Ontology after Ontotheology: Plurality, Event, and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy

Introduction: Returning to Ontology

1 INTRODUCTION Returning to Ontology “Our epoch can be said to have been stamped and signed, in philosophy, by the return of the question of Being.” —Alain Badiou, Deleuze “Ereignis. This term...remains undoubtedly to be appropriated by a thought of today.” —Jean-Luc Nancy, “Hors colloque” “Until a new and coherent ontology of potentiality... has replaced the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality and its relation to potentiality.” —Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer THE CONTEMPORARY SPACE OF FIRST PHILOSOPHY If we consider the landscape of continental philosophy today, we may easily be struck by the fact that many works demonstrate a renewed interest in first philosophy or ontology. Of course, ontology was never simply absent. As Alain Badiou acknowledges in the epigraph above, our epoch is stamped and signed by Martin Heidegger’s return to the question of being. Even in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, in which the attention to language, poetics, and discourse in different strands of hermeneutics, structuralism, and deconstruction formed the main core of the philosophical debates, one could still read in Gilles Deleuze’s work that “philosophy merges with ontology”; and philosophical hermeneutics, despite its focus on language, has always been 2 Ontology after Ontotheology attracted by the question of ontology, as Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Paul Ricoeur’s development of a hermeneutic ontology demonstrate.1 Yet, what sets apart the turn to ontology in Badiou, Agamben, Nancy, and Meillassoux from this hermeneutic interest in the question of being is that it places ontology more directly in the center of our attention. Despite the many mutual differences, it makes sense to point out two shared sources of inspiration motivating philosophers to return to ontology more insistently. First, to sketch very briefly the context from which the contemporary concern for ontology stems, the particular focus on language, discourse, and interpretation characteristic of important strands of hermeneutics and deconstruction had a serious implication for ontology : in the hermeneutic framework, our access to being is always determined by logos, that is, by the features of the medium in which being is said and understood. Therefore, a careful examination of language was a necessary detour to be able to come to ontology in the first place. In particular, this careful examination famously resulted in the hermeneutic version of Aristotle’s adage “being is said in many ways,” namely, “being is interpreted in many ways.” Nevertheless, an analysis of this medium of our access to being does not necessarily tell us anything about the subject matter expressed in it. In particular, the multiplicity of interpretations, languages, and discourses discovered in philosophical hermeneutics does not say anything about the multiplicity or the oneness of being. In fact, the question of whether being itself is many or one remains (necessarily) unaddressed. In the philosophical hermeneutics of, for instance, Gadamer and Ricoeur, (the meaning of) being therefore becomes a presupposed “transcendental signified,” as Derrida puts it—or a regulative idea in a terminology to which Ricoeur would probably subscribe. This means that in this hermeneutic framework the meaning of being both attracts and motivates every interpretation but also remains indefinitely out of reach for the praxis of interpretation . In this context, Derrida’s work has proved to be of extreme importance since he has thought this problematic to the limit: for Derrida, ontology is an intrinsically impossible project because the question of being cannot be addressed without understanding the medium in which it is said and understood. Derrida’s argument is Introduction 3 a simple one. Because our understanding of being always moves within the limits of discourse and language—we lack a “view from nowhere”—we will never be able to know whether or not being and the medium in which we speak about being are in accord with each other and whether or not language distorts being in its presentation of it. Thus, every onto-logy is necessarily affected by the possibility of an unaccounted-for disharmony between being and the medium in which it is said, such as language. The impassable possibility of such a disharmony makes the project of any well-founded understanding or knowing of being an impossible one.2 Yet, it is exactly in such a situation that the question of being becomes more pressing. In a medium that speaks of being without ever reaching being itself, being becomes the vanishing point, the point of attraction as well as the limit of such...