This book attempts to justify, perhaps not always very successfully, the belief that the unique is everything or, to put it more precisely using one of Plato’s expressions, that the unique is to ontos on, the really real.
By the unique I do not mean that which responds to the question who are you?, that is, the first person whose identity constitutes itself as it narrates its life to the other.
The dominant theory of experience from Descartes to Husserl, including Kant, either conflates the uniqueness of experience with the first person or it accounts for the former by reference to the latter. A Kantian or a phenomenologist, the difference does not matter in this regard, will say that my perception of the red cube is incommensurable with yours because that first perception is mine.
I argue in Chapter 1 of this book that uniqueness is prior in meaning to and that it makes possible the constitution of the first person. An experience can be unique and anonymous at the same time, that is to say, it can be left unclaimed by the self.
That is especially true in the case of limit experiences or traumas of different sorts where someone suffers the complete collapse of their personal identity. The sense of that person’s life grows dark. She is no longer capable of referring to herself as I. Nevertheless, that does not mean that her experience has become qualitatively indistinguishable from someone else’s whose personal identity has also broken down. As I put it in this book, a life is and remains non-replaceable, singular or unique, even when the unity of the first person has broken down, and it is no longer possible to think in the first person or ascribe experiences to the I.
To justify that position, I argue in Chapter 1 against transcendental philosophy’s claim that the collapse of the unity of the first person is not a possible experience. Drawing on cases of schizophrenia in Ronald Laing’s The Divided Self and Heidegger’s description of anxiety in What is Metaphysics?, I show that the collapse of the unity of the self is a possible experience and that possible experience, consequently, does not depend on the unity of the first person as a necessary condition of possibility.
What accounts for the non-replaceability of a life if not the unity of the first person? Uniqueness is not a feature that descends from heaven (the immortality of the person). Or at least I don’t believe that it does.
Like the word being, uniqueness is not a predicate with an empirical or eidetic content. It does not pick out an accidental property or essence. It tells us nothing about who or what one is. Uniqueness is not the essence of the human being. It is a purely formal feature of existence. One is non-replaceable just by virtue of existing (that is, of being to the measure of Dasein).
Consequently, the haecceity of a being, that is, someone’s thisness or uniqueness, is not determined by a numerical or material difference, as is generally believed in the Aristotelian tradition (one’s position in space and time; the hue of one’s skin or hair, the molecular structure of one’s body; one’s habits or dispositions or, more generally, one’s character). Rather, if uniqueness is a formal feature of existence, then it must be determined by a difference that is equally formal and unique.
There are, in that regard, at least two possible candidates for that difference or principle of singularization. There is the imminence of death, according to Heidegger, and there is the responsibility for the other, according to Ricoeur and Levinas.
Irrespective of whether the first or the second has a priority of meaning (which, besides, I am not sure that it is possible to decide), in both of these cases, we are thinking of a life in its singularity in distinction from the numerical identity of a person or that of a substance and of the taxonomic apparatus that pertains to the latter (genus, species, specific difference), as Porphyry sets it out in his Isagoge.
Generally speaking, my aim in this book is to demonstrate that it is necessary to take thought beyond the limits imposed by the concept, language and experience of identity in order to be faithful, as far as possible, to the thought of uniqueness. A thinking of uniqueness is a thinking of absolute difference, and that calls for a thinking of finitude.
Let me explain. I can view myself from the first or from the third person standpoint, that is, as a person (who) or as a thing (what). I usually tend to do both in my unreflective and sometimes in my reflective engagement with others in the world. I often identify with others on the basis of shared experiences. I also identify with them on the basis of the fact that we have the same job or the same gender or because we are part of the same race, religion or nationality, etc.
At least two things follow from this kind of constitution of personal and social identity. To have an identity is to be a member of some groups and to be excluded from others. As feminist scholars and political theorists have been emphasizing in the last few decades, an identity is a norm and standard of inclusion and exclusion that creates insiders and outsiders (see Butler 1990, Edkins 2007, Perpich 2010, Winkler 2016).
In the second place, and as Heidegger tells us in his discussion of the inauthenticity of Dasein in Being and Time, if I regard myself in terms of what I do, then I inevitably see myself as someone who is replaceable by others. I am a teacher (say) and, as such, I am replaceable by any other teacher. It is no different when I identify with others on the basis of shared experiences or third personal characteristics. I claim ownership of my existence in these social roles, shared experiences, or through these third personal characteristics as something that is common and, therefore, exchangeable with others.
To be unique, on the other hand, is to be unlike any other. It is to be, like an absolute origin, without precedent in history or nature. The unique is beyond the distinction between insider and outsider. It is the absolutely other. Or what amounts to the same thing, it is the without-identity, the anonymous or the absolute stranger.
The unique marks the finitude of language and thought. That is not because it is ineffable. It is said that the individual is ineffable (individuum est ineffabile). That is because the notion of an individual substance has an infinite intension (and, correlatively, an extension that is equal to 1) that only God’s infinite intellect can comprehend. For example, Leibniz claims that a contingent being is grasped in its thisness by adding together the infinite number of predicates that are true of it in its ‘complete individual concept’.
But the unique is not the individual, as I argue in Chapter 1. Besides, an existent is manifest in its uniqueness not when all the predicates that are true of it have been added to its notion but once it has been deprived of all the characteristics that it could have in common with others, that is, once it has been stripped of all conceivable characteristics (since there is no characteristic that an existent has that could not be instantiated by another). When nothing more can be said of it except that it is, then and only then does it stand apart and shine through in the singularity of its existence.
Put differently, an existent stands out in its absolute non-replaceability when thought confronts the absolute impossibility of classifying it under taxonomic systems in general, of determining it under the concept of an object, or of identifying it under the categories of being such as thing-property and, more broadly even, under the modern distinction between thing and person, something and someone, what and who.
The unique is, strictly speaking, the unclassifiable, the unidentifiable. That is why an experience of it (providing that an experience of it is possible, which is not at all certain, if it is true that the possibility of experience involves the possibility of identification, of determination under a concept, of the institution of equivalents and of their substitution, of the symbolic exchangeability of a being by an instance of the same or of another kind, of the reproduction of the present in a representation, etc.) leaves us speechless, is traumatic, is, like an event that cannot be anticipated in advance, an absolute surprise, a shock. It brings thought back before the absolute impossibility of thought, or the limit of the thinkable. Again not because it is ineffable but, rather, because it is without a determinable identity. The content of the unique is determined by nothing save alterity and strangeness, the strangeness of being there at all. The thinking of the unique is a thinking of finitude.
I show in Chapter 3 that this is especially evident when we think of being in Heidegger’s sense of that term. Being in Heidegger signifies the intelligibility of entities. It denotes the way they appear, their manifestation or disclosure, their becoming-apparent to Dasein.
The intelligibility of entities in Heidegger is localized neither in a transcendental subject (transcendental idealism) nor in the entities themselves (metaphysical realism). At least that is true of Heidegger during the 1930s and 1940s. He leans towards transcendental idealism during the 1920s, identifying the intelligibility of entities (their being) with Dasein’s understanding of being. During the 1930s and 1940s, Heidegger thinks of the relation of being and Dasein as a relation of reciprocal implication or mutual dependency (belonging and need are his two key terms, the first for Dasein’s relation to being, the second for being’s relation to Dasein), which means that he does not collapse one into the other. Being, the intelligibility of entities, unfolds as a play of differences and contrasts (Aus-einander-setzung), whereas Dasein shelters that play in beings (at least as long as it exists authentically).
The light (Lichtung) that suddenly breaks into entities articulates them in their outline and contours. It detaches them from the undifferentiated background with which they were initially fused and brings them out in relief against each other. But that light is not, in turn, an entity. It has no figure or motion or extent or mental properties. It has none of the features by which entities are usually identified, described or explained.
That is why exposure to that light, providing that were possible, would be tantamount to an exposure to nothingness, anxiety, loss of orientation, loss of self. That is perhaps why that light is also self-veiling, namely, so that Dasein can talk and engage with others in the world.
Heidegger says at the start of Being and Time that ‘Being is the transcendens pure and simple’ and that the transcendence of Dasein’s being implies ‘the possibility and the necessity of the most radical singularization’ (BT 62). I explain the second clause in Chapter 1. What Heidegger means to emphasize in the first clause, it seems, is the ontico-ontological difference. Being is not an entity. It is entirely other than, or it is incommensurable with, the totality of entities. We can put this by saying that being and singularity are semantically convertible terms, or that being is (none other than) singularity. It is (the) absolutely other.
What escapes the logic of the concept, the system, or identification is not only the singularity of the self (Kierkegaard) or that of the other human being (Levinas). It is, first and foremost, being as singularity.
I argue in Chapter 3 that being in that sense is unthinkable except as a figuration of someone or something or, more precisely, as a figure in which the force of the distinction between the someone and the something, the who and the what, has been suspended – as a figure, therefore, that is without a determinable identity. I argue that the feminine in Levinas and the absolute arrivant in Derrida are figurations of being in that sense.
In Chapter 6, I argue that what makes possible the appearance of substantia as a technical or ontological term in the language of the Romans is a play of metaphors and that the expressions figure and metaphor in this context cannot be used in their ordinary sense as a sensuous image that conveys a non-sensuous meaning. That is because such figures of being first articulate and make intelligible the distinction and opposition between the sensuous and the non-sensuous.
Given what the unique stands for – notably, something that is absolutely unlike anything that was, is, and will be present – it follows that the unique is not reducible to a context of interpretation (and that it is manifest precisely as such). It transcends history as the space and limit of hermeneutical understanding. At any rate, that is true inasmuch as to contextualize something involves tracing similarities or commonalities between it and other things past and present and situating them in a shared horizon of meaning. If we can adapt what Levinas (1979: 23) says of the other human being in Totality and Infinity, we can say that the unique is a signification without context.
By the same token, it also transcends the temporality of consciousness. The latter privileges the present (or, correlatively, primal impression and, in a different register, the intuitively evident) as the origin of the meaning of things, whereas the unique signifies, like a trauma, a past that was never present or a future that will never be present.
In other words, the mode of presence of the unique is the already there or the to come. It is manifest as an originary (or non-derivable) absence in the world. It eludes the present and, by implication, the classical sense of being as presence, at any rate, if it is true that being has since the Classical Age of the Greeks been understood by reference to the present, as both Heidegger and Levinas maintain.
I argue in the first four chapters of the book that the relation with the unique is accomplished as time, and that that is a relation, beyond consciousness and history, to an absolute past or future. That relationship takes several forms in the book, including mourning and anticipation, as well as hospitality, responsibility, dwelling and guest friendship.
This book, then, deals with the unique in a variety of ways, as the uniqueness of being, of the self, of the other human being, of death, and of the responsibility for the other. It also considers whether the unique is a possible experience and how to think and talk about it.
Chapter 1 focuses on the uniqueness of existence. I argue that the latter does not issue from the unity of the first person but from the imminence of death or the responsibility for the other. I argue in Chapter 2 that the uniqueness (or alterity) of the self does not give access to the uniqueness (or alterity) of the other human being. In Chapter 3, I argue that the uniqueness of being is unthinkable except as a figure that lacks a determinable identity and that such a figuration of being is one of the conditions necessary for something to qualify as an event or origin of meaning.
In Chapter 4, I consider some of the figurations of being that appear in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s lectures, starting with his 1934–5 lecture on Germania to his final lecture on Der Ister in 1942. In Chapter 5, I offer an alternative reading of Nietzsche to the one Heidegger and Derrida respectively provide and consider the non-metaphysical sense of being as light that is operative in Nietzsche’s text. In the final chapter, I show that substantia appears as a word for being in the language and thought of the Romans through a play of metaphors, and consider the way in which such terms as figure and metaphor should be taken when what is at stake is being understood as the light that articulates the intelligibility of what there is.
This book on uniqueness would have benefitted from an engagement with the recent work of Adriana Cavarero as well as Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on singularity and community. However, limitations of space and time did not allow for it. An engagement with both authors (and others) is planned in the sequel to this book.