Jean-Luc Nancy and Antonio Negri on Collective Potentialities

Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Community/Common: Jean-Luc Nancy andAntonio Negri on Collective Potentialities

Helen Morgan Parmett

Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA

Philosophical debates about ‘‘the common’’ have emerged as a prevalent thread of scholarshipin communication. Little of this work, however, considers the relationship between thecommon and community. This essay takes up this relationship by putting the work ofAntonio Negri into conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy. I attend to the two scholars’ differingconceptions of immanence and alterity, death and poverty, language and communication,work and production, love, and the people and multitude. I suggest juxtaposing Negri’sand Nancy’s ontologies of the common creates divergent possibilities for understandinghow collective potentialities emerge and can be actualized. Ultimately, I argue for a refusalto choose between the two thinkers, suggesting the necessity of thinking the commonkairologically.

doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01125.x

‘‘Community’’ remains a prevalent and ubiquitous discourse in modern culture.Take, for example, post-Katrina New Orleans, where ‘‘community’’ emerged as acentral organizing principle for understanding the storm, its aftermath, and thecity’s rebuilding. Cited variously as the reason for survival through the storm (‘‘thecommunity—not the government—pulled together to rescue its citizens’’), themobilization behind the rebuilding process (‘‘the community is pulling together torebuild the city’’), and the object of the rebuilding itself (‘‘the city will be rebuilt torestore a sense of community’’), community is a keyword (Williams, 1985) throughwhich the city is imagined and reimagined. In these examples of New Orleans,community is taken for granted as a necessary and ultimate good. Yet, it can also bethought of as a ‘‘terrain of struggle,’’ where community is a site of contestation betweenthose forces that seek to emphasize ‘‘collective responsibility and discipline as the basisof successful ‘prosperity’ (i.e., positioning on the market)’’ and movements that ‘‘tendto oppose alternative forms of identification based on radical decommodificationand reappropriation from below’’ (Barchiesi, 2003, pp. 4–5). The continued pull and

Corresponding author: Helen Morgan Parmett; e-mail: [email protected]

Communication, Culture & Critique 5 (2012) 171–190 © 2012 International Communication Association 171

Community/Common H. Morgan Parmett

import of a discourse of community in the current conjuncture is precisely its abilityto speak to these tensions between a kind of ‘‘government through community’’(Rose, 1999) and what is increasingly being referred to in philosophical and politicaldebates as ‘‘the common.’’

Despite its recent uptake in a range of scholarship, discussions around thecommon infrequently reference Jean-Luc Nancy, though his writings on being-in-common and community emerged in conjunction with the autonomist Marxistswho are more commonly associated with thinking through the common. Anto-nio Negri emerges as perhaps the most well known among the autonomists, buthis approach to the common and to community is quite different than Nancy’s.For both thinkers, the common is an ontological category that grapples with thecollective potentiality of singularities and problematizes philosophical and politicalconceptions of community. Both aim to think of how to understand differenceand being together in common beyond its capture, governmentalization, or sub-lation. Yet, the alternatives that each poses differ, and, thus, they offer differentcritiques of community and pose different ontological frameworks for thinkingabout the collective potentiality of the common and how such potentiality might beactualized.

In this essay, I put Negri and Nancy into conversation to draw out the tensionsbetween their categories of the common, including their differing conceptions ofimmanence and alterity, death and poverty, work and production, love, and thepeople and multitude. In thinking through the tensions between these two thinkers,I argue that the common emerges as a complex and multifaceted category for under-standing how collective potentialities emerge and can be actualized. Further, thejuxtaposition of the two thinkers’ conceptions of the common provides a critiqueof community at the current conjuncture and of alternatives to its capture andgovernmentalization. I contend juxtaposing Negri’s and Nancy’s ontologies of thecommon complicates what the common can be. Ultimately, I argue for a refusal tochoose between the two thinkers, suggesting the necessity of thinking the commonkairologically.

Governmentalizing community

As Butchart (2010) notes, community is often taken for granted as a necessaryand ultimate good; yet, it is precisely its seeming innocence that renders it anintegral category of critique for addressing persisting philosophical questions onthe universal and the particular, the interior and the exterior, and similarity anddifference (pp. 21–22). Community can be traced in ancient Greek thought aboutthe polis (Delanty, 2003; Depew & Peters, 2001; Miller, 1993), Christian thoughtabout the cosmos and neighborly brotherhood (Delanty, 2003; Derrida, 1997;Isin, 2011), as well as in critiques of modernity and the fall of medieval institu-tions (Durkheim, 1964; Isin, 2002, 2011; Tonnies, 1963; Weber, 1947; Williams,1983). By way of creating a constructive dialogue between Negri and Nancy, I

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H. Morgan Parmett Community/Common

would first like to think through what is one of the exigencies to which thecommon is posed to address at the present conjuncture: the governmentalization ofcommunity.

Nikolas Rose (1999) argues that although the theme of the loss of communityand the desire to restore it has been prevalent at least since the 18th century andparticularly in the work of Rousseau and Hegel, it was in the 1960s and 1970s thatcommunity emerged as a response and solution to problems in government. Beforethis, community was primarily theorized in terms of a sense of belonging in relationto society and modernity. Community was characterized by its loss and the passingof an organic world that had given way to one of industrialization, urbanization,fragmentation, and alienation (e.g., Tonnies’, 1963, distinction between Gemeinschaftand Gesellschaft). Durkheim (1964) and the Chicago School of Sociology (Burgess,1926; Park, 1915; Park & Burgess, 1925; Wirth, 1938), conversely, looked for howcommunity emerged out of diversity in new forms in modern society in, for example,industrialized urban communities. Themes of community’s loss and retrieval amidstan increasingly fragmented society are followed in communitarian theories ofcommunity as well, where community is posed as belonging in terms of citizenship(e.g., Bellah, 1995; Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swindler, & Tipton, 1996; Etzioni, 1995;Putnam, 1993, 1999). Robert Putnam’s (1999) suggestion that community has beenlost in postmodern society, as we now ‘‘bowl alone’’ rather than together in ourcommunities, contends that bowling alone produces a lack of social capital and aconsequent diminishing of the democratic structures of society. Community is thusoffered as a solution to the problems of governing a diverse and dispersed citizenry.

Rose’s (1999) theory of ‘‘governing through community’’ draws attention to howcommunity is rationalized as the appropriate locus for crime, psychology, socialwelfare, community care, architecture, policing, and so on. Governing throughcommunity does not entail repressive mechanisms of force and control but insteaddepends on the active and productive participation of individuals who articu-late themselves to a community and to community ethics. Rose argues governingthrough community points to a transition into a new form of power, what he terms‘‘ethico-politics.’’ Ethico-politics ‘‘concerns itself with the self-techniques necessaryfor responsible self-government and the relations between one’s obligation to oneselfand one’s obligations to others’’ (Rose, 1999, p. 188). Although these communi-ties that are brought into existence are not a cooptation of previously authenticcommunities, the governmental move is nonetheless a kind of harnessing or captureof something else:

. . . in the institution of community, a sector is brought into existence whosevectors and forces can be mobilized, enrolled, deployed in novel programmesand techniques which encourage and harness active practices ofself-management and identity construction, of personal ethics and collectiveallegiances. (1999, p. 176)



On my read, Rose is suggesting community is a kind of harnessing of the com-mon—a harnessing of the collective potentialities that are embodied in theseactive, material, technical, and creative assemblages that serve to constitute potentialforms of life. In post-Katrina New Orleans, for example, the collective allegiancesthat arose directly after the storm risk being harnessed by the reconstituting of acommunity through the governmentalizing and making measurable those struc-tures of care and support that arose out of the struggles and resistances of thepoor. Efforts such as the Neighborhood Participation Program—which encour-ages neighborhood organizations (a key site of collective organizing after thestorm) to register with city government to receive benefits—harness, rational-ize, and limit the collective potentiality that is forged out of these organizationsby putting them to work in the interests of governance rather than constitutingthe common (the Neighborhood Participation Program, Resolution No. R-10-412,October 7, 2010).

Formulated through the Autonomia movement in Italy in the 1970s, ‘‘thecommon’’ emerged as a way to theorize the collective potentiality embodied inwhat Marx (1973) referred to as living labor and the general intellect. Capital, asMario Tronti (1966) suggested, is parasitic on this collective potentiality, and aslabor becomes increasingly flexible and service-based, it depends more and moreon the immaterial, creative, and communicative capacities of social individualsin an attempt to subsume and harness these potentialities for the benefit andprofit of capital (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 2004; Lazzarato, 1996; Terranova, 2004;Virno, 2004). The common, which reemerged in recent years as a responseto the increasing flexiblization of post-Fordist capital, theorizes how politicalmovements can resist capital’s harnessing of collective potentiality to create newforms of collective life. Precisely where community fits into the common issomewhat ambiguous. At once assumed as the subsumed form of collectivepotentiality from which value can be abstracted (Hardt & Negri, 2000) and simul-taneously the form and means of sustaining the common (De Angelis, 2003),community thus appears as a specter to the common that remains particularlyundertheorized.

It is in this sense that the work of Jean-Luc Nancy becomes insightful for theorizingand interrogating how community might be understood in relation to a theory of thecommon. Nancy’s theory of being-in-common as an inoperative community formedout of exposure to the death of an other is perhaps the most influential poststructuraltheory on community. His work, which draws on Bataille and Heidegger, is part of,and highly influential on, a prolific thread of poststructural scholarship that tries toreimagine the philosophical and ontological possibilities of community at the presentconjuncture (Agamben, 1993; Auge, 1995; Balibar, 2011; Blanchot, 1988; Cortlett,1989; Esposito, 2010; Lash, 1994; Lingis, 1994; Maffesoli, 1996). Nancy has also beencriticized for his fidelity to the concept of community and his attempt to recuperateit (Derrida, 1997; Isin, 2011; Joseph, 2002). Yet, in what follows, I draw on Nancy toraise the specter of community in the debate about the possibility of the common.



In so doing, I aim to trouble and deepen the theorization of the relationship betweencommunity and the common and, consequently, how its ontology might be theorizedto resist governmentalization and sublation.

Alterity/immanence and death/poverty

Jean-Luc Nancy and Antonio Negri both offer a conception of the common that servesas a critique of and alternative to how community instrumentalizes collectivity andcollective action into a unified One. Although both thinkers offer slightly differentconceptions of ‘‘singular’’ being as a response to community’s tendency to erasedifference by fusing the many into the One, Nancy and Negri differ in how theyconceive those singularities are made to be in common. Central to the differencesbetween Nancy and Negri’s conceptions of the common are their differing ontologicaltheories of being as alterity (Nancy) and being as immanent totality (Negri).

Community emerges as a question for Nancy (1990, 1991) at the moment at whichit seems we are at the ‘‘‘end’ of any attempt to appropriate the sense of community’’(1991, p. 6). That is, we can no longer think of community as immanent essence inthe sense that it explains something about common being. As Nancy (1991) puts it,‘‘We can no longer say, Here is sense, here is cohumanity, and here is its philosophy’’(p. 5). It is with this in mind that Nancy sets out to rethink community. Drawingon Heidegger’s Dasein and Mitsein and Bataille, Nancy proposes an alternativeontological conception of community, what he terms being-in-common.

Yet, Nancy does not abandon the term of community altogether. Instead, herethinks what it means to be community where community is not a ‘‘something’’but is instead ‘‘something that happens to us’’ (1990, p. 2). Being-in-common thusputs an emphasis on the in—it is an emphasis of a relation but one that is not tiedto any particular commonality. He argues, ‘‘What could be more common than tobe, than being? . . . We shall say that being is not common in the sense of a commonproperty, but that it is in common’’ (1990, p. 1). It is therefore not the nature ofbeing that is common, but rather the very fact of being that is lived in-common, andconsequently, always shared and relational (1991, p. 2).

Being-in-common is proposed by Nancy as an alternative to communities ofessence or, in other words, conceptions of common being that assume an immanenttranscendence. It is this immanentism that Nancy sees as the greatest failure ofcommunism. Communism, he argues, defines being in terms of production of itsown essence, which becomes embodied in the oneness of community: ‘‘A communitypresupposed as having to be one of human beings presupposes that it effect, or that itmust effect, as such and integrally, its own essence, which is itself the accomplishmentof the essence of humanness’’ (1990, p. 3). It is this philosophy among communistthinkers that he argues makes community falter into totalitarianism. Nancy alsocritiques Rousseau and Hegel, who theorized immanence in terms of distinctelements fused together into one. Both these thinkers historicized on the basis of alost community, something to be regained and reconstituted, a lost age of harmonious



bonding and immanent unity where community meant intimate communication(1990, p. 9). Further, Nancy suggests that Christianity and its desire for resurrectionsolidify the immanentism of community. That is, the desire for a lost communityspeaks to a desire for reuniting with the divine and positing the divine essence ofcommunity (1990, p. 10). Community becomes figured as fusion, being absorbedinto a larger body, enveloped into a common substance (1990, p. xxxviii).

As an alternative to immanence, Nancy refigures community as the impossibilityof immanence, which one can only come into contact with through death. Nancyfigures death as that which constitutes being-in-common through recognition ofalterity. Drawing from Bataille and Heidegger’s being-toward-death, Nancy arguesthat it is through death that the individual experiences the impossibility of commu-nion and the impossibility of complete immanence and unity through fusion. It is theexperience of the death of the other that desubjectifies the subject into a singularitythat can only be in-common:

The motif of the revelation, through death, of being-together or being-with, andof the crystallization of the community around the death of its members, that isto say around the ‘‘loss’’ (the impossibility) of their immanence and not aroundtheir fusional assumption in some collective hypostasis, leads to a space ofthinking incommensurable with the problematics of sociality orintersubjectivity. . . . Death irremediably exceeds the resources of a metaphysicsof the subject. (Nancy, 1990, p. 14; emphasis in original)

Community is therefore forged out of the impossibility of a communion with thesubject of death. Through the exposure to the other’s death, we come into contactwith our own mortality. But more so, it is through the other’s death that we cometo know existence because death brings out the impossibility of sharing in existence.It is only through knowing this impossibility that we come to know existence asbeing-in-common, that we exist together in relation, that existence is community.This creates a relationship to the other that is formed in nonrecognition or alterity(Nancy, 1990, p. 33). The ‘‘in’’ of being-in-common is thus the ‘‘‘in’ inside of what hasno inside’’ (Nancy, 1991, p. 8). Being is forged at the limit of being, at its finitude. Inremembering the many dead left in the wake of Katrina, which many of us witnessedtogether on our television screens, and the bodies of those with whom it seems thatwe have little in common, Nancy makes a powerful call for how we might understandsuch an event to be an important moment of constituting being-in-common ascommunion with an other not through what we share, but through this exposureand nonsharing, we are nonetheless there for, and with each other, in death.Nancy’s deconstructionism thus places ontology as an alterity:

We are alike because each one of us is exposed to the outside that we are forourselves. . . . I do not rediscover myself, nor do I recognize myself in the other: Iexperience the other’s alterity, or I experience alterity in the other together withthe alteration that ‘‘in me’’ sets my singularity outside me and infinitely delimits



it. Community is that singular ontological order in which the other and the sameare alike . . . that is to say, in the sharing of identity. (Nancy, 1990, p. 33)

Yet, it is not that the subject comes to know the self through the other.1 Rather,the subject comes to know that it is not a subject through the other—both aresingularities that can only exist in relation to each other. Nancy (1990) describessingularities as ‘‘the singular being, which is not the individual, is the finite being. . . .Individuation detaches closed-off entities from a formless ground—whereas onlycommunication, contagion, or communion constitute the being of individuals’’(p. 27). Nancy’s thinking on alterity, singularity, and the being-in-common betweenthese singularities poses being not as essence or communion but rather as difference.Yet, his thinking also provides a way for understanding how difference is shared, asthis being of fundamental difference, this alterity, is what all beings share (Nancy,1990, pp. 27–28). Nancy thus redefines community from that which restores a lostcommunion to the sharing of community and the sharing of finitude. Communitybecomes dethingified and instead becomes a verb. Community is the sharing of thefinitude of being; it is the exposure of the singularity of being between singular beings.

An important concept for Nancy’s being-in-common is exposure. He contends,

Sharing comes down to this: what community reveals to me, in presenting to memy birth and my death, is my existence outside myself. . . . Community itself, insum, is nothing but this exposition. It is the community of finite beings, and assuch it is itself a finite community. In other words, not a limited community asopposed to an infinite community, but a community of finitude, becausefinitude ‘‘is’’ communitarian, and because finitude alone is communitarian.(Nancy, 1990, pp. 26–27)

Community is not something that can be presupposed as a ground of being; this iswhat totalitarianism does—it presupposes a fundamental essence to the community.Instead, community is exposition, where being exposed means ‘‘to be ‘posed’ inexteriority, according to an exteriority, having to do with an outside in the veryintimacy of an inside’’ (Nancy, 1990, p. xxxvii). In Nancy’s terms, if HurricaneKatrina brought about a kind of being-in-common, it was not because peoplereinvested themselves into creating renewed bonds of a shared or common life, but,rather, because it was a moment of exposure of finitude.

Antonio Negri is critical of ontological frameworks such as Nancy’s that positbeing in terms of alterity and finitude. Criticizing postmodern thinkers who ‘‘lookfor an opening on the margins of the model that is emerging,’’ he argues that thismove seeks a liminal transcendence, ‘‘an immanence that is almost a transcendence,an ambiguous location where materialist realism must bow to mysticism’’ (Negri,2003, p. 192). Negri argues that these thinkers are correctly diagnosing the symptomsof shifts in capital that leave us abandoned at the margins, but instead of remainingtransfixed or immobilized by the limit and our finitude, we need to push throughto the other side to go beyond the limit—to dilate the opening of the common.



Postmodern thinking instead remains a dialectical solution. He argues, ‘‘This iswhat occurs in the most careful, critical, and attentive postmodern readings. . . . Inorder to grasp the movement, they are forced to construct a structural dialecticthat surreptitiously recuperates the margin or reinserts bare alterity within totality’’(Negri, 2003, p. 207). In this sense, the being-in-common that is shared in post-Katrina New Orleans is not only that which is born out of the sharing of death andfinitude. It is the forces of capital that indeed influenced the levee breech and theabandonment of the black, poor, and elderly in New Orleans, but this abandonmentand exposure to alterity need not be all that we share. Instead, Negri points to thepossibility that, in the wake of this abandonment, there is also the possibility thatnew subjectivities and bonds of commonality might be born out of these struggles.This speaks to Negri’s fundamentally productivist ontology, which he draws largelyfrom Spinoza and Deleuze.

Further, Negri’s ontology also draws from these thinkers a conception of imma-nence that denies transcendence. Instead, it is an immanence that conceives ofa totality where being is teleological but without a particular telos. Immanentbeing therefore does not seek communion with a One. Thus, if we are to con-tinue with the example from New Orleans, the new bonds of commonalitythat might be produced would not be aimed at reconstituting a harmoniouscity that imagines and nostalgizes a lost community destroyed by the storm.Instead, Negri draws from Spinoza to pose immanence in terms of the multi-tude, where the multitude is composed of singularities. Hardt and Negri (2004)articulate singularities as ‘‘a social subject whose difference cannot be reducedto sameness, a difference that remains different. . . . The plural singularities ofthe multitude thus stand in contrast to the undifferentiated unity of the people’’(p. 99).

Rather than touching being at the limit of finitude as Nancy does, Negriargues for being as eternal, as an opening beyond measure. He finds this open-ing in the ontologically constitutive figure of poverty, which, he argues, has noexteriority:

The experience of poverty is given on the edge of time, in the innovation of theeternal; it is thus a practice of the immeasurable. This practice presents itself as‘‘outside measure,’’ i.e., as resistance; or it presents itself as ‘‘beyond measure,’’i.e., as constituent power. (Negri, 2003, p. 200)

Here, Negri’s temporalizing of the eternal beyond measure stands in contrast toNancy’s more spatializing exposure to alterity. Negri thus recuperates an oftenoverlooked facet of collectivity: time. Although community both depends on andhelps construct the meaning of time through collective memory that refigures thepast for the present (Zelizer, 2001, p. 184), Negri’s emphasis on the common asproducing the eternal offers an alternative rendering of time than that of community.It presents an opening, rather than a closing, as potential, tipping toward the futurerather than the past.



Moreover, Negri’s figure of the poor as the ontology of the eternal standsin juxtaposition to Nancy’s being-in-common through Heidegger’s being-toward-death. Negri argues the poor elude death because they have already overcome it. Theyare that which capital could not rationalize through its economic, humanist, moral,and religious measures (Negri, 2003, pp. 167–168). Thus, the lessons of Katrina arenot that we are all potentially abandoned together at the margins, but, rather, it isfound in the productive potentiality of those who have been most abandoned tosurvive, to be affected, and to create affects. In this, Negri sees a productive capacityof the poor; they produce the common through their opening to the immeasurabilityof time (Negri, 2003, p. 168). The poor’s production is corporeal, as the locationof poverty is in the body. Through biopolitical production, the body is subjectedto capital through its exclusion, but it expresses its resistance through its body andits ‘‘capacity to express affects . . . when it shows itself as ‘being affected’ . . . by theproductive relations of singularity’’ (Negri, 2003, p. 204). The body of the poor istherefore the power of the common. The bodies of those abandoned at the Superdomeor New Orleans’ Convention Center after Hurricane Katrina express this power ofthe body to affectively resist and to pose the possibility of the common. The bodies ofthose who had been all but discarded and laid to waste (Bauman, 2004) articulated aright to persist by being forced and forcing themselves into a public space in whichthose bodies essentially had no ‘‘legitimate’’ right to occupy (Butler, 2011).

Here thus emerges the first juxtaposition between Negri and Nancy—that betweenNancy’s ontology through alterity, which is born out through a relationship with thedeath of the other, and Negri’s ontology, which presents itself through the constitutivefigure of poverty as an opening into the eternal beyond measure. Whereas Negriposits an immanent ontology where there is no outside, Nancy posits an ontologyin which there is no inside. Though both turn to singularities to understand theconstitutive forces of common being that deny transcendence or common essence,their differing ontologies make their conception of singularity not reducible toone another. Negri’s singularity is not something that is finite and Nancy’s is notsomething that is produced or productive. Thus, another aporia between the twothinkers, to which I now turn, is their differing conceptions of how the commoncomes into being. Whereas Nancy’s being-in-common can only be brought into beingthrough an unworking, or desoeuvrement,2 for Negri, the common is something thatis produced out of the collective potentiality of the multitude.

Unworking/producing, communication, and love

For Negri, the common is a constant becoming, a potentiality, whereas for Nancy,it is through experiences of exposure that we find ourselves in community. What isat stake in positing the common as finitude versus as eternal and beyond measureis differing conceptions of how production functions in relation to the common.Nancy’s ontology of being-in-common as finitude leads him to argue communitymust be unworked, creating what he calls the inoperative community. For Negri,



conversely, the common is something that is produced through the constitutivepower of the multitude. Negri’s fidelity to Marx leads him to privilege the category ofproduction within his ontological framework, whereas Nancy’s deconstructionismdeprivileges production. Both see communication as key to collectivity, but forNancy, communication unworks community, whereas for Negri, revolutionizingcommunication is central to produce new forms of common being. Negri and Nancyboth also turn to love as a way to understand how the common is constituted, but,again, their differing ontologies present divergent possibilities for thinking abouthow love constitutes the common and being-in-common.

Part of Nancy’s critique of communist politics is that it views community as awork or as a product of a working community. Through work and the productionof community, Nancy suggests community becomes a single thing that loses its ‘‘in’’of being-in-common (Nancy, 1990, p. xxxix). Thus, Nancy argues ‘‘community ismade of what retreats from it: the hypostasis of the ‘common,’ and its work’’ (Nancy,1990, p. xxxix). This subtraction is not to be interpreted in terms of lack, but ratherit is a workless and inoperative activity. That is, community is not something thatneeds to be made, produced, or instituted, nor is it a product of political will. Instead,‘‘community is given to us with being and as being, well in advance of all our projects,desires, and undertakings. At bottom, it is impossible for us to lose community’’(Nancy, 1990, p. 35).

For Nancy, the unworking of community is presented through writing, language,and communication (Nancy, 1990, p. 41). The practice and theory of communi-cation is inextricably intertwined with scholarly debates regarding the formation,maintenance, and reproduction of community (Anderson, 1991; Carey, 1989; Depew& Peters, 2001; Habermas, 1984, 1987; Miller, 1993; Williams, 1983). As RaymondWilliams (1983) notes, ‘‘any real theory of communication is a theory of community’’(p. 313). Central to these debates are analyses of how communication bridges, orfails to bridge, difference and the vexed possibilities of sublating the individual intoa unified one or whole (see, e.g., Allen, 2006; Fraser, 1992; Grewal, 2007; Peters,1994; Rothenbuhler, 2001; Warner, 2002). Nancy aims to negotiate the relationshipbetween similarity/difference and the one/many to theorize communication in a waythat maintains the alterity of being as constitutive of common being.

As Fynsk (1990) explains,

There ‘‘is’’ an other of language, but it is given to us in its alterity only insofar asit is written. And this writing occurs always in a singular voice. . . . The mutualinterpellation of singularities is not prior to any address in language, it is theaddress of language. . .What Nancy defines as community lies at the limits oflanguage—it is even the ‘‘origin’’ of language . . . but is always of language.Otherwise, there would be no need to write and no way to write it. (p. xxv)

Communication exposes singularity, a lack of commonality, and the impossibilityof recognition of self or other. For Nancy, however, this requires an alternativeunderstanding of communication from classical and modern conceptions. Whereas



much communication research figures communication as that which can overcomedifference, Nancy suggests what communities communicate is their singularity—thefundamental inassimilable being in difference. Communication communicates theimpossibility of communication as we know it. It is important to stress here that it isnot a communication of lack for Nancy, but rather of finitude.

Here, Alphonso Lingis’ (1994) thoughts on the communication that is calledforth when one is at the bedside of one who is dying is particularly useful in parsingout the possibilities of Nancy’s theory of communication of finitude. Lingis suggests,

. . . we who go to their side, who have to go to their side, find ourselves at thelimit of speech. This is not where the necessity of language ends in silence, butwhere it is no longer what has to be said that is the essential, and the saying andthe one that says inessential: now you find you have to be there and have tospeak. You have to say something—something that language cannot say,something that is not in the resources of common discourse to be able to say,and something that is, in the end, inessential. . . . This situation is not only theend of language. . . . It is also the beginning, the beginning of communication.(Lingis, 1994, pp. 113–114, emphasis in original)

Lingis suggests that in this exposure to finitude the communication called forthcannot be that which is composed in the shared rationality and discourses of abounded community (as in Habermas’ sense of communicative action). Generally,we conceive that what matters most is what one says and what one says must beframed within the common language and discourse of our communities. But thisis not so in the being-in-common that is forged through death and finitude—themeaning of what one says matters little. When one speaks, one communicates thesingularity of being, which, for Lingis, is communicated as the noise that rationaldiscourse and communication excoriates. He suggests, ‘‘Our singularity and ourindefinite discernibility is found in, and is heard in, our outcries and our murmurs,our laughter and our tears: the noise of life’’ (Lingis, 1994, p. 92).

Both Negri and Nancy could agree on the point that communication is fun-damental to the common and that what is communicated is the singularity ofbeing. Both also call for a new theory of communication that speaks to singularity.Yet, Negri (2003) is skeptical of deconstructionists’ privileging of language andcommunication as ‘‘the exclusive horizon of being’’ of the common (p. 192). Heargues,

They bring their search to a halt on the edge of current being, and go no further.The result is the exhaustion of the ontological sphere, the end of history and anomnivorous tautology of the exposition. If the common submits to theseconditions it will present itself as the end of the common. (Negri, 2003, p. 192)

Finitude for Negri is thus the edge of current being. Negri sees something beyondthis mode of being—beyond being that is caught in a tautology of exposure. Tomove beyond postmodern being—a being that he would say capital continually tries



to harness and capture—new forms of being need to be produced. Again, what isproduced for Negri is the eternal, which is the opening of the common rather thanthe common as finitude. Thus, Negri might argue that Nancy takes us to the edgeof being and abandons us there, whereas he seeks an understanding of how to gobeyond this being. In this sense, it is a teleological process, but one that has no telos.Negri’s politics therefore do not fall into the immanent ontology of the transcen-dent essence of the One of community. Instead, there is no final cause to whichthe teleology of the multitude advances—‘‘it is the form through which eternityof matter . . . progressively constitutes itself without any axiomatic qualification’’(Negri, 2003, p. 183). Being, for Negri, is therefore a constituent power that is alwaysproductive. Rather than an unworking of community through communication thatcan only communicate the finitude of being, Negri seeks to produce new formsof communication and subjectivity. Terranova’s (2004) discussion of peer-to-peernetworking poses one possibility of what these new forms of communication mightlook like.

Negri presents two interwoven ways in which this production is made possi-ble: through exodus and through love, the latter of which I turn to momentarily.Whereas for Nancy, the unworking of community requires retreat or subtrac-tion, exodus for Negri is still based on the productive and constituent powerof the multitude. The multitude, in effect, takes its power that capital seeksto harness elsewhere. Exodus requires the production of new spaces and newtemporalities where the common constitutes an ‘‘ever more common context’’(Negri, 2003, p. 185). Negri’s constituent power that is beyond measure is adilation of the common that would seem to require a kind of working or atleast production or will as it works to constitute a common context. Nancy’sunworking of community, conversely, does not require this kind of exodus. Theinoperative community is before the working of community and thus is accessedthrough communication that unworks its workings to expose its alterity. Theinoperative community thus exposes spatialities and temporalities of constitutivedifference.

For both thinkers, however, what is at stake in the production and unworkingof the common is resistance to capture or perhaps resistance to the technologiesof governing in terms of Rose’s (1999) ethico-politics. Negri (2003) articulates thethreat of capture in terms of measure: ‘‘Since resistance produces new spaces ofcreation and circulation, it follows that new institutions of measure will try tocontrol them and bring them under their rule, while new enterprises will attempt toexploit them’’ (p. 201). This follows autonomist thinking of capital as fundamentallyreactive to the constituent power of the multitude. Resistance for Negri is thereforea ‘‘negation of the limit that exclusion imposes on the common . . . the unlimited(apeiron), against the limit (peras) of exclusion and of measure; it is an absoluteopening against the closure of the common and the pervasion of its teleology’’(Negri, 2003, p. 202). Again, Negri refers to a kind of opening or dilation ofthe common. Such an opening might be glimpsed in the networks of care that



emerged in New Orleans directly after Katrina, in, for example, the revitalization ofneighborhood organizations. These alternative structures of care respond to the lackof governmental support in helping survivors to return and rebuild. In effect, theyrepresent the multitude taking its constitutive power and putting it to work elsewhere,and it is precisely this power that the Neighborhood Participation Program seeks toharness.

Nancy figures resistance in terms of community’s resistance to its completion,a kind of becoming-community that is always incomplete or an excess. Nancy’sconception of community is that which exceeds signification, ‘‘its aim would be toanswer to an unforeseeable event that escapes any instituted order or meaning andconstitutes the site where the question of the very meaning of political existence isreopened’’ (Fynsk, 1990, p. xxvi). This excess is the space at which being itself isabandoned. In the rebuilding of New Orleans, Nancy might encourage us to lookto the excesses in those moments of being-in-common that cannot be captured bygovernment programs such as the Neighborhood Participation Program. We wouldthus need to unwork the governmentalizing forces of community to find spaces andpractices of excess.

Negri and Nancy, however, both turn to love as a way to explain how thecommon is constituted. Whereas for Negri, love is generative and constructs toolsthat make possible the production of subjects and the common, for Nancy loveis expositive. It exposes the finitude of being and therefore unworks the bonds ofcommunities of essence. Nancy suggests what lovers do is expose the impossibilityof communion and the fact that communication is not communion. Love exposesthe unworking and incompletion of community through the unleashing of passions.Negri’s love, conversely, is a productive force capable of forming new subjectivities.Negri draws on Spinoza’s materialist sense of love, where ‘‘love is the ontologicalpower that constructs being. But being is not a given, but a constructed product’’(Negri, 2003, p. 210). Love ‘‘constructs tools, languages, and politics of being withinthe common; and in generating, it creates being. . . . But in the common, generationis always singular because it is characterized by poverty’’ (Negri, 2003, p. 211). Lovetherefore tips being away from death and toward eternity: ‘‘Nothingness and deathare prior to love, before the experience of the generation of being; then being isregenerated in the common and in the eternal’’ (Negri, 2003, p. 212). Thus, forNegri, love is the generative capacity of being that constitutes subjects, whereasfor Nancy, love is what exposes the (non)subject of being. We are hence facedwith another aporia between the two thinkers’ theories of subjectivity, where Negriseeks to think through how new subjects are produced in common and Nancyseeks to understand how subjects are desubjectified and, in the process, exposedto the in of being-in-common. For both, however, these processes are political,and they help identify how singular beings act in common. I thus now turn tothe final juxtaposition between the two thinkers, that between the multitude andthe people, which identifies how each thinker understands the politicization ofthe common.



Multitude/the people

For Negri, the multitude is the political figure of his immanent ontology, but Nancymaintains the controversial community and even ‘‘the people.’’ As Paulo Virno(2004) explains, the multitude poses an alternative to the Hobbesian concept of ‘‘thepeople,’’ the latter of which ‘‘is strictly correlated to the existence of the State,’’ wherethe many of the state of nature fuse into One through the forging of the state (p. 22).Spinoza’s multitude, in contrast, is ‘‘a plurality which persists as such in the publicscene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converginginto a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion’’ (Virno, 2004,p. 21). The multitude is the many as the many, that which Hobbes feared would leadto the war of all against all and to which the concept of the people and the bodyseeks to pose a solution through the communion of the many through the State.The multitude redefines the meaning of the One and of immanence: its unity is nolonger the State (or God), but, rather ‘‘language, intellect, the communal facultiesof the human race. . . . The many must be thought of as the individualization ofthe universal, of the generic, of the shared experience’’ (2004, p. 25). Despite thedifferences between Negri and Virno,2 it is in their autonomist Marxist conception ofimmanence as the multitude as a common being not reducible to a One that serves todistinguish Negri and Virno from Nancy’s figuring of the unworking of communityand reconstitution of the people.3

In an interview, Nancy (2003) states he is skeptical of Negri’s and others’ disposalof the concept of the people for the multitude. He poses three problems with this:first, the multitude breaks things into individual units, which fail to account forhow movements identify themselves in terms of community; second, the multitudeconstitutes an effect of the globalization of capital; and third, it is ambiguous anddoes not contain within it a conception of how multitudes multiply or increase theirforce. Nancy suggests he is more interested in reclaiming the concept of the peoplefrom its populist leanings toward one that does not assume an essence. He sees thepeople as a possibility for thinking in terms of a ‘‘we’’ such that a kind of ‘‘jointstatement’’ might be made. He asks Negri (2003), ‘‘can multitudes say ‘we’? And, ifso, which ‘we’ are we talking about?’’ This desire to hold onto a sense of the ‘‘we’’and of the people is suggestive of the reasons why Nancy is not willing to abandonthe concept of community altogether but instead seeks to redefine and unwork it.

Nancy’s critique of multitude is one that is frequently waged against Hardt andNegri’s (2000) Empire. If multitude is a singularity that strikes vertically at the heartof Empire, to what extent, if at all, do singularities need to communicate? And howdo they communicate? Hardt and Negri (2000) suggest the need to develop newtypes of communication between singularities that are based on difference ratherthan resemblance (p. 57), but they do little to theorize communication of multitude.In Multitude, Hardt and Negri (2004) turn toward a discussion of habits and ofButler’s performativity to begin to theorize alternative modes of communication(pp. 199–201). This desire to think about how communication can be revolutionized



between singularities in the service of the common is, in my view, what has drivensome theorists of the common to return to a conception of community (Barchiesi,2003; De Angelis, 2003; De Marcellus, 2003; Harvie, 2004). It is here that placingNegri’s and Nancy’s theories of the common in a productive juxtaposition canmost fruitfully help pose critical possibilities for theorizing collective action andcommunication beyond the governmentalizing capture of community. Thus, in theconclusion that follows, I consider what each thinker’s ontology offers for under-standing the common in relation to community and communication at the presentconjuncture.

Between Negri and Nancy: community, communication, and the common

Barchiesi (2003) suggests community is not only that which is harnessed, but, rather,it exists also as a force in excess to capital’s capture. Although he, Harvie (2004),De Angelis (2003), and De Marcellus (2003) note the problems associated withcommunity,3 these authors seek to rethink the role of community in relation tothe common where it is figured as that which sustains the commons: ‘‘Commonssuggest alternative, noncommodified means to fulfill social needs. . .Commons arenecessarily created and sustained by communities, i.e., by social networks of mutualaid, solidarity, and practices of human exchange that are not reduced to the marketform’’ (De Angelis, 2003, p. 5). Harvie further argues communities exist betweenthe commons and the commodity. Communities are powerful because they enablethe production of information and knowledge for capital, and they also sustainproduction that is cooperative, self-managed, and self-organized (p. 2). Communitiesthat are overlapping and engaged in noncompetitive sharing and the gift-economyare thus seen as essential constituents of the common.4

It is to this end of thinking community in relation to the common that Nancy’sunworking of the concept of community becomes particularly helpful. If we are tothink of community as that which sustains the commons, community risks becomingessence, or unity through transcendent immanence. Community and commonsfigured as such both seem to be things—resources that are means and ends. Nancyis helpful in providing an ontological framework for this community that unworksit by positing community as an alterity already in common. This resonates withHarvie’s (2004) argument that we need to evaluate the communities we are alreadya part of, to think about the kinds of power they might hold, and about how theyfoster or prevent the production of the common. But this turn toward productionis clearly more in line with Negri’s productivist ontology. Communities in thissense are figured as that which works or are something to be worked on in theservice of the production of the common. What Nancy’s thinking provides is away for understanding community as something that does rather than somethingthat is. Nancy (1990) suggests community is born through communication in thesense that ‘‘communication is not a bond,’’ but, rather, ‘‘the constitutive fact of anexposition to the outside that defines singularity. . . . Community is the presentation



of the detachment (or retrenchment) of this distinction that is not individuation,but finitude compearing’’ (p. 29). It is through communication in this sense—in thesense of an exposure to alterity—that community as essence is unworked, and, thus,emerges as community of being-in-common.

Yet, there is also something unfulfilling to Nancy’s ontology, and it is to thisthat Negri’s productivism speaks. What is beyond the unworking of community orabandoned being? Negri’s move to think about how new forms of life can be producedthrough the collective potentiality of the multitude becomes more easily situated interms of a revolutionary politics that offers a vision of an alternative. Yet, I wouldargue both ontologies are political, as Nancy’s conception of being-in-common isinherently tied to the politicization of being that has been depoliticized throughthinking community as essence. The differences they pose in terms of their ontologiesof the common offer up two seemingly insoluble positions situated between deathand the figure of poverty, between immanence and alterity, between the people andmultitude, and between love’s unworking of community and love’s production ofcommon subjectivities.

However, by way of conclusion, I want to argue that each thinker’s position mustnecessarily be thought in terms of specific political contexts. They need to be thoughtkairologically in terms of how being is figured and positioned within particularmoments, how being emerges within the context of a particular event (Badiou, 2005).This is not a dialectical resolution between the two thinkers; instead, it offers away of thinking of ontology juxtapositionally. Ontology is figured as contingent andproduced out of a specific event to which the commonness of being emerges as alwayscommon, but not always common in the same way. In New Orleans, for example,Hurricane Katrina emerged as an event that unworked the bonds of communitythat had been solidified through the spatial politics of the city and exposed thefinitude of being. In the rebuilding process, on the other hand, there is a workingthat is at hand in the restoring of a sense of community that can tend toward thegovernmental and that can also tend toward the common, toward community thattips toward becoming and the production of new forms of life in Negri’s sense. Thereare elements of community that therefore need to be unworked in New Orleans—thebeing-in-common of being needs exposure to resist the governmentalizing gesturesof community to expose the commonality of being—but there is also an openingof a possibility for the dilation of the common. There are various possibilities forthinking beyond being as finitude. It is my hope, then, that in reading Nancy andNegri in juxtaposition to each other that perhaps a more complicated and troubledconceptualization of the common might emerge, a common whose ontology emergeswithin the context of particular events that tip toward divergent political possibilities.

Notes

1 See, for example, Nancy’s (2000) discussion of alterity as alter (p. 11).2 For a discussion of the meanings of the French term desoeuvrement, see Joris (1988),

where, in his translation of Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, he suggests that



though the word implies ‘‘idleness, a state of being without work, unoccupied, etc.’’(p. xxiii), it also implies an activity, of being active in one’s worklessness, that issomewhat lost in the English translation.

3 Virno (2004) is not willing to valorize the multitude in and of itself as necessarilyrevolutionary. He recognizes the multitude ‘‘contains within itself both loss andsalvation, acquiescence and conflict, servility and freedom’’ (p. 26). Virno and Negri alsodepart on the role of biopolitics in the production of real subsumption. For Negri,capital’s shift to biopolitical production—where capital relies on the production andreproduction of the very forms of life itself—enables real subsumption and also makespossible the constituent power of the multitude. Virno argues that there is nothing new inthis shift to biopolitical production; capital has always relied on labor power, which, heargues, is the real foundation of biopolitics (p. 83).

4 They cite, for example, the problems of understanding community in terms of the nationthat becomes self-valorizing and homogenizes differences (Barchiesi, 2003, p. 2; see alsoHardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 95, 106–107, and in particular their discussion of blacknationalism, p. 113). There is also a reference to the problems of understandingcommunity in terms of authentic locality that leads to overly romantic visions of a localas detached from larger global forces of capital and forces the exclusion of those who donot belong to the local (De Angelis, 2003, p. 11; De Marcellus, 2003, p. 15; Hardt & Negri,2000, p. 45). Instead, they propose seeing the local as ‘‘trans-local’’ (Barchiesi, 2003, p. 2;De Angelis, 2003, pp. 11–13).

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社区/公共：Jean-Luc Nancy 和 Antonio Negri 的集体潜力。

【摘要：】

传播学领域对“公共”的哲学辩论已经成为一条重要的主线，然而这类研究很少涉及到公共和社区之间的关系。本文将 Antonio Negri 与 Jean-Luc Nancy 的著作相比，来理清公共和社区之间的关系。我研读了两位学者关于内在和异性、死亡和贫穷、语言和沟通、工作和生产、爱情以及民族和民众的不同的概念阐释。我认为并列 Negri 和 Nancy 对公共的本体阐释增加了了解集体潜力出现和现实化的多种可能性。最后我认为对两个思想家不可放弃其一，表明了时机性地思考公共的概念的必要性。

Communauté/Commun : Jean-Luc Nancy et Antonio Negri sur les virtualités collectives

Les débats philosophiques à propos du « commun » sont ressortis comme étant un des thèmes

importants de la littérature en communication. Peu de ces travaux, néanmoins, examinent

l’association entre le commun et la communauté. Cet article s’intéresse à cette association en faisant

converser les travaux d’Antonio Negri et ceux de Jean-Luc Nancy. J’aborde les conceptions

différentes chez les deux auteurs d’immanence et d’altérité, de mort et de pauvreté, de langage et de

communication, de travail et de production, d’amour, et du peuple et de la multitude. Je suggère

qu’une juxtaposition des ontologies du commun de Negri et de Nancy crée des possibilités

divergentes de comprendre comment les potentialités collectives émergent et peuvent être

actualisées. Enfin, je parle en faveur d’un refus de choisir entre les deux penseurs, suggérant ainsi la

nécessité de penser le commun de façon kairologique.

Mots clés : théorie critique et culturelle, gouvernance, communication pour le changement social,

communication et communauté, le commun

Gemeingut: Jean-Luc Nancy und Antonio Negri über kollektive Möglichkeiten

Philosophische Debatten über ‚Gemeingut‘ sind in der Kommunikationswissenschaft stetig präsent. Kaum eine dieser Arbeiten thematisiert jedoch die Beziehung zwischen Gemeingut und Gemeinschaft. Dieser Aufsatz knüpft an diesen Zusammenhang an und bezieht die Arbeiten von Antonio Negri auf jene von Jean-Luc Nancy. Insbesondere betrachte ich die verschiedenen Konzepte beider Wissenschaftler zu Immanenz und Andersartigkeit, Tod und Armut, Sprache und Kommunikation, Arbeit und Produktion, Liebe, die Menschen und Menge. Ich schlage vor, dass die gemeinsame Betrachtung dieser Ontologien des Gemeinguts von Negri und Nancy unterschiedliche Potentiale birgt, zu verstehen, wie kollektive Möglichkeiten zu Stande kommen und realisiert werden können. Schließlich argumentiere ich dafür, sich nicht für einen dieser beiden Denker zu entscheiden, sondern Gemeingut kairologisch zu erfassen.

Schlüsselbegriffe: Kritische Theorie, Kulturtheorie, Regierung, Kommunikation mit dem Ziel sozialer Veränderung, Kommunikation und Gemeinschaft, Gemeingut

커뮤니티/커먼: 집합적 잠재성에 대한 Nancy 와 Negri 의 논쟁

요약

커먼에 관한 철학적 논쟁은 커뮤니케이션 연구 전통내에서 지배적인 가치로 등장해

왔다. 그러나, 이에 관한 연구들은 커먼과 커뮤니티 사이에 관계에 대해서는 별로

중요시하게 다루어 오지 않았다. 본 에세이는 Antonio Negri 의 학문적 업적을 Jean-Luc

Nancy 와의 대화속에 집어 넣는 것에 의해 이러한 관계를 조명하였다. 본 에세이는 두

학자들의 서로 다른 개념들을 주목하였는바, 그들은 내재성과 타자, 죽음과 가난,

언어와 커뮤니케이션, 작업과 생산, 사랑, 그리고 사람과 다양성등이다. 본 에세이는

Negri 와 Nancy 의 커먼의 실체론들을 옆에 나란히 놓는 것이 어떻게 집합적인

잠재성들이 나타나고 실재화될 수 있는가를 이해하기 위한 다양한 가능성들을 만들어

낸다는 것을 제안하고 있다. 궁극적으로, 본 에세이는 두 사상가들 사이의 선택을

거부하고 커먼을 양적으로 생각할 필요성을 제안하고 있다.

Comunidad/ Común: Jean-Luc Nancy y Antonio Negri sobre las potencialidades colectivas

Resumen: Los debates filosóficos sobre “lo común” han emergido como un hilo prevalente de la erudición de la Comunicación. Poco de este trabajo, sin embargo, considera la relación entre lo común y la comunidad. Este ensayo lleva esta relación al poner el trabajo de Antonio Negri en conversación con el de Jean-Luc Nancy. Atiendo a los dos eruditos y sus concepciones diferentes de la inmanencia, la alteridad, la muerte y la pobreza, el lenguaje y la comunicación, el trabajo y la producción, el amor, y la gente y la multitud. Sugiero que al yuxtaponer las ontologías de Negri y de Nancy sobre lo común crea posibilidades divergentes para el entendimiento de cómo las potencialidades colectivas emergen y pueden ser actualizadas. En última instancia, argumento por una negativa en la elección entre los dos pensadores, sugiriendo la necesidad de pensar lo común mediante la calidad del tiempo.

Palabras Claves: Teoría crítica y cultural, Gobierno, Comunicación para el cambio social, Comunicación y comunidad, Lo común

Jean-Luc Nancy and Antonio Negri on Collective Potentialities

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