Rien (Nancy)

Nancy's philosophical use of French rien — etymologically from Latin rem (accusative of res, "thing"), via Old French where rien meant "something" rather than "nothing." For Nancy, le rien names the thing tending toward its pure being-a-thing — emptied of essence, indeterminate as to what, but still res. Distinct from le néant (nothingness, Heideggerian Nichts). The distinction is the operator by which Nancy annuls (not confuses) the ontological difference — see ontological-difference. Anchored at Creation of the World 103; The Experience of Freedom 167; and the Birth to Presence "Heart of Things" essay (see also Morin Ch 7 §5 + fn 39, citing Émile Littré).

Key Points

  • Etymology — Littré's note (Morin Ch 7 fn 39): the literal meaning of rien is "something." Old French: "il serait dangereux de rien entreprendre" = "it would be dangerous to undertake something"; only with the addition of the negative particle ne (or ni) does the locution mean "nothing." As a noun, un rien = "a very small thing, something that is almost nothing at all" (e.g., "pleurer pour un rien" — "to burst into tears for a trifle").
  • Distinction from néant: Nancy explicitly differentiates le néant (nothingness; das Nichts) from le rien (the thing emptied of essence). Néant is what Being turns into as soon as it is posited in its difference from beings — Being-as-the-highest, Being-as-universal — that is, ontologised. Le rien is the thing taken in its existence rather than in its essence: "Nothing is the thing tending toward its pure and simple being of a thing, consequently also toward the most common being of something and thus toward the vanishing, momentary quality of the smallest amount of beingness [étantité]" (CW 103).
  • The operator that annuls the ontological difference: via le rien, the ontological difference is "cancelled as a difference between two realities, Being and being, the ground and the grounded, but also as the abandonment of beings by Being, the withdrawal and reserve of Being. There are only beings, nothing behind, beneath or beyond them." The step back from the ontological difference into the dif-ference is "the identity of being and beings: existence. Or more precisely: freedom" (EF 167). See ontological-difference for the full annulment-not-confusion framework.
  • NOT confusion of Being and beings: critical distinction. The annulment does not collapse Being into beings (ontic monism); it refuses to treat Being and beings as two realities. Morin Ch 7 §5: "the annulment of the ontological difference has nothing to do with the confusion between Being and beings or a forgetting of their difference."
  • Connected to creation ex nihilo (creation-ex-nihilo-materialist): the ex nihilo of creation is read by Nancy as the world's groundlessness — "nothing but that which is, nothing but that which grows" (D 24). The world is the rien-positioned thing-without-essence, freely growing.

Details

Why this etymology matters

Nancy's philosophical use of rien is not a clever pun but a retrieval of an Old French sense in which the word retains its Latin res (thing) — the negation only attaches via ne. The point is that rien names the thing in its being-a-thing rather than its essence; the thing as such, indeterminate as to what but determinate as this. This connects directly to Nancy's *quelconque*: the double-determinacy (conceptual indeterminacy + material concretion).

The structural symmetry is exact:

  • quelconque — what kind the thing is is undetermined; that it is concrete is determined.
  • rien — what the thing's essence is is undetermined; that it is res is determined.

Both are operators by which Nancy can speak of the thing without an essence, without confusing thing-and-no-thing, without ontologising the difference.

Distinction from Heideggerian Nichts

For Heidegger, das Nichts (in Was ist Metaphysik? and the Postscript) is "not a being and not nothing in the ordinary sense" — the Nothing that nichtet (nihilates) and is the counterpart of Being as positing. The Heideggerian Nichts is on the Being-side of the ontological difference; le néant (French translation of Nichts) is what Being becomes when ontologised against beings.

Nancy's le rien is on the thing-side — it is the thing emptied of essence, not Being emptied of beings. The Heideggerian nichtiges Nichts is what MP also names as the foil to Being-as-positivity (NC 102: "Seyn is not a being . . . yet it is also not . . . ein nichtiges Nichts"). Nancy and MP converge here.

The full annulment passage

EF 167 (cited by Morin Ch 7 §5 at p. 174): the step back from the ontological difference into the dif-ference is "the identity of being and beings: existence. Or more precisely: freedom. Freedom: the withdrawal of every positing of being, including its being posited as differing from beings."

The annulment is therefore not a forgetting of the ontological difference (the Heideggerian charge against metaphysics) but a radicalisation of it: every positing of Being-against-beings is itself withdrawn, leaving only the existence of beings in their freedom.

Connections

  • operator of the annulment-not-confusion of ontological-difference (Nancy).
  • distinct from nothing / néant / Nichts (Heideggerian).
  • parallels whateverness-quelconque — both are double-determinacy operators (thing-without-essence-but-still-this-thing).
  • requires creation-ex-nihilo-materialist — the world's groundlessness is the precondition for the rien-thing.
  • parallels MP's "zero of being which is not nothingness" (VI 260) — both Nancy and MP refuse to treat being-emptied as nothingness.
  • connects to seinsverlassenheit-abandonment-of-being — le rien is what the thing is when Being abandons it without abandoning it to nothingness.

Open Questions

  • Is le rien compatible with the concret-de-pierre of the stone (Nancy SW 62)? They seem to track the same operator (thing-without-essence-but-still-concrete) but the philological provenance is different.
  • Does Nancy's le rien / le néant distinction survive translation into English? "Nothing" in English does double duty (Heideggerian Nichts and ordinary "there is nothing"); the Old French preservation of rien-as-res is lost. Translators face the same problem Derrida flagged.
  • Is the annulment-via-rien compatible with Derrida's deconstruction of the gift "without giver, without given, without property/propriety" (Given Time 20–22)? Morin reads them as parallel: Heidegger fails on propriety, retaining "Being" as super-presence; Nancy refuses the propriety via rien.

Sources