1. Introduction: Towards a Theory of Solidarity as Constructed Social-Ontological Givenness

This contribution aims to provide, in dialogue with the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, an account of solidarity that runs counter to intentional and moral understandings of solidarity. Intentional theories view solidarity as an expression of the will of a sovereign subject (cf. Gilbert 1996; Pettit 2001; Tuomela 2007, 2013; Alonso 2009; Schweikard 2011; Sangiovanni 2015; Schmid 2023). Moral theories view solidarity either as a moral good or as a means of satisfying or achieving a moral goal or purpose (cf. the early Habermas 1990; Dean 1995; Honneth 1996; Dean 1996; Jaeggi 2001; Derpmann 2013, 2022; Laitinen/Pessi 2014; Kolers 2016; Neuhouser 2022). The problem with intentional theories of solidarity is that they presuppose, if not a pre-social or metaphysical agent, a (non-socially-constructed) sovereign and autonomous subject, i.e., a subject that (1) is assumed to have properties that are not formed through processes of socialization and that (2) is aware of its properties.¹ The problem with moral theories of solidarity is that they instrumentalize solidarity as a set of collective action(s) that are acceptable only as long as they (1) can be signified within a certain moral order or (2) can contribute to a certain moral order as a means of overcoming problems that are considered untenable from the perspective of that order. Despite their theoretical differences, both tendencies agree on one parameter concerning solidary practices: that either due to a universal, unilateral, or integral understanding of subjectivity or due to a common goal or a shared moral interest or value, solidarity struggles require similarity, consent and a common social bond in order to be substantiated.

The account of solidarity that I argue for with Nancy emphasizes the collective character of solidary practices. On my account, however, solidarity is more than just a form of (collective) practice derived from the sovereign subject's individual agency. Additionally, it is more than just a complementary form of (collective) practice in which the subject finds refuge as soon as its individual practices were proven insufficient. Rather, I sketch a theory of solidarity as a socially constructed social-ontological givenness that corresponds to the type of subjectivity that has been socially constructed as a common and collective being (Telios 2021a, 2024a), i.e., as the intersectional result of various modes of subjectivity production (Knapp 1999; Yuval-Davis 2006; Gunnarsson 2017).² Inquiring the solidarity practices of such a type of subjectivity challenges both the intentional and the moral understanding of solidarity. It transforms solidarity from an intentional activity or moral conundrum to a necessity. Within this framework, and as I will show, solidarity comprises three aspects: first, solidarity is manifested as the necessarily collective form of agency, given that the subject is itself a collective that embodies and contains different identities that have been inscribed into it through various modes of subjectivity production; second, solidarity is executed through 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, solidarity accounts for an immanent and performative form of normativity production through collective struggles, where inclusion functions as solidarity's ethical materialization.

I call this account of solidarity overdetermined. Solidarity is conceptually, politically, and normatively overdetermined. Conceptually, solidarity embraces not only a set of practices but also a form of agency as well as a mode of normativity. Politically, solidary struggles cannot pursue a single common interest, serve a single unilateral goal, and/or presuppose one and the same identity. Instead, solidarity as a form of agency and a set of practices emancipates the subject holistically, i.e., from all modes of its heteronomous production while addressing struggles of different subjects both in their uniqueness and in their entanglement without separating or hierarchizing them. Normatively, solidarity is overdetermined due to its inclusivity. Solidarity is not a form of support that the subject offers to another subject in need, but a performative process of normativity production that cannot come to a halt before every subject's heteronomous production has been accounted for. In the words of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, "nobody's free until everybody's free" (Hamer 2011, 136).

In this light, solidarity's overdetermination entails an (anti-individualist and anti-atomistic) anti-reductionism. Conceptually, overdetermination protects solidarity from being addressed solely as a form of practice while ignoring the dimensions of agency and normativity. Politically, overdetermination underscores that the different forms and objectives of solidarity struggles cannot be subsumed or hierarchized under a predominant identity, form of practice, or normative goal. Normatively, overdetermination pushes for recognizing every singular subject's social production. Thus, solidarity does not involve clustering subjects in transindividual, unified, and uniform collectives. Rather, instead of forfeiting singularity to act collectively, the subject's singularity becomes the precondition for the conceiving, organizing, and executing solidarity practices.

To underpin these points, I read (2) Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy to extrapolate a theory of the subject as a social-ontological and collective entity. I discuss Nancy's conceptualization of freedom (2.1), his concept of the body as an "instance par excellence of contradiction" that is "always in the plural" (2.2), and ultimately his theory of the irreducible but not incommensurable Other (2.3). Against this background (3), I derive the idea of solidarity as a necessary form of collective agency from Nancy's understanding of the commensurable Other (3.1); from his understanding of a body, and with the help of Oliver Marchart's concept of "necessary contingency" (cf. Marchart 2007), the idea of solidarity as a contingently necessary set of collective practices (3.2); and ultimately, from Nancy's understanding of freedom, the idea of solidarity as a normative measure that underscores the holistic and inclusive character of solidary actions (3.3).³

In doing so, I not only aim to substantiate Stella Gaon's older suggestion "that there is a particular political purchase to Nancy's undertaking with respect to the question of solidarity" (Gaon 2005, 401). More importantly, I wish to contribute to the long-standing debate on whether, as Lea Susemichel and Jens Kastner recently put it, there can be a solidarity "based on differences" instead of presupposing a "common horizon of experience" (Susemichel/Kastner 2021, 15; my translation) or identities, interests, and goals. For Oliver Marchart, the "desolidarization with one's own [Entsolidarisierung mit dem Eigenen]" is the precondition for our "solidarization with the other" (Marchart 2010, 359; my translation). Thinking the subject, with Nancy, as a collective, aims at such a "desolidarization with one's own".⁴ As such, the concept that I propose goes beyond the mere "hope […] that political solidarity can be affirmed without losing sight of the difference within it." (Elam 1994, 69) On the contrary, it stages difference in solidarity as a necessity that derives from the constitutive character of the Other for the subject's production.⁵

2. Jean-Luc Nancy's Social-Ontological Concept of Subjectivity

There are three axes that are central to Nancy's understanding of subjectivity as a collective, or what Nancy repeatedly refers to as "being-in-common" or "being-with": (1) the axis of freedom, through which Nancy perforates the solipsist metaphysics of the subject's sovereignty; (2) the axis of the body, through which Nancy subverts the subject's phenomenological integrality; and (3) the axis of the Other, through which Nancy counters the sacrosanct positioning (within poststructuralist discourse) of the Other as incommensurable. In regard to freedom (1), Nancy champions relationality (as well as praxeological and performative collectivity and plurality) over self-realization and self-expression; in regard to the body (2), he champions contradiction over discursivity; and in regard to the other (3), he champions co-originary embodiment over justice.

(1) Of Relational (Collective, Plural, Praxeological, and Performative) Freedom. Nancy's philosophy is driven by the concrete and outspokenly modern political imperative that is freedom. However, freedom should not be understood as a metaphysical quality, moral value, or as the form of self-expression "of a subjectivity in charge of itself and of its decisions, evolving freely and in perfect independence from every obstacle" (Nancy 1993, 66). Rather, Nancy argues that freedom equals the opening and creation of a common space that includes the subject and its communicating Other. This is why Nancy's account of freedom is "symbolic," in the sense of a joint and collective projection (derived from the Greek prefix συν-, with, and the verb βάλλω, to put or to throw) that creates an "opened interval", displaying that each one is "with one another [les-uns-avec-les-autres]" (Nancy 2000, 58).

This is not to say that freedom merely designates the empty space between two subjects as the relation's relata. Rather, freedom is the relational space between the subject and its Other, only to include both the subject and its Other in a third space that unravels from the interactions between them. Therefore, freedom is relational only to the extent that it is collective. Freedom brings the subject and its Other together, in a common projection where the subject and its Other are co-related and where different forms or structures of interaction and communication can unfold without dissolving the differences between self and other. Seen this way, freedom is not only relational and collective but also normatively pluralistic. Freedom requires the subject and its Other to enter into a relation with and condition one another while upholding their difference(s). This transforms freedom from a quality and value of the subject to a condition of the subject's emergence, thus preceding the subject's appearance. The subject and the Other co-emerge, so that there can be no subject without the Other, just as there can be no Other without the subject. As Nancy puts it: "Being is not without Being, which is not another miserable tautology as long as one understands it in the cooriginary mode of being-with-being-itself" (Nancy 2000, 38; emphasis added).⁶ This notion of freedom has praxeological bearing, since freedom's transformation into practice also transforms the content of freedom. For Nancy, solidarity is precisely the form of realized freedom, which returns to reactualize freedom and serve as a catalyst for its realization.⁷ As Nancy puts it, still using the word "fraternity," a term that preceded "solidarity" (Bayertz 1999, 3) and whose reapplication was vehemently countered by Derrida in his Politics of Friendship (Derrida 2005, 171–193): "the political act of freedom is freedom (equality, fraternity, justice) in action, and not the aim of a regulative ideal of freedom" (Nancy 1993, 77; emphases added).

(2) Of the Body as the "Instance Par Excellence of Contradiction" that is "Always in the Plural." With regard to the body, it is important to point out that at a time when the linguistic turn was prevalent across the humanities, Nancy, like Merleau-Ponty, conceives of the body as a phenomenological touching. At the same time, Nancy never stopped thinking in dialectical terms even if only to rectify them. As Nancy writes in Sense of the World (1997), dialectics is not a process of adjustment of the different significations under a dominant order. Rather, dialectics discloses an "oversignification" (Nancy 1997, 10), i.e., a process of amassment and proliferation, and not synthesis, of signification(s). Nancy's dialectical-phenomenological understanding of the body brings this to the fore. As Nancy states, the body, in its "very concreteness" (Nancy 1997, 10), is the place "where thought uses itself to touch (to be touched by) […] its body: the space of this extension and opening in which and as which it exscribes itself, that is, lets itself be transformed into the concreteness or praxis of sense" (Nancy 1997, 10). The body connotes a historicized and active "coming to presence" (Nancy 2008, 63), an act of "expansion, extension—where existences [actively; T.T.] take place" (Nancy 2008, 63) and reshuffle spatial matter to appear as the active, "plastic material of spacing" (Nancy 2008, 63). The body is neither an inert entity that is susceptible to instrumentalization by thought nor a naturalistic phenomenon beyond social meaning. Rather, it is a historical processualization and therefore "par excellence the thing created" (Nancy 2008, 63). This should not be read as reducing the body to a one-dimensional and monocausal byproduct of only one mode of subjectivity formation. Rather, the body becomes the "instance par excellence of contradiction" (Nancy 2008, 69), a space of conflict between the body's alleged materialistic (self-)truth and the various discourses' forceful attempts to bring it under their total(izing) and determining power. Parallel to contemporary new materialisms that see in the body "the context and constellation […] of a tense relationship" (Goll, Keil, and Telios 2013, 11; my translation, emphases added), Nancy sees in the body "the absolute contradiction of not being able to be a body without being the body of a spirit, which disembodies it" (Nancy 2008, 69).

Does this then mean that the body ought to be understood as an entity that entails, preserves, and synthesizes all the significations it has amassed throughout its historical processualization? It does not—and thus we arrive at the core of Nancy's most ingenious idea within his neo-materialist, dialectical, and phenomenological understanding of the body, namely the notion that "the body is always in the plural" (Nancy 2008, 63). If the body were the manifestation of one mode of subjectivity production, or even a synthesis of various modes, it would be singular, having harmonized, adjusted, and adapted the different significations into a single unifying one. In turn, Nancy holds that the body is and must remain an irreconcilable "instance of contradiction"; a place of conflict that conjoins different significations without subjugating one to the other. Just as freedom is collective insofar as it involves the creation of a solidary space that accommodates both the subject and its Other, the body is no less collective. It is a site where significations are upheld without being reduced, curtailed, or diminished within the overarching identity of the subject. In this way, the body's agency is not individual but collective. If the body is never singular but "always in the plural," then this body's agency can only be an agency in relation and in rapport—an agency to act-with instead of an agency to act-to. The individual's alleged sovereignty and omnipotence dwindles, and in its place collective agency arises as the subject's only and original form of agency.

This leads Nancy to circumscribe "the political" as "the place of being-together" (Nancy 1997, 88). If the subject's agency is collective, then its actions can only be originally collective actions. This is not to say that the subject's actions must always acquire a collective form; however, it is to say that even those actions that are individually executed cannot but resonate with the subject's collective agency and represent or epitomize collective action.

Are the subject's actions foreseeable and finite? Can they be catalogized and archived? And is there a blueprint regarding what kinds of action must be employed? Clearly not, and the reason for this is a final contradiction that the body performs: the fact that the body never gives away its collectivity. The body does not allow for itself to be apprehended as a structured, collective, and diverse entirety but stubbornly strives to present itself as a sovereign and homogeneous self-expression.⁸ In What's These Worlds Coming To? (2011/2015), a collaboration with the astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau, Nancy deploys the neologism "struction" to come to terms with this contradiction.

Nancy emphasizes the intrinsic collectivity at the etymological origin of "struction:" "Struo signifies 'to amass', 'to heap.' It is truly not a question of order or organization that is implied by con- and in-struction. It is the heap, the non-assembled ensemble. Surely, it is contiguity and copresence, but without a principle of coordination" (Nancy/Barrau 2014, 48–49). Seen this way, struction is a gathering or a collective of "things or being, the contingency of their belonging together, the dispersion of profusions of aspects, species, forces, forms, tensions, and intentions (instincts, drives, inclinations, and momentums)" (Nancy/Barrau 2014, 49). Struction is not a hierarchically organized system but an "uncoordinated simultaneity," a "profusion," where "no order is valued more than the others" (Nancy/Barrau 2014, 49). Instead of promoting harmony, however, the elements of struction "seem destined to collide or dissolve into one another or to be confused with one another" (Nancy/Barrau 2014, 49). In this light, struction has a radical-democratic character, where the elements that have composed it do not just inter-act but, to use a term from Karen Barad (Barad 2007), intra-act with one another, creating spaces—again, perhaps even of freedom—in which they find themselves existing with/as/through each other.

Against this background, the cunningness of liberal solipsism and atomism is disclosed. Although the subject is eventuated through a process of collectivization, it feigns being a homogenous and integral entity that cannot but take its phenomenological individuality as its starting point to comprehend its becoming. It is precisely this forgetfulness that struction debunks. The subject is always-already a collective syntax or a system (Telios 2021b), the totality of the subjectivation processes that have effectuated its becoming.⁹ And this reality can never be erased but only suppressed: "Overconstruction is turning into struction" (Nancy/Barrau 2010, 51). What the subject is, namely collectivity, is redeployed as a "con-struction" that has lost consciousness of its having been construed as a construction instead of a mere struction. And yet, not even as a struction can the subject ever be liberated from its structuration as a collective. The word "struction" performs this contradiction to remind the subject of its collective becoming.

(3) Of the Commensurable Other: Nancy is categorical about how constitutive the Other is for the subject's becoming or existence: "[T]here has never been, nor will there ever be, any [real] philosophical solipsism. In a certain way, there never has been, and never will be, a philosophy 'of the subject' in the sense of the final [infinie] closure in itself of a for-itself" (Nancy 2000, 29). On the contrary, "the essence of Being" can be understood "only as co-essence" that sets " the co- (the cum) itself in the position or guise of an essence" (Nancy 2000, 30). What is at stake here is nothing short of a new Copernican turn to avoid the pitfalls of "philosophical solipsism", thus transforming, as he aphoristically puts it, Descartes's 'ego sum' into an "ego cum" (Nancy 2000, 31): into the co-originary co-existence of the subject and the Other only as/through each other.

Under "philosophical solipsism", Nancy subsumes not only views that portray the Other as mediated through the subject—an approach that institutes the subject as the primary point of reference while rendering the Other secondary or accidental. Positioning the Other as incommensurable, as the poststructuralist tradition does, is just the flip side of what Nancy defines as "philosophical solipsism".¹⁰ In doing so, Nancy upend "the specular arrangement (of recognition of the self in the other, which presupposes the recognition of the other in oneself)" (Nancy 1991, 33) and argues for an Other who becomes recognizable by engrafting themself through the subject's emergence as part of the subject. By partaking in the subject's production, the Other not just lives through/as the subject. Rendering the subject's body an entity that is henceforth "always in the plural," the Other also lays within the subject itself the foundations of its own recognition by the subject. In this light, however, not only is the subject the subjectivated individual of the Other, but the Other is subjectivated by the subject. It is for this reason that both the subject and the Other are no longer seen as "subject" and "Other" but as co-producing co-subjects: neither subject nor Other but co-subjectivated and co-subjectivating counterparts. As Nancy writes in "Shattered Love," the fourth essay of his Inoperative Community, in a tone reminiscent of Hegel's "Bei-sich-selbst-Sein im Anderen" and predating Judith Butler's essay on the same topic (Butler 2015a) by thirty years:

It is not the singular being that puts itself outside itself: it is the other, and in the other it is not the subject's identity that operates this movement or this touch. But in the other it is this movement that makes it other and which is always other than "itself" in its identity; that is what transcends "in me." (Nancy 1991, 97)

At this point, the social-ontological parameters diagnosed in Nancy's understanding of freedom again become apparent, but this time through the concept of "creation" that Nancy elucidates in The Creation of the World or Globalization (2007). Explicating historical and social-ontological processes by employing the metaphysically overburdened concept of "creation" is certainly a bold move. For Nancy, however, creation is not to be understood in the sense of the subject's self-production or the subject's production through a sole mode of subjectivity formation. Instead, for Nancy, creation subverts not only self-expression but any monocausal und unilateral explanation of subjectivity production. In short: creation must become collective. Therefore, and to avoid any notion of the subject as "self-giving" (Nancy 2007, 73), the collectivity of creation cannot but affect both the collective form of the practice through which the subject emerges through/as/with the Other and the collectivization of the form of the subject's essence. Accordingly, it is impossible to differentiate between creation and appearance, since the "first feature of the creation of the world is that it creates the with of all things" (Nancy 2007, 73). This leads to an understanding of the world not as a synthetic manifold but as the simultaneous appearance of all entities—or a "com-pearance," as Nancy would put it.

This collective and correlative causation of the subject and its Other as/through/with each other is, however, "not the mystery of a hypothetical Subject but […] the real condition of a real multiplicity of real relationships" (Nancy 1992, 388; emphasis added). The subject must succumb to its being at its core or "nakedness" (Nancy 1992, 391), the collective outcome of a collective process and thus the confirmation of its social-ontological necessitation by another co-subject with which it co-appears. There is no merely 'accidental' co-subject to be excluded from the social-ontological history of becoming. History may "displace[] and transform[] this assignations [sic!] of exclusion" (Nancy 1992, 392) and categorize the "Jew" or the "Arab," the "Black" or the "Yellow"— racial categories to which Nancy recurs—into rasters of closeness, proximity, and immediacy, yet this is the contradiction, as Nancy might have said—a contradiction performed, this time, not by the body, but by the community. Just as the body feigns being a struction rather than a construction, "[c]ommunity excludes its own foundation—because it wants to disbar the concealing of the ground which is its essence: the in-common, the between-us of the compearance" (Nancy 1992, 392). This may remind of what, in analytical social ontology, has been defined as "in-group" belonging and "we-thinking" (Tuomela 2013). For Nancy, this would ultimately lead to a "'denaturation' of politics" (Nancy 1992, 391): a distortion of our co-originary collective togetherness. Reducing our togetherness to a single goal (whether "exploitation, oppression, extortion, extermination"; Nancy 1992, 392) or to a single group that allegedly represents us in our entirety (like the proletariat, the nation or the people—three group formations that Nancy mentions; Nancy 1992, 392) is a "denial of existence […] for it touches the in of the in-common" (Nancy 1992, 392). Having to subsume the aims of our struggles under a single unifying moral paradigm, or assuming that there is a sole political actor (such as a party) that can exclusively represent different forms of struggle, runs counter to the subject's collective being. This is not to say that we should abandon rallying points or representative group formations whatsoever, yet such normative ideals and formations cannot but emanate through collective solidary struggles. And, as will be shown in the next section, solidarity's normative potential is to be found in the holistic inclusion of all subject positions and all forms of solidary struggle that correspond to those positions.

3. Towards an Overdetermined Solidarity

How does Nancy's social-ontological account of the subject as a collective help extrapolate a theory of solidarity? To answer this question, we need to revisit Nancy's three axes of collective subjectivity. (1) Nancy's understanding of the commensurable Other serves as a foundation for solidarity as a necessary form of agency. (2) Nancy's (neo-)materialist and dialectical-phenomenological understanding of the body as the "instance par excellence of contradiction" that is "always in the plural," displays solidarity as a 'contingently necessary' set of actions. Finally (3), Nancy's normative understanding of freedom underscores the holistic and inclusive character of solidary struggles, outlining solidarity as a self-referential normative measure. Let me spell these three aspects out in more detail.

(1) Solidarity as a necessary form of agency: Solidarity connotes an agential disposition, not a mere form of practice. Through the subject's production as/at the intersection of various modes of subjectivity formation, the subject emanates as a plural entity that becomes agential by confirming, through its practice, the entirety of the modes of subjectivation that have structured it. As the subject's practices are not grounded in self-expression or authenticity but stem from the Other(s) whom the subject has incorporated and who thereby keep(s) working through the subject's practices, it would be inconsequent, if not ideological, to insist that the subject is a sovereign agent. Rather, agency is engrafted in the subject in virtue of the subject's social structuration as a collective. However, there is another, perhaps even more important consequence. While the liberal actor's primary form of agency is individual, Nancy's collective subject's primary form of agency is collective. Collective agency is not secondary to individual agency and applicable only after individual agency has been proven insufficient. Nor is collective agency dependent on external normative parameters such as the pursuit of a common interest, the materialization of an ideal, or the sharing of an identity. Rather, collective agency is immanently (anti-normatively) generated as a trait of the subject's collective structuration as a collective. This is why solidarity should not be located solely on the level of practice. Rather, solidarity is already involved previously, namely in agency itself. Solidarity not only conditions the collective character of the subject's practices but prepares the subject's agency, i.e., the ground that makes collective practices possible.

It is from this perspective that Nancy can assume that "[c]ommunism […] comes before any politics" (Nancy 2010, 149). If, in Nancy's jargon, the word "communism" denotes "an existential with" (Nancy 2010, 148) that "belongs to the very constitution or disposition […] of us" (Nancy 2010, 148), then it should be obvious why such a form of togetherness neither depends on a shared identity nor pertains either to a normative ideal that needs to be realized or to an instrumentalized type of practice that needs to be executed in order to satisfy certain interests. Rather, such collective structuration of subjectivity "is what gives to politics an absolute prerequisite to open the common space to the common itself" (Nancy 2010, 149) and why, in the end, "[c]ommunism is a principle of activation and limitation of politics" (Nancy 2010, 149) and not a mere political program. Solidarity is the agential disposition of politics since solidarity serves as the constitutional principle that allows the subject to enter the sphere of politics and become politically active. And the reason why solidarity should be regarded as necessary starting at the level of agency is that solidarity as a form of agency emanates alongside and corresponds to the subject's social-ontological emergence. Assuming that individual agency is the subject's primary form of agency would be as fictitious as assuming that the subject disposes of an individual, sovereign and integral essence. Rather, taking off from the subject's collective agency is the only logical consequence of the subject's historical production as a collective.

Does this also mean that the subject's practices always need to be collective? Can there be practices that the subject executes or performs single-handedly? And are all collective practices necessarily practices of (or in) solidarity? Oliver Marchart has demonstrated, with his concept of "necessary contingency," the complex relationship between necessity and contingency with regard to the structuration of subjectivities. Reversing this term, I will speak of a "contingent necessity" to conceive, with Nancy, of solidarity as a form of collective practices.

(2) Solidarity as contingent necessary collective practices: Marchart's pathbreaking thesis in Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (2007) is that the Heideggerian absence of ultimate foundations should not be interpreted as connoting a lack of foundations altogether. Rather, it should be rethought as entailing the absence of a single foundation. Instead of revoking the existence of any grounds upon which our actions can be based, our actions cannot be traced back to a single, ultimate ground. The "impossibility of such a ground is the necessary condition of possibility for grounds in the plural" (Marchart 2007, 25). In this incongruence—between the absence of a foundation tout court and the existence of multiple foundations (Marchart 2007, 26)—Marchart sees the main tenet of post-foundational political thought. The concept of "necessary contingency" aims to explicate this. In its weak, more conventional sense, contingency refers to a structure that "could be otherwise" (Marchart 2007, 28). In its strong sense, "contingency can be used […] as an operational term indicating the necessary impossibility […] of the full beingness of beings or ground" (Marchart 2007, 29). "Necessary contingency" stands for the impossibility of the subject's conclusive categorization, reduction, and subsumption under a single unifying identity. Following this line of thought, and to explain the collective practices of a subject that is a necessarily collective entity, I propose to reverse the terms and speak of a "contingent necessity." Let me explain:

It is obvious that the subject does not always act collectively. While its agency is always necessarily collective, since it corresponds to the subject's emergence as a collective, the subject's actions are not (and need not be) carried out in a collective manner. Nevertheless, this does not thwart collectivity on the ontological level; it merely renders the practical actualization of the subject's necessarily collective agency contingently necessary. If necessity is the modality of the subject's collective agency, contingent necessity is the modality of the subject's practices since they can but need not always be collective. The subject can weigh in, assess, and ponder how it should act in each particular case. However, in order to do so, the body, which is "always in the plural," forces the subject to take all modes of its production into account. Therefore, what may appear as an individual action is yet another contradiction that the body as an "instance par excellence of contradiction" performs. While it gives the impression of acting individually, this individuality is a mere appearance and realization of a complex decision-making process that considers all the entangled modes of subjectivity production. Given that the subject's becoming is necessarily conditioned by all the modes of subjectivity production that partook in its production, it is not the mere contingent outcome of one or some of its modes of production but the collective amalgam of all of them. This is why – in contrast to the socially constructed subject's necessarily collective agency – I speak of contingently necessary collective practices. We may not know which of the modes of subjectivity production is prevalent in the subject's actions in a given situation (contingency), but we know that this action is the result of multiple coefficients that must be factored in in their entirety (necessity), since at each and every point they house the subject's body, which is "always in the plural."¹¹

This begs the question of whether this account implies that all practices should be understood as practices of solidarity. Can we conceive of every action as a solidary action? The elephant in the room is of course Max Weber's distinction between action and social action. As Weber professes, "[w]e shall speak of 'action' insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior" and of social action "insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course" (Weber 1978, 4). It is apparent that within the atomistic paradigm of the liberal sovereignty- and autonomy-based understanding of subjectivity, solidarity practices can only be understood as a subcategory of social actions. This is not the case within the social-ontological understanding of subjectivity as a collectively constructed collective entity, however, that I laid out with Nancy. Not only are the subject's actions social because they are conducted through/as/with the Other whom the subject has incorporated into its "body always in the plural". The meaningfulness that the subject must attribute to its actions is also conditioned by the Other. This is yet another contradiction that the body performs in Nancy's account. The body does not just accumulate and amass modes of subjectivity production mediated through the Other(s); it is "always in the plural" also because it conjoins "the ideality of the sensible and the sensibility of the idea" (Nancy 2002, 49) and serves as "the passage of the one in the other" (Nancy 2002, 49). Taking advantage of the double meaning of "sense", which denotes "sensible sense or intelligible sense" (Nancy 2002, 117 FN1), Nancy holds that sense is "the whole as such—which is to say, the relation to self of each and every thing, one through the other, for the other, in and as the other" (Nancy 2002, 49; emphasis added). This should suffice to demonstrate the kind of pressure that this type of collectively emerged collective subjectivity puts on the Weberian understanding of social action. If "[s]ubjective attitudes constitute social action only so far as they are oriented to the behavior of others" (Weber 1978, 22) and are "confined to cases where the actor's behavior is meaningfully oriented to that of others" (Weber 1978, 23), then one is justified in asking whether the omnipresence of the Other with regard to the subject's structuration as a collective can allow any action not to be social. And if the Other is not only the addressee of the subject's intentions but, more importantly, also the source of the meaningfulness of the subject's actions, then it becomes clear how every action is social and therefore, as I would claim, structurally also solidary. Does this then mean that we cannot normatively assess whether an action is indeed solidary? And are there no normative rules by which to evaluate the solidary character of actions? These question lead us to the third form of solidarity, namely to:

(3) Solidarity as performative normativity: The last question pertains to the evaluation of solidarity practices as such. As mentioned above, it is Nancy's relational, collective, pluralist, and praxeological understanding of freedom that seems to be the key to answering these questions, since it discloses a deep and well-hidden normative performativity, as I would like to call it, that renders freedom, and thus solidarity, holistic and inclusive.

By pointing out the fundamental relationality, collectivity, plurality and praxeologicity of freedom, Nancy seeks not only to underline the co-dependence of the subject and the Other but to historicize their co-dependence to demonstrate how they praxeologically appear as equal co-determinants. For Nancy, freedom "is," i.e., exists, only if it has materialized itself into action, and he glosses "equality, fraternity, justice" (Nancy 1993, 77) as forms of "freedom […] in action" (Nancy 1993, 77). We would be mistaken to read these concepts as simple vectors or roadmaps of freedom's realization; this would give freedom a disproportionate normative valence and reinstate a normative hierarchy that is foreign to Nancy's horizontally co-created world.¹² Rather, solidarity should be conceived of as one of the forms that freedom acquires when or upon being realized. While freedom might stipulate the opening of a common space between the subject and the Other where the subject and the Other meet, at the moment at which this opening eventuates, freedom takes the form of solidarity. The Hegelian move from actuality to reality is—even if unobtrusive—unmistakable in Nancy's account of freedom: Freedom's actuality is its transformation and passage to solidarity as freedom's reality.

It is this processualization and transformation of freedom from actuality to reality in the form of solidarity that gives both freedom and solidarity their performative normativity. Freedom needs, one the one hand, to be substantialized in a way that corresponds to its relational, collective, and plural character. Yet solidarity, on the other hand, cannot tolerate being a mere materialization or eidolon of freedom. Rather, it must develop its own (self-)conceptualization. And solidarity achieves the latter by becoming inclusive. This pertains to solidarity taking into account, first, the various identities engrafted in the subject through its collective production and, second, the fact that also the Other constitutes a socially constructed collective entity that comports more than one identity. This solidary attitude also to the Other's social structuration as a collective leads to the realization that the Other cannot be either recognized and included when they share the same interests, goals, and identities or rejected and excluded when found to have a different set of interests, goals, and identities.¹³ Being in a life-threatening situation, suffering the results of excluding and discriminating discourses, or experiencing the loss or growing retreat of social-welfare infrastructure networks leads to solidarize with groups such as refugees, LGBTQIA+ people, and precariously living individuals of various gendered or racialized Othernesses across different geographies and situations. With regard to certain of their identities, those bodies will find themselves on the receiving end of solidarity; with regard to others, they will not. The reason is that the conceptualization of solidarity that derives its agency from an understanding of the body as "always in the plural" and as the "instance par excellence of contradiction" dictates that while the Other must always be included in the subject's practices (necessarily collective agency), those practices need not always be executed in concert with them (contingently necessary practices). The same body can be dialectically both excluded and included in solidarity practices, depending on which of its identities predominates in the situation. Further, inclusivity means that alongside the particular identities, the aims of each Other must be taken into account and included in the subject's decision-making processes. I can neither force a person to prize one of their identities over another nor play one group off against another. In this sense, it would be equally anti-solidary to prioritize the struggle against nationalism over homophobia, classism over racism, or ableism over social and labor rights.

Exactly herein lies the normative contribution of overdetermined solidarity, namely in how it addresses and incorporates difference(s) as constitutive condition(s) of solidarity. As constitutive condition(s), difference(s) neither contradict nor merely complement each other. Rather, they depend on and precondition each other. If solidarity were an appeal for help towards the satisfaction of certain of the subject's needs, desires, goals and identities, then it would be nothing but a self-serving, utilitarian activity. Similarly, if solidarity was granted only to Others with whom the subject identifies itself, then it would be nothing but a deontological self-projection onto the Other(s). In this light, solidarity can be developed only through collective practices where the subject and the Other intra-act with one another forming, thereby, each other through this process. What counts as solidary as well as the means and practices to achieve it depend on the processual operations and normative presuppositions that are developed and critically self-reflected in the execution of solidarity practices.¹⁴ Overdetermined solidarity accommodates difference and becomes a process of normativity production by not exhausting itself in the satisfaction of one kind of struggle. Rather, it sees itself obliged to pursue and accommodate all different kinds and forms of struggle as they unravel through solidarity struggles.¹⁵ Moreover, overdetermined solidarity distinguishes between (partial) identities and (holistic) subjects whose body is "always in the plural" and allows for different re-entries of the concrete Other into the subject's practices, depending on the subject's and the Other's ad hoc situation and (historical, social, political, contextual) embeddedness. Finally, overdetermined solidarity highlights that the subject cannot realize itself on its own, but only through the collective restructuring of the social environments that produced not only itself but also its co-subjects.

Solidarity, as a normative value that performs itself, can be oriented and interested only in its own self-realization and self-preservation.¹⁶ It cannot be a coincidental side-effect or instrumentalized means of freedom or any other principle. Instead, it is grounded in (i) how the Other is necessary for the subject's production, which lends the subject its capacity to become political (solidarity as a necessary form of agency); (ii) the Other's contingently necessary engagement in the subject's practices, which paves the way for the subject's collective self-realization (solidarity as a contingently necessary set of practices); and finally, (iii) the continuous, procedural and processual inclusion and recognition of the Other's collective structuration as a collective with its own needs and aims, which forces the subject to reconsider and realign its practices according to the always renewed needs and aims of the Other. As Bini Adamczak brilliantly writes: "Solidarity is an already feasible experience in the past and present. It is at the same time a desire to overthrow all conditions that make a life in solidarity for all impossible" (Adamczak 2021, 87; my translation). Precisely herein lies the task of solidarity: the countering of every structure, ideological apparatus, power mechanism, and discourse that, insofar as it ignores the social-ontological co-construction of the subject and the Other as collectives, prevents solidarity from being grasped, accrued, and realized to its full potential.

4. Conclusion

In this paper, I have drawn on Jean-Luc Nancy to reconstruct solidarity as neither an intentional activity nor a purely moral issue but rather as a social-ontological givenness. This transformation of solidarity has involved more than a discussion of the forms and grounds of solidarity struggles. Rather, it points to a fundamental rethinking of the nature of subjectivity, of how the singular subject is rendered-through its social structuration-capable of associating with other subjects within given social and political structures, and of how norms that regulate and guarantee this being-together are generated. From this perspective, what started as a discussion of solidarity became a discussion about the subject's dependence on the Other and the given possibilities for an inclusive and collectively self-determined future. This is possible, first, as long as our starting point is an understanding of solidarity as an "overdetermined" concept that comprises of a necessarily collective form of agency, a contingently necessary set of practices, and a performative mode of normativity production. Second, such an inclusive and collectively self-determined future is possible thanks to an understanding of solidarity as an overdetermined concept, because it underlines both the necessity for different forms of practices that correspond to different forms of collective struggle as well as the necessity to think of those different forms of practices and struggles as interlocked with one another. Third, such an inclusive and collectively self-determined future is possible thanks to an understanding of solidarity as an overdetermined concept, because it necessitates that everyone's objectives are satisfied through solidarity practices, drawing a line between those who see in solidarity the groundwork of a subjectivity as togetherness and those who do not. As such, solidarity is recalibrated to an instrument for critique of individualism and a vector for a radically collective togetherness based on difference and inclusion.

Acknowledgements

This paper was developed during the programme "Crises of Solidarity" within the research area "Cultural Encounters—Cultural Conflicts" as the University of Innsbruck. I am indebted to Michaela Bstieler and Sergej Seitz for the invitation to the programme as well as to my co-fellows Mareike Gebhardt and Sarah Teufel for their invaluable insights throughout the entire period of the fellowship. I would also like to thank Matthias Flatscher, Stephanie Graf, Judith Möllhoff and Anna Weithaler for their helpful and constructive feedback at the presentation of the first draft of this paper at the final workshop of the programme.