Derrida’s Island – The Political Ontology of Loneliness

If any, what is the problem with loneliness? Addressing this question illustrates the cogency of Derrida’s thought on the ontology of the political via his work on sovereignty. The question of loneliness comes to us at a particular time. Loneliness gained topicality over the last few decades and even more with the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the lack of phenomenal clarity when addressing loneliness from theoretical and empirical perspectives, some people spoke of an ongoing epidemic of loneliness. This juxtaposition of pandemic and epidemic has a conceptual indeterminacy, needing an appropriate philosophical framework. Hence, the paper scrutinises Derrida’s fundamental contribution to understanding the phenomenon of loneliness as an ontological issue. Derrida pays attention to the archetypal literary figure of the lonely man, the isolated man, the true island-man, or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. I am lonely; what does it mean? The paper argues that, by reading Derrida, particularly his drawing upon Heidegger’s ontological work on Einsamkeit, one manages to bring out the otherwise neglected core of today’s epidemic of loneliness, namely its link with sovereignty and the profundity of human’s archic ambition of ipseity, or subject’s aim of political control over its political nature. This pertains to the uncomfortable experience that the subject has of the political dimension of its subjectivity. Man would like to be on an island, or an island tout court, ideally, a deserted one. However, his desire is already a non-isolated expression of his sociable politicalness that betrays a looming political ontology grasping the subject. The link between the subject’s political ontology and the existential discomfort with it, of which loneliness is an expression, is never sufficiently emphasised. In this sense, the pertinence of Derrida’s work affirms the importance of deconstruction for understanding the contemporary and contextually affirms the naivety of dissociating science and philosophy as two islands.