The Sense of Freedom. The Surprise of Being-in-Common

Abstract

‘Globalization’ implies, among other things, the radical crisis of the metaphysical and theologico-political conceptions of sense. The crisis of the device built upon the concepts of the abstract individual, the nation and the State is at the same time the crisis of the subject as a master and an owner of sense (each time, the sense). But, if human beings are subtracted by the national, historical and metaphysical identities, by the system of the meanings-image, they are exposed to the possibility itself of sense as what precedes and exceeds every constituted identity or reality. This article aims at exploring in Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought the strict relationship between the ‘non-appropriable’ nature of sense and the being-in-common of human beings considered not as abstract individuals, but as multiple-singularities. A community that is the opening itself of sense, is not sacrificed to an originary or future Unity, but it is offered to the event of the present; to the existences as events and to an ‘immediate mediation’ as surprise. The experience of this offer as surprise is what Nancy calls ‘freedom’.