ABSTRACT
In the solitude of writing, one enacts a conversation and invokes the presence of an absence. More than merely letters of individuals, the correspondences in Walter Benjamin’s book assumed a social dimension shared between the sobriety of the material problems of life and the desire of proximity and change. Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters, where one letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness. The co-respondence founds the social beyond any inter-subjectivity and blurs the lines that separate ontology from ethics. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and his philosophy of the “with/co” present a productive conceptual apparatus to think about those ethical and ontological aspects implicated in the co-respondence concept.
