코뮨주의에서 공동성과 특이성

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the concept of community on the ontological level. The central theses of ontological theory on community, such as “inoperative community” (Nancy), “the coming community” (Agamben), and “the community of those who have nothing in common” (Lingis), can be summarized as follows: “It is where the community is not that the community is.” While these arguments emphasize ontological communality at the expense of communities in real life, I accentuate the dimension of the actual in the theorization of community. I argue that we can properly think of the virtual or ontological dimension of community only through trying to conjure up communities at the actual level. At the root of this conceptualization of community is the Spinozist thesis that the individual is formed through the process of individualization and that the individual is an assemblage of many “dividuals.” While we define commun-ity (the concept of community) as the process of individualization that unites multiple heterogeneous components, we define singularity as the process of bringing heterogeneous singular points together. In Deleuzean terms, the former becomes the “content” of community, whereas the latter take on its “expression.” The central thesis of this article is to examine the problem of the interiority and outsideness of community through these two concepts, i.e., “commun-ity” and “singularity.”