The Locus: The Address, the Deed, and the One Who Answers

The Locus is the concluding volume of a philosophical trilogy written as walks and conversations. It opens after a death. The man who conducted the earlier walks has died, and does not return in these pages as voice, vision, or device; his friend of forty years walks in his place, with a young man of the town, through one winter in a Cypriot harbour town, beginning at a block of uncut marble in a mason's yard that is waiting for words. Granted a floor of address and answerability, and granted that nothing beneath it holds it up, the book asks what a someone is: what can be addressed and not replaced, what answers and cannot hand the answering on, when there is no soul-substance underneath, no ground behind, and no maker above to countersign. The question is carried in the form the walks meet it: when an answer is demanded of you, and nothing behind you can give it, and no one beside you can take it over, who answers? Seventeen walks pass through gifts, offices, institutions, borrowed voices, joint action, the duties owed the dead, and a machine that speaks fluently in the town's own words from any counter it is set on — treated at length, without a verdict it has not earned. A closing scholarly section restates the findings in academic register, with the literature engaged by name, for readers who want the argument stripped of the walking. An appendix registers the book's vocabulary and pays its debts. Volume Three of the Phenomenology of Being-With, completing the sequence begun in Koinonia and continued in No Ground. Each volume stands on its own.