An unbecoming introduction John Paul Ricco This volume of essays configured around the concept of unbecoming – a concept that defies or refuses conceptualization and therefore can only be conceived as such a defiance and refusal – is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, populated by figures: dirty old men, patient zero, the friend with AIDS, the Times Square pervert, traitors, strangers and intruders. What are we to make of this gathering of rather unseemly and rather unremarkable someones? As you will no doubt realize, in your reading of these essays, these figures are not simply or ever quite accurately various embodiments, characterizations, or subjectifications of certain individual modes of existence. Without prediction, predication, prescription or preemption, they are the affirmation and attestation of existence as that which is impossible to affirm and attest to, that which is beyond the capacities of the epistemological, irreducible to the phenomenological, and touching the ontological without ever becoming an ontology. Other than fixed and complete subjects or objects of interpretation – and yet something other than the absolutely and wholly Other – they are less beings than becomings, that in their infinite coming, interrupt and indefinitely sus- pend being as neither an immanence nor a transcendence, but an unbecoming singularity. They are then, non-figurative figures, heteronomous whatever singularities – whomevers – infinitely con-figured as non-negating exposures to finitude (and thereby also de-figured and re-con-figured). They are the bearing of the traces, and the vibrating of the rhythms of becoming/unbecoming, in which the latter is the incessant doing and undoing, the inexhaustible exhaustion of all dialectical logics and structures. Figures in extremis, they exist only in and through the incessantly coming force of unbecoming, in all of its indeterminancy. Endlessly coming towards, yet an endless coming towards that is unseemly, untimely and untoward. In the following passage, Jean-Luc Nancy provides us with a sense not only of this unbecoming figure, but also its political outline as precisely that which undoes all formalizations of the political: This sort of configuration of space would not be the equivalent of a political figuration (fiction, myth). It would trace the form of being- toward in being-together without identifying the traits of the toward- what or toward-whom, without identifying or verifying the ‘to what end’ of the sense of being-in-common – or else, by identifying these traits as those of each one: a different ‘totality’, a different unicity of truth. Of being-in-common, it would operate a transitivity, not a substantiality. 1 parallax, 2005, vol. 11, no. 2, 1–3 parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13534640500058418 parallax 1