The Mangrove Notebook

1 Jean-Luc Nancy says that the individual is the residue of the erosion of community.

2 Nancy argues that two things negate community:

• the idea of an individual that is taken to be the point of departure of the common which decays into the atomization and privatization of experience (liberal, capitalist democracies)

• the idea of a fused collective body, which results in undifferentiation (real communisms).

Against these “betrayals of community,” he poses the thought that being in common has nothing to do with communion or individuals gathering to participate in a group of shared interests or characteristics.

Historically, these forms of organization have been based on a substantial, fixed identity of either the individual or the collective; the outcome has been different forms of totalitarian societies (past Soviet communism or contemporary fascist capitalism, for example). This phenomenon is what Édouard Glissant calls the “totalitarian drive of a single, unique root.”

Roberto Esposito says that thinking about community is today more necessary than ever given the “failure of all communisms” and “the misery of new individualisms.”

3 Esposito asserts that community is not a “wider subjectivity” or a “unity of unities.” He says that this idea stems from a concept of the subject as absolute unity and interiority. Community, according to this perspective, is therefore a “property belonging to subjects that join them together: an attribute, a definition, a predicate that qualifies them as belonging to the same totality, or as a substance that is produced by their union.” The subject, individual or collective, taken to be “full” or “whole,” produces a notion of community as that which reflects “what is most properly our own.” Normally, this is related to some definition of the human or of humanity (language, territory, etc.) In this sense, through community we gather what is most common to all of us and “communicate what is most properly our own.” Community, according t