Weaving Political Identities: Jean-Luc Nancy, Empedocles, and (the Later) Plato

Abstract

Since Anaxagoras offered us a homoeomeric view of substance, Empedocles a conception of a principled blending of elements, and the Plato of Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus a robust conception of blending (properties, syllables, and kinds), Western metaphysics has been perplexed by the problem of mixture: What can be combined? Does it maintain its essence when mixed? Is there a limit to the number of combinations? Can things of different kinds mix? Does the mixture form a unity? Does the notion of mixture challenge our idea of kinds, and indeed, objects, themselves?

These questions become more complicated when one looks not at abstract objects but at actual cultures and persons. Jean-Luc Nancy has written extensively about “identity” in language and metaphysics, with perhaps the most focused study being his work titled “Identity and Trembling.” Addressing identity in the Hegelian system, Nancy explores the internal and external relations that constitute what is identified. He describes a number of operations (or functions) performed by what is identified on itself and that it performs on itself by means of itself. Differences constitute what is identified. What is identified, what identifies, that by means of which they are related, and how they are different from one another—these are all differents that constitute identity. What is identified makes a difference by introducing these differences into being. We might especially pay attention to the identity objects that are identical have, as well as their difference. This identity, which makes identical things identical, Nancy says, is “indifferent”: it is not different from anything. Only such an identity can make another identity “different” from another. All objects with an identity “have” this indifferent identity. Only something capable of actively relating to itself can be identical in this sense. Then it is capable, one might say, of being open to differences that are not merely aspects of itself (Nancy 1993: 9–11). In this creative interpretation of Hegel, Nancy learns that these formal aspects of identity and difference are inadequate for understanding singularity, plurality, or what he calls “being-singular-plural.”

Such a sterile, formal notion of identity, as he understands it, excludes everything of importance to him. The matter of purification and mélange/mêlée is addressed in a less rigorous essay titled “Eulogy for the Mêlée” and later in his Identity. In these works, Nancy has offered a much celebrated ontology of “being-singular-plurality,” an effort to balance an emphasis on what one might call a radical singularity more basic than any identity, and a plurality that is not reducible to some quantitative multiple. It is a singularity without essential ingredients or necessary conditions, parts without either sum or whole, a changing plurality of relations and trajectories without identity: an “identity” that is not one, an identity that always frustrates and subverts expectations. Try as we might to conceive of identity as an internal relation (something is what it is because it coincides with itself, it returns to itself in a single move, A = A), there is no such coinciding, no return, only an open work of mixing or weaving together of something intimated or alluded to, but never properly named even if it has a proper name.

Being-singular-plural, as it should be hyphenated, conjures the notion of both unity and division (Nancy 2000: 37). Nancy couches this in terms of the “each” of singularity, the uniqueness of singularization, and the irreducibility of plurality, often spoken of in terms of “spacing,” “exposure,” “sharing,” and “co-appearance.” Concerning singularity, there is a unique exteriority within each human being that makes the “human” itself. We might be shocked to learn that “a singularity is always a body, and all bodies are singularities (the bodies, their states, their movements, their transformations)” (Nancy 2000: 18). “Being-singular-plural” has no predetermined syntax that could help us to understand it, he insists. It carries a dual equivalence within it. If one might hazard to say that, if it can refer at all, it refers to both the “singularly plural” and the “plurally singular,” which in neither case even predicates Being at all (a claim that will have consequences later in this article) (Nancy 2000: 28–29).

One fascinating issue at the core of this ontology is the nature of mixture. For Nancy, a conception of mixture should not leave everything in place. It should take care not to presuppose Being, but work with the singularizaton of “singularly plural” and the pluralization of the “plurally singular” (Nancy 2000: 56). It should not be conceived as a mixture of distinct, identifiable objects or properties. The initial state of these objects or properties prior to mixture should not be thought of as a quantitative multiple. Instead, we ought to think of such mixture as mélange, and since mélange is still threatened by identification and reduction, also as an active mêlée. Standing in the way of doing so is a fixation with purity, and so a notion of mixtures being impurities, of impurities being corruptions or contaminations of original states of purity. With racism, either that of the Nazis or other modern agents in view, theory should work to eliminate the threat of any such purity in mind, working to disclose the original “singular plurality” prior to submission to a standard of identity. Mixture, as mêlée, is the original state of being, the original work of mixing, of course without being reduced to some particular identity consisting of a quantitative plurality of basic purities.

Easier said than done. As Nancy himself is painfully aware, a fixation with purity, a conception of identity, and a commitment to quantifying relations between objects and properties are intrinsic to the basic operations of conceptualization and the formation of theory itself. But there is a significant inconsistency at the core of his presentation. When developing his notion of mêlée, Nancy taps into the Empedoclean notions of Love (named as Aphrodite, not Philotes) and Strife (named as Ares, not Neikos), seemingly overcoming the resulting substantial ontology with an appeal to the “mêlée of Hermes.” Surely what is more interesting than a Nancean interpretation of Empedocles would be an Empedoclean response to this interpretation. What is even more captivating is the manner in which the Plato of Sophist, Theaetetus, and Statesman offers a view of mixture in terms of a weaving that challenges Nancy's view of the matter.

If “Eulogy for the Mêlée” is a work of the 1990s, Identity is very much a work of the decades that followed. It is a polemical reply to the French government's effort to ponder the possibility that there is a single, national identity. In the name of consistency, we might examine the problem of abstract philosophical identity. Nancy is certain that even those philosophers who push the kind of identity that allegedly denies difference and mixture, such as Leibniz and Hegel, seem to acknowledge the rigidity of the concept of identity (Nancy 2014: 12). For Nancy, what counts most of all is that, in the mêlée, in the disorganized work of identification, identity is always something overflowing what is identified, withdrawing from its determinate figures (Ellison 2017: 534).

Nancy regards it as no fad that two generations of scientists, thinkers, and artists have chosen to study the “relativity” of identities, “the intertwined lacing of this notion with an internal difference, the impossibility of assigning unbreakable identities to a ‘territory’ or to a ‘culture’, to a ‘person’ or to a ‘language’.” Nancy seems to think that identity has “never ceased to be wounded, bruised, or simply transformed, displaced, disfigured, or transfigured, perhaps simply metamorphosed: simply and abysmally” (Nancy 2014: 25–26). Identities are always metastable, never stable, because each is always being displaced in and by changing figures into which one can never simply enter and which can never be tried on like clothing. It is not merely a “perpetual imitation” of something in a mode, but something always modalizing (Nancy 2014: 11). It might still be possible to think of the origin(s) of identities, their trajectory and formation, and their affirmation.

Birth, quite naturally, is not the origin of identity. No fixed identity can be owed to birth itself, Nancy insists. Birth is, after all, merely an accident by which one “falls” into the world. One is born into a network of relations and communities. It is in birth that a belonging to community is given, an occasion and an accident, such that, since one must fall somewhere, one must fall some “where.” “The belonging of this original community thereby delineates the edges, at least—the more or less proximate and tangible borders—of other communities and the possibility of going from one to the other, perhaps of choosing another one, or several others, or even none” (Nancy 2014: 22). Consequently, the nature of identity from birth onward can best be understood in terms of a point and a path, with the point being birth and the path being the labyrinth through which one travels. One's identity presumably develops in the gap between the identities on offer by circumstance and the aspects of life in which one accepts no identity at all.

Concerning the trajectory and formation of identities, Nancy refers to an ad hoc “law of existences in general” in which there is no original “people,” but always a pluralism of peoples, each of which is neither an entity, nor something separate from its network of interactions with other groups. Without any purity of individuality, each people and each of the plurality of identities within it “passes through” a multiplicity of divisions and distinctions, in which sense is made through language and gesture, and the myriad of productions and exchanges they facilitate. Since sense is a process of making and unmaking, doing and undoing, identity is as much indebted to what is undone in the work of identity as anything fleetingly made. When a person declares itself in the group, or a people declares itself among peoples, there is nothing other than a “realization of symbolic partage, the dividing up and sharing out of the symbolic field.” However, we would not be permitted by the law of existences in general to say who shares and what is shared, who conceives of and who participates in the symbolic field, as they are somehow the results of such sharing (Nancy 2014: 30, 32).

Identity springs from an utterance at a point in life, an utterance that is affected by a multiplicity of pluralities all coming to a head in that moment of utterance. One will “frankly” declare one's identity, though we must be careful not to think of this as an obviously truthful declaration, as if, in spite of it all, there is still some pure identity now finally declared in and by the utterance. To clarify, one might note that such a declaration could be veridical, but not sincere, since one might not be aware of the “unconscious” conditions that impel one to make it.

No matter whether we think of existences in terms of a plurality of “scattered” things, the mind cannot sever it from its conception of what-is. Indeed, we must not even think of this as a duality: the one that one is “thinking about” is the one that “is”; they are coextensive (F4 DK 28B3). One cannot consistently think of a plurality that is not one, since one cannot think of “that which is not” at all (Waterfield 2000: 58, F3 DK 28B2).

Nancy acknowledges this Eleatic matter. When Parmenides argues that only Being exists, that only one single Being exists, Nancy regards this as a peculiar “placement” and “disposition” of existence itself. In other words, there is no Being that “pre-exists” or serves as a ground for the “singular plural.” Only what exists, exists, Nancy says, and that is the singular plural itself, not any preexisting, permanent Being. Since Parmenides, Nancy suggests, we have seen only the substantial and propositional subject as existing, not the predicative states, which obviously name only states and propositions associated with such a subject (Nancy 2000: 29). In an effort to subvert this Parmenidean tradition, Nancy has contraposited the statement of being. He has placed what has typically been predicated, the singular plurality of states and properties, into the subject position and a myriad of more evocative terms into the predicative (weaving, sharing, exchanging, loving, etc.). But as is surely becoming increasingly clear, even if the contents of a Parmenidean proposition are altered and the subject and predicate positions switched, there is still one subject that, in being predicated in a multiplicity of ways, has a single substantial identity. The singular plural, being the propositional subject, is one if it is to be predicated at all. Nancy does not explicitly struggle against this dynamic within his own position.

As is well known, Empedocles follows Parmenides only so far: Nothing comes from nothing, and what exists cannot perish. But Empedocles rejects the conclusions Parmenides draws from these claims: that reality is a single unity and that it is immovable (Guthrie 1969: 138–140; see also Long 1949: 156). What Empedocles does adduce from this remains “Eleatic,” but its pluralism enables him to explore a dynamic unknown to Parmenides. And in fact, Empedocles gives us an assurance Nancy cannot. Not only is there a certain commensuration between being and thought, but thoughts themselves will find their coherence if only we do not interfere by insisting on precisely the kind of associative thought that makes Nancy's perspective fascinating and frustrating. The dazzling succession of predications, the associative thoughts piled in ragged heaps, are for the Eleatic merely symptoms of “affliction” (Waterfield 2000: 143, F6 DK 31B2 and F8, DK 31B110). Perhaps one might make the case that all theoretical work or conceptual construction takes place under conditions of affliction or, at the very least, that affliction always marks theory in some way. But even in such a case, affliction is a problem that ought to be surmounted. Any theory that seeks to surmount it has advantages over any conceptual construction that simply explores it. This affords us a reason to look at the Empedoclean work that Nancy uses so cursorily in order to find solutions to problems Nancy himself seems to celebrate. Is an emphasis on “being-singular-plural” a sign of Eleatic “affliction”?

What precisely do Neikos and Philotes achieve for Empedocles? They could be regarded as principles, but equally are not immaterial, though the Platonic–Aristotelian distinction between the material and immaterial may not have been known to him (Long 1949: 151–154). Neikos has its own Sphairos, Philotes another, in which processes of coming together and coming apart occur (Solmsen 1995: 237; Barnes 1967: 18–19). For Empedocles, both are powerful in our current world. Things that have separate existences owe their blending to Philotes, insofar as they are suited for blending. But if they are not suited for blending, if “hostile,” they are pulled apart and scattered. It is clear that we are thinking of opposite processes happening at different times to the same things, but not to different things at the same time (Stokes 1971: 155–156). Neikos separates elements into the four elemental and homogenous masses; in doing so, the cosmos is created (Solmsen 1995: 230). What is important about Neikos here is that things that are disseminated in this way owe their very existence to this hostility. There are things born from Neikos and other things born from Philotes (Waterfield 2000: 146, F17 DK31B22). In terms of their explanatory function, Neikos and Philotes are the principles that scatter or consolidate. For example, Neikos makes things distinct and separate from one another, much in the way that Nancy describes in the mêlée. But love makes things desire one another even as it brings them together (Waterfield 2000: 147, F19 DK 31B21). Unfortunately, there is a problem of symmetry: Philotes pushes Neikos to the circumference of the Spheiros, but there is no textual evidence Neikos pushes Philotes to the center (O'Brien 1969: 104). Since Aristotle, we know that there has been no cosmogony in the process from Philotes’s increase or dominance and Neikos’s decline (see De Caelo 301a15). In fact, it may be that Neikos creates the cosmos, but Philotes makes living beings (Solmsen 1995: 231). In fact, it may be that Aphrodite in particular restores harmony or lost unity through sexual reproduction during the dominance of Neikos, in which things are disintegrating (Solmsen 1995: 242). Generally speaking, we may say that there is cosmogony under Neikos, but only zoogeny under Philotes (Stokes 1971: 163).

At this point, the “roots” or “elements” should be introduced. Hera, Nestis, Hades, and Zeus are the mythic representatives of these elements, though there seems to have been some confusion even in the ancient world about which figure represents which element (Waterfield 2000: 144, F10 DK 31A33, and also T5 DK 31a33). At any rate, fire, air, earth, and water are each eternal; indeed, each is to be regarded as a Parmenidean imperishable “one.” They are the roots of all that was and is and will be (Waterfield 2000: 147, F19 DK 31B21). They do not lose their identity when mixed but retain whatever characteristics make them what they are (Guthrie 1969: 158). The elements mix by love and are separated by strife in an “alternating motion” (Waterfield 2000: 146–147, T7 DK 31A28). Being equally old, the elements nonetheless have their different domains and, in their different permutations, rule the cosmic order in cycles. In these permutations, the elements “run through” one another, each remaining the same while compositely assuming different forms (Waterfield 2000: 147–148, F20 DK 31B17 lines 27–35).

We might notice that, in this, Empedocles's clearest description of a cycle, or process in a cycle, we are starting in media res. Under Philotes, the roots are unified insofar as they are different. Under Neikos, they are scattered insofar as they are the same: It is things that are the same, unified in Philotes, that are scattered by Neikos. In this process, Neikos withdraws, and in its wake, some things that were unmixed, drawn by Philotes, will mix (Guthrie 1969: 156). Curiously, after having named those things created in and by Philotes, Empedocles does not name those things created by Neikos, declaring only that “countless species of mortal things poured forth” (Waterfield 2000: 149, F21 DK 31B35 line 16). It is not difficult to see that each principle holds together a motive cause and a substantial effect: Neikos scatters the same and creates the condition for Philotes to concentrate what was unmixed, while Philotes concentrates what is different and creates the condition for Neikos to disseminate what was unmixed in the concentrations of Philotes.

Throughout these cycles, what is mixed and unmixed, concentrated and disseminated, remains what it is. For Empedocles, each root is eternal and the process of alternation is “never ceasing” in an “unchanging cycle.” Each thing that is composed of these elements and subject to this rhythm changes (Waterfield 2000: 150, F22 31B26). Being is permanent. Although Empedocles is confident that unity can form from plurality and dissolve back into it (Stokes 1971: 173), the lack of clarity of purpose in his work complicates our ability to find his own support for it. What is important for our purposes, however, is that Empedocles at least thinks it can be done, whereas Nancy does not even entertain that it might. Empedocles explores the possibility of a dialectic of sorts between unity and plurality. Nancy repeatedly describes a state of plurality—he would insist “states,” one can only suppose— that unsuccessfully refuses any such unity. It does not merely undo or dissolve it. It is the negative that refuses any such move.

Nancy's limited Empedoclean perspective enables powers to work in ambiguous ways, weaving, sharing, etc., without there being anything basic, anything “elemental,” for them to work on or work through. Of course, we might dismiss his reference to Aphrodite and Ares as mere rhetoric, a clever way of articulating something about identity that resists undesirable reduction. But Nancy himself rejects such representations in reference to identity. He warns us not to treat identity in terms of figures. At any rate, Nancy does understand these as representations of the powers of concentration and dissemination. However, his perspective becomes unbalanced when we understand these powers do not violate any of the criteria, however vague, of being-singular-plural. The powers of Neikos and Philotes work effectively for Empedocles because they presuppose an origin (cosmogonic cycles), material grounds (elements), form (concentration/dissemination), and purpose (the evolution of matter for the good, at least when Philotes is ascendant). For Nancy, such powers can do none of these things. The scheme of origin, material, form, and purpose implies precisely the sort of identity Nancy categorically rejects. In many respects, the imposition of the enigmatic mêlée of Hermes onto the mêlées of Aphrodite and Ares, for Nancy, produces considerable incoherence. Is this imposition ordered? purposive? etc.? If not, then what exactly is the message of Hermes contributing to the cycles of concentration and dissemination? If so, then order has been imposed in precisely the way Nancy prohibits.

However, it appears that weaving and intertwining are terms Nancy commonly uses to present the sort of ontological vision he has in mind. Weaving, unlike the other terms used, implies human agency, or something analogous to it. If that is so, an explanation of Nancy's perspective leads naturally to the role of weaving in the later work of Plato.

Weaving (huphantikes) is a fascinating aspect of Plato's late work, especially as it functions in regard to the “art of measurement” and the “method of division and composition” that are integral to late, authentic Platonism. Arguably, it flows out of Plato's discovery of the vital importance of mixture, which he presented initially in Socrates's Anaxagorean way in, for example, Protagoras, but which he came to understand as an important notion in Theaetetus and Sophist, and even a kind (or genus) in Philebus. Plato develops a remarkably complex notion of mixture in Theaetetus and Sophist in particular, even using it as a cosmogonic device in Timaeus, culminating in an active “weaving” of political elements informed and guided by phronesis in Statesman. Although Nancy and Plato are equally intrigued by what “runs through” weaving (e.g., Sophist 253, Philebus 15–18; Nancy 2014: 14–18, all marginal reference numbers refer to Cooper 1997), Plato insists that weaving can be subjected to the agency of practical wisdom, whereas Nancy protects weaving from any such subjection.

Plato's Socrates develops an Anaxagorean view of pluralism in Protagoras (329d and 349b), where there is an analogy between the form of Virtue/the virtues and the parts of either the face or the parts of gold. Protagoras insists the virtues, parts of Virtue, relate to one another as the parts of a face do, and each virtue relates to Virtue as a part of the face relates to the face itself (Adams 2006: 171–174). But Socrates, developing what has come to be called the unity of the virtues thesis, counters that it is more accurate to say that Virtue is like gold: just as gold is homoeomeric (same throughout), so is Virtue. Plato remains fascinated by this view of the relation between the form of Virtue and the virtues, but only once is it submitted to the “art of measurement” (356d).

Plato's own view of mixture in the middle dialogues is perhaps best intimated in Symposium, where Eryximachus, a medical doctor, offers a somewhat Empedoclean view of the subject quite different from Socrates's Anaxagorean perspective. He is impressed by Pausanias's distinction between the two kinds of love. “Consider for a moment that marked difference, the radical dissimilarity, between healthy and diseased constitutions and the fact that dissimilar subjects desire and love objects that are themselves dissimilar. Therefore, the love manifested in health is fundamentally distinct from the love manifested in disease” (186b–c). Eryximachus regards love as integral to medicine, where the elements of hot/cold, bitter/sweet, and wet/dry are basic to an understanding of healthy and unhealthy alike. These elements can be “animated” by a healthy and an unhealthy kind of Love, which brings things together either in productive ways or in disordered ways (188b–c). Ultimately, the power of Love is absolute, but “greater” when directed toward the good, such that all that is good in life, society, and religion are gifts of Love itself (188d).

As Plato develops his own conception of mixture, the Empedoclean notions of love and strife fall away as the parts/whole distinction is submitted to an “art of measurement.” We see this most clearly in Sophist, where the identity of being is understood initially in terms of change and rest, then also the same and different. A brief summary would be valuable here. Change and rest are equal with one another, each equally a being about which we can think. Neither change nor rest changes. Neither change nor rest is at rest. So, since even rest is not at rest, and change is not itself changing, there must be some third thing that encompasses both rest and change (250). After weighing several options as to how rest and change can be encompassed by being, Plato concludes that the best we can say is that some things that can change and rest can associate, but not all (251d–e). Plato's Visitor compares these permutations with those of letters and syllables that compose an alphabet, with some combinations working, others not. Vowels need to make acceptable patterns. But it would take an expert to understand these combinations, much as only a musicologist can understand the harmony of notes. For Plato, this is knowledge of dialectic, which enables the philosopher to know what can and cannot mix, what runs through and makes blending possible, just as vowels hold words together. And for Plato, this entails that anyone with knowledge of dialectics could then discern “a single form spread out all through a lot of other things, each of which stands separate from the others” (253d). He notes, however, that in comparing change and rest, we have wondered whether they are the same or different. Change (and rest) is distinct from the same and from the different; yet it is the same as something and different than something. Plato often speaks of the relation between these kinds in terms of one being “set over” another, or one of them “sharing in” the other.

Change and rest are not the only metaphysical “kinds,” which can also be the same or different. Now, all kinds are the same insofar as they share in or participate in the kind of the same. All kinds are different from one another because they all share in the kind of the different. Change is different from rest, but it is the same as rest because they both share in that which is. Change is different from the same, but all forms share in the same so is the same. Change, then, is the same under one aspect and not the same under another. And change, then, is the different under one aspect and not the different under another. Even “that which is” both is “that which is” and “that which is not,” since what is, is and that which is, is the same as itself and yet is also the same as that which is not, since it is different from everything it is not.

Now, there is something interesting about the change in the notion of “that which is” here. Earlier in Sophist, we were working with what we might call the sophists’ understanding of that “which is not” as the contrary or opposite of “that which is.” At 257c–259, the Visitor starts to correct this. He points out that not- and non- refer to difference, to something other than what is negated. “That which is not” is the negation of “that which is,” not its contrary. That which is not beautiful is not ugly, merely in that area marked off by things as non-beautiful. Moreover, “that which is not” has its own nature. Something not beautiful has its own nature as lacking beauty. After all, “that which is not” is not something that is not, but rather a kind that is. “That which is not” in itself is not, but insofar as it participates in the kind of “that which is not,” is. In comparison, it can seem that Nancy's rhetoric keeps mélange oscillating between being and non-being, not even being “one” in some respect but not in another. Mixture is neither “that which is” nor “that which is not.” There is a sense in which mélange is beyond logos. After all, how can we characterize mélange if it cannot even be situated in terms of same/different, or that which is and that which is not?

Returning to Sophist, the Visitor is quite confident that we have now disproved Parmenides twice over. Not only have we proven that we can conceive of “that which is not,” but we can conceive of a sense in which “that which is,” is not, because each part of the nature of the different is set over against “that which is” (258e). After all, “that which is,” is not millions of things, nor is it all of those things that are. According to Plato, sophists just keep bandying about these notions of opposition or contrariness in order to separate each thing from everything else. This is done in order to exploit the confusion that such eristical discourse produces in a “completely unmusical and unphilosophical person” (259e). In such terms, we might wonder whether Nancy's hyperbolic language and shifting ontological perspectives suggest that such unprincipled separation is the goal of his procedure. According to Plato's own procedure, the massive permutation of kinds and their instantiations facilitates control over what is separated. Indeed, even the processes of dividing singularities into kinds facilitate such control, without such division offering violence to singularities. Speech itself, which weaves these forms together, is that through which meaning runs as it voices divisions and combinations (260 onward).

Curiously, there is a similar scheme presented in Theaetetus, where Plato offers a theory of elements/parts and wholes/complexes to explain the aspects of the version of the justified true belief theory he proposes and ultimately rejects. In introducing the concept of “an account” (logos), Socrates claims to have had a peculiar dream about elements and kinds, a dream that relates to Nancy's mélange in interesting ways. In this dream, people tell Socrates that the primary elements can only be named: Nothing else can be said about them, nothing else should be added on to them. We cannot even use such terms as “this” or “that,” even “each” (201e–202a). When Socrates turns to what they have said of complexes, he notes that, just as the elements can be “woven together,” so can their names be woven and thus become an “account” (logos) of something. In effect, only complexes can be both known and expressed in language, and indeed, serve as objects of true judgment (202b). Socrates claims to find something unsatisfactory in this presentation: that the elements are unknowable and the complexes knowable. He then proceeds to analyze the very language with which this account is made: letters and syllables. Are letters or syllables the elements of language? Aren't syllables themselves composed of letters, such that we would need to know whether there is nothing more to a syllable than the letters that compose it or it is itself a “single form”? Is it possible to know the combination without knowing its parts? That would be a “strange and unaccountable thing,” Theaetetus says. And so the original “beautiful theory” outlined in the quotes above is no longer acceptable.

After a discussion of whether or not there is a difference between a “whole” (pantos) and a “sum” (pan), Socrates returns to the matter of the complex. If the complex can be predicated as having many elements and as a whole, with its elements being the parts of that whole, then we can say that both complexes and elements are knowable, mainly because the parts proved to be nothing other than the whole (205d). But, on the contrary, what if we think of the complex as single, having no parts, then complexes and parts are both unaccountable (205e). Ultimately, Socrates claims to have found a solution, albeit one that is contrary to the original proposal. At 206b, Socrates informs us that elements are more clearly known than complexes, or in fact, that it is never the case that the complex is knowable but the element is not. Socrates is here defending a certain kind of analysis, in which there is something unclear about complexes, and thus they need to be broken down into elements. It would be pointless to analyze the complex into elements if the elements are unknowable. It remains somewhat unclear whether Socrates has resolved the basic issue or forced a solution in keeping with the desired result. At any rate, in Plato's terms, we might wonder whether Nancy is saying that, in being-singular-plural, neither elements nor complexes are knowable, since elements are unnamed and complexes are irreducible to any concept of substance. Indeed, if simples are unnameable and complexes cannot be treated as substance, there can only be a mixing of something that is neither being nor not being.

In Philebus, Plato presents mixture as one of the four genera. For our purposes, what is most interesting is how it blends two other genera and is caused by another. As is well known, mixture is the name for the blending of the unlimited and the limited, of the indeterminate qualities of the former and the determinate properties of the latter (22–27, especially 27d). More specifically, Plato says that it is discourse through which mixing things pass when reason attempts to understand unity. Interestingly, we must start with the unlimited, but the limited emerges with the need to enumerate a plurality of states (15–18). And, of course, the fourth of the genera is “cause,” the cause of the mixtures of the unlimited and the limited. This might lead us to wonder about the cause of Nancean mêlée in particular, although it is clearly meant to be irreducible to the order of causality.

Although mixture can be understood in terms of the activity of mêlée which is an exception to the control of any political agent, for the Plato of Statesman, the question of mixture is addressed in terms of the weaving, (huphantikes) of political identity in an exercise of phronesis (from 279b) (see Sampson 2020; Blandell 2005; Santos and Vale 2019; Madrid 2019). In weaving, which he describes in considerable detail, there is a process of combination and separation (282b). One combines two elements to form a new mixture, which one then separates into two, each one of which is separated and then mixed with the other. The matter of weaving is very important to Plato, as it figures not only here but in Theaetetus (e.g., 202b) and Sophist (e.g., 253c and 259e). But in Statesman, the notion of weaving is ultimately of political significance. It is used to describe true statesmanship itself. Once the proper classes composing the city–state become clear, it is possible for the statesman to intertwine the elements of the polis by means of phronesis (Stern 1997: 264 and 274). It is the task of the philosopher to understand the kind of intertwining that kingship consists in, and the way it forms a political fabric (305e–306). Statesman itself concludes in passages rich in the language of weaving. Plato notes that political courage, when mixed with anything moderate, attains a peak of power and then bursts into madness, whereas a moderate soul unmixed with courage produces only a sluggish nature that ultimately becomes impotent. He insists that the kingly nature, practicing statesmanship, will weave the moderate and the courageous dispositions together, “as if with a shuttle, through sharing of opinions, through honors, dishonor, esteem, and the giving of pledges to one another, it draws together a smooth and ‘fine-woven fabric’” (310e–311a). Weaving the dispositions of “brave and moderate people,” the king “brings their life together in agreement and friendship and makes it common among them,” producing a magnificent fabric (311b–c). We might notice that the very fabric of the polis is determined by an active weaving in and through phronesis, which requires not only that there be elements that can be woven but that the statesmanship of the kingly art requires that political authority weave these elements together. Weaving is not merely something that happens, such that dialectics must analyze its parts and re-synthesize them. It is also something that can be done, indeed, political agency. What is woven is being; it is known as such. How it is woven is action, and it too is known. Philosophical dialectics is purposive: It is based on knowledge of what there is, how it can combine, and how it can combine for the good.

Furthermore, as Cole has pointed out, weaving in Greek culture is associated with ingenuity, wit, and cleverness, a “cunning intelligence” operative in crisis or emergency, normally by overcoming a more powerful foe in political mêlée. As a form of political techne, hyphainon metin, “weaving a clever scheme,” enables a people to evolve naturally from within its own condition. In the fabric of the polis, those who weave and those whose lives are affected by weaving are involved both individually and communally. This requires, not the sort of plurality Nancy proposes, but homonoia, likeness—or oneness—of mind, which is at once the product of the conditions of public life and the living of life in that condition. Weaving does not eliminate differences but enables them to have public significance, bringing the strengths of differences into unison for the betterment of all (Cole 1991: 202–204).

Although one might insist that politics is too complex to be represented by “weaving” (Kochin 1999: 77–78), this is to misunderstand the nature of the representation. Weaving means something substantial, specifically a thick defensive “woolen” protection against cold and heat (Sampson 2020: 495). Neither an inadequate, thin construct, nor a chaotic mix of elements, and most importantly, not a mathematical reduction, a formal reduction of difference, weaving is a “way of incorporating different entities and joining diverse threads into a cohesive unity, without reducing them to a form of sameness that mere mathematical counting would” (Sampson 2020: 499, see also 495–496).

In comparison, Nancy's notions of mélange and mêlée have little of this power. If Nancy's critique of formal identity is meant solely for culture-identity and person-identity, then it may be of some limited interest to those working with cultural, social, and personal issues. But even then, how are we to understand being-singular-plural in relation to formal identity? Does it supplant it, which is puzzling because it does not make a satisfactory case that cultures and persons, even in plurality, are metaphysically distinct from other identifiable entities, given that they have uniquely complex ontological statuses and intriguing existential states? Or are we meant to understand that his critique merely modifies and augments such a metaphysical identity? If so, then his claims are relevant at best to culture-identity and person-identity, which are still formally identified but somehow also have an ontological status and existential states irreducible to it. One might read Nancy's notion of being-singular-plural as merely one way we might represent culture-identity and person-identity. But this in itself suggests that his view is merely a recommended outlook, if one so prefers, not a commitment of theory. It is internally unbalanced by its metaphysical dimension, specifically the unwarranted Empedoclean commitment to powers of mixture. While Plato offers a quantifiable notion of weaving and what is intertwined, which has political significance (as in Statesman), Nancy offers mere qualitative tropes of language that insist upon their exceptionality, with little success in resisting reduction to formal identity. If Nancy regards the Empedoclean–Platonic approach to identity as metaphysically reductive, and culturally or politically violent, the Greeks might inveigh against his rhetorical effort to preserve identity as sophistical or “afflicted,” rendering even political weaving for the good by means of political wisdom impotent.

The disorganized mêlée of social relations Nancy celebrates might mean, for Empedocles, that Neikos is in the ascendant or represents a theoretical orientation that is afflicted by a desire to throw things into disorder, or even an expression of the sort of love that is diseased (Eriximachus in Symposium). For Plato, Nancy's notions of mixture, as mélange or as mêlée, are an eristical perspective intended to unbalance metaphysical relations that not only make identity intelligible but also facilitate the political weaving that makes the good possible in a political community.

The author has no conflicts of interest.