The Ontological Demand: On the ethics of being-in-common in Jean-Luc Nancy and Achille Mbembe

This dissertation addresses the research question of what demands us to be ethical after the ‘death of God’ and the ethico-political critique of the modern Subject. It moreover explicates the implications of the proposed answer to this question for the debate on race and rehumanization. The question is addressed in conversation with the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and Cameroonian philosopher and historian Achille Mbembe. Accordingly, the study argues for the position of an ontological demand that situates the ethical demand in being obligated to take responsibility for our disposition of existing in the world always already with others, a demand that concerns our ethos or conduct of existing in the world. The implications of this claim is considered in conversation with Nancy, who first outlined this stance, and Mbembe, who pushes it further in terms of a critical engagement with the question of race—more specifically, regarding the relation between the ethical demand and the reparation of the dignity of those historically dehumanized under a racialized worldview. As Mbembe notes, it concerns reparation not reduced only to its economic meaning. Instead, it concerns the reparation of the broken relations within our shared world. Correspondingly, the main research question is divided into three sub-questions: how does Western metaphysics constitute ethics, and why is it problematic? (chapters 2 through 5); how do Nancy and Mbembe help us reconceive what demands us to be ethical, given the critique of Western metaphysics and the limits of the Self-Other schema? (chapters 6 and 7); and how does the dialogue with and between Nancy and Mbembe help advance the debate on race in a globalized world, and what are the implications thereof for philosophizing from the Global South? (chapter 8).