The Coming Communities

Below is a paragraph that hits upon the main idea of both Jean-Luc Nancy and Agamben's books about a deconstructive community or a non-essentialist community. It is from an editorial intro to a journal issue devoted to the topic of "Community Without Community". The whole journal is available online here:

borderlands e-journal

What Nancy and Agamben offer in The Inoperative Community (1991) and The Coming Community (1993) respectively is a conception of community that is marked by a shift in thinking of the idea of community as a concept that we always already occupy, of being in (hence one is red, French or Muslim, or an activist), to one that sees it as a concept that does not have a guarantee of meaning, identity, belonging; a concept that does not have an essence - that of a unified collectivity. This is Nancy's idea of "community without community" (1991: 71). Agamben shares a similar critical trajectory in his designation of the coming community - a community "without destiny and without essence, the community that returns is never present in the first place" (Wall, 1999: 156). What Nancy does here is shift the question of, or on, community away from one invested in the notion of identity and belonging (being-in) to an idea of the community that ceaselessly works to produce more democratic, open and fluid relationships with others to foster a sense of "being with." (Nancy, 1991: 33). Like Nancy, Agamben also proposes the idea of community that is based on the notion of belonging without identity. This is a community of singularities, fragments: it is "of a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging ... nor by the simple absence of conditions ... but by belonging itself" (Agamben, 1993: 85).

--Vijay Devadas & Jane Mummery
University of Otago & University of Ballarat