A Reading of Community
Nina Seiler
nina.seiler@uzh.chUniveristy of Zurich (Switzerland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8006-5917
Abstract
The thinking about the idea, forms and practices of communitas has developed a specific discourse in political philosophical writing since the 1980s. This paper retraces the ways in which Jean-Luc Nancy established a “community of writing [and] the writing of community,” how in his view community compears with philosophical writing. Taking Nancy’s discussion as a ground line, the author modulates the perspective on writing—as both text and practice—and focuses on the confrontation with community in reading. By poetologically tackling Nancy’s essay “The Confronted Community” (2001), she investigates into the text’s performing of community and the affective interaction between text and corporeality. Her reading of Nancy’s writing thus activates not only its ecstatic valences leading towards the proposed community of those who have no community; it also uncovers the aesthetic, social and political implications that emanate from Nancy’s writing in this situated reading. Therefore, this paper analytically retraces the textual micro-performances of community in writing as a performative confrontation entailed in reading.
Supporting Agencies
Keywords:
philosophy, community, writing, reading, Jean-Luc Nancy, performance, affects, identityReferences
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Authors
Nina Seilernina.seiler@uzh.ch
Univeristy of Zurich Switzerland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8006-5917
Postdoctoral researcher in Interart (Eastern Europe) at the Slavic Seminar of the University of Zurich. She works in the SNSF project Crisis and Communitas. Performative Concepts of Commonality in the Polish Culture since the Beginning of the 20th Century. Her current research focuses on immunitarian/communitarian processes around the Polish “March 1968” and their implications on posthuman relations. She graduated in Slavic Studies and Popular Cultures and was associated with the doctoral programme in Gender Studies. During her M.A. and PhD studies, she spent two and a half year in Krakow (UJ) and Warsaw (IBL PAN) for study and research purposes. She defended her PhD thesis on feminist criticism in 1990s’ Polish literary studies at the University of Zurich in 2017. Her book Privatisierte Weiblichkeit. Genealogien und Einbettungsstrategien in der feministischen Kritik im postsozialistischen Polen (Privatised femininity: Genealogies and strategies of implementation in feminist criticism in post-socialist Poland) was published in 2018 and will appear shortly in Polish translation.
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