Book Review
Being Singular Plural
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Bryne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 207 pp.
If individualism and subjectivism are but sticky residues of our modern tradition, how is it that we continue to value the singularity of events and identities? By highlighting the limits of Heidegger's critique of individualism we come, roughly, to the view that the communalization of meaning need not reduce events to their common properties. To do so, we must think of community not only as expropriating individual properties but simultaneously as individuating material events. But is that enough to justify the sweeping generalizations ("Philosophy is . . . ," "The whole question of politics is . . .") that accompany Nancy's contribution? Only for the already converted, I suspect, which is all the more unfortunate given the communication that might have taken place along these lines. The second half of the book shows Nancy as social critic, applying an artillery of theoretical neither-nors to recent chapters in the ongoing story of human barbarism. Someone else might one day draw a good argument from these musings, especially those on "sovereignty," but there is too much pontificating to see the matter clearly. "Human Excess," a short essay toward the end, returns from the glib depths and reminds us, as does the title essay, that Nancy is indeed one of the most interesting thinkers in France today.
Michael Fagenblat
Michael Fagenblat is a Jerusalem Fellow of the Mandel Foundation. He has recently completed a study of Levinas and Heidegger.
