessness,” the registration of a shared pain or loss, and therefore of a desire, is distinctly audible in these words: “The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer . . . is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.”⁴

 

This sentence could stand as a more or less appropriate epigraph for both the texts under review (more so for The Coming Community, less so for The Transparent Society). Like Nancy, both Gianni Vattimo and Giorgio Agamben address questions of our contemporaneity on a very broad scale. They too write in response to this epochal demand: not to “be at home everywhere,” but to free the very idea of “home,” of a certain belonging, from the planetary administration of techno-economic forces. And like Nancy, both authors draw considerably on Heidegger to articulate not only their diagnoses of our (post)modernity, but also their prescriptions for rethinking our being-in-the-world.

 

Despite marked differences in tone, style, content, and indeed, quality, The Transparent Society and The Coming Community contribute to our political imagination, to our ideas about “freedom” and “singularity,” “heterotopia” and “community.” With varying success, they outline new ways of being at home in a world that is increasingly no longer, quite simply, “ours.”

 

II. Hermeneutic Oscillations

 

English readers of Gianni Vattimo’s previously translated work–particularly the later essays collected in The End of Modernity–will not discover much that is radically new in The Transparent Society (but given Vattimo’s thesis about the impossibility of a definitive overcoming, an Uberwindung, this should certainly come as no surprise). Those who are unfamiliar with his writing, or who have only heard his name in association with the miserable label “weak thought” (pensiero diebole), will find this book a lucid and economical (120 pages of largish type) summary of his latest views on “the postmodern question.”⁵

 

The brevity of his text does not inhibit Vattimo from fielding a wide range of academic topoi: the evolution of the human sciences, the modern resurgence of myth, the privilege of “shock” in aesthetic experience, the disappearance of utopian models, the centrality of interpretation in a radically plural society. These discussions do not dwell on example and illustration (with the exception of a brief and unexceptional look at Blade Runner). Rather, Vattimo engages his interlocuters–Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Apel, Habermas, Gadamer–at a pace of brisk generality we might as well call journalistic.

 

Despite the liberal scope of the contents, however, the book’s eight chapters elaborate a consistent politico-philosophical vision. At the risk of oversimplifying, I believe Vattimo’s essential argument is encapsulated in this sentence from the opening chapter: “To live in this pluralistic world means to experience freedom as a continual oscillation between belonging and disorientation” (10). I will direct my review of the book towards a critical gloss on this sentence.

 

The Transparent Society takes up where the last book left off–namely, at “the end of modernity.” Vattimo elegantly defines modernity as “the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself” (1). This cultural capitalization of the new, which emerges in art with the cult of genius, is eventually incorporated into a greater narrative of human progress and emancipation. Within a unilinear, Enlightenment conception of history the intrinsic value of anything modern consists in its being simply the latest, the most advanced, the nearest to the ends of man.

 

In a hypothesis which clearly resonates with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s, Vattimo states: “modernity ends when–for a number of reasons–it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear” (2). In The End of Modernity the “reasons” he gives are confined principally to philosophical ones–in particular, the forceful anti-foundationalist thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger. In the present work, however, the advent of postmodernity is no longer an emphatically “theoretical” event. Vattimo foregrounds two major sociological causes for the dissolution of unilinear history.

 

First, decolonization. The global rebellion against European colonialism and imperialism renders the very notion of a single, centralized story of human progress “de facto problematic”; “The European ideal of humanity has been revealed as one ideal amongst others, not necessarily worse, but unable, without violence, to obtain as the true essence of man, of all men” (4).

 

Second, planetary mass media. Vattimo seems to regard this factor to be more decisive in ending modernity than the emergence of post-colonial voices because (although he does not say this explicitly) the former is the technological condition of possibility for the latter. A “society of generalized communication” must be in place for multiculturalism to get on the map. The relentless expansion of informational media enables “Cultures and subcultures of all sorts [to step] into the limelight of public opinion” (5).

 

According to Vattimo, this “giddy proliferation of communication” seems to equip the world for actualizing a fully “transparent society.” We should note, however, that the book is misleadingly, or at least provocatively, titled. For “the transparent society” does not name Vattimo’s vision of a utopian postmodernity. Rather, it describes the belated, modernist ideal of our socius championed by every postmodernist’s favourite straw men: Karl Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas.

 

Vattimo argues that Apel’s community of “unrestricted communication” and Habermas’ universe of “communicative action” are informed by the old dream of a self-transparent society. More specifically, their normative ideals of communicative rationality are modelled on the communal drive for self-knowledge exemplified by the human sciences. “But,” Vattimo objects, “can one legitimately model the emancipated human subject, and ultimately society, on the ideal of the scientist in her laboratory, whose objectivity and disinterest are demanded by what is at bottom a technological interest and who conceives of nature as an object only to the extent that it is marked out as a place for potential domination . . . ?” (24).

 

Here Vattimo sides with the Frankfurt School (and Heideggerean) critique of instrumental reason. The Enlightenment ideal of a perfectly self-transparent society–in which the subject (the Subject) seamlessly enframes the world as an object of reflexive knowledge–does not augur human liberation. Instead, it installs a logic of domination. Man is not emancipated from his social labour, but dehumanized by technology. The transparent society is the totally administered and regulated society.

 

Now does the ungovernable or “giddy” expansion of information technology today mean we are on the verge of realizing such a transparent society?

 

According to Vattimo, no.

 

Adorno’s pessimistic vision of an increasingly instrumentalized modernity is well taken. But “–and this is what Adorno missed–within the communication system itself, mechanisms develop (the ‘rise of new centres of history’) that make the realization of self-transparency in principle impossible” (23). Vattimo does not specify what these “mechanisms” might be. Instead, he testifies repeatedly that the generalization of communication guarantees the dissolution of a monolithic history of human knowledge; “the freedom given by the mass media to so many cultures and Weltanschauungen has belied the very ideal of a transparent society” (6). In postmodernity, it seems everyone gets to step up to the mike.

 

We should object here that the “liberation of differences” Vattimo has in mind–a sort of “giddy” multicultural polylogue–does not necessarily entail a radical challenge to the existing order.⁶ The fact that everybody now can have their “say” does not automatically disrupt the present constitution of our public sphere. Perhaps real political differences, differences that won’t make a difference by their mere “say” are everywhere today, to borrow Claude Lefort’s phrase, “dissolved into the ceremony of communication.”⁷

 

Vattimo acknowledges this objection, but hastens to emphasize the “irreducible pluralization” (6) accompanying the veritable explosion of mass media in our daily lives. Moreover–and here we return to his central argument–emancipation today should not, he urges, be thought on the model of self-authentication (this would return us to the dream of self-transparency). What is liberating about postmodernism is not the parading of different identities per se.

 

Rather, “The emancipatory significance of the liberation of differences and dialects consists . . . in the general disorientation accompanying their initial identification. If, in a world of dialects, I speak my own dialect, I shall be conscious that it is not the only ‘language,’ but that it is precisely one amongst many” (9). In this irreducibly multicultural and heterotopian world I carry around a “weakened” sense of my “reality.” Freedom here does not come from asserting the particularity of my (linguistic) being. Rather, I experience freedom in a totally new way: by “oscillating” continually between feeling at home in my language and sensing how thoroughly finite, transient, and contingent it actually is.

 

Without commenting on the viability of this weird notion of “freedom” (how could such a thing be judged in all rigour?), I would like to close out this discussion by dwelling a bit on the key word “oscillation.”

 

The figurative movement of vibrating or fluctuating is certainly not new to Vattimo’s thinking. Indeed, oscillation in the present work may well be read as a spatial translation of the temporal or (post)historical notion of Verwindung which is described in the last essay of The End of Modernity. Readers of that work may recall this Heideggerean word signifies a going-beyond of metaphysics which is not a complete overcoming of metaphysics (the modernist myth), but rather a sort of deepening, healing resignation to its tracelike survival. Amongst Verwindung’s other lexical meanings Vattimo points out “twisting” and “distortion.” We experience Being in postmodernity not as an emancipated presence, but as an ironic twist or distortion. Being is only approachable in its estrangement from our nostalgic grasp–as a constant oscillation between revelation and concealment.

 

In The Transparent Society Vattimo fleshes out this meaning of oscillation as ongoing estrangement by referring us to the realm of the aesthetic. The fluid play of differences we find in postmodernity is likened to the disorienting encounter with the artwork–the blow (Stoss) or “shock”–described by Heidegger and Benjamin. Vattimo explicitly gives ontology and aesthetic theory a defining role in conceptualizing the oscillation and disorientation peculiar to postmodern being.

 

But I would suggest the metaphor of oscillation in Vattimo’s argument does not only derive from his interpretations of philosophy and postmodernity. Oscillation is a crucial feature of his interpretive methodology itself.

 

An implicit aim of The Transparent Society (but made explicit in the final chapter) is to defend a ramified understanding of Gadamerian hermeneutics. To move very quickly here, Vattimo wants to rescue hermeneutics from unacceptable axioms like this one: “To recognize oneself (or one’s own) in the other and find a home abroad–this is the basic movement of spirit whose being consists in this return to itself from otherness.”⁸ Hermeneutics’ universalizing appropriation of other worlds can only be corrected by breaking its circular understanding. Thus, the hermeneutic circle gives way to a trembling arc of interpretation. The figure of swaying between the poles of belonging and disorientation, home and away, assure Vattimo’s hermeneutic procedure “cannot appear . . .[under the] logics of subsumption.”⁹

 

But this metaphor of oscillation is hardly a postmodern twist on interpretation. The methodological notion of oscillation appears at the pre-Gadamerian beginnings of hermeneutics. As Werner Hamacher has noted: “Schleiermacher’s concept for the delicate relationship between the general and the individual, within which all verbal and language-generative acts manifest themselves, is called the ‘schema of oscillation between the general and the particular.'”¹⁰

 

Vattimo’s hermeneutic oscillation guarantees his understanding of postmodern alterity will remain disoriented. But this does not allow other “dialects” to appear outside the sway of hermeneutic understanding (no matter how “weakened”) itself. In this oscillation differences can only appear as trembling versions of themselves–as different or “contaminated” identities¹¹ –and not as differences indifferent to identity. To borrow a term from Agamben, nothing singular may appear.

 

It does not occur to Vattimo that the postmodern experience of freedom may be post-hermeneutic as well.

 

III. Whatever Being

 

“Marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender.”¹²

 

Edward Said’s words testify, in their own way, to what Nancy calls “the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.” Said here is criticizing the politics of identity–the “unreconstructed nationalism”–that grips not only the academy, but the postcolonial world at large. Reclamations of cultural identity were useful and necessary for asserting independence from colonial rule. But, today, nationalist affirmations of identity for their own sake act only in the interests of a clamorous separatism. Nancy concurs with this diagnosis when he remarks that “the emergence . . . of decolonized communities has not . . . triggered any genuine renewal of the question of community.”¹³

 

Unlike Said, however, Nancy does not presuppose the question of community to be a question about reclaiming our humanity. He does not think community on the traditional humanist model of a lost or broken immanence (“what has for centuries been denied”) which must be restored. Like Vattimo, he does not imagine our future in the direction of a “transparent society.”

 

But what other than a local or universal affiliation–a sense of belonging to this tribe, this nation, this race, or to the human race as a whole–could form the basis for any meaningful community? This is where Agamben’s latest book makes, I think, a fundamental contribution to our political thought. The Coming Community delineates the topos of belonging without mobilizing identity politics and without falling back on the idees fixes of humanist discourse.

 

It is impossible, in the space that remains, to give the reader an adequate sense of the immense scope of Agamben’s philosophical and philological learning. The expected readings of Kant and Heidegger, Benjamin and Kafka, are supplemented at every turn with astonishing examples drawn from medieval logic and analytic philosophy, Talmudic tales and Provencal poetry.

 

Dense though it is, Agamben’s writing is never turgid or pedantic. Rather, his terse, fluid style is reminiscent (the likeness has been drawn before and will be drawn again) of Walter Benjamin’s.

 

And like Benjamin (at least in this latest book), Agamben probes contemporary social phenomena–technology and media, the society of the spectacle and the modern fate of social classes, a stocking commercial and Tiananmen Square–in the light of his theoretical expositions.

 

A lengthier discussion would need to sample some of these exemplary readings (and this entire text proceeds through the by-play, the Bei-spiel, of examples). It might be more useful here, however, to summarize for the reader, against the grain of the text’s singular movement, the gist of the argument. To enhance the critical significance of such a reductive reading, I will place Agamben’s conception of “the coming being” in relation to Nancy’s groundbreaking ideas about community.

 

In order to rescue community from its nostalgic (and finally Christian) assumptions we must, Nancy thinks, return to ontology (first philosophy). A serious reflection on community requires we answer the call to rethink–at the most mundane level–what it means to be-in-common.

 

For Nancy this call does not arise from a utopian or humanist appeal for a reorganization of social relations in which community is posited as the end result, the work, of a subject labouring on itself. The obscure exigency of community comes from the existential position of our being-there, thrown into the world. This being-there is not a punctual self-presence, a being-oneself. Community or being-in-common is not a predicate of an essentially solitary entity. Rather, being-there (Dasein) is none other than a being-with (Mitsein). The very possibility of my being alone depends on my ontological potential to share my existence.

 

Emphasizing Heidegger’s differential and relational definition of Dasein in order to underline our constitutive being-in-common may be easy enough to follow. What is much more difficult to grasp is that for Nancy, our strange built-in sociality does not provide any groundwork for building a community in any identifiable sense. On the contrary, the fact that we are (ontologically) only in relation to one another thwarts–or resists (a key word for Nancy)–in advance any self- or communitarian identification with this or that identity trait (being red, being Italian, being communist–to cite Agamben’s examples). Our being-in-common is a limit-experience, a feeling for our finitude. What we share at the end of ourselves, ecstatically (so to speak), is not our shared individuality, but our uncommon singularity.

 

The experience of this sharing should not be understood as a selfless fusion into a group (both Nancy and Agamben write continuously against the unsurpassed danger of our political modernity: fascism, Nazism). Rather, our shared singularity takes the form of an exposure. We are exposed to the absence of any substantial identity to which we could belong. Exposure to singularity: that means to be scattered together, like strangers on a train, not quite face-to-face, oscillating between the poles of communion and disaggregation.¹⁴ It is this banal relation without relation that exposes our pre-identical singularity, our being-in-common.

 

Coming now to Agamben, I believe his work helps us to approach this renewed question of community from another angle. Specifically, he gives positive content to what Nancy is inclined, I think, to describe negatively: namely, the concept of singularity.

 

The Coming Community opens like this: “The coming being is whatever being. In the Scholastic enumeration of transcendentals (quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum–whatever entity is one, true, good, or perfect), the term that, remaining unthought in each, conditions the meaning of all the others is the adjective quodlibet. The common translation of this term as ‘whatever’ in the sense of ‘it does not matter which, indifferently’ is certainly correct, but in its form the Latin says exactly the opposite: Quodlibet ens is not ‘being, it does not matter which,’ but rather ‘being such that it always matters.’ The Latin always already contains, that is, a reference to the will (libet). Whatever being has an original relation to desire” (1).

 

The basis of the coming community, the singular being, is whatever being–not in the sense of “I don’t care what you are,” but rather, “I care for you such as you are.” As such you are freed from belonging either to the emptiness of the universal or the ineffability of the individual.

 

In Agamben’s elaboration of singularity, human identity is not mediated by its belonging to some set or class (being old, being American, being gay). Nor does it consist in the simple negation of all belonging (here Agamben parts company with Bataille’s notion of the “negative community,” the community of those who have no community). Rather, whatever names a sort of radical generosity with respect to belonging. The singular being is not the being who belongs only here or there, but nor is it the being who belongs everywhere and nowhere (flipsides of the same empty generality). This other being always matters to me not because I am drawn to this or that trait, nor because I identify him or her with a favoured race, class, or gender. And certainly not because he or she belongs to a putatively universal set like humanity or the human race.

 

The other always matters to me only when I am taken with all of his/her traits, such as they are. This defining generosity of the singular means that quodlibet ens is not determined by this or that belonging, but by the condition of belonging itself. It belongs to belonging. The singularity of being resides in its exposure to an unconditional belonging. [51] Such a singularly exposed being wants to belong–which is to say, it belongs to want, or, for lack of a less semantically burdened and empty word, to love: “The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is, lovable” (2).

 

We must be careful here not to conflate Agamben’s exposition of whatever being with a more familiar discourse on love: “Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such–this is the lover’s particular fetishism” (2).

 

But what could a thing with all of its predicates look like? Agamben gives us the example of the human face. Every face is singular. This does not mean a face individuates a pre-existing form or universalizes individual features. The face as such is utterly indifferent to what makes it different and yet similar. It is impossible to determine from which sphere–the common or the proper–the face derives its singular expressivity.

 

In this the face is not unlike handwriting in which it is impossible to draw the line between what makes this signature at the same time common and proper, legible and unique. We cannot say for certain whether this hand and this face actualize a universal form, or whether the universal form is engendered by these million different scripts and faces.

 

Whatever being emerges, like handwriting, like the face, on “a line of sparkling alternation” (20) between language and word, form and expression, potentiality and act. “This is how we must read the theory of those medieval philosophers,” Agamben writes, “who held that the passage from potentiality to act, from common form to singularity, is not an event accomplished once and for all, but an infinite series of modal oscillations” (19).¹⁵ The coming community is founded on the imperceptible oscillations of whatever being.

 

But what, finally, might the politics of whatever belonging be?

 

Agamben envisions the coming politics not as a hegemonic struggle between classes for control of the State, but as an inexorable agon between whatever singularity and state organization. What the State cannot digest is not the political affirmations of identity (on the contrary), but the formation of a community not grounded in any belonging except for the human co-belonging to whatever being.

 

“What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May,” Agamben points out, “was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands” (85).

 

Here Agamben surely also has in mind the singular example of May 68. I would even say The Coming Community is (not unlike Vattimo’s book) a belated response to the radical promise–let’s say (using the wrong idiom perhaps), the promise of human happiness–exposed in that event.

 

In these works by two important Italian thinkers, philosophy becomes once again, perhaps, a kind of homesickness, a longing to belong. To a permanent disorientation. To oscillation. To whatever.

 

 Notes

 

1. The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT UP, 1971), 29.

 

2. This phrase, “La pensee du dehors,” is the title of Michel Foucault’s important essay on Maurice Blanchot (first published in Critique 229, 1966). Gilles Deleuze elaborates on the theme of exteriority in his excellent book on Foucault Foucault, trans. Sean Hand [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988]). See especially the chapter entitled “Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power)” where he links up this early essay with Foucault’s later and better known piece on Nietzschean genealogy.

 

3. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

 

4. This is the opening sentence of “The Inoperative Community” (trans. Peter Connor, in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor [Minneapolis and Oxford: U of Minnesota P, 1991], 1).

 

5. I take this phrase from a blurb on the back jacket of the book: “‘This book is of major importance to the debate on the postmodern question.’–Jean-Francois Lyotard.”

 

6. For a recent–and typical (that is, typically anti-academic)–articulation of this objection see David Rieff’s piece “Multiculturalism’s Silent Partner: It’s the newly globalized economy, stupid,” Harper’s 287 August 1993: 17-19.

 

7. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 226.

 

8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 15.

 

9. This quote, not to mention my understanding of the role of oscillation in hermeneutics, comes from Werner Hamacher’s essay “Hermeneutic Ellipses: Writing the Hermeneutical Circle in Schleiermacher,” trans. Timothy Bahti, in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 190.

 

10. Ibid. 190.

 

11. In an essay entitled “Hermeneutics and Anthropology” Vattimo is careful to underscore the ideological nature of ethnographic otherness. Anticipating the theme of generalized communication he writes: “The hermeneutic–but also anthropological–illusion of encountering the other, with all its theoretical grandiosity, finds itself faced with a mixed reality in which alterity is entirely exhausted. The disappearance of alterity does not occur as a part of the dreamed-for total organization of the world, but rather as a condition of widespread contamination” The End of Modernity 159). This sobering reminder about the Westernization of third world cultures seems to drop out of Vattimo’s discussion in The Transparent Society where the emphasis falls on heterogeneity not homologation.

 

12. Edward Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” Raritan 11 (Summer 1991): 31.

 

13. Nancy 22.

 

14. “Passengers in the same train compartment are simply seated next to each other in an accidental, arbitrary, and completely exterior manner. They are not linked. But they are also quite together inasmuch as they are travelers on this train, in this same space and for this same period of time. They are between the disintegration of the ‘crowd’ and the aggregation of the group, both extremes remaining possible, virtual, and near at every moment. This suspension is what makes ‘being-with’: a relation without relation, or rather, being exposed simultaneously to relationship and absence of relationship” (Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” trans. James Creech, Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991] 7).

 

15. “Oscillation” is an entirely appropriate word to use in this context for, as Hamacher points out, “oscillum is in fact a derivation of os, mouth, face, and thus means little mouth, little face and mask. Oscillation, understood in its etymological context, would indicate that ‘originary’ movement of language in which it is allotted to something or someone, which has neither language nor face, is neither intuition or concept” (190).

 

16. This sentence concludes, in parentheses: “(democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao–Bang, was immediately granted)” (85).