A Comment on the Common

It Recedes upon its naming,

knowable only by its circumscription. Where there is a named community, there is no common – an unchosen name left in place of an evacuated ethos or ecumen. Only its defense is left discernible once it is constituted.

The common is shared, yes, but it is not given, received, or framed by nameable foci. So long as community always attests to a constituent body, it attests to the carnage that keeps it firmly intelligible.

As Benjamin wrote in his misunderstood theses, there are no documents of civilization which are not also promissory notes of interminable butchery. When a community grounds Right, it acquires the sword of law and the sword of Damocles. Whether it is Nancy’s “community”, where shared “vulnerability” and bare life lies before us as the object of a sovereignty, or Arendt’s public sphere and common space – the exception lurks.

Those who write in praise of community never write in praise of the common but of the “munis” of communis.

There can be no common if there is still the sacred and the profane, still the sovereign subject of reason and the terrorizing madman beside him. The conditions that render the human “capable” of politics are the same conditions that render the human always in the midst of a lurking incapacity. The Multitude gives abnormality its name and position of exception again, and again. Under this condition there is only a proliferation of the stockades of humanity and disciplines that testify to their supposed necessity.

Where there is community based in this primeval, present sacrifice there is only the death of the common and its tragedy that only ever comes as farce.