This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are internally related to Being Singular Plural. One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is his attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of the book is that being is always being with, that I is not prior to we, that existence is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this being-with not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the I and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a society of spectacle nor via some form of authenticity.
