Abstract

To-be being-with, that is, to be co-constitutive of the world of spirit and as well of the world of the social: this is how Jean-Luc Nancy reformulates Hegel’s question of Being’s identity with thought. Nancy’s preoccupation with the Thought-event of being offers a transformative reading of Hegel, one which calls for a move beyond the political tradition of Being’s identity with representational thought. Hegel contributes to a renewal of the idea of thinking that moves beyond representation by introducing a movement into thought as driven by a force that is not simply the negativity of Kant’s “thing-in-itself.” It is received orthodoxy that Hegel understood representation as representing thought as dialectical movement. Yet as Nancy argues, Hegel grasps that under the force of development of a necessary transcendental illusion thought no longer can remain at the level of representation, and the principle that drives it is rather ontic-ontological. I will introduce a three-point approach to reconstructing the shift to an ontology of Being-with, but first, I will sketch this perspective more generally.