Workshop contribution by Kim Wagener at FernUniversität Hagen

On 25 June 2026, Kim Wagener will present parts of their doctoral project at the workshop “Phenomenology of Situation and Situated Readings” at FernUniversität in Hagen. Their contribution, titled “Speaking-‘With’”, draws on Nancy to contribute to a phenomenology of situation:

Practices of critically situating one’s knowledge draw on 1980s’ feminist epistemologies and their critique of the male-dominated concept of objectivity in Western modernity. In current debates on identity politics—both within and beyond academic knowledge production—these practices are sometimes equated with ‘speaking-as’ or even with ’saying-I’. In contrast to this narrowing focus on subject centred speech acts, my workshop contribution proposes a reading of situatedness grounded in difference theory as speaking-‘with‘. This reading, following Jean-Luc Nancy, proceeds from the assumption that every instance of saying „I” already occurs “within the horizon of a ‘with-others'” (Bedorf 2007, 695. Trans. KW). This horizonal—that is, structural—entanglement of the self with the other does not merely conceive of embodied situatedness as one position among others but equally as the genetic point zero of spatialisation, experience, and shared meaning-making itself. Here, ‘with‘ constitutes an existential of the self and forms the pre-position of a situation, which in turn is itself without any position. 
Rather than understanding the concept of situation merely as the phenomenal moment of experience or, in the Kantian sense, its enabling condition, my workshop contribution—following Nancy—proposes to gather under “situation” the simultaneously ontological and social genesis of (co-)existence as such. Beginning with Nancy’s 2000 essay L’Intrus (Eng. The Intruder, 2024), which draws on his experience of a heart transplant in 1991, I invite a collective reflection on the insight that “every presupposition of Being must consist in its nonpresupposition” (Nancy 2000, 56; emphasis in original). Through the figure of “transplantation” (greffe) as an experience of emerging into a space “emptied of any propriety or intimacy” (Nancy 2024, 20), my contribution takes—with Nancy—the embodied exposure, mutual dependence, and the pathic dimension of shared being as the starting point for reflecting on specific forms of a situated practice of speaking-with. Finally, Nancy’s essayistic writing, which intertwines biographical experiences with conceptual reflections, raises the question of possible “performative” consequences of a concept of difference grounded in self-otherness and the paradoxical assumption of a singular plural being.

Further details on the programme can be found on the workshop website: Link

Literature

Bedorf, Thomas. 2007. Bodenlos: Der Kampf um den Sinn im Politischen. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 55(5). 689–715.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2024. The Intruder. Fordham University Press.

— 2000. Being Singular Plural. Stanford University Press.