Being-With and Its Worlds: Ontology, Precarity, and the Politics of Shared Life

This seminar takes as its point of departure a philosophically crucial observation that Jean-Luc Nancy makes in passing and does not follow: that being's constitutive resistance to the will to essence is rendered "slight and inaccessible" by the very historical and political conditions that the will to essence produces. Across The Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural, Nancy proposes an expanded account of Heidegger's Mitsein or being-with, arguing that to be is never self-enclosed but always already constitutively plural and shared out. This panel asks if there are there arrangements of the social and political world in which shared existence is not systematically foreclosed but actively sustained, in which aesthetic and social practices create contexts in which lives heading toward extinction can resist and remain?

These questions have body counts. The will to essence is not merely a philosophical error but the logical condition of possibility of the concentration camp, the ethnic cleansing of Sarajevo, the ongoing obliteration of Palestinian life. Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation extends this argument from within the Caribbean experience, showing how colonization and the trans-Atlantic slave trade produced a new and radically different kind of Relation, constituted from within total dispossession. Glissant's right to opacity extends Nancy's framework into material politics, naming who has the right to have rights. Judith Butler names the differential distribution of precarity as the mechanism through which certain lives are rendered mournable and others are not. Saidiya Hartman shows how the most precarious lives have generated, from within abandonment, forms of collective life in which shared existence becomes radically creative and humanizing.

This seminar invites papers asking how philosophical orientations produce catastrophic historical conditions and how aesthetic, political, and/or social practices produce conditions in which relation can be sustained rather than foreclosed, as well as papers on related questions from various disciplines and orientations.

Questions participants might consider:

How do literary or cultural texts perform rather than illustrate the claims of shared existence and precarity?

What does thinking Nancy and Glissant together reveal that neither can provide alone?

How does Glissant's opacity complicate continental accounts of difference and alterity?

What is the relationship between the ontological condition of precarity and its historical and political distribution?

How do aesthetic, political, and social practices function as counter-practices to the logic of disposability?

Where do we find evidence that the cultivation of relation produces conditions in which lives are sustained rather than foreclosed?

How do decolonial frameworks challenge the claims of the European continental tradition, and what new possibilities emerge?