Abstract
This chapter upholds that the notion of responsibility for nevertheless requires further integration. Indeed since it implies taking charge of the future, we cannot forgo an image of the future. This is not a matter of bringing back the obsolete idea of a world image, but of further reflecting on the role of the imagination (already dealt with in Part III, Chap. 7): not just to prefigure the negative scenarios of the catastrophe, but also to think positively of a different form of the world. Nancy maintains that globalization provides the premises for ‘creating’ a world, in order to transform a ‘market totality’ into a ‘totality of meaning’. Indeed this reveals an ontological truth thus far disregarded: that the meaning of the world lies in everybody’s interconnection in a single humankind, in coexistence, in ‘cum’. But this chapter suggests that this creation is not possible without activating the imagination: which makes the future present (Arendt), mobilizing the subject to take responsibility and care. Furthermore, following Nancy and Arendt, it is proposed to think of the world as a totality that hosts the plurality. But the necessity is set out to rethink the same notion of plurality starting from the other’s irruption as different and from the fact of contamination (see Part III, Chap. 7): in order to think of the world as the solidaristic coexistence of differences.
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Notes
- 1.
Here we could bring up some of the questions that orient Remo Bodei’s reflection in his fascinating depiction of personal identity: ‘How can individuality’s power be increased so as not to fall into variants of supermanism, which legitimizes pitiless social hierarchies, or of narcissism, which encloses the individual in himself? How can we teach masses corrupted by totalitarianisms or conformisms, accustomed to the primacy of “us”, to learn to say “I” without arrogance and with a sober sense of the real and the possible?’ (Destini personali. L’età della colonizzazione delle coscienze (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002), 16, own translation).
- 2.
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Globalizzazione, libertà, rischio,” Micromega, no. 5 (2001): 103, own translation. Translator’s note: in the official translations of Nancy’s works the term ‘sens’ is translated by both ‘meaning’ and ‘sense’, whereas for reasons of consistency I have opted to use the term ‘meaning’ alone.
- 3.
See Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, II, 111ff.
- 4.
Ibid., 21ff.
- 5.
Ibid., 310–11.
- 6.
Ibid., 69.
- 7.
On the ‘meaninglessness’ (Sinnlosigkeit), see in particular ibid., II, 362ff.
- 8.
In addition to the pilotless plane metaphor that I brought up above (see Bauman, In Search of Politics, 20), in this connection Bauman also puts forward an IT metaphor: ‘The world appears to us as a monstruously obese, gargantuan version of the Internet: here as there, everybody adds to the universal scramble but no one seems to visualize the consequences, let alone to control them. […] like the Web, the world is not just out of control, it is uncontrollable.’ (Ibid., 145).
- 9.
On this point, it is important to underline that in the face of the nuclear threat Arendt herself, critical of modernity and its emphasis on life, reclaims the value of life; see Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005). Originally published as Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, ed. Ursula Ludz (Munich: Piper, 1993). In general we could say that the limit of the biopolitical approach presently lies in its undervaluing the problem of survival and the necessity of self-preservation in the global age.
- 10.
Günther Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?,” in Die Zerstörung einer Zukunft, ed. Mathias Greffrath (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979), 49ff.
- 11.
‘In French the word for “globalization” is mondialisation. “Globe” and “world” are, however, not the same process: creating a world means creating a totality of meaning, not market totality. Globalization and mondialisation are rather two aspects of the same process, whose problem is not its (ir)reversibility […] but its ambiguity, its duplicity.’ (Nancy, “Globalizzazione, libertà, rischio,” 101, own translation).
- 12.
Ibid., 103, own translation.
- 13.
Nancy, The Creation of the World, 34.
- 14.
‘The fact that the world is destroying itself is not a hypothesis: it is in a sense the fact which any thinking of the world follows’ (ibid., 35).
- 15.
Ibid., 42.
- 16.
‘To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, “to begin,” “to lead,” and eventually “to rule,” indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere).’ (Arendt, The Human Condition, 177).
- 17.
‘[…] of the three [activities, that is: labour, work and action] action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.’ (Ibid., 9).
- 18.
See ibid. and also Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 113.
- 19.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 177.
- 20.
Ibid., 178.
- 21.
Nancy, The Creation of the World, 41 and 37.
- 22.
As Sergio Caruso rightly observes while underlining its specificity with respect to other similar concepts (such as Earth or Globe), the world is constitutively intersubjective (as well as being formed by objective aspects – such as mountains, things, houses – and by subjective aspects – people). And it becomes so even more today, in the global horizon of communication. See the entry in Andrea Giuntini, Piero Meucci and Debora Spini, eds., Parole del mondo globale (Pisa: ETS, 2007), s.v. ‘mondo’.
- 23.
‘[…] the meaning of the world does not occur as a reference to something external to the world. […] The stance of a world is the experience it makes of itself. […] A representation of the world, a worldview, means the assigning of a principle and an end to the world. […] The world is thus outside representation, outside its representation and of a world of representation, and this is how, no doubt, one reaches the most contemporary determination of the world.’ (Nancy, The Creation of the World, 43). For a wider treatment of this topic, see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, originally published as Le sens du monde (Paris: Galilée, 1993).
- 24.
Nancy, The Creation of the World, 47.
- 25.
‘[…] “meaning,” used in this absolute way, has become the bared [dénudé] name of our being-with-one-another. We do not “have” meaning anymore, because we ourselves are meaning – entirely, without reserve, infinitely, with no meaning other than “us.”’ (Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 1).
- 26.
‘A world is not something external to existence; it is not an extrinsic addition to other existences; the world is the coexistence that puts these existences together.’ (Ibid., 29). The concept of the world ‘is that of being-with as originary. That is, if the meaning (of Being) is dis-position as such, then this is being-with as meaning: the structure of with is the structure of the there. Being-with is not added on to being-there; instead, with nothing more, with no subsumption of this meaning under any other truth than that of the with.’ (Ibid., 97–98).
- 27.
‘Being-many-together is the originary situation’ (ibid., 41).
- 28.
Ibid., 5.
- 29.
‘Community is bare, but it is imperative.’ (Ibid., 36).
- 30.
‘“Ontology” does not occur at a level reserved for principles, a level that is withdrawn, speculative, and altogether abstract. Its name means the thinking of existence. And today, the situation of ontology signifies the following: to think existence at the height of this challenge to thinking that is globalness [mondialité] as such’. (Ibid., 46–47). On the ‘ontology of the present’, see Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, ed. Frédéric Gros (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, originally published as Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France, 1982–1983 (Paris: Gallimard 2008). See also Giacomo Marramao, La passione del presente (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), who, with respect to Foucault, interprets ontology of the present as the perspective enabling the very sense of contingency and the possibility of openness to be restored, so that we can seize the chances given by the global age.
- 31.
‘[T]he world […] remains essentially “the world of humans.” It is not so much the world of humanity as it is the world of the nonhuman to which humanity is exposed and which humanity, in turn, exposes. One could try to formulate it in the following way: humanity is the exposing of the world; it is neither the end nor the ground of the world; the world is the exposure of humanity; it is neither the environment nor the representation of humanity.’ (Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 18; see also ibid., 53–54).
- 32.
Nancy, The Creation of the World, 45.
- 33.
Ibid., 52.
- 34.
Ibid., 53.
- 35.
Ibid., 48.
- 36.
Ibid., 53.
- 37.
On praxis, see also Nancy, Being Singular Plural.
- 38.
For reflections on Marx, see Nancy, The Creation of the World, 36, 53–55.
- 39.
Ibid., 54.
- 40.
See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Originally published as “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” (1938) in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950).
- 41.
Hans Blumenberg, “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle,” in Nachrichten der Giessener Hochschulgesellschaft, vol. 30 (Giessen: Schmitz, 1961), 67–75. For an additional investigation of the topic of ‘world images’ see also Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1960); and Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, in particular 137–44.
- 42.
For an accurate reconstruction of the role of imagination, see Chiara Bottici and Benoit Challand, eds., The Politics of Imagination (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2011).
- 43.
Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
- 44.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 351, note 312.
- 45.
Ibid., I, 274 and 312.
- 46.
See Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” in Crises of the Republic, ed. Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 5.
- 47.
‘We saw that an “enlarged mentality” is the condition sine qua non of right judgment; one’s community sense makes it possible to enlarge one’s mentality. Negatively speaking, this means that one is able to abstract from private conditions and circumstances, which, as far as judgment is concerned, limit and inhibit its exercise. Private conditions condition us; imagination and reflection enable us to liberate ourselves from them and to attain that relative impartiality that is the specific virtue of judgment.’ (Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 73).
- 48.
Indeed, if we are to take up the thesis of the intergenerational chain that I referred to above, we can also consider our tie with the future generations as a bond of meaning.
- 49.
‘Creation’, Nancy reminds us, means to ‘take care of’, as shown by the etymology of the term itself (to care means to give birth to, take care of a growth). (Nancy, The Creation of the World, 51).
- 50.
While it may be true, Cerutti says, that the old idea of totality, such as the one present in Hegel’s philosophy of history, has become definitively obsolete, it is also true that today we are in the presence of ‘threatening totality structures’ which renew a holistic vision of the world, against all thoughts of fragmentation and partialness. (Cerutti, Global Challenges, chap. 6, 169).
- 51.
From this perspective we can also read some interesting recent reflections relating to the necessity to rethink the concept of the ‘public realm’ or ‘civil society’ in the new global dimension: see Daniel Innerarity, El nuevo espacio pùblico (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2006); Debora Spini, La società civile postnazionale (Rome: Meltemi, 2006).
- 52.
See Jean-Luc Nancy, La pensée dérobée (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 13, note 22; to this effect, in general the deconstructive approach to the topic of community which I referred to in Part I, Chap. 2, Sect. 2.1 seems valuable. On this approach see the already quoted Blanchot, The Unavowable Community; Esposito, Communitas and Nancy, The Inoperative Community.
- 53.
The present-day reality and its communitarian revivals show that ‘we have brought to boiling point the communitarian intensities that had their regimes and distinctions, through the effect of indistinction of a world process in which endless infinity seems to brush away all defined coexistence’. (Nancy, “Cum,” in La pensée dérobée, 129, own translation).
- 54.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 36.
- 55.
Ibid., 45.
- 56.
Nancy, Globalizzazione, libertà, rischio, 105, own translation.
- 57.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 10.
- 58.
On the complex notion of ‘singularity’, here it is sufficient to say that – unlike ‘individual’ and ‘particular’, and evidently subject – it assumes plurality: ‘The singular is primarily each one and, therefore, also with and among all the others. The singular is a plural.’ (Ibid., 32).
- 59.
Ibid., 29.
- 60.
On the concept of ‘world’, see the online magazine Kainòs, no. 3, 2003.
- 61.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 41–47.
- 62.
Ibid., 63.
- 63.
It is impossible not to notice that Nancy limits himself to mentioning Arendt in just one short note, see ibid., 2.
- 64.
Even Simona Forti, whom we must thank for what is still one of the best monographs on Arendt, underlines the difficulty of taking account of Arendt’s concept of ‘world’: see Simona Forti, Vita della mente e tempo della polis. Hannah Arendt tra filosofia e politica (Milan: Angeli, 1996), 286ff.
- 65.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 52.
- 66.
Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times. Thoughts About Lessing,” in Men in Dark Times (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983), 13.
- 67.
In sum: ‘The term “public” signifies two closely interrelated but not altogether identical phenomena: It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity […]. Second, the term “public” signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.’ (Arendt, The Human Condition, 50 and 52).
- 68.
Ibid., 57.
- 69.
‘If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only […]. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us.’ (Ibid., 55).
- 70.
‘Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear.’ (Ibid., 57).
- 71.
Ibid., 6.
- 72.
Ibid., 58.
- 73.
Arendt, On Humanity in Dark Times, 13.
- 74.
Ibid., 31.
- 75.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 58.
- 76.
Ibid., 176.
- 77.
See for example ibid., 208, but evidently it is a crucial and recurrent topos in Arendt’s reflection.
- 78.
Ibid., 153–57.
- 79.
Ibid., 126–35.
- 80.
Ibid., 190–92.
- 81.
The expression is by Alessandro Dal Lago in his introduction to the Italian edition of Arendt, The Human Condition.
- 82.
The Human Condition, 220.
- 83.
Ibid., 229.
- 84.
Ibid., 234.
- 85.
Ibid., 230–31.
- 86.
Ibid., 231, my italics.
- 87.
Ibid.
- 88.
‘Modern world’ as distinct from the modern age (which began in the seventeenth century): ‘[…] the modern age is not the same as the modern world. Scientifically, the modern age which began in the seventeenth century came to an end at the beginning of the twentieth century; politically, the modern world, in which we live today, was born with the first atomic explosions.’ (Ibid., 6).
- 89.
Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 157ff.
- 90.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 232.
- 91.
Ibid., 233.
- 92.
Ibid., 176.
- 93.
Ibid., 179 and 180.
- 94.
Ibid., 179–80.
- 95.
Ibid., 208.
- 96.
Nancy, Globalizzazione, libertà, rischio, 105, own translation.
- 97.
‘The other is presented as the alter ego or as the other of the ego, as the other outside of the self or as the other within the self, as “others” or the “Other”; all these ways of looking at it, all these aspects […] always bring us back to the very heart of the matter, to an alterity or alteration where the “self” is at stake.’ (Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 77).
- 98.
Ibid., 20.
- 99.
The unexpected vividness with which Nancy lists these forms is striking in a context of abstract reflection: ‘[…] mutilation, carving up, relentlessness, meticulous execution, the joy of agony. Or it is the massacre, the mass grave, massive and technological execution, the bookkeeping of the camps.’ (Ibid., 20–21).
- 100.
See Part II.
- 101.
On the pathos of the relationship, see also Part III, Chap. 7 of this book, Sect. 7.3.
- 102.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 34.
- 103.
‘[…] the “thought” of “us” is not a representational thought (not an idea, or notion, or concept). It is, instead, a praxis and an ethos […]. We are always there at each instant. This is not an innovation – but the stage must be reinvented; we must reinvent it each time, each time making our entrance anew.’ (Ibid., 71).
- 104.
See Part III, Chap. 7, Sect. 7.3.
- 105.
Could we perhaps speak of ‘agonality’ in the Arendian sense? Alessandro Dal Lago hints at this concept in his Introduction to the Italian edition of The Human Condition. For a fresh proposal in political terms of an ‘agonal’ perspective, see Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005).
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Pulcini, E. (2013). A World in Common. In: Care of the World. Studies in Global Justice, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4482-0_9
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