Jean-Luc Nancy traces the how the notion of community connects to concepts of experience, discourse and the individual. Arguing that is has dominated modern thought, Nancy discards the popular notions and redefines community. He believes it can’t be reduced to a collection of separate individuals nor a fascist hypostasized communal substance. Our attempts to design pre-planned definitions often leads to social violence and political terror. Thus, he poses the social and political question of how to proceed with the development of society. He believes that community shouldn’t be the result of production but a work of art. He doesn’t want the community to become a single thing or to be the result of a longing for an “original community.”
Giorgio Agamben, in turn, looks at the politics of a whatever singularity, that is a being whose community is not mediated by any condition of belonging. He believes that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity. He believes that cultural identity were useful and necessary to assert independence from colonial rule but today, nationalist affirmations of identity for their own sake act only in the interests of separatism. In his elaboration of singularity, human identity is not mediated by its belonging. His politics calls for equality not on being part of a group, but in being a singular whatever being.
Diane Davis looks at how we develop boundaries in language and identities and tries to examine instances that can break down those boundaries and reveal a connection shared among subjects and how it is fluid and excessive. This approach is based on a play of language and disrupting the either/or binary construction of the dialectic. Her emphasis on the excluded “third” of excess overflows language’s dichotomies. Specifically, she looks at how language disrupts and shatters confining conceptual frameworks. She criticizes identity politics which solidify identity in terms of community and ends up maintaining the very social structures they are trying to eliminate.
Gayatri Spivak examines how teaching can serve as an interruption of this conventional notion of community by examining how after the event of political independence, there is always a new nation that cannot participate in decolonization. This community has no established communication process outside of the culture of imperialism. The subaltern functions in this community as an invisible resistance to homegenic practices. She is concerned with how subalterns can resist and protest outside impositions without being further buried underground.
