Six volumes
Books
The trilogy is the path; Positive No-Ground joins what that path reached separately into one modal movement, and that joining is its own achievement; Ethical Ontology, Volume I supplies the category that answers the question the founding statement leaves open. Listed here in the order of the work, not the order of reading.
Phenomenology of Being-With
I. Koinonia: A Phenomenology of Being-With
Published
Begins with the most familiar and least examined thing there is: that before anyone speaks, one is already with others in a world held in common. Through figures rather than proofs, it finds the bare fact that persons can address one another and be held to answer, and draws from it one law: the field constitutes, and only persons answer.
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II. No Ground
Published
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Opens the door Koinonia chose to leave shut. Beneath the floor, every age has posited a ground: nature, the gods, the order of things, the certain self, history. Two friends walk the towns of Cyprus, and what they find is stated by the title: beneath the floor there is no ground, and there never was one.
III. The Locus
Published
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Asks the question the removal of ground makes urgent: when something comes due — an address, a deed, a debt — where does the answer land, if nothing beneath us receives it? It locates the finite place where substitution runs out. Not a ground bearing from beneath; a place receiving from before.
The founding statement
Positive No-Ground: The Common and the Locus of Answerability
Published
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Positive No-Ground joins into one modal movement what the trilogy reached separately: the constitution without absolution established in Koinonia, and the refusal of the ground-office together with the positive standing of what remains — keeping, carried possibility, and the facing — reached in No Ground. The joining is this book’s own achievement, and its result is the programme’s founding statement: positive no-ground. The common makes everything possible and finally answers for nothing; what remains when the ground is refused is not chaos but the precise structure of common possibility, address, and the answerable locus.
The ontology
Ethical Ontology, Volume I: The Modal Coincidence
Published
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Answers the question left open by the founding statement. The who is not a substance, bearer, bundle, narrative, or hidden object, but the coincidence of a manner and its obtaining as this one — modal coincidence. Ownness is the differentia of who: the whole modal coincidence obtains as someone rather than merely something; the category who articulates this ownness, and neither produces nor confers it. The formal statement is given in The Calculus of Modal Coincidence.
Ethical Ontology, Volume II: The Sacred Economy
Published
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Takes the doctrine outside itself and tests it on dated historical material, under conditions fixed and deposited in advance. Twenty-five centuries, from Athenian sacred-civic coinage to contemporary model-lifecycle administration, are asked one conjunctive question: whether anything in a sacred economy authorises the whole field, terminates the question of right, and stands immune from the interrogation it applies to everything else. No registered episode established all three marks together. The seat is awarded to no occupant, which is not the same as establishing it was vacant. The apparatus is published separately as the Trial Record.
Note on the two series
Readers arriving at any single book may want the relation stated plainly.
Phenomenology of Being-With — Koinonia, No Ground, The Locus — is philosophy written in narrative form: walks, conversations, and ordinary things followed until they yield what they hold. Koinonia reaches the floor and establishes constitution without absolution; No Ground reaches the refusal of the ground-office and the positive standing of what remains. The trilogy does not join those determinations into one modal movement.
Ethical Ontology — beginning with Positive No-Ground and continuing through Volume I: The Modal Coincidence — is therefore not the same account in another register. Positive No-Ground performs the joining the trilogy does not perform. Volume I then answers the question left open by that founding statement with a categorial determination that Positive No-Ground neither states nor entails. Neither series is a summary of the other, and each is written to be readable without the other.