Overdetermined Solidarity: Rethinking Solidarity as a Form of Agency, a Set of Practices, and Performative Normativity with Jean-Luc Nancy

The paper sketches a social-ontological understanding of solidarity. Following the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, solidarity is neither an intentional collective activity aiming at overcoming significant adversities (cf. Sangiovanni 2015) nor a moral goal (cf. Habermas 1990) or a certain means to avoiding social pathologies (cf. Neuhouser 2022). Rather, solidarity is overdetermined, comprising three interrelated aspects: first, a collective form of agency, given that the subject is a collective entity that embodies the entirety of the different identities that have been inscribed in it through various modes of subjectivity production; second, a set of collective practices that are contingent since they do not bar individual actions and necessary in the sense of not having to be legitimized when manifesting themselves in a collective manner because they correspond to the subject's collective agency; and third, a performative mode of normativity production through collective struggles, where inclusion functions as solidarity's ethical materialization. To explicate how the individual subject can be conceived as a socially structured, collective entity, I refer to Nancy's conceptualization of freedom, to his concept of the body as an "instance par excellence of contradiction" that is "always in the plural", and ultimately to his theory of the irreducible but not incommensurable Other. In doing so, I extrapolate the idea of solidarity as a necessary form of collective agency from Nancy's understanding of the commensurable Other; from his understanding of a body, the idea of solidarity as a contingently necessary set of collective practices; and ultimately, from Nancy's understanding of freedom, the idea of solidarity as a performative normativity that guarantees the holistic and inclusive character of solidary actions.