Conclusion: Simmel and Contemporary Social Theory

Abstract

The general aim of this book has been to use the work of Simmel to revitalize the critical engagement in thinking the social. The fact that Simmel tackles fundamental sociological questions about the nature and conditions of possibility of the social readily makes him a social theorist still worth reading. Yet his contribution is not confined to the gesture of posing these questions. It also has to do a lot with his original answers to them, as well as his overall way of examining the social. In sociology, the social has been typically grasped by commencing from a subject, be it an individual actor or the community and society. The focus on these figures of the individual and the communal subject has tended to exclude the social’s relational mode, signalled by the previously discussed notions of ‘between’ and the ‘with’ of being-with. In fact, this may even be said to betray a shortfall in thinking that is common to the entire Western tradition. According to Nancy, it is ‘a fundamental disposition of our whole tradition’ that ‘between two subjects, the first being “the person” and the second “the community,” there is no place left for the “with”’ (Nancy, 2008, p. 5). With regard to the thought of the social, the thinking which takes the isolated actor as its point of departure sees the relations between individuals as merely relations of exteriority which do not touch the constitution of the individuals themselves. And, the theories premised on the notion of society or community, in turn, tend to neglect the ‘with’ in favour of a pure interiority, achieved in the hyper-existence of society or in a harmonious community which unites individuals who are assumed to share a common substance.