ALTERNATIVE COMMUNITIES, ALTERNATIVES TO COMMUNITY(*).

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Chesterman, Simon
• Date: 01 January 1997

Introduction: An Offering ... And All the Angels of Heaven Besides

A little tree stands in the meadow and many more nice little trees besides. A little leaf freezes in the frosty wind and many more lonely little leaves besides. A little pile of snow glimmers by the brook and many more white little piles besides. A little hilltop laughs down on the valley and many more nasty hilltops besides. And behind all this the devil and many more poor devils besides. A little angel turns aside his weeping face and all the angels of heaven besides. Robert Walser, `A Little Landscape'. The prince of darkness is a gentleman. Shakespeare, King Lear, III, iv What does it mean to speak of alternative communities and alternatives to community? What does it mean today, especially today when the promise of a New World Order is said to have been broken, perhaps by the old world disorder?

What is implicated in our recognition of the violence that has been done to and in the name of `community'; defined by and reciprocally defining subsisting identities (individuals) as the attempt to realise an essence? And what might be a politics that does not stem from such a will?

These questions (and many others) form the departure point for the studies of community and its alternatives to be considered in this offering. An offering because, like those texts, polemical or programmatological approaches are antithetical to the ideas explored and played with there and here.

This offering, then, will begin with the question of human association, the construction of modern community as the self-evident and self-authenticating myth of its own origins. What is lost in such a construction? There will be an examination of the perceived `problem' with(in) community through an analysis of Julia Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves(1) and Jean-Luc Nancy's discussion of the `loss' of community in The Inoperative Community.(2)

In Part Two, we move to a consideration of the politics of individuation within the modern (and `postmodern') community, and the ways in which `community' may not be constructed by individuals so much as prohibited by that anterior construction. Derrida's The Other Heading(3) and Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community(4) will be important here. That construction in turn brings us to the question of meaning itself (and its alternatives), discussed in the third section with particular emphasis on the myth that is community in

Jean-Luc Nancy's Inoperative Community.

Finally, Being and its post-Heideggerian, post-secular implications will be raised in the juxtaposition of the Derridean aporia, Agamben's quodlibet and the `literary communism' of Nancy. For it is in the contrapuntal bringing together of such texts as these and the preparedness to go far beyond them that we may conceive of alternative conceptions of being neither of nor for community but in community, being not as singularity indifferent to its common property nor as examples (exemplars) of universal commonality - the divine, the essence - but being-such as we are, being thus.

1. The Politics of Human Association

Society was not built on the ruins of a community. It emerged from the disappearance or the conservation of something - tribes or empires - perhaps just as unrelated to what we call `community' as to what we call `society'. So that community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us - question, waiting, event, imperative - in the wake of society. Jean-Luc nancy, The Inoperative Community. When questioned as to the wisdom of its course, the newly converted fanatic of nationalism answers that `so long as nations are rampant in this world we have not the option to freely develop our higher humanity. We must utilize every faculty that we possess to resist the evil by assuming it ourselves in the fullest degree. For, the only brotherhood possible in the modern world is the brotherhood of hooliganism.' Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism. Intolerance and the Victory of the West

The foreigner exists only when there is a `we' outside of whom she stands. Today, confronted by the hope and the terror of an order promised to be new, but in which the same rages in the name of community manifest in different places under different names (the concentration camp doubly sanitised by the appellation `ethnic cleansing'), the violences of identity politics are said to be countered by (the violence of) a globalising culture. The unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism posited in the `prating eloquence of a White House advisor'(5) (or the way `we won the Cold War'(6) has reinforced what `we' knew all along: that Western domination of the world was foreordained and morally justified.(7) (This self-assuredness surely represents the greatest problematic in Western epistemology: its irony being that it is at once restrictive and self-validating.)

Herein lies the hope, fear and trembling that Derrida notes accompanying the signs of European (re)union, implicit in the spirit of the promise of a `new' Europe.(8) This trepidation is perhaps most bluntly borne out by Samuel P Huntington's facile `Clash of Civilizations' thesis, positing a post-bipolar world of the `West versus the rest' (with Islam implicitly the main enemy of `order'). Of interest here, however, is Huntington's central determinant of allegiance:

In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was `Which side are you on?' and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is `What are you?' That is a given that cannot be changed.(9) Such an approach surely does violence to the individuals within its suffocating embrace. The presumption of a subjectivity contingent on the communion of the community (existence as a common being defined by the Most common) denies its constituents any form of agency. And yet it is argued that community nevertheless provides the vocabulary within which empowerment becomes possible.(10)

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, not the pathetic pretence that these differences do not exist.(11) Das Unheimliche

For Julia Kristeva, the problem of community centres around the location of the foreigner. The foreigner can only be defined negatively, as external (to my religion, my land, my blood). Her analysis focuses on the historical images of the foreigner, and in particular the legal implications of citizenship: the foreigner is seen as a scar between man and citizen, a `symptom' of the difficulties humans face in living with their others.(12) The conclusion of her (admittedly experimental) work is that foreignness is sublated only by the positing of the self qua foreigner: `If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners.'(13)

The crucial step is the recognition of the foreigner within and to the self revealed by psychoanalysis. Here, she draws heavily on Freud's essay on the fluid antonymity of the German heimlich/unheimlich, arguing that the unheimlich experience (translated here as `uncanny strangeness'(14) is the confrontation with the other: `the familiar potentially tainted with strangeness and referred (beyond its imaginative origin) to an improper past. The other is my ("own and proper") unconscious.'(15)

It is difficult to uncritically adopt Kristeva's assertions that this is the `small truth ... [that will] enlighten the people of our time',(16) and that the confrontation with the other causes one to `lose my boundaries',(17) entering a condition of `being with others'.(18) Firstly, it is the construction of those boundaries that constitutes the other as foreigner, it is the condition of the interaction above and beyond any external shock that one experiences. The construction of the gulf between us does not `shock', it is that which precludes recognition. Second, Kristeva's is a restrictive reading of Freud's `Das Unheimliche',(19) perhaps answering her own question as to why Freud does not refer to foreigners in that context. Rather than implying a broad but unspoken ethically inspired politics of psychoanalysis (a cosmopolitanism whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious),(20) unheimlich -- with its intimations of an unfamiliar rehearsal of the familiar -- is a personal experience not clearly linked to the manifestations of the foreigner recounted by Kristeva. (In what way is the foreigner `familiar'? Is unheimlich not more appropriately applied to the strangeness of our fellows: our strange neighbours, our betraying friends ...?)

Despite the stretching of her conclusions, however, Kristeva's contribution provides a valuable entry point into the considerations of community that are the focus of this paper. The contribution of psychoanalysis to muddying the waters of identity politics may not resolve the problems of nationalism, racism, ethnicism, but it does highlight the instability of monolithic identity formations. This revelation of the contingency of being, `homelessness', is the state of finding oneself to be a `guest'. The experience of unheimlich may therefore enable the possibility of responding to the other because one has at least come to know in some sense what alterity is:(21)

When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the `double' being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted -- a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The `double' has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.(22) The Loss of Community, the Lost Community

In the reconceptualisation (or the return to a conception) of community as being-in-common, rather than existing in communion as some higher order entity endowed with unicity and coherence that cannot be other than...