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in
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Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 brill.nl/rp

Evil and the Experience of Freedom:

Nancy on Schelling and Heidegger

Patrick Roney
Koç University, Istanbul

Abstract
This essay examines Jean-Luc Nancy’s re-posing of the question of freedom in The Experience of
Freedom in relation to three issues—what he calls the “thought of freedom,” the reality of evil,
and the closure of metaphysics. All three elements that he discusses point directly to Heidegger’s
engagement with Friedrich Schelling’s attempt to establish a system of freedom. My intervention
into the discussion between these three thinkers will address several issues. The first part draws
out the implications of Nancy’s argument that the thought of freedom, not the question of being
as Heidegger would have it, is the ultimate matter for thinking that arises at the end of meta-
physics. This in turn has important implications for Nancy’s understanding of evil. The next part
confronts and criticizes Nancy’s contention that there is an “ontodicy” in Heidegger’s thought
that lends a certain justification to evil. The final part aims to show how Heidegger’s engagement
with Schelling and the reality of evil has to be understood within the context of the question
concerning technology. This leads to a second confrontation with Nancy, who proposes a quite
different interpretation of technology according to his own ontology, which he calls “being sin-
gular plural,” which amounts in effect to a liberation of technology from the being-question.

Keywords
Nancy, Heidegger, Schelling, freedom, evil

Introduction
The objective of my essay is to determine what is at stake in the way that the
work of Jean-Luc Nancy reopens the question of freedom. Nancy poses the
question in the context of a threefold unity—what he calls the “thought of
freedom,” the reality of evil, and the closure of metaphysics. All three elements
that he discusses point directly to Heidegger’s engagement with Friedrich
Schelling’s attempt in the Freiheitschrift of 1809 to establish a system of free-
dom. By means of this engagement, Heidegger himself had sought a way
toward the saying of the finitude of being. My intervention into the discussion
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/008555509X12472022364127
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 375

between these three thinkers will address several issues. In the first part, I will
draw out the implications of Nancy’s argument that it is the thought of free-
dom that arises as the ultimate matter for thought at the end of metaphysics,
not the question of being, as Heidegger would have it. This in turn has impor-
tant implications for Nancy’s understanding of evil. In the next part, I will
confront and criticize Nancy’s suspicion that there is an “ontodicy” in Hei-
degger’s thought that lends a certain justification for evil. In the final part, my
aim is to show how Heidegger’s engagement with Schelling and the reality of
evil has to be understood within the context of the question concerning tech-
nology. This leads to a second confrontation with Nancy, who proposes a quite
different interpretation of technology according to his own ontology, which
he calls “being singular plural,” which amounts in effect to a liberation of
technology from the being-question.
In his book The Experience of Freedom, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that there is
an essential connection between freedom and evil that can be understood no
longer simply as a philosophical issue but as a fact, “Henceforth, there is an
experience of evil that thought can no longer ignore.” To which he then adds,
“In fact, this is perhaps the major experience of all contemporary thought as
the thought of freedom.”1 One cannot but recognize a certain urgency or even
an imperative in these statements. There lies in this, he claims, a “modern
knowledge of evil,” different in kind from every prior knowledge, with which
we contemporaries must come to terms. What, however, is the meaning of this
statement, and what specifically does the “thought of freedom” refer to, and by
what necessity is it linked to the experience of evil? No simple and straightfor-
ward answer to this question is possible here at the start because Nancy’s claim
is based on his reading of a plethora of texts, all of which in some way address
what is perhaps the central issue in modern philosophy since Kant, the issue to
which he gives the name “the thought of freedom” or, alternatively, although
with a certain difference, the “experience of freedom.”
For Nancy, the “experience of freedom” also names his own attempt at an
ontology of finitude, or “being singular plural,” which should not be under-
stood as an ontology in the strict sense. This is because the thought of freedom
as Nancy understands its development from Kant through Schelling, to Hegel
and Heidegger has produced not a completed system of reason but the oppo-

1)
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, 122. Abbreviations for the English translations of
Nancy’s text are as follows: EF for The Experience of Freedom; BSP for Being Singular Plural, and
SW for The Sense of the World. For publication information of all works cited in this essay, see
attached list of references.
376 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

site. Idealism after Kant is shattered by the idea of freedom, thereby bringing
metaphysics, whose task was to show the unity of knowledge and action, of
being as such and thinking, to its ends.2 Nancy’s essential claim is that the
experience of freedom is equally the experience of the end of metaphysics and
of the opening of our being singular plural. Yet he also recognizes that to
address the matter in this way requires an engagement with that which the
tradition of German Idealism had identified as the reality of human freedom,
that is, the possibility of evil. As Schelling had argued, the reality of human
freedom, which a completed Idealism as exemplified by the philosophies of
Fichte and more so of Hegel cannot account for, is the decidedness for good
and evil, and perhaps more originally, the decision for evil as a definite and
essential possibility of human being. This then is the thought that philosophy
produces when it proposes freedom alone as the principle upon which the
system will be grounded, when philosophy knows itself as its own praxis, and
which runs aground on this very attempt, leaving freedom as the one idea that
metaphysics cannot think.
My essay will attempt to pursue Nancy’s thinking at some length, and I will
do so in light of several questions addressed in, and addressed to, two of his
primary works, The Experience of Freedom and Being Singular Plural. If, as
Nancy maintains, the task of thinking is to determine not the essence of exis-
tence but the freedom of existence, then this implies that the question of free-
dom takes priority over the question of being and that freedom is no longer
tethered to being. What are the stakes of this shift in questioning, particularly
as it pertains to the question of responsibility? Nancy’s suggestion seems to be
that thinking is not primarily responsible for, and does not respond to, the
abandonment of beings by Being, as in Heidegger, as much as it affirms the

2)
I say “ends” in the plural for several reasons. First, as with both Heidegger and Derrida, Nancy
does not understand the “end of metaphysics” to be its cessation, as if metaphysics will disappear.
Nancy understands “end” in the sense of finality, that is, the “mode of execution” (l’exécution) or
“accomplishment” of a being insofar as it comes to a stand as a complete, finished being. What
the end or the “finishing” (la finition) of metaphysics signifies is the carrying out, the “execution”
of metaphysics to the limit of its own logic, that is, “to the extremity of its own Being” (BSP
118). And it is precisely at this extremity that meaning (sens) exceeds the ends of metaphysical
thinking. Beings can no longer be “finished off ” in terms of the ends that are tied to the sovereign
character of Being itself. In The Sense of the World, Nancy offers essentially the same thought as a
process of the subtraction of meaning from the world. The phrase, ‘the end of the world’ means
that “there is no longer any assignable signification of ‘world,’ or that the ‘world’ is subtracting
itself, bit by bit, from the entire regime of signification available to us” (SW 5).
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 377

abandonment that existence is—that existence is nothing else than “la liberté
de cet abandon.”3
Secondly, in what way does this shift also transform the central problem of
human freedom, that of evil? In his Schelling lectures, Heidegger followed
Schelling in his characterization of the malice of evil as “reversed conscien-
tiousness” (umgekehrte Gewissenhaftigkeit) in which the self-contained indi-
vidual will reverses the relation between existence and ground, or alternatively
stated, the “insurrection of the ground’s craving, as the ground not to be one
condition, but the sole condition.”4 In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger
names evil as “the malice of fury,”5 which represents an essential possibility of
human Dasein, which, rather than describing the destructiveness of mere ego-
tism, points to the absolutizing of the subject that comes to presence in the
purest and yet most concealed way with the advent of modern technology.
Thus, Heidegger elucidates the reality of evil as part of the withdrawal of
Being, insofar as nihilation and the nothing belong to Being, which takes an
extreme form in the power age where beings as a whole are nothing except that
which is constantly available, that is, a Gestell. In stark contrast, Nancy under-
stands technology as the very expression and development of our being singu-
lar plural. One can locate this claim precisely in the section of his book Being
Singular Plural that bears the title “Ecotechnics” (Écotechnie). Ecotechnics
names the uncanny way in which modern technology and especially commu-
nication technology damages, weakens, and upsets the functioning of all final-
ities, on the one hand, and all sovereignties, on the other. Ecotechnics, he

3)
As will be discussed at length, this issue represents the major point of confrontation between
Nancy and Heidegger. Two major points regarding this confrontation will be discussed here.
First, like Derrida, Nancy argues for a further deconstruction of the Being-question, a decon-
struction that will yield the ultimate thought that both ends and exceeds metaphysics—freedom.
Second, Nancy understands Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte as an ontodicy, or at least the temptation
to an ontodicy, which would represent the penultimate obstacle to the free-thinking of freedom.
The disagreement can be formulated as the question, what if freedom exceeds Being, or alterna-
tively, is Being anything other than the free opening of ek-sistence? Both points need to be
examined carefully.
4)
Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, 160. Hereafter abbre-
viated as ST.
5)
The German phrase reads, “es [das Böse] beruht im Bösartigen des Grimmes” (Martin Hei-
degger, Über den Humanismus, 51). The German word “das Grimme” can also mean rage or
wrath and carries the connotation of that which is fierce. Heidegger’s usage of the word here
suggests a fierce affirmation of the ‘not.’ Since this phrase appears in the context of a discussion
on the nihilating essence of being, what it emphasizes is the strife-like character of the finitude
of being.
378 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

writes, “is also pure techne, the pure techne of nonsovereignty” (BSP 135). And
again, in his work The Sense of the World, he writes, “the world of technology,
that is, the technologized world, is not nature delivered up to rape and pil-
lage,” but is, “the world becoming world,” and world in turn “is the name of a
gathering or being-together that arises from art—a techne—and the sense of
which is identical with the very exercise of this art” (SW 41). What is expressed
here is perhaps the strongest point of his confrontation with Heidegger’s
thought, and the criticism that Nancy levels against him is that what stands
behind Heidegger’s question concerning technology, from which technology
must be freed, is not a theodicy but an “ontodicy.”
It is these two issues that will be addressed in this essay in the hopes that
both the meaning of the “thought of freedom” and the way in which it deter-
mines our “modern knowledge of evil” can be made clear. The issues to be
taken up respectively are, first, Nancy’s contention that the thought of free-
dom corresponds to the closure of metaphysics insofar as it forces us to rethink
existence according to Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. Nancy will then argue
that Heidegger did not go far enough in his thinking of the finitude of being-
there, because he subordinated freedom to Being. Second, I will argue that
Heidegger’s reading of Schelling’s attempt to address the reality of evil as the
central problem of a system of freedom necessarily leads to the question con-
cerning technology. I will show how both the questions concerning evil and
technology converge in the idea of unconditional subjectivity. I will then trace
the manner in which Nancy attempts to free τέχνη, and by implication tech-
nology, from the way in which Heidegger has understood the latter out of the
history of being as the completion of metaphysics. If Heidegger is right that
technology brings to presence Being’s most extreme withdrawal, Nancy seeks
to remove technology from this Seinsgeschichte through the notion of an
ecotechnics as the very opening of existence itself. To what extent he is success-
ful is not clear.

Freedom or Being?
The first task is therefore to understand how Nancy re-poses the question of
freedom as the question of thinking in the epoch of the end of metaphysics.
The opening chapter of The Experience of Freedom states the matter with par-
ticular clarity. “Once,” he writes, “existence is no longer produced or deduced,
but simply posited (this simplicity arrests all our thought), and once existence
is abandoned to this positing at the same time that it is abandoned by it, we
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 379

must think the freedom of this abandonment” (EF 9). This, he continues, is
precisely the epoch-making thought that Heidegger introduced in Being and
Time with the statement, “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence.” Thus, it
is through and within the thought of the finitude of being that the question of
freedom will be posed again in an original repetition. Nancy’s interpretation
of this key statement reveals the direction of his own thinking:

Freedom can no longer be either “essential” or “existential,” but is implicated in the chias-
mus of these concepts: we have to consider what makes existence, which is in its essence
abandoned to freedom, free for this abandonment, offered to it, available in it.
[il faut penser ce qui fait l’existence, en son essence abandonnée à une liberté, libre pour cet
abandon, livrée à lui disponible.] (EF 9)

The chiasmus that Nancy speaks of is nothing else than the crossing-through
of the attempt to understand existent beings as the actualization of an essence.
It is thus metaphysics that Heidegger’s gesture crosses out on the basis of free-
dom, insofar as freedom frees existence from its determination by essence.
Existence, once abandoned by the metaphysical distinction and freed for this
abandonment, emerges as sheer facticity, the that-it-is of being-in-the-world.
Two important motifs are already present in this exposition of free exis-
tence. On the one hand, an existence that is neither produced, deduced, deter-
mined, nor grounded is also without finality and as such is a freed existence.
Existence is, quite literally, the in-essential. Nancy’s conception remains within
the Scholastic opposition between quidditas and haeccitas, the what-it-is and
the that-it-is of a being, which he then subjects to a chiasmatic operation of a
crossing-through. This has significant implications for his understanding of
facticity. Nancy’s chiasmatic operation places the emphasis on singularity, and
singularity is in turn understood as the factum brutum of things themselves.6
That is, haeccity freed from the priority of quiddity yields an understanding
of existence that is itself “the reason for its presence and the presence of its
reason” (EF 10). Factual existence and, by extension, the beings that belong
to it are thus radicalized in their “thisness.” This is the reason why his use
of the term “existence abandonné” is wholly appropriate. Existence, as the
name that designates the being of Dasein, is neither deduced nor can it be
subsumed under a universal. This conception contrasts sharply with the way

6)
Nancy goes so far as to identify freedom with the materiality of the body as freed from any
kind of causality. Freedom is the “force of the thing,” in which the relation between things
appears as the “difference of singularities as a difference of forces” (EF 103).
380 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

that Heidegger understands Dasein’s facticity. Whereas Nancy emphasizes the

freedom from principles, which is certainly present in Heidegger, the latter
identifies the fundamental phenomenon of facticity as temporality. Dasein
exists and understands itself in terms of a “today” in which Dasein is “there”
for a while, directed in a concernful way toward the today in which it is
absorbed.7 The point I wish to make here is that it is not enough for Nancy to
simply cross out the distinction between essence and existence; he must also
think being according to the horizon of time. That is of course Heidegger’s
whole project. Chiasmus may indeed point out the collapse of metaphysical
distinctions, but it does not necessarily succeed in showing singularity as a
mode of presencing. The series of reversals that give an articulation to our free
existing tend to proliferate in Nancy’s text. “Freedom is a fact. . . . It is the fact
of existence as the essence of itself ” (EF 11). And again, “The fact of freedom
is this de-liverance of existence from every law and from itself as law” (EF 30).
There is a markedly Kantian nuance to these statements. The factuality of
freedom is synonymous with its not being deduced. Nancy’s interpretation of
facticity and freedom represents a significant change of emphasis. The “free
thinking of freedom” is re-oriented toward the new, the giving-birth, and to
the “surprise.”8 As a result, Heidegger’s attempt to retrieve the question of
being in terms of the presencing of the present is shifted, in Nancy, toward an
understanding of presencing as the advent of the new.
On the other hand, what Nancy wants to draw out of Heidegger and what
he is at pains to criticize is any subordination of freedom to the truth of being.
Such a subordination would in effect hold freedom in reserve, meaning that
the free generosity of being’s disclosure, of truth—of letting beings be and
belong to a world—would always be subject to a withdrawal of this same free
gesture. This is Nancy’s primary objection. Disclosure, ἀλήθεια, also marks
the withdrawal of Being as it reveals itself in beings, and in this withdrawal a
“reserve” is created where, in effect, the truth of beings is also its untruth.9

7)
References here are to Heidegger, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 24–26.
8)
“Freedom surprises—or rather, because freedom is not the subject of an action, freedom sur-
prises itself ” (EF 115). Nancy wants to make of freedom the originary temporalization of time.
What freedom offers us is the surprise of the present that is subject to no finality.
9)
Concerning ἀλήθεια and the withdrawal of Being, what Heidegger actually writes in The
Anaximander Fragment is the following: “Being thereby holds to its truth and keeps to itself. This
keeping to itself is the way it reveals itself early on” (Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 26;
hereafter EGT ). He calls this Being’s “luminous keeping to itself in the truth of its essence.”
Nancy’s tendency is to interpret Being’s keeping to itself as a holding back, as if Being held itself
in reserve in the manner of a fund that waits for its maturity date. Whether Heidegger thinks the
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 381

Already in Being and Time and throughout the whole of Heidegger’s work,
Nancy finds a certain equivocation over the relation of truth to freedom,
where he sometimes suggests that the truth of being holds priority, other times
that freedom grounds Dasein (a ground that Nancy certainly recognizes as an
Abgrund, to be sure). Of the several senses of freedom Heidegger employs, the
most important early ones can be summarized as follows. First, the freedom of
Dasein is to be free for its ownmost possibility of being, that is, its being-
towards-death. Since death can never become present as an ‘end’ in the sense
of an accomplished finality, death renders our being profoundly incomplete,
other, and inessential.10 Second, freedom is also equated with the transcen-
dence of Dasein; the thrown-projection of itself into possibilities for being
takes place in the free projection of an understanding of Being, and thus the
meaning of Being rests upon the Abgrund of freedom.11 Third, the proper
factuality of freedom occurs as the necessity for Dasein to be its own essence,
that it must take over resolutely in the face of its own Abgrund.12 According to
Nancy, these three moments could have led Heidegger to a more profound
thinking of freedom, but unfortunately they did not. His contention is that
Heidegger sacrificed the question of freedom in favor of the question of being,
and as a result, he did not think sufficiently beyond the metaphysical determi-
nation of freedom as idea. “Heidegger,” Nancy writes, “so little attended to the
proper force of the word ‘freedom’—which is, in sum, the force of a resistance
to the Concept or Idea or Freedom—that he used it until the end without
retaining any of this force, or at least without any longer articulating any real
notion of it” (EF 35). Even so, two important points result. First, these three

truth of Being in this way is far from clear however. Heidegger speaks of the truth of Being as a
gathering that clears and preserves (verwahren). This however, can only be accomplished “within
the openedness of Da-Sein” (EGT 36). The correctness of his interpretation aside, Nancy’s aim
is to think Being as an expenditure without reserve, which would mean in effect a crossing-out
of Being as the work of freedom.
10)
Heidegger speaks of a “freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the
Illusions of the ‘they,’ and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious” (Martin Heidegger,
Being and Time, 311; hereafter BT ).
11)
This is expressed most clearly in Heidegger’s lecture course published as The Essence of Human
Freedom: “The letting be encountered of being in each and every mode of manifestness, is only
possible where freedom exists. Freedom is the condition of the possibility of the manifestness of the
being of beings, of the understanding of being” (Martin Heidegger, 205).
12)
The one notion of freedom absent here, which unfortunately Nancy did not address at any
length is Gelassenheit. See the work of Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From
Principles to Anarchy for a discussion of the consequences of this oversight among a great many
interpreters of Heidegger’s work.
382 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

senses indicate that freedom is the proper foundation for Dasein, yet freedom
founds Dasein upon an abyss. Second, the necessity for Dasein to be its
essence, its truth, has its origin in the nothing. That is to say, ‘necessity’ is
founded not upon the apriority of Being, but upon the null ground of Dasein’s
being-there.13 Thus, Nancy maintains that the priority of freedom in being-
there, in existence, comes to presence in the pure that there is of disclosure:
a free space opens up in which beings are dis-closed and to which Dasein is
ex-posed. Freedom gives Dasein the freedom for ex-posure, and Dasein is
nothing but this being-exposed-outside-of-itself.
What Nancy is trying to draw attention to are two possibilities, each com-
prising one side of the equivocation. If the truth of Being takes precedence
over the freedom of being, then the result is the construction of an “ontodicy”:
As it reveals itself in beings, Being withdraws, its holds itself back in reserve,
and renders the proper destiny of our history as the errancy of Being. The
errancy of Being as it completes its history, as technology, might then lead to
a retrieval of the originary force of Being. If, on the other hand, the freedom
of being takes precedence, then there is in disclosure no reserve, no withdrawal
or not-granting of Being. Freedom gives existence, abandons us, ex-poses us
each time, singularly, without reserve.
However, if Nancy seeks to re-pose the question of freedom for the sake of
removing the final barriers to an ontology of finitude, which is what being
singular plural intends to be, then he must likewise transform the central
problem on which the metaphysics of freedom reaches and at the same time
exceeds its “ends,” namely, the elucidation of evil as the essential possibility of
human freedom. Anticipating the results to follow on this particular subject,
Nancy reads Heidegger’s lecture course of 1936 on Schelling’s treatise on free-
dom as what should or at least could have been the completion of Heidegger’s
inquiries into the freedom of Dasein. But rather than presenting freedom
as the “archi-foundation” of Dasein, Heidegger abandoned both Schelling’s
philosophy and the project. With regard to the meaning of evil, Heidegger
developed it in two senses. First, evil is a way of man’s being free as revolt
against his own abyssal ground.14 In terms of his later thought, evil bespeaks
the refusal of the very opening of the world and the letting be of beings.
13)
Concerning Dasein’s “nullity of Being-a-basis,” Heidegger writes, “The nullity we have in
mind belongs to Dasein’s Being-free for its existentiell possibilities” (BT 331).
14)
One must keep in mind Schelling’s description of the ground as Regellos, which is variously
translated as ‘unruly’ or ‘anarchic’ and which Schelling characterizes as the “incomprehensible
base of reality” and as the “indivisible remainder,” a phrase of out which Slavoj Žižek made a
great deal of hay.
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 383

Schelling’s “living God” may explain the origin of the individual being, but
not its essence, not its being-free. When this groundlessness of the ground is
refused, when the human being wills the pure craving of the ground as his own
and seeks to make himself the sole ground and basis of his own existence, then
this effects the de-formation of the essence of Dasein. Dasein says “no” to its
existence as grounded in God and says “yes” to the act of separation by which
the human becomes what it is, a Scheidung so radical as to reverse the relation
of ground and existence. However, since for Heidegger this “no” is a possibil-
ity that emerges from the errancy of being—that is to say, from the fact that
in this disclosure/withdrawal the nothing and nihilation occur essentially in
being—then it appears as if evil is justified according to the destiny of being,
and that Dasein’s resoluteness for its own proper being is established through
evil (EF 131).
Such, according to Nancy, are the consequences of an ontodicy that will
make its presence felt right up through the question concerning technology,
where the advent of technology is thought in relation to the oblivion of being.
Nancy’s tentative rejoinder to this occurs in three statements that, while dis-
placing any metaphysical or moral interpretations of good and evil, reinter-
prets the reality of evil as the supreme danger that consists, paradoxically, of
the free refusal of the freedom of existing: one must affirm 1) that evil is
strictly unjustifiable, and the ontodical tendency in Heidegger is in danger of
justifying the unjustifiable, 2) that evil is positive wickedness in the Kantian
sense of a maxim of the will, of ruining the possibility of the good for its own
sake, and 3) that in its actual incarnation as the mass disposal of all singulari-
ties in terms of peoples, things, and worlds, evil is strictly unbearable and
unpardonable (EF 123).
Nancy’s view here is not without its problems. First, to call evil unjustifi-
able, unbearable, and unpardonable, while at the same time accepting that evil
is a positive possibility of existence, appears contradictory. If evil names the
possibility of refusing existence, then it is hard to see how this represents any-
thing except a pure negativity. Evil would simply be a ‘no.’ Second, Nancy’s
tentative questioning style vis-à-vis Heidegger, not to mention the equally
tentative charge of “ontodicy,” is so much so that one is left to wonder pre-
cisely what it is he attributes to Heidegger. What is most troubling here is
how these questions result in an innuendo. “Is it possible,” Nancy asks, “to say
that the thinking of being, at least as Heidegger was able to announce it, has
escaped the profound logic and tonality of the idealism of freedom, according
to which freedom ‘for good and for evil’ is first established and can only be
established through evil, and must therefore, whether it wants to or not, in one
384 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

way or another justify evil . . .?” (EF 131; italics mine). To which he then adds,
“to what extent, in spite of everything and everyone, did Heidegger silently
justify Auschwitz?”
Is Nancy charging Heidegger with historicism? Nancy appears to be confus-
ing two issues here. Heidegger’s reading of Schelling certainly does affirm evil
as a positive possibility of Dasein, and not just that, but as a possibility that
belongs to the innermost essence of Dasein. However, to suggest that this
ontology of evil serves as a justification for Heidegger’s ethical decisions regard-
ing this historical event is simply unfounded. Despite everything, it seems as
if Nancy denies the ontological dimension of evil, which understands evil
from out of the discord in being, and opts instead for a moral interpretation
in which decision or praxis plays the primary role: “The thinking of existence
cannot think free decision without having actually decided for its own exis-
tence and not for its ruin” (EF 136).
What emerges from Nancy’s discussion is an interpretation of evil that pro-
duces a quite different result. Before pursuing that, however, it is important to
address the question of whether there is an ontodicy in Heidegger in a more
direct way by examining certain aspects of Heidegger’s reading of Schelling.
The substance of my argument here is that Heidegger’s way of thinking evil
according to the history of being succeeds first of all in showing that evil has
an ontological basis such that there is a reality of evil and, second, that there is
a direct and clear linkage of the reality of evil with the essence of technology.
By contrast, Nancy’s way once again turns evil into something negative, and
furthermore and in a certain way, freedom and τέχνη are brought into a posi-
tive relation in which the work of freedom consists of releasing the body from
its spiritual chains and freeing it as a play of forces—in short, a technical inter-
pretation of the body.
In one of the concluding remarks of his lectures on Schelling, Heidegger
summarizes the results of his interrogation of the reality of evil, in relation to
Schelling’s quest for a system of philosophy, with the remark that “because evil
comes from the ground, the ground, however belongs to the essence of beings,
evil is posited in principle with the Being of beings,” which implies that “where
beings as a whole are projected in the jointure of Being, where system is
thought, evil is included and implicated” (ST 160). The term Fug or “join-
ture” refers to being as unifying, that is, to the difference-in-unity of Being
and beings. Heidegger’s point is that the reality of evil belongs just as surely to
the truth of being and that there is no way to cast evil out of the realm of
being. That, of course, was Schelling’s major point. In what sense however
does evil belong to the truth of being? If an ontodicy were at all present, it
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 385

would mean that the history of being would be conceived of as a series of

necessary stages leading up to the final, happy, full unfolding of being itself.
What Heidegger does say is that the truth of being “depends on the history of
be-ing [Seyn], whether be-ing gifts or refuses itself and this truth and thus first
of all actually conveys into its history what is of abground [das Abgründige].”15
The point that Heidegger is making is that part of being’s essential sway is that
it refuses itself, but that this refusal does not remain at an infinite distance but
may in fact be always what is nearest to us in the disclosure of beings. Hei-
degger does not prophesize anything about what is to come other than to
maintain that thinking can open up a place where that refusal may disclose
itself. In the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger offers yet a further explana-
tion as to why evil must be thought in relation to the truth of being rather
than ethically. If the refusal of being, or what he refers to in that text as the
“nihilating in being,” belongs essentially to being, then evil “can essentially
occur in being only insofar as being itself is in strife.”16 These statements cor-
respond to what Heidegger in his lecture course remarked concerning the
finitude of being, namely, that “strife is the basic law and basic power of being,”
and that, “the essence of all Being is finitude and only what exists finitely has
the privilege and the pain of standing in Being as such and experiencing what
is true as beings” (ST 162). This point must be emphasized: the strife of being
is the very stamp of the finitude of being. If being offers itself as a refusal, it is
not so that it will postpone its appearance to a later date. The strife is primor-
dial, and that is but one reason why I find Nancy’s suggestion of a ontodical
tendency in Heidegger rather unfounded, not to say confusing.
With these comments in mind it is now possible to see how Heidegger
reads Schelling’s presentation of the reality of evil according to the truth of
being. Recalling Heidegger’s remark quoted earlier that “evil is the insurrec-
tion of the ground’s craving, as the ground not to be one condition, but the
sole condition,” there are two critical conclusions Heidegger draws from this.
First, it places the possibility of the system, the self-knowing unity of Being
and beings, into question. If, as Schelling maintains, will is primordial being,
then evil presents the most extreme opposition to the unification of beings.
Evil is disjointure. Second, evil consists of a self-affirmation insofar as it strives
to present itself to itself unconditionally. The link to the essence of technology
lies here. Self-affirmation as self-presentation is effectively re-presentation.
Representation is in turn the manner in which the subject as will wills itself

15)
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), 64.
16)
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, 272.
386 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

unconditionally. As beings present themselves to themselves, “in this presentation

[they] represent, and representing, strive for themselves. (Ge-Stell )” (ST 171).
Gestell is the precise term that Heidegger employed to name the essence of
technology. What is thus named as the reality of evil in Schelling corresponds
to the insurrectional will of the individual not only to will its own essence but
to claim the whole of beings for itself. “All existence demands a condition so
that it may become real, namely personal, existence,” writes Schelling. “Man
never gains control over the condition, although in evil he strives to do so.”17
Man is thus the tragedy of his own demand for the unconditional. What is
named as the essence of technology, on the other hand, is also a claim; it is the
claim placed upon man to render all beings including himself as constantly
present, that which is always available as a standing-reserve. The absolute and
unconditional subject is not man himself; it is rather the claim placed upon
man to respond to a certain mode of presencing that is characterized as a
“challenging.” That is the truth of being to which technology belongs. “We
now name that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-
revealing of the standing-reserve: ‘Ge-stell ’ ” (QT 19).
Returning now to Nancy’s discussion of evil one may ask, why does Nancy
eschew this interpretation? Let me restate the reason: if human freedom is a
decidedness for good and evil, if they belong together as part of the primordial
strife in being, then this would implicate Heidegger’s thought of being in a
justification of evil. The notion of a “discord” collapses the separation between
the “malice of fury” and of “grace,”18 which threatens the distinction between
good and evil with indifference. This he finds unacceptable because “the
unbearable and the unjustifiable have not ceased” (EF 135). Nancy’s seeming
dread before the strife of being can thus be explained as an attempt to make
room for decision. It is freedom as a praxis that Nancy desires, where the
decidedness for good and evil is only in the realm of possibility, whereas
according to the decision for existence that must always already be there, there
is only a decision for good or evil. Freedom in its act is “not the united and
indifferent unleashing of good and evil, but in and through itself good or bad
decision” (EF 136).
To summarize the previous discussion, when interpreted within the horizon
of the truth of Being, evil manifests itself as the primordial will of the subject
in its becoming absolute. This absolutizing of the subject comes to presence in

17)
F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom, 62.
18)
Nancy uses the terms fureur and grâce, which I assume are translations of das Grimme and das
Heil, which can also mean the holy and also the healing.
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 387

modern technology, which marks at the same time being’s most extreme with-
drawal. Das Gestell, Heidegger’s term for the essence of technology, drives out
every other mode of presencing, letting beings be only insofar as they fit into
the standing reserve, and as such, expresses the supreme danger of nihilation
that belongs essentially to being. Being nihilates, that is to say, it not only
withdraws but in withdrawing renders beings themselves null.19
On the other hand, when interpreted according to the freedom of exis-
tence, evil appears as the hatred, the free refusal of existence as such, and as the
hatred of singular plural being. This hatred shows itself as the re-assertion of
an essence, which has been crossed through and crossed out, in the form of an
identity that turns the singular into the uniformity of a mass, and from there,
consigns it to a mass grave. Existence is reabsorbed into essence. Nancy’s pre-
cise formulation is “freedom’s self-hatred,” which is then gathered into the
statement, “Evil is in the existent as its innermost possibility of refusing exis-
tence.” (le mal est dans l’existant comme sa plus possibilité de refus de l’exis-
tence.20 This notion of a free refusal repeats, in a way, Kant’s maxim of
wickedness as a possibility for the will and thus marks a turn back to the con-
ception of human being that emerges from Kant’s elucidation of pure practical
reason—that is, of praxis.
There is another quite notable difference in the two conceptions. Evil for
Nancy is in fact reactionary. It signifies a reversion to an earlier state of affairs
that has since been deconstructed. Apparently, the reality of evil cannot be
admitted into Nancy’s thought. For Heidegger, evil expresses an affirmation of
unconditional subjectivity by means of which the whole of beings are brought
under control and disposed of. There is nothing reactionary about evil. It is a
positive possibility that arises out of the discord of being.

19)
This can be seen in Heidegger’s claim that technology is a mode of revealing that sets upon
nature in the sense of challenging it to yield itself up to become a standing reserve (Bestand ).
“Thus when man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he
has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an
object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve”
(see Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning
Technology and other Essays, 19; hereafter QT ). Thus for example, a mountain appears as part of
the standing-reserve—the coal that can be extracted from it—or it does not appear; it is null.
20)
Jean-Luc Nancy, L’expérience de la liberté, 167; EF 129.
388 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

The Character of Nonbeing: Evil and Nihilism

In order to clarify the difference between the two interpretations even further,
it is useful to return once again to Heidegger’s engagement with Schelling’s
work. In his lecture course of 1936, Heidegger presents two provocative issues.
First, he suggests that the problem of evil shatters the project of German Ideal-
ism, leaving no more possibility for a system of freedom; and second, Hei-
degger himself interrupts his investigation, finding the way toward a more
primordial thinking of freedom blocked even in Schelling.21
Two points deserve mention however. First, in order to escape from the
often tedious debate as to whether pantheism is a form of determinism that
denies freedom, Schelling had argued that if one leaves behind the merely
mechanical notion in favor of a “living God,” then it is possible to see that
there is something in God that is not God himself. In other words, even though
God as the pure primal ground is absolute and above every opposition, the
living God is nonetheless capable of negating itself as ground, and thus of
restricting itself in order to give birth to itself as a self. That is to say, God
emerges from its ground to become a self that both stands within it and yet
exists relatively independent of it. Second, it is only with this conception of a
living God that the traditional ontotheological concept of evil, which is almost
always relegated either to a lack in being or to nonbeing, can be overcome. In
both cases, the issue is the being of nonbeing. God as ground is the selfless,
dark, unruly (regellos) One that yearns to give birth to itself and thus to bring
its ground into existence as a self that stands in the open. Through this con-
ception Schelling has effectively displaced the distinction between essence and
existence. The ground remains dark; it emerges as a self that appears; but this
self is not the determination of some pre-existing essence, for only in relation
to the existent self does the ground truly become a ground. God becomes, and
becomes something other than what was originally there—an individual self
whose forms of individuation proceed through definite stages, beginning with
nature and reaching its highest and purest self-revealing in Man, who, as dis-
tinct from God, possesses the Word or the Logos that reveals him most clearly.
Only through logos can God be revealed, but logos can occur only in the crea-
ture that is most independent of the primal ground, namely, Man.
The unity of an individual being is thus expressed through the craving of
the ground to emerge into being, to reveal itself as something that is in unity

21)
Of this Nancy writes, “We are the inheritors of this interruption” (De cette interruption,
nous sommes tributaires) (Expérience de la liberté, 33).
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 389

with and yet relatively independent from, the ground—an individual, self-
contained being. The relation between the two is named by Schelling as a
particular form of primal willing or ‘longing,’ Sehnsucht, which involves a
double movement of striving away from oneself or spreading oneself out, and
yet through this negation, returning back to oneself. According to Heidegger,
the unity of ground and existence described by Schelling represents nothing
less than the ‘jointure of being’ in which the difference of the individual, self-
contained being in its belonging together with Being is given an articulation.
However, it is with this jointure that Schelling is also able to show evil as an
inner possibility of being. That is to say, evil has an ontological ground where
the “conditions for the possibility of God revealing himself as a self ” are the
conditions for the specific capacity in man for good and evil. Why man?
Because he is the one in whom the Word that both reveals and separates
becomes fully articulate. Man is therefore the one who holds the principle of
separation in himself, standing opposite of God in both love and strife so that
God can reveal himself. Man is thus effectively articulate will, and as such,
Schelling has consistently developed the thought of freedom from Kant to
Fichte that posits the essence of man as his own act. This means, however, that
man possesses the capacity to raise the principle of separation to the level of a
maxim and will himself as an individual being absolutely. Yet in separating
himself from the ground, man returns back to the ground: he acts according
to blind will, or Sehnsucht, and in effect strives to make himself his own ground.
This explains the ontological sense of egotism which, as Schelling writes, is a
decision man has already made in the eternal beginning of his emergence:
“man from eternity took his stand in egotism and selfishness [Eigenheit und
Selbstsucht]; and all who are born are born with the dark principle of evil
attached to them” (PI, 66). And further, “Only an evil which attaches to us by
our own act, but does so from birth, can therefore be designated as radical
evil” (PI 67).
Of the many implications of Schelling’s presentation of the facticity of
human freedom as the ontological necessity behind man’s decision for evil, the
following deserve mention in this context. Insofar as man is motivated by
Selbstsucht, man strives to become absolute in the literal sense of dissolving all
bonds, including and most importantly the one that binds him to the ground.
Evil thus acquires not a moral but a tragic dimension. The more he decides for
his own actuality, the more man destroys the unity of ground and existence,
and the more needful he becomes. “Man never gains control over the condi-
tion even though in evil he strives to do so . . . hence his personality and self-
hood can never be raised to complete actuality.” Thus does Schelling speak of
390 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

“the sadness which adheres to all finite life” (PI 79). This is the greatness, and
the catastrophe of evil. What Schelling has done is to show how the absoluti-
zation of the subject in the movement of the will willing itself to be an indi-
vidual represents radical evil as a positive possibility of human Dasein. This in
turn reveals something else no less uncanny: the reality of evil is undeniable,
yet for the very reason that the willing of one’s self can never attain complete
actuality, evil is left somewhere poised between being and nonbeing, never
acquiring the status of being. This forces Schelling to consider more carefully
what it means for something not to have being: “This [evil] clearly persuades
us that there would be something mediate between what is and nothing,
namely, what is not and also should not be, but which still endeavors to be.”
This need for a third, mediating concept between being and nothing, “what is
not and should not be, but which still endeavors to be,” is none other than
evil. “Evil is an inner lie and lacks all true Being. And yet evil is and it shows a
terrible actuality, not as something that truly has being but as that which by
nature has being in endeavoring to be.”22 Schelling names this type of actuality
as a sickness, a contagion, a false life that does not exist outside ‘true actuality’
but lies concealed in it. Thus a terrible paradox erupts at the heart of human
being where the subject that wills itself to be absolute and thus to be the
ground of being is deprived of the same at the very moment that it seeks to
elevate itself to the status of a being. The absolute subject sacrifices everything
to making itself actual only to exile itself further and further out of the unity
of being.
One can perhaps understand from this why Heidegger was so attracted to
Schelling’s work on human freedom, for even though Schelling never did
see how this primordial discord or splitting in being could lead towards a
notion of finite being,23 mutatis mutandis Heidegger sees the unfolding of
nihilism in the same way, an unfolding that leads us back to the appearance of
the thought of freedom from out of the crossing-through of the concepts
essence and existence.
In Heidegger’s discussion of the themes of nihilism, technology, and the
end of metaphysics in the letter published as “On the Question of Being”
(Über die Linie), addressed to Ernst Jünger, Heidegger asks, how can we

22)
F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, 48.
23)
Of particular importance here would be the way in which Heidegger understands Logos as
the gathering-together of an originary strife in being, that is as Ereignis. Logos divides as it unites,
such that Being is never a whole. How this might affect Nancy’s reading of Heidegger and his
charge of “ontodicy” would require extensive discussion.
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 391

venture a definition of the line that would mark the limit of nihilism so that
we might be able to cure ourselves of this illness that afflicts us?24 Such a line
would be critical in the sense that it would draw a border that would distin-
guish what comes before from what comes after and would envision a beyond-
the-line that could be overstepped.
But nihilism, Heidegger maintains, is not of this nature. There is no before
and after of nihilism, because it is not a being and cannot become an object of
a representation. As a nonbeing that yet is, nihilism lives an uncanny existence
within the epoch of the metaphysics of the subject (the subject in the sense of
the very power of bringing all beings and being itself into the sphere of repre-
sentation). Heidegger’s response to Jünger reads thus:

What if the language of metaphysics and metaphysics itself, whether it is that of the living
god or of the dead god, in fact constituted, as metaphysics, that limit which prevents a
transition over the line, i.e. the overcoming of nihilism? If this were the case, would not
crossing the line then necessarily have to become a transformation of our saying and
demand a transformed relation to the essence of language?25

Because we remain entangled in the language of metaphysics, which thinks

beings as beings such that they are placed before us with the assurance that
their being is already revealed, nihilism and the end of metaphysics tend to
‘dissemble’ their essence; consequently, the encounter that is supposed to be
taking place is in fact not happening at all. One may very well experience
beings as null or without value, but never the question of the relation of being
and nothing.
By tracing this connection between the reality of human freedom as the
decision for evil and nihilism, the respective positions of Heidegger and Nancy
concerning Nichtigkeit, the nihilating essence of being, can be made clearer.
Of course, the two positions do not stand opposed, for Nancy almost always
remains very close to Heidegger’s thinking and always again in an attempt to
think what is unthought, which is never the same as what is lacking. Following
Heidegger, if metaphysics comes to completion in the pro-position of the
absolute subject, which Schelling had expressly identified as the positive deci-
sion for evil, and if this “evil” comes to presence in modernity as nihilism, the
uncanny guest who stands at the door, then what speaks out of the essence of

24)
It is notable how Jünger seems to approach Schelling’s conception of evil as a contagion when
the former considers nihilism as a “cancer-causing agent.”
25)
Martin Heidegger, “On the Question of Being,” in Pathmarks, 306; hereafter QB.
392 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

nihilism is more than just the abandonment of beings by Being; it is a process

that is impossible to formulate in the language of metaphysics, namely, that
nothing is happening to being. “Wie ist es mit dem Sein?” asks Heidegger.
“Mit dem Sein ist es nichts.”26 Insofar as metaphysics demands the transpar-
ency of beings, this not only remains unthinkable, but metaphysics is itself
implicated in the process of their nihilation: beings are or they are not, but
the ‘not’ remains nugatory, and nihilism is taken to be a sickness, an ‘evil’ to
be overcome. In response, Heidegger crosses out being, for neither being nor
nothing “is”—Schelling rightly identified this as a profound discord in which
the human being turns away from the ground of being and also that the pos-
sibility of turning away already belongs to the essence of human freedom. The
difference however is that for Heidegger the task is not to overcome nihilism
by a decision for being, if such a thing were even possible, but to turn towards
and pay heed to being’s oblivion, to the nihilation that belongs to being. His
most telling comment to Jünger, regarding the line that might separate a con-
summated nihilism from its overcoming, is to re-think where the human being
stands in relation to the line: “The human being not only stands within the
critical zone of the line. He himself is this zone and thus the line” (QB 311).
Dasein is thus the space of this “in-between,” the site of a crossing-out in
which nihilism unfolds as part of its destiny.
Here, within the line, within the crossing-out where Dasein hangs in sus-
pension, Nancy endeavors to take Heidegger’s thinking in another direction,
one that would free his thought from an orientation towards the ‘destining’ of
being. Rather than paying heed to the abandonment of being, he claims that
it is necessary to think the freedom of this abandonment. That is to say, if
nothing is happening to being, then it is not being as such but freedom that
is responsible for this. What is this becoming-nothing if not the freedom of
existing? Freedom frees existence from being, and alternatively, freedom gives
being as the pure “ex-position” of singular beings who are nothing but their
ex-posure to one another.
Whether there is such an ontodicy in Heidegger is something I have already
addressed. What is important here is to point out some of the implications of
this shift in Nancy towards the priority of freedom over being, a shift that
seems much more Kantian in orientation.

26)
Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’ ” 104. The original German sen-
tence is contained in a footnote, see Heidegger, “Nietzsches Wort ‘Gott ist Tot,’ ” in Holzwege, 259.
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 393

The first consequence would be the collapse of the ontological difference. It

is no exaggeration to say that, for Nancy, Being as the withdrawing ground
and the difference between Being and beings ceases to be of significance. This
is amply stated in his definition of being singular plural, “The plurality of
beings is at the foundation of Being” (BSP 12). It is freedom that gives being
and does so in the plural, as plural being, that is, as Mitsein. Yet it is already
erroneous to refer this to the “as” of understanding, for there is no “as”—free-
dom gives without withdrawing its reserves into a difference. It gives; being in
the plural is given. Such is the facticity of freedom of which nothing more can
be said, since freedom for both Kant and Nancy is neither deduced nor pro-
duced. And with the displacement of the ontological difference come other
consequences, the first of which would be the radical transformation of the
problem of evil. The line that has been traced from the ontological grounding
of evil in Schelling to nihilism, where it is a question of the nothing that
befalls being and to which human being belongs, even unto the laying bare of
Dasein’s being in its own most possibility as Being-towards-death, cannot
remain the same. Evil comes to mean the hatred of existence as such, which is
a free possibility of the singular being but only as directed against its own
being-exposed, as the hatred of the exteriority into which the singular being
is thrown, the hatred of partage. One puts into play the refusal of relation:
the singular being chooses itself as the One-All who reduces being-with-one-
another into absolute proximity, or one decides for the One-Me in which
being-with-others is placed at an absolute distance. “Evil is only found,” Nancy
writes, “in an operation that fulfills the with” (qui comble l’avec) (“fulfills” in
the sense of completes, finishes off ). “In either case, murder is on the horizon,
that is, death as the operative negativity of the One” (BSP 92). The absolute
subjectivity that Heidegger identified as the consummation of metaphysics as
nihilism is thus translated into a refusal of existing. Nancy’s thought moves
like a shadow across that of Heidegger, undertaking what seems at times to be
a massive translation process. However, once evil has been displaced from the
ontological, one has to wonder whether or not this “innermost possibility of
refusal” by the singular being resonates with certain political overtones. It
would seem as if evil is once again a matter of decision, and that the decision
itself is voluntaristic: either one chooses to react against the freeing of existence
from its various determinations by a principle or essence, or else one affirms it.
Where is the necessity for this decision of abandoned existence against its own
abandonment? Or is there any necessity at all? And if there is not, does that
mean that evil can be avoided?
394 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

Liberated Technology
One further consequence of this shift concerns the consummation of τέχνη as
modern technology. Rather than an unleashing of absolute subjectivity that
dissembles its own essence and covers over the oblivion into which being is
cast, technology, for Nancy, holds a promise and is in fact nothing less than
the praxis of being singular plural—of the freeing of existence for existing.
What needs to be addressed further here, however, is the way in which this
revaluation of the sense of τέχνη is a direct result of his re-reading of Mitsein
and, by extension, of community. One can see from the opening pages of
Being Singular Plural that the shortcomings of the existential analytic of Mit-
sein in Being and Time represent Nancy’s point of departure. In addition to
what has already been mentioned concerning the priority of the truth of being
over the freedom of being, where does the shortcoming in the analysis of Mit-
sein lie? To Heidegger’s statement that Dasein’s understanding of Being already
implies the understanding of others, Nancy responds,

But this surely does not say enough. The understanding of Being is nothing other than
an understanding of others, which means, in every sense, understanding others through
“me”. . . . one could say even more simply that Being is communication. (BSP 27–28)

This shift from the word ‘implies’ to ‘nothing other than’ is one whose signifi-
cance cannot be underestimated. For Heidegger, Mitsein is co-primordial with
In-der-Welt-sein. For Nancy, Mitsein is primordial In-der-Welt-sein. In a man-
ner of utterance that Nancy uses again and again—“il n’y a pas d’autre sens
que . . . le sens de la circulation” or the “sommes nous rien que. . . . terre et homme? ”—
one can see that the question of the meaning of Being and of the ontological
difference has been crossed out and translated into the sheer facticity of being-
with: being presences according to the structure of the “rien que”—it “is”
nothing but a plurality of contacts and distances, nothing but a plurality of
origins in which it is others who, singularly each time, give me, the one who is
always already ex-posed, the sense of the world.
Within this transformed ontology of Mitsein, τέχνη acquires a much
different sense. How close, and yet how far, Nancy moves from Heidegger’s
question concerning technology becomes evident in the section entitled
“Ecotechnics,” in which the advent of technology is explicitly linked with the
disappearance of sovereignty, which forms yet another casualty—a happy one
at that—of the ontology of Mitsein. For sovereignty would be that very point
where existence is “taken back up into essence” in the form of the sovereign,
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 395

and thus that point of the free refusal of existence, whereas technology empties
sovereignty out and thus—dare one use the word?—authentically frees existing
and lets “la liberté de cet abandon” happen. “What is called technology,”
Nancy writes, is “the techne of finitude or spacing . . . techne as the existence of
finite existence in all its brilliance and violence” (BSP 140). He even goes on
to describe technology without sovereignty, ecotechnics, as the revolutionary
essence of τέχνη (BSP 141).
Ecotechnics, the new name for the essence of technology and art! At times
Nancy seems closer to a Marxist position, with certain qualifications. How-
ever, it would be unfair to identify Nancy with a happy consciousness of tech-
nicism. It is evident that with ecotechnics, Nancy is calling for an il-limited
technology that as such would be no longer merely the technical but praxis,
that is, the free giving of existence without reserve in which “we” are “nothing
but” the ever expanding plurality of singulars who participate in the web
of communication. As the exhibitio of being-with-one-another, the “revolu-
tionary essence” of τέχνη illimits the Western as well, ex-posing it not as the
universal but as plural singularities that are now offered to, and which touch
other, singular plurals and, thus, other origins of (the) world. In other words,
ecotechnics would be the process whereby the West is freed from its sover-
eignty. Such may be the hope, anyhow. But for Nancy to anticipate such an
event as a possibility would mean that the exhibition of communication would
itself have to be freed from the limits of the mode of presentation characteris-
tic of the absolute subject, namely, representation. Such would be this revolu-
tionary hope, growing like a flower out of the loam of the earth when the
heaven and earth of the ontological difference have collapsed and there is noth-
ing but the fertile earth,

it is less important to respond to the question of the meaning of Being . . . than it is to pay
attention to the fact of its exhibition. If “communication” is for us, today, such an affair . . .
then it is because something is exposed or laid bare. In fact, what is exposed is the bare and
“content”-less web of “communication” . . . the bare web of the com-. (BSP 28)

In response to this revolutionary hope and its relation to Nancy’s deconstruc-

tion of Heideggerian Mitsein, I should like to venture a few questions. Nancy
claims that what ecotechnics as the illimitation of τέχνη offers is not the sense
of the world but the possibility of world as sense. But what is the other of
τέχνη? Φύσις obviously, which, when translated as “nature” in the sense of the
self-originating, marks the inception of metaphysics. In Aristotle’s work, it
396 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

represents a distinction between two types of causality, and it marks that point
when the event of presencing is translated into causation: that which has come
forth into presence out of itself or and that which has its origin in another
principle outside of itself, i.e., in know-how.27 Τέχνη is thus understood as a
supplement to φύσις in the sense that, to take the famous example of Aristotle,
the doctor cannot apply the know-how of a cure unless the body is capable of
regaining its health. The ἀρχή is health; the cure only helps the body’s becom-
ing-healthy. Or another example, when a house is constructed according to
the builder’s idea, it comes to a stand. However, the house never stands from
out of itself but on a foundation, the earth. It is a construction, which signifies
for Aristotle that the house can never place itself back into its ἀρχή.28 One
must keep in mind however that this is already on the way toward a causal
understanding of presencing in the sense that what predominates is an under-
standing of being as fabrication.29
Within this difference and as the name for Being, φύσις signifies coming to
a stand out of its own ἀρχή in the completion of its end, its ἐντελέχια. In
Being Singular Plural and The Sense of the World, Nancy inflects this sense of
the word into a more Kantian register (particularly in his aesthetics, the Cri-
tique of Judgment, where beauty refers to reason’s auto-presentation), arguing
that φύσις appears as a figure of self-presentation insofar as it is self-engender-
ing without the aid of any other principle, including knowledge, which is then
usurped by τέχνη such that eventually the relation is reversed: nature as origin
becomes the ens creatum of the deus artifex, the perfect artificer that is God.
But for that very reason φύσις marks a “natural nature” that, for Nancy, has
never taken place. It is merely enclosed within a limit whose confines are
always already subject to illimitation, always ex-posed, and the name for its
illimitation is τέχνη. Technology thus unworks and illimits “nature,” allowing
nature to communicate—and by this no metaphor is meant. As φύσις, nature
moves and remains in itself, never communicating with an outside but always
returning back to its beginning so as to blossom forth yet again. Τέχνη, by

27)
The description here summarizes a few of the important points that Heidegger makes in “On
the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1,” in Pathmarks, especially 188–89.
It must be stressed that one of Heidegger’s main objectives is to show that the notion of causality
is derivative and that what is originally thought in the Greek word Φύσις is “emerging into
presencing.” Cf. 191.
28)
Ibid., 197–98.
29)
Reiner Schürmann rightly remarks that Heidegger’s attitude toward Aristotle is ambiguous,
because of the turn toward a notion of nature as another form of causality that exists alongside
the knowing fabrication of beings by man. See his Heidegger on Being and Acting, 85–86.
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 397

contrast, is a φύσις disseminated both from its ἀρχή and for its becoming
world. The world of technology is a world precisely because it is the praxis
of Mitsein.30
This first thing to notice about Nancy’s attempt is that he interprets φύσις
even more decisively as a form of causality. Therefore, he remains within
the metaphysical dichotomy that he has apparently set up for purposes of
deconstruction. Whereas he may have deconstructed the opposition between
them, this does not mean that the idea of causality has been displaced. One
wonders whether, despite everything, τέχνη remains a kind of knowing-pro-
duction towards an end. In this case, however, the end would be the place that
the being assumes in the network of communication that forms the reality of
our being singular plural.
Second, there is the risk of a re-instatement of the subjectivity of the subject
that τέχνη reappears within and as a result of the immanence of being singular
plural. Heidegger had also traced this same movement of the increasing auton-
omy, until it finally reveals itself as machination, the idea that everything can
be made and is made insofar as it is re-presented and, as such, made accessible
to calculation. Φύσις, the self-showing of Being, withdraws, and all beings
now reveal themselves as τέχνη or they do not reveal themselves at all. That
there is a presencing and withdrawal here is, in a way, confirmed by Nancy’s
own thesis that Being is now “nothing but” communication. Beings them-
selves—the stones, fishes, fibers, dough, world, nature, history, humans—
show themselves according to the new as-structure of the “nothing but,” and
for that very reason, beings no longer present themselves as arising out of the
already concealed essence of φύσις. For whatever promise this opens up for
our being-with-one-another, it also marks the danger and the risk that is given
decisive expression in the following statement by Heidegger from his lecture
on Aristotle’s Φύσις,

Sometimes it seems as if modern humanity is rushing headlong toward this goal of produc-
ing itself technologically. If humanity achieves this, it will have exploded itself, i.e. its essence

30)
“Phusis and nature were figures of self-presentation” (SW 41). And it is precisely because they
are figures of self-presentation that they are unable to bring thought to the limit, whereas techne
“withdraws from presentation the values of ‘self ’ (on the side of the origin) and ‘presence’ (on the
side of the end)” (ibid.). Techne in that sense would be the ex-position or the desoeuvrement of
phusis. The logic of the distinction thus seems clear: whatever takes the self as an origin closes in
upon itself and is thus unable to speak to the pluralization of the world, whereas techne breaks
the confines of phusis and is thus always already on the way toward the plural opening of
world.
398 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400

qua subjectivity, into thin air, into a region where the absolutely meaningless is valued as the
one and only “meaning” and where preserving this value appears as the human “domina-
tion” of the globe. Subjectivity is not overcome but merely tranquilized.31

Any attempt to make a caricature of this statement, explaining it away as

Heidegger’s horror before the evils of modern technology is worse than erro-
neous; it is thoughtless. Heidegger’s statement raises the question of the sub-
jectivity of the subject, of the ground or ὑποκείμενον of the subject, and asks
what happens to the meaning of our being-there when modern humanity sets
as its project the production of its own ὑποκείμενον. If such a thing were even
possible, and it is far from certain that it is, what will have happened is that
human beings will have produced themselves as ungrounded—not abgegrün-
det but, if you will, ungegründet, the extreme forgetfulness of the withdrawal
of being. What then will health and sickness, birth and death come to mean if
not mere signs to which no understanding corresponds, and for that reason
will perpetually border on the meaningless? Admittedly, the fear of such a
prospect maintains a certain relation to metaphysics and to the understanding
of ‘meaning’ as the projection of an essence upon the ontic realm. Nonethe-
less, Heidegger’s statement would, I submit, necessitate a re-reading of the
bold maneuver by which Nancy opens Being Singular Plural concerning the
essence of meaning that, in the crossing-out of any such foundation, trans-
forms that essence into a performative sharing where foundations are always
local and in the process of taking place, in-finite-ly.
As a concluding note, and with the required caveats, I return once again to
Schelling’s elucidation of the reality of human freedom and ask to what extent
the promise of the revolutionary τέχνη invoked by Nancy participates in the
decision for evil—not wholly, but perhaps at the level of a certain contamina-
tion of which he is not sufficiently mindful. If the individual takes its stand in
self-will, the will to be its own ground and to be its ground absolutely, then
the problem of evil reinscribes itself into techno-logic, with the same tragic
result: the self that wills its complete actuality is the self that produces its own
orphanage. Are we are the inheritors of that orphanage? And is the freedom of
our abandonment all that is left to us when not even the traces of Being come
to presence with the predominance of modern technology?

31)
Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1,” 197.
 P. Roney / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 374–400 399

Abbreviations
BT Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962)
BSP Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and
Anne O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)
EF Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993)
EGT Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Krell and Frank
Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1975)
PI F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human
Freedom, trans. James Gutman (LaSalle: Open Court Publishing, 1992)
QB Martin Heidegger, “On the Question of Being,” trans. William
McNeill, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1967), 291–322
QT Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977)
ST Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom,
trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985)
SW Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey Librett (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

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