Opening up Jean-Luc Nancy's Being Singular Plural is a real treat because I feel like here at last is an affirmation of what is apparent, and a healthy scepticism about the kinds of "wonder" that signal a desire to escape from the world. Under the heading "People are Strange," Nancy criticizes Heidegger's impoverished notion of everydayness:
One cannot affirm that the meaning of Being must express itself starting from everydayness and then begin by neglecting the general differentiation of the everyday, its constantly renewed rupture, its intimate discord, its polymorphy and its polyphony, its relief and its variety. A "day" is not simply a unit for counting; it is the turning of the world–each time singular. And days, indeed every day, could not be similar if they were not first different, difference itself. Likewise "people," or rather "peoples," given the irreducible strangeness that constitutes them as such, are themselves primarily the exposing of the singularity according to which existence exists, irreducibly and primarily–and an exposition of singularity that experience claims to communicate with, in the sense of "to" and "along with," the totality of beings.
(p. 9)
Labels: everydayness, Nancy, ontology