Kouba, Petr. Heidegger and Nancy: Social change between project and event

Filosofický časopis 2018/2, s. 189 - 204

The aim of this article is to provide a critical study of the phenomenology of sociality as it is proposed in Heidegger’s account of historicity and collective happening, put forward in Sein und Zeit. On the basis of this account and in view of a critical, but still constructive, interpretation of it, we arrive at the conception of sociality which is sketched in Nancy’s works La communauté désoeuvrée and Être singulier pluriel. This movement is connected with a stress on the opposition between project and event which comes out in the way social change is perceived. We are not, therefore, concerned with investigating sociality in its static form, which would by its very nature deny the character of social interaction, but with investigating the dynamic of social changes which can be seen either through the prism of project or through the prism of event. Deeper investigation, however, shows that social changes do not necessarily have the character of pure project or pure event. Much more often we encounter processes which have both the character of a project and an event. The key to this way of comprehending social processes is to be provided by Nancy’s reinterpretation of Heidegger’s Mitsein and of the collective happening of human existence.