Introduction: Starting at the Limit

The preceding chapters offered readings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, respectively, which drew out the importance of limits in post-foundational approaches to ethics. In the absence of ethical grounds or foundations, the task at hand is to begin thinking from these limits. This chapter turns to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to develop the implications of such a starting point for conceptualising ethics and politics.

Nancy's work is apposite to this task because it offers an explicit focus on the limit. It is precisely the tension between the Other and the Third, conditional and unconditional, absolute and relative around which the discussion of ethics and politics has so far centred that Nancy takes as a starting point. There is, in his work, a focus on how we might think about these relationships of separation, interpenetration and indissociability, without resorting to polarities, purity or originary terms. Nancy offers instead an ontology of the singular-plural of being, in which the limit operates as the central term, such that we start only with second places. There are two specific elements of this ontology on which the argument in this chapter draws to develop an account of ethics and politics that remains at, and is mindful of, this limit as the very condition for their emergence.