What Carries Us On

Implicit within the debate on Coronavirus curated by Antinomie and archived by Sergio Benvenuto is the question—for what must we carry on?  That is, do we—humanity, which has been reckoned by many thinkers as the error in nature—carry on for the sake of carrying on?  Or, should we, following Thomas Taylor, M. K. Gandhi, Pierre Clastres, and several others, proceed with a project of returning towards a moment in history that, for Agamben, is “the normal conditions of life”. The text is part of a conversation between Jean-Luc Nancy and Shaj Mohan.

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Our Mysterious Being

Considering CoVid-19 a “communovirus”, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy ponders the official Chinese communism as well as Marx’s notion of individual property and self-realisation. By isolating us, the “communovirus” makes us experience the “shared sense of our uniqueness”, which, according to Nancy, reveals our “most intimate community”. Starting from the question of whether there is a norm for man, Shaj Mohan introduces in his answer to Jean-Luc Nancy the concept of the obscure experience. For the Indian philosopher, this experiences shared by the commonplace allow us to reflect on future forms of our being together.

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