Unanimity of Separation

Unanimity of Separation names a paradoxical structure of genuine communal bond in which authentic collective unity is produced not despite but through radical individual singularity. In the Kierkegaardian framework that McCormick mobilizes, the relation between individuals and a shared idea is "optimal and normative" precisely when each individual is passionately and essentially related to that idea on their own terms — alone, for themselves — such that the separateness of each is the very mechanism by which they are ideally united. The separation is not a failure of community but its condition: the bond holds because each singular subject maintains an irreducible interiority, and it is this maintained singularity that prevents the collective from collapsing into mere aggregation or mechanical identity. The "unanimity" is thus not achieved by submerging individual difference but by each difference pointing, from its own irreducible position, toward the same idea.

This structure stands in explicit contrast to the degraded modern collectivity that the surrounding argument diagnoses. When the passionate, singular relation to an idea is replaced by "chatter" (snak) — by the automatized circulation of discourse that accompanies mechanical beat-counting — the separation that once grounded communal unity dissolves into indifferent aggregation. The individuals are no longer "each one individually" related to an idea; they are merged into an undifferentiated mass by the very medium (mechanical repetition, idle talk) that simulates togetherness. Unanimity of Separation therefore operates as a diagnostic ideal: a normative baseline against which modernity's substitution of Automaton-like communal noise for genuine communal bond becomes legible as loss.

Within the argument of samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, Unanimity of Separation functions as the normative counterpoint to the concept of "chatter" (snak) as a distinctly modern pathology. It appears at the moment when the text deploys Kierkegaard to articulate what is lost when music — and by extension, collective discourse — becomes mechanical beat-counting: what is lost is precisely the structure whereby individual passionate singularity sustains communal ideality. The concept is therefore not a description of modernity but a critical standard immanent to the text's genealogy of everyday talk.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, Unanimity of Separation most directly inverts the logic of Alienation. Lacanian alienation names a forced choice in which being and meaning cannot be simultaneously preserved — entry into the symbolic necessarily costs something essential. Unanimity of Separation, by contrast, posits a (pre-modern, or counter-modern) configuration in which the symbolic act of individual separation — maintaining oneself "for oneself" — does not produce aphanisis but instead is the enabling condition of a higher, ideal unity. It is as though the concept sketches a domain where alienation's irreducible loss is partially redeemed through singularity rather than effaced by merger. At the same time, the concept implicitly diagnoses Gerede and Automaton as its structural opposites: the automaton's mechanical repetition and Gerede's uprooted circulation of "what one says" are exactly what replace the passionate individual relation to an idea, producing the false unanimity of the mass — the sham clarity of shared noise — in place of the genuine unanimity of separation. Ideology, in the Lacanian-Žižekian register, is the operation that makes this substitution imperceptible, allowing mechanical aggregation to be experienced as communal harmony.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.62)

When individuals (each one individually) are essentially and passionately related to an idea and together are essentially related to the same idea, the relation is optimal and normative. Individually the relation separates them (each one has himself for himself), and ideally it unites them.

The theoretical weight of the quote rests on the tension between "individually" and "ideally": the same relation that "separates" — keeping each one "for himself" in passionate singularity — is simultaneously what "unites" them at the ideal level. This makes separation not the negation of unity but its very mechanism, inverting the commonsense assumption that community requires the suppression of individual difference and establishing the normative baseline against which modern chatter's false togetherness is measured.