The Project of Community

Research in Phenomenology 53, 2023

The author analyzes the deconstruction of the community carried out by Jean-Luc Nancy. For Nancy, the aim of the community has been historically accomplished by its self-destruction in the "work of death" of totalitarianism. This does not lead him to renounce the notion of community, like Derrida, but to highlight its paradoxical (im-)possibility. This is why Nancy proposes the concept of a "community without community" which would retain only the cum of the communitas, the with of being-with or being in-common. The author shows that this approach is subject to aporias. Indeed, Nancy wants to base being-with on an ontology of bodily touch. As he considers touching as distancing, displacement, he fails to understand the cum, that is to say the possibility of constituting a community. Keywords community-being-with-deconstruction-touching Can a conversation cut short by death go on despite silence and absence? Perhaps it can take on other, more spectral forms, involving writing and, first, rereading what the deceased left us. Isn't it, however, precisely when it seems to have become impossible that such a conversation returns to its most essential state of possibility, that of a thinking community of the living and the dead that shares only the question of its possibility? This is the philosophical question par excellence according to Jean-Luc Nancy, who claimed that "philosophy and community are inseparable" and that "community is the theme of all AQ 1

Pamiętnik Teatralny, 2021

The thinking about the idea, forms and practices of communitas has developed a specific discourse in political philosophical writing since the 1980s. This paper retraces the ways in which Jean-Luc Nancy established a “community of writing [and] the writing of community,” how in his view community compears with philosophical writing. Taking Nancy’s discussion as a ground line, the author modulates the perspective on writing—as both text and practice—and focuses on the confrontation with community in reading. By poetologically tackling Nancy’s essay “The Confronted Community” (2001), she investigates into the text’s performing of community and the affective interaction between text and corporeality. Her reading of Nancy’s writing thus activates not only its ecstatic valences leading towards the proposed community of those who have no community; it also uncovers the aesthetic, social and political implications that emanate from Nancy’s writing in this situated reading. Therefore, this paper analytically retraces the textual micro-performances of community in writing as a performative confrontation entailed in reading.

Iris, 2010

The re-emergence of a diffuse need for community in the context of the global age compels us to rethink the concept of “community” in the light of the changes and transformations that are unfolding today. The community cannot be considered as a residual phenomenon of resistance to the processes of modernization, but must be recognized as a new phenomenon which accompanies the processes of globali- zation. The following contribution investigates the fundamental sources of the need for community in the world today, and identifies principally two: 1) community as a response to the pathologies of individual- ism (insecurity, loss of meaning, atomism, loss of solidarity); 2) community as a response to the dynamics of exclusion that affect societies that are ever more multicultural in character. Also if community largely tends today to assume pathological forms that harbour the potential for conflict and violence, the need for community is legitimate insofar as it expresses a need for belonging and solidarity, and a need for the affirmation of identities and a demand for recognition. In my view, the global era offers the bases for shar- ing in this sense insofar as it gives rise to the idea of the community of the human species, a community united by interdependence of processes and events, brought together by its shared vulnerability in the face of the new risks and challenges that are produced by globalization.

Philippine Studies, 2012

Social Philosophy Today, Vol. 28, 2012

Communities play an important role in many areas of philosophy, ranging from epistemology through social and political philosophy. However, two notions of community are often conflated. The descriptive concept of community takes a community to be a collection of individuals satisfying a particular description. The relational concept of community takes a community to consist of more than a set of members satisfying a particular trait; there must also be a relation of recognition among the members or between the members and the community as a whole. The descriptive concept is simpler, however, it does not provide a sufficiently robust concept of community. I argue instead that the relational notion is philosophically richer and more accurately captures the true nature of a community.

2010

fate, or history to be part of the Jewish community, but rather a choosing people, deciding day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-byminute whether or not we want our Jewishness to inform our lives. And if we want Jews to continue to choose Judaism, we must ensure that the case for doing so, and the ways in which we are able to do so, are exceptionally compelling.

Omega, 1999

The purpose of this paper is to open space for a debate about normative visions of community and their implications for community OR. It is argued that, if practitioners do not re¯ect on the dierent visions that it is possible to promote, then there is a danger that they will default to the understanding of community that is implicit in the liberal/capitalist tradition currently dominant in the West (and increasingly most of the rest of the world). Some may be happy with this, but for those who wish to consider the value of alternative political traditions, there is a need for explicit re¯ection on the dierent possible meanings of the term`community'. To clarify some of the choices available to community OR practitioners, three major political traditions are reviewed (liberalism, Marxism and communitarianism), as well as sub-divisions of these, and the paper asks: what kind of community OR practice would support each one? In all, eight dierent (sometimes overlapping) forms of community OR practice are identi®ed, each of which is capable of promoting a dierent normative vision of community. There are therefore substantial political choices open to those involved in community OR. #

Journal of Community Psychology, 1986

This is a reflection on the importance of attachment for a community to bond