Western Theories of the Contemporary Community: Focusing on Inoperative Community and the Coming Community

Abstract

This essay aims to explore genealogy of community in the contemporary western theories focusing on two major European scholars’ theories of community: Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘the inoperative community’ and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘the coming community.’ In the history of contemporary theories, Georges Bataille, a French philosopher, contextualizing communication and community, first proposed the idea of ‘Unavowable Community’ which influenced Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of inoperative community. The inoperative community refuses identity politics and immanence to delineate a community where singular subject, going through desubjectification, take part in unrecognizable community expurgating any violence or drive for death. Nancy metaphysically critiques limit of the idea of community and suggests inoperative community as a metaphysically fundamental community. Though sounding purely ethical, Nancy’s community is product of the collapse of communism and resistance against totalitarian or capitalistic desire for unified community. In turn, the essay delves into complicated ideas of coming community in Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community. Agamben, inheriting as well as critiquing Nancy’s inoperative community, proposes ‘potentiality’ and ‘ease’ as the key elements of coming community in which political theology and ethico-ontology center the idea of community of singularity and coming politics.