Koinonia: A Phenomenology of Being-With

Koinonia is a free-standing phenomenology of being-with: the being-among-others already in place whenever persons meet, speak, understand, misunderstand, answer, refuse, belong, or become strangers to one another. Heidegger named being-with as equiprimordial and left it underived; this book takes up the derivation.

Its method follows from its object. The shared world cannot be examined directly, because it is the medium of examining. It is therefore read exclusively at its perimeter — in breakdowns, and once in a birth. Its figures are the withheld greeting, the greeting that does not land, the cat and the speaking cat, the factor without access, the births and deaths of languages, and the first encounter between two worlds that share nothing. Most of the book proceeds as a dialogue between two voices, so that every result rests on what a reader can be brought to see rather than on any authority.

Its results are the floor — co-membership in answerable disclosedness, the bare standing of one who can be addressed, can answer, and can be held to what is said; the first law, constitution without absolution: the shared field constitutes persons, and only persons answer; the two strata, the disclosed world and the articulated field of address, proved distinct because they move independently; the carrier-not-author law of languages; and the modal givenness of the common. A coda offers a phenomenological translation of late Heidegger. Three appendices apply the figures to the speaking machine, to the politics of borders and peoples, and to the member who cannot answer for himself.

The book does not rank its floor above prior accounts: it presents its result as the condition of possibility of Klaus Held's account of political answerability rather than as something deeper. It does not make the shared field an agent over persons. And it does not treat artificial intelligence as its subject — the machine appears once in the body, as a derived limit case.

Volume One of the Phenomenology of Being-With, preceding No Ground and The Locus, and the root of the ethical ontology programme.