No Ground

No Ground is a work of philosophy written as a sequence of walks and conversations. Two friends — a retired archivist from the north and a man who has spent his life in a harbour town on Cyprus — move through Larnaca, Nicosia, and the island's divided north, and look at ordinary things: a fenced excavation, a market quarrel, a museum case, a cemetery notice board, an evening street. The preceding volume established a floor: the bare fact that persons can address one another and be held to answer. This book asks what lies beneath it. The finding is that there is nothing there — no substance, no order, no first principle holding it up — and that nothing is missing. The second half is the harder half, and the book's central labour is to earn it: to show that the absence of a ground is a discovery about how things stand rather than a mood, a loss, or a disappointment. What follows is worked out rather than announced — what inheritance is when nothing underwrites it, what keeping means, what obligation can be with no instance standing behind it to enforce, what mourning discloses, and what becomes of political life once every archic office is seen to be empty and to have always been empty. The method is deliberately exposed. Nothing rests on authority; no thinker is named in the body of the text, and the debts are paid by name in a closing section where they can be checked. Each walk ends with a short passage in italics stating exactly what the day earned and no more. The island is not scenery. The hardest places are entered as a guest enters, indebted to both houses, and the book refuses two symmetrical errors by name: the scoundrel's direction, which dissolves particular hands upward into a giant that did the deed, and the avenger's direction, which distributes a collective guilt downward onto whoever is to hand. Volume Two of the Phenomenology of Being-With. It follows Koinonia and precedes The Locus; each volume stands on its own.