Whateverness / quelconque (Nancy)

Nancy's name for the thing as some thing — quelque chose, n'importe quoi, une chose quelconque: a "certain something" that is both conceptually indeterminate (lacks essential determinations) and materially concrete (this tree, this stone). Anchored at Birth to Presence 173–87 ("The Heart of Things"). Morin uses whateverness in Ch 6 §3 of morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being to defend Nancy against Harman's charge of overmining — reducing objects to relations-without-relata. The defence distinguishes two propositions: "there is nothing prior to relations" (true of Nancy) and "there is nothing but relations" (false of Nancy).

Key Points

  • Double determinacy: "Whatever is the indeterminateness of being in what is posited and exposed within the strict, determined concretion of a singular thing, and the indeterminateness of its singular existence" (BP 174). Both/and: indeterminacy of what the thing is + concretion of this thing here.
  • Etymology: quelconque derives from Latin qualis + cumque — indeterminacy with regard to the quality or kind (the "what"). The Nancean point: this indeterminacy is "not a privation, nor . . . a poverty, but its most characteristic affirmation, with the compaction, the concretion, wherein the thing 'reifies' itself, properly speaking" (BP 174).
  • The list as deployment (BP 186): "some thing is free to be a stone, a tree, a ball, Pierre, a nail, salt, Jacques, a number, a trace, a lioness, a marguerite." The enumeration is a literary performance of quelconque: each item is utterly determinate AND none of them is privileged.
  • Defended against Harman's overmining: Harman ("On Interface" 99–101) reads Nancy's whateverness as "currently accessible features" / "arbitrary bundling of immediately perceived qualities" — a "unified whatever" only individuated by contact. Morin's reply (Ch 6 §3): Harman equivocates between "nothing prior to relations" (true; Nancy denies a pre-relational substrate) and "nothing but relations" (false; Nancy has relata — the "inside" is "an effect, not an illusion," Morin p. 143).
  • Connected to creation ex nihilo (creation-ex-nihilo-materialist): the whateverness of the thing follows from the world's groundlessness — Nancy CW 51 "radical materialism, materialism without roots." The thing is quelconque because there is no transcendent principle determining what kind of thing it must be.

Details

Defence against Harman's charge

Harman (Graham Harman, "On Interface: Nancy's Weights and Masses," in Gratton & Morin, eds., Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking 99–101): "no individual character outside their mutual touching and weighing"; the in-itself is "a unified whatever." This is the overmining reductionism — reducing objects to relations-without-relata.

Morin's reply rests on a distinction:

  • "There is nothing prior to relations" — TRUE of Nancy. Nancy denies a pre-relational substrate (no prime matter, no transcendent ground, no transcendental Subject). What is primordial is the spacing or opening of the to-itself.
  • "There is nothing but relations" — FALSE of Nancy. The relata are real; the "inside" is an effect (not an illusion); the whateverness includes concretion (this stone, not an undifferentiated glob). BP 174: indeterminacy + concretion simultaneously.

So Harman equivocates by sliding from the first proposition (Nancy's actual view) to the second (an overmining position Nancy rejects). Reading the whateverness as a unified whatever fails to capture the double-determinacy structure.

Connection to MP's in-itself-for-us

Per Morin (Ch 6 §3 closing, by structural analogy), the whateverness echoes MP's in-itself-for-us as a double-determined category: in MP the thing is both correlate-of-my-body and denying-that-it-is-such-a-correlate; in Nancy the thing is both indeterminate (no essence) and concrete (this here). Both refuse the in-itself / for-itself partition; both refuse pure relations-without-relata. The structural parallel is one of Morin's quieter contributions.

What it grants the stone

Nancy can say the stone exists, has hardness that "se faire sentir dure" (freedom-of-the-stone + the concret-de-pierre), is free, makes sense — without animism or panpsychism. The stone is quelconque in Nancy's sense, which means it does not need a transcendent essence to be a determinate this-stone, nor a constituting subject to encounter it; it is exposed at its limits and that exposure is its mode of being. (See freedom-of-the-stone for the freedom side.)

Positions

  • Harman ("On Interface" 99–101; "Road to Objects" 172): Nancy's whateverness is overmining — reduces objects to relations / currently-accessible features; the singularity is "merely an effect of relations" rather than an entity in its own right.
  • Morin (Ch 6 §3): defends Nancy via the "nothing prior to / nothing but" distinction. Whateverness is double-determined; the "inside" is an effect, not an illusion.
  • Sam Mickey ("Touching without Touching," Open Philosophy 1 [2018]: 295–6): mediating position — Nancy needs an OOO corrective because "determinate qualities emerge only in contact" and the indeterminate-whateverness fails to account for the specific qualities of real beings.
  • Ian James ("Lucidity and Tact," 9–19; Technique of Thought ch 2): Nancy is aligned with the ontic-structural-realism of Ladyman and Ross — the central Continental debate is not realism vs. correlationism but philosophies of relations vs. isolationist philosophies of substance.

Connections

Open Questions

  • Does Morin's "nothing prior to / nothing but" distinction actually defeat Harman's overmining charge, or does it just shift the question? Harman could counter: if the "inside" is only an effect, then in what sense is it real (not merely a useful fiction)?
  • Is quelconque compatible with the kind of kind-determinacy that biological / physical sciences seem to require? A stone-quelconque is fine philosophically; an electron-quelconque is more puzzling. Sam Mickey raises this worry.
  • Does the whateverness of the thing extend to thought (Nancy says "[some] thing or other among so many other things [Une chose quelconque parmi tant des choses quelconques]," BP 178–9)? This would make thinking itself a quelconque — a thing among things; the weight-of-thought argument requires this extension.

Sources

  • morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being — Ch 6 §3 (the defence against Harman; the "nothing prior to / nothing but" distinction; the double-determinacy reading).