Registers of Plurality: Freedom and the Question of Being-With

This thesis presents a thematic dialogue between Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-Luc Nancy on the concept of freedom. It charts how Arendt and Nancy each take up the task of thinking the essence of freedom in the wake of Heidegger’s reframing of the problem within the horizon of our essential being-with and it further explores how they respond to key tensions or deficiencies that they identify in his account. Against the troubling implications of Heidegger’s approach, the claim advanced in this thesis is that freedom must be thought of in an essential relation to plurality, if an investigation of the conditions of our being-with intends to retain some basic commitment to democratic forms of being-together. This is because in situating the discussion around the theme of communal disclosure, it is necessary to consider how an experience of freedom in the world helps to resist the tendency to conceive of a closed community. Plurality is the common conceptual impulse behind Arendt’s and Nancy’s turns away from Heidegger accounting for how forms of being-together can be oriented towards openness and the welcoming of new arrivals or strangers. Freedom for both Arendt and Nancy retains a disclosive impulse that they rework through their critical engagements with Heidegger, and in each it is conceived of as a praxis such that our collective experiences of freedom coincide with the appearance of plurality in the world. Bringing together Arendt and Nancy not only advances this point, but problematises several concepts that are mutual to their approaches, raising a number of implications for phenomenological political and social theory. Their divergent strands of freedom open distinct understandings of plurality and are rooted in fundamentally contrasting interpretations of equality, leading them to anchor their accounts around their descriptions of different core experiences. The task that this thesis proposes — a thinking of registers of plurality — demands that the tensions between these approaches be kept active in dialogue, in the service of considering an openness to forms of democratic being-together into the future.