Precarity and abandonment? Precarity or abandonment? Or precarity as abandonment's worldly condition and abandonment as precarity's ontological condition? Or conversely, precarity as ontological and abandonment as worldly? This chapter addresses two terms that appear to sustain different critical trajectories, two discourses that open towards quite separate, critical domains. It also addresses two distinct fields of operation– two forms of experience– that one might characterise provisionally as social and economic on the one hand, ontological and philosophical on the other; but two terms in which their political presuppositions, at once shared and incommensurable, also remain to be thought. The chapter's concern, then, is with problematising this opening distinction between precarity and abandonment, beyond or prior to the established heuristic between precarity– understood as a condition of labour, work, or social reproduction– and those forms of precarious life marked by vulnerability, dependency, and exposure to the Other. (As I will suggest, the sense of alterity implied by abandonment is not a relation to the Other but thinking, with Nancy, ‘the other of the with’.) The chapter thus works towards other ways of thinking what binds and unbinds precarity and abandonment to and with one another, and so towards other dispositions in which to discern the relation– the rapport as such– between precarity and abandonment. In short, the chapter seeks to address other arguments that turn on precarity and abandonment's shared or irreducibly singular worldliness, their shared potential or impotential for what Nancy terms the creation of a world.

Central to this chapter is Nancy's ‘Abandoned Being’, a brief and tightly wrought text first published in 1981. Given that the chapter resonates strongly with the section of Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy on Seinsverlassenheit or ‘abandonment’, it would be important to note, as others have done, that Heidegger's volume was first published in 1989, after Nancy's text. No doubt references to abandonment appear with some frequency throughout both Heidegger and Nancy's writings. But Nancy's essay can be read as marking its critical distance from a series of Heideggerian propositions it simultaneously inherits, as if disinheriting Heidegger's thinking at the very moment in which Nancy's proximity and fidelity to his thought appears most evident.