The founding statement
Positive No-Ground
Published
This book is an autonomous monograph written after the dialogue trilogy. It does not continue that literary sequence as a fourth phenomenological dialogue: it reconstructs in systematic form the philosophical doctrine that emerged from it, and carries that doctrine further.
The book
The doctrine is the relation among the common, no-ground, the finite locus, and answerability. Its founding statement is positive no-ground: constitution without absolution. The common makes action possible without becoming the final answerer for its situated enactments. We are made through and through by commons we did not choose; nothing we are made by ever takes our place when the answering comes due.
What remains when the ground is refused is not chaos but a precise positive structure: common possibility, address, and the answerable locus. The book carries the doctrine further by making explicit its modal movement, from the possibilising necessitation of the common field to the conditional singularising necessarisation of an answerable locus when substitution can go no further.
Selected figures from all three dialogue volumes are rewritten here in the monograph's systematic register and used as philosophical tests. From Koinonia, the withheld and failed greetings give phenomenal access to common possibility and to the internal borders among its determinate articulations. From No Ground, a compressed excavation discloses the demanded office of final ground and the positive work of keeping. From The Locus, the lamp clarifies common routing before actual direction, and the joining of reaching and non-forwardability clarifies the topology of localisation.
No prior reading of the trilogy is required.
Contents
On the Relation to the Trilogy · Introduction: The Constituted Answerer
Part I — The Priority and Event of the Common
Part II — Heidegger and the Missing Relation
Part III — The Symmetrical Refusal and Modal Trial
Part IV — Philosophical Inheritance
Part V — The Everyday Common
Part VI — Ethical Ontology
Part VII — Trials of the Locus
Conclusion: Where Substitution Ends · Debts · Note on Terminology Across Volumes · Bibliography
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Terms
All rights reserved. Permission is granted to read, to quote with attribution, and to cite the work; it is not licensed for use in training or developing AI systems. Registered with the United States Copyright Office (2026), case no. 1-15225033791. See terms in full.
Citation
Montaruli, Alessio. Positive No-Ground: The Common and the Locus of Answerability. Institute for Ethical Ontology, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21628405.