Under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, the theme of absolute alterity still dominates the thinking of the ethical in Continental philosophy. This article examines an alternative ethical démarche, Jean-Luc Nancy's ‘singular plurality’, which refuses to start with the opposition of same and other, arguing instead for a primacy of relation, the ‘in-common’ and the ‘with’. The article first distinguishes Nancy's ‘singular plural’ from other recent attempts to disengage ethical thinking from the Levinasian framework, before showing how Nancy proceeds otherwise than in terms of sameness and alterity while still maintaining an ethical impetus. Foregrounding what is politically and philosophically at stake in the difference between Nancy and the Levinasian/Derridean model, the article concludes by considering how Nancy can be defended against critics who mistakenly argue that he discounts alterity.

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Chapter 4 turns to the question of human identity over time in Malabou. After setting out the stakes of her recent work on epigenesis in Before Tomorrow, the chapter points out some shortcomings of her previous accounts of identity over time, particularly in relation to the famous case of Phineas Gage and her experience of her own grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease. Malabou’s account of epigenesis provides us with a powerful way to re-read this earlier work. Prior to Before Tomorrow, Malabou is trapped in a paradigm which forces her to regard cerebral matter as the ‘host substance’ of human identity and personhood: just as rational thought acted as a gatekeeper of humanity for Badiou and Meillassoux, personal memory as it is encoded in the individual’s brain is the gatekeeper of personhood and identity for Malabou. However, in her recent work she elaborates what she calls an ‘epigenesis of the real’ according to which epigenesis and hermeneutics are extensions of each other, breaking down the division between nature and culture. I draw out the implications of this new position, using Paul Ricœur’s account of narrative identity as a sounding board for what I call Malabou’s eco-synaptic selfhood.

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