Community beyond Identity: Rethinking Radical Politics with Nancy, Agamben, and Esposito

The key theme of this paper is to rethink of the concept of community, as inspired by three specific works: "The Inoperative Community" by Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Coming Community" by Giorgio Agamben, and "Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community" by Roberto Esposito. These three diverse procedures of deconstructing community do not suggest a political program or a master discourse about 'how a community should be'. On the contrary, they pose a series of questions which challenge the exigency of identity, the concept of the political as antagonism, and the state apparatus. What is revealed through these three projects is the affirmation of another possible way of being-in-common without being-common. Challenging the certainties of emancipatory projects, such as Marxism and Anarchism, these deconstructions lean towards a proposal of non-identity, non-utopian politics- values which are, in a way, embodied in the recent Occupy movements across the world and especially in the Gezi community, in Turkey, June 2013.