Obrad Savi

172:141.78

Community of non-belonging *
Abstract: In the first part of this article, Togethernes: Selfconflicted closeness, I propose a complex intervention on the
persistence of the concept of community, on the perverse mode
in which it maintains itself, even in the most radical forms of its
emptying. I try to reconstruct, and deconstruct, too, the collapse
of the political concept of community. I search for its conceptual
origins and historical destination. I pay special attention to the
overdramatized philosophical discourse on the end and death
of community. This kind of narrative was connected, from the
very begining, with a homogenizing idiom of community, which
was rejected and replaced by the singularity paradigm of community of those who are without a community.
Keywords: community, unity, togetherness, closeness, isolation,
singularity, Jean Luc-Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben,
Roberto Exposito, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari

I Togetherness: Self-conflicted closeness

The common condition is at the same time the common
reduction to a common denomination and the condition of
being absolutely in common. These two senses of common
are both intermixed and in opposition to each other.
(Jean-Luc Nancy, La Comparution/The Compearance, 1992)

efore I begin to speak on the increasing mistrust that surrounds the

very notion of community, I would like to thank my Russian friend
Oleg Nikiforov, who generously invited me to participate in this conference. I also wish to express my profound gratitude to my colleagues at
*

The article, Community of Non-Belonging represents a revised version

of a speech delivered at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts
(NCCA) Moscow, 1 August, 2011.

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| 11

the National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA), Moscow, for their welcoming hospitality. I came to this conference with the deep conviction that
Moscow is really the proper place to articulate the most painful testimony
of the modern world, the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation or
the conflagration of community. In some sense, Moscow may represent the
final political destination of the unstoppable and ongoing process of dissolution of the collective desire for unity, for a unified community. Endorsing
Boris Groyss ironic comment, the real community was a new, collectivistic practice of togetherness, of total restriction of the personal, intimate
life, and a total revocation of the private property. During the 1930s every
kind of private property was completely abolished. [] One could eat communistically, house and dress oneself communistically or likewise noncommunistically, or even anti-communistically. (Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript, 2010: 16). In a later evaluation of the historical explosion
of communist anger, Peter Sloterdijk refers to Groyss insight with the following comment: To the communists in power, taking satisfaction in the
philistine joy of expropriation and longing for revenge against private property was, overall, always more important than any spreading of new values.
(Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, 2010:
34). There is no longer anything enigmatic in the socio-historical collapse of
the totalitarian community. Yet, despite the crumbling of dictatorial immanentism, the communist utopia of togetherness still functions as a political
banner of leftist communitarianism. This renewed discourse of community
as unified brotherhood becomes, however, un-operative at the very moment
it is transformed into the unworkable ideology of work. Communism was the
last giant failure predicated on a dream of harmonious socialistic life. The
manifest collapse of what it promised upon the emblem of Communism is
inseparable from the self-evident betrayal of community understood as political unity, as a unified political community.
Let me here clarify briefly what may be a cause for confusion. To my mind,
Communism was, and still is, an ontological proposition, not a political option. As Jean-Luc Nancy apparently argued,
Communism means it wants to say, it has worn itself out trying to express,
to yell, to bring out, to prophesy this ... (and this is what all has to be said
over, completely differently) communism wants to say that being is in common. It wants to say that we are, insofar as we are, in common. That we are
commonly. That each one of us, from between us, is in common, commonly.

12 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #2

Between us: what is it that is between? What is there between, in the between, as between. This is what it is all about.1

The socio-historical and politico-ethical analysis of the very notion of community calls for a rigorous analysis, and for responsible interpretations. Such
an analysis must be open toward concepts that are deeply embedded in the
extensive history of the community. Therefore, the intolerable question of
the death and the end of community, even of crime in, and by, the community
was broadly articulated by an impressive group of thinkers (from Blanchot
and Nancy to Agamben and Esposito) who shaped a new philosophical interrogation into the deadly concept of community. What is strange is that
these thinkers are uncompromising in dealing with a speculative, thanatoontological conception of community but they never work on the empirical,
or really existing community, as has been articulated by Zygmunt Bauman,
for instance. Nominally, of course, the philosophers have accepted a nonmetaphysical approach to community: Philosophers start to think precisely
the community of being, and not the being of community. Or if you prefer:
the community of existence and not the essence of community. (Georges
Van Den Abbeele, Community at Loose Ends, 1991: 32). Technically, they
affirm the pre-eminence of speculative discourse on the self-destructive
community, a discourse that starts to function as philosophical narrative on
the work of death. The main task of such alarming and alarmist discourse
is to bear witness and testify to the collective practice of killing. In a sense,
these over-dramatized discourses on the end, and death, of community represent a radical tendency (I am quite aware of the understandable reservations
that today could be expressed regarding the felicity of the term radical)
inside contemporary totalitarian debates. This line of thinking favours a
genealogy of community based on an act of crime. Its main assault on the
community comes from the popular theory of foundational crime: according to this tradition Crime presides over the birth of any community, either
secret or public one. (Frank Tannenbaum, Crime and the Community, 1957:
12). The discourse on community has survived these philosophical attacks,
extensively transformed, although its theoretical reputation and influence are
much diminished. The reluctant question proposed by Benedict Anderson,
Why is the idea of community so powerful that it is possible for its members to willingly die for such limited imaginings? is evidence that the long
celebration of an idea of heroic self-sacrificing for the homeland is reasonably dead.

Jean-Luc Nancy, La Comparution/The Compearance, 1992: 378).

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| 13

In the age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals

(particularly in Europe) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its root in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it
is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly
self-sacrificing love. [] The idea of the ultimate sacrifice comes only with the
idea of purity (homogeneity of the ethnic nation), through fatality.2

The prevailing philosophical critique of the Life and Death of, in, and by,
with community is particularly based on the idea of a conceptual break, an
epistemological rupture at the heart of the very notion of community, a community that is separated from, and confronted with, itself.
That this confrontation with self may be a law of being-in-common and its
meaning, this is what is on the task sheet for the work of thought immediately
accompanied by this other project of thought: that the confrontation, in grasping the fact of itself, grasp the fact that mutual destruction destroys all the way
along to the very possibility of confrontation, and with that destruction the
possibility of being-in-common or being-with.3

What dominates over Western conceptions of community is the unavoidable

dichotomy between real and imagined community. What constitutes the dynamic of this dichotomy is a nostalgic desire for the loss of full presence of
the homogenized and unified community. This captivating nostalgia is based
on the foundational myth of homogenized identity. Such a nostalgia degenerates into a painful discourse about the supposed loss of collective unity, a
loss which is not accidental but rather constitutive of the destiny of the political community. After the community turn in contemporary philosophical
discourse, however, we know very well that what sounds like nostalgia is
not nostalgia at all; loss does not refer here to anything one has ever had,
except wistfulness for the very possibility of community itself. Nancy was
first among the philosophers to try to articulate the ontological foundation of
togetherness and thus to move away from the homogenizing idiom of community.

2
3

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community, (London: Verso press,

1991), p.141.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Confronted Community, Postcolonial Studies,
Vol. 6, No.1/2003, p. 25.

14 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #2

What is especially challenging today for the debate over the destiny of the
political notion of community is the surprisingly effective argument that we
can imagine a community without essence neither people, nor nation
nor indeed destiny.
In any case, Nancys answer is tentative and suggestive: in our political programs, he argues, the properly common character of community disappears
- that is, being-in-common, or with or the together that defines it. In contrast
to the immanentism of the subject and of the commonor, as he also calls it,
the generalized totalitarianism in which the individual is absolutely closed off
from all relation, and in which being itself is absolute in the form of the Idea,
History, the Individual, the State, Science, the Work of Art, and so on - Nancy
proposes that singular plural beings only exist in an original sociality, insofar
as finite being always presents itself together, hence, severally.4

According to this post-metaphysical concept of community, our singular

plural existences must be grounded in the work of relations: what we share
is only the existence of these relations. The new community is simply made
of relations, of those relations without relations. Coming into existence with
shared relations is granted by the ontological status of the human being, as
a being open to: This openness to, this inclination toward the world, the
world of the other, has nothing to do with tolerance, friendship, or with moral
and political correctness. Rather, to be is being-toward, being exposed, being abandoned, prior to any will, intention, or open-mindedness of a subject.
Indeed if one were to say a community is founded on disassociation, is it not
to thoroughly destabilize the integrity of the concept of community itself? Is
Derrida not simply saying that at the heart of any community is an inescapable
volatility? [...] Instead, there seems to be the simultaneous desire to re-affirm a
notion of a community which is differentiated, fractured and porous, exposed
to and taking its condition from that which it is not.5

It seems that the reluctant debates on the inhuman moment constituted on

any imagined, harmonized togetherness partake of a reinvention of the idea
that community discourse has an inner-conflicted structure, internal differ-

4
5

Stella Goan, Communities in Question: Sociality and Solidarity in

Nancy and Blanchot, Journal for Cultural Research, No. 4, 2005: 394.
Patrick OConnor, Derrida: Profanations (New York: Continuum, 2010),
p.122.

Obrad Savi

| 15

ences, and alterity options that are ultimately unsuitable for straightforward
communal identification. Collective identity is broken down and incommensurable singularities are privileged.
There is no essence to the relation between singular beings; they depend on the
existence of a relation and are defined by it, yet there is no communality that
could describe in it any definite manner. There is sharing between singularities
but no essential being in common. [] Freedom is this relation without relation, the coexistence of singular being and the absence of communal essence.
[] Singularity is not only multiple in terms of its relations with other singularities but also plural within itself.6

I could not follow the main traces of the restoration of community, the singularisation of a deconstructed concept of community because I am not quite
sure that such a concept is really valid, or even possible! It is well known
that Derrida openly expressed his deep suspicion, even animosity, toward the
very notion of community. As Derrida explicitly states:
I dont much like the word community; I am not even sure I like the thing. If
by community one implies, as is often the case, a harmonious group consensus,
and fundamental agreement beneath the phenomena of discord or war, then I
dont believe in it very much and I sense in it as much threat as promise. There
is doubtless this irrepressible desire for a community to form but also for it to
know its limit and for its limit to be an opening.7

Community never played a central role in the history of Derridas deconstructive interventions, and he never engaged or participates in actual valorisation, sustained valorisation, of community itself. Simply speaking, Community does not hold the conceptual resources to undermine what it already
6
7

Jane Diddleston, Reinventing Community, Legend, London, 2005, p. 73.

Jacques Derrida, Points (Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 1995), 355. For an
instructive discussion of Derridas sporadic remarks on community, see
Geoff Benningtons, Interrupting Derrida, (London: Routledge, 2000),
pp. 11321. A condensed theoretical speculation on deconstructed community, community yet to come can be found in the charming book,
Jelisaveta Blagojevi, Community of those without Community (Belgrade: Faculty of Media and Communications, 2008). It is also worthwhile to read the book, Miroslav Milovi, The Community of Differences
(aak: Gradac, 2008).

16 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #2

is, namely community. Community is thus not deconstructive and offers no

challenge to whatever communal space is posited. We can add here that the
book The Politics of Friendship, for the first time offers, more stringently
than anywhere else, fraternalistic critique of community There is still perhaps some fraternity in Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy, and I wonder, from the
depths of my admiring friendship, whether it doesnt merit some loosening
[dprise] and if it should still orient the thought of community, even if it be
a community without community or a fraternity without fraternity (Jacques
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 2005: 48) and, on the other hand, deconstructive protection of the promising concept a community without community. It is quite unusual that Derrida himself tries to save community, even
in its singular and contingent form, based on a deep sense of exceptional
love and incomparable friendship. Thus he announced the unique form of
anchoritic community, a community of those who love in separation (who
love to stand alone, qui aiment seloginer), those who can love only at
a distance, in separation (qui naiment qu se sparer au loin), of those
who are uncompromising friends of solitary singularity. Perhaps, Derrida
created, invented a rebellion concept of a community of those without community because, let us speculate for a moment, he was very disappointed
with the classical concept of community always belonging to the past, and
death, and therefore, created a promising concept of community, a community yet to come (-venir, Zu-kunft), open for the future, and, on the side
of life. I will return later to the question why, for Derrida, as well as for Esposito, but in a different way, autoimmunity becomes a more relevant notion
than community. Immunity is a more radical concept since it is subject to
originary violability, and therefore, in principle, susceptible to incalculable
violations. How is it possible that community just does not hold the same
deconstructive force as autoimmunity if that community is on the side of
protection, and hence on the side of life, or more specifically, calls for the
survival of life no matter what the cost!? Community, for Derrida, must thus
be wholly erased because its own system of survival is rendered dead entailing the drive to survival, life itself.
The growing and unstoppable process of critical profanation (and deregulation) of the political concept of community (disassociation and singularity
are pre-conditions for the coming community) offers a perfect reminder that
community discourse can perpetuate itself by way of a radical break with
ethnic, national, and race mythologies of togetherness, endlessly resurrected
by the sanguinary logic of a bloody community. A long and uninterrupted
history of the suspected concept of a community of blood has been finally
articulated in the exemplary philosophical book by Gil Anidjar, Blood: A

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| 17

Critique of Christianity, 2012. In his remarkably analysis of the community

as a community unified in, by, and as blood, with blood, Anidjar searches for
the conceptual origins and historical destination of the Christianized concept
of community as a community of blood:
The argument I wish to advance in this chapter is quite straightforward: Christianity invented the community of substance as the community of blood. [...]
It becomes the first community ever to understand and conceive itself as a
community of blood.8

Anidjar exposes the historical moment of blood, a crucial moment in the

history of the community of blood, a moment whereby blood becomes
part for the whole, and comes to dominate the whole, as a privileged example of a generalized signifier. This is the turbulent and raging moment an extended one, but still only a moment whereby a collective (family or tribe, clan or nation) can be isolated, separated and singled out, taken as
a part and taken apart, by way of blood. In this eloquent and critical work,
Anidjar offers disturbing insights into the politics of blood indeed massive
expansion of blood as the site figurative as it may at times be of the collective bond, of which the Inquisition is but a small if significant part. The
reach of Anidjars Hematheology goes far beyond Derridas elegant formulation that blood would make all the difference, thus proposing that blood
functioned as a possible marker for the exceptional construction of difference on the basis of blood. Quite the opposite:
The major contribution of the purity of blood to history is not to be found in the
exceptional construction of difference on the basis of blood, and in the ensuing exclusion of specific groups and collectives. On the contrary, the purity of
blood, as its numerous opponents knew well, was part of a massive transformation, a general refiguration of the body politic as a whole, and first (if not alone)
in it, the new community of Christians, the Christian community as a community of blood. [] The first individual whose blood, everywhere flowing as it

Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity, 2012: 74, forthcoming.

Intriguing and fascinating theoretical reflections on Christianity can
be found in other Anidjars books: Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion
(London: Routledge, 2002); The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Semites: Race, Religion,
Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).

18 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #2

had never flowed before, initiated and established the possibility of imagining
a community of pure blood, and enforcing it by law.9

Having in mind the theological-political, and bio-political implications of

Anidjars book on blood, we can say that a continuum of blood underpinned
every secular community understood as a Christianized ethno-national unity.
The inclusion of blood in a lexicon of political concepts, whether blood is a
symbol, metaphor, or cipher, requires a new theological-political discourse
on community understood as a violent, despotic unity.
The idea of community in modernity has obvious Christian connotations
and, even more deeply, Hebraic mystical roots, and is already present in
philosophical debates:
On several sides I saw approaching the dangers inspired by the usage of the
word community: its invincibly full resonance [...] its quite inevitable Christian references (spiritual and brotherly community, communial community) or
more broadly religious one (Jewish community, community of prayer, community of believers-umma), its usage to support the claims of supposed ethnicities could only put one on ones guard. [...] Objections or reservations were
quick to emerge, even friendly ones such as that coming from Derrida, who
opposed himself on this point to both Blanchot and myself, or like Badious,
which demanded that equality be substituted for community. 10

The present, overdramatized articulation of the end of community and

death of community, needs to be rethought, as much as possible, between
exercises of political, and moral responsibility and their theoretical, or even
doctrinal thematisation. This demand for a critical thinking of community
implies an active and permanent responsibility (one is never responsible
enough) toward what has been always neglected and ignored by the conventional discourse on community. By now we have learned from Derrida
(The Gift of Death, 1999) that there is no responsibility without a dissident
and inventive rupture with respect to tradition, authority, orthodoxy, rule, or
doctrine. Having in mind this subversive remark, I shall take the risk of a
conversion, even of apostasy, and say that exponential violence (the violent

9
10

Gil Anidjar, Blood, Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, 2011.

<(http://www.politicalconcepts.org/2011/blood)> [accessed 5 October
2012]
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Confronted Community, Postcolonial
Studies, 6/1 (2003), pp. 23-36 (p, 31).

Obrad Savi

| 19

relations of all relations) remained unthinkable in community discourse as it

was, for example, in academic debates between liberals and communitarians. But with the new elaborated paradigm of blood we might, together
with Stathis Gourgouris and Gil Anidjar, pose the question with brutal literalness: what is violence without blood?, and, still further, what is a community without blood, a community of blood? I think the possible answer
to this required question lies in a reconceptualization of the community connected with the figure of blood, the community of blood. Even if the idea
of bloodless violence holds some validity, some amount of blood is always
present, even in its absence, as the price of participation in a bloody community which is the converted, secularized politico-theological concept of
the community of blood. As Anidjar puts it: Blood operates, or, shall we
say, circulates at the outer extremes of politics, there where the shedding of
blood signifies the ultimate exercise of power, as well as the undoing of the
community that descends into violence. (Blutgewalt in Oxford Literary
Review. Volume 31, 2009: 174).
If we go further, we can argue that the community paradigm was transformed
into a great series of social principles, universal norms, either practiced everywhere or tolerated nowhere. In the specific historical constellation, small
groups, communities, organizations and associations can start to resonate
with each other and create extremely unified micropolitics of power - in
other words, fascisms.
But fascism is inseparable from the proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood
fascism, youth fascism and veteran fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism
of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every micro
fascism is defined by a communications with each other, before resonating in
a great, generalized, central black hole. () Even after the National Socialist
State has been established, microfascism persisted gave it unequaled ability to
act upon the masses.11

This explains why the exponential violence of masses has always come with
exalted communities, with national brotherhood in the moment of mass euphoria and collective autohypnosis. I cant comment here the brilliant analy-

11

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987), p. 214.

20 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #2

sis offered by Elias Canetti, who tray to explain how a normal community
can transform into wild, erupted crowds. But I can stress here that Canettis
sobering formulations can help us to understand the self-cannibalization
of community itself. (Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power [New York: Farrar,
1960]) The discourse of self-immunized community, a narrative of permanent violence against itself, of deadly violence, always required an endless
responsibility toward lucid affirmation of a death that is coming, always
already there, impossible to anticipate. On the horizon of new justice to
come, as Derrida pleads, we need new, endless responsibility before the
ghost of those who are not yet born or who are already dead (Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 2007: 13), before those who died from, and for,
our community. This eternal responsibility toward a defeated humanity of
togetherness (Only absolute inhumanity can testify for humanity Primo
Levi) is revealingly present in the colossal fictional works of Franz Kafka,
one of the best thinkers of the very notion of (post)humanity.
I shall focus provisionally on Kafkas fictional writings, on the ghostly structure of private, as well as public life. It is well known that Kafkas literary
universe was structured around the idea of the claustrophobic community (all
Kafka characters feel eternal anxiety, either in private or in public life). All of
his novels and short stories are set within an inescapable constellation of imprisonment. His characters are constantly trapped by parents and family, or
imprisoned by state institutions (Kairina Kordel, Freedom and Confinement
in Modernity: Kakfas Cages, 2011: 12). The traumatic fear of the brutality
of the external world demands a Sisyphean labour on the part of Kafkas
characters, an escape from this dehumanized world. As Kafka himself says,
the problem is not that of liberty but of escape from the unacceptable obscenity of communal life, the possibility of fleeing from any form of compulsive
familiarity and closeness.
Both of them (Proust and Kafka, O.S.) seek to avoid, through letters, the specific sort of proximity that characterizes the conjugal relationship But to
get rid of proximity, Kafka maintains and guards spatial distance, the faraway
position of the loved one: he too presents himself as a prisoner (prisoner of
his body, of his room, of his family, of his job) and multiplies the obstacles
that prevent him from seeing or rejoining his beloved. In Proust, in contrast,
the same exorcism takes place in an inverse way: one reaches the imperceptible, the invisible, by exaggerating proximity, by making it a captive proximity Prousts solution is the strangestto overcome the conjugal conditions

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of presence and of vision. By an excessive rapprochement; one sees less the

closer one is.12

Perhaps the most astonishing discovery is found in Kafkas idea that there
is nothing sacred in community, and that it is not exclusion that produces
human suffering, but the opposite: inclusion itself, insofar as it goes hand in
hand with a fetishisation of being-in-common, of togetherness. Let us consider the Kafkaesque allegory on friendship, the unavoidable paradox of
mutual exteriority in being together and of existing separately, alone. In his
autobiographical short story, Fellowship, Franz Kafka describes in ironic,
almost humoristic way, how a neighbourly community can be built only
through the discrimination of the newcomer. I will take a small risk and
describe the figure of the newcomer as the guests who arrive always to
early or too late, even if they are on time. Let us consider how Kafkas allegorical narrative demystifies the dominant, self-limiting practice of built
togetherness.
We are five friends, one day we came out of a house one after the other, first
one came and placed himself beside the gate, then the second came, or rather
he glided through the gate like a little ball of quicksilver, and placed himself
near the first one, then came the third, then the fourth, then the fifth. Finally we
all stood in a row. People began to notice us, they pointed at us and said: Those
five just came out of that house. Since then we have been living together, it
would be a peaceful life if it werent for a sixth one continually trying to interfere. He doesnt do us any harm, but he annoys us, and that is harm enough;
why does he intrude when he is not wanted? We dont know him and dont
want him to join us. There was a time, of course, when the five of us did not
know one another, either, and it could be said that we still dont know one another, but what is possible and can be tolerated by the five of us is not possible
and cannot be tolerated with this sixth one. In any case, we are five and dont
want to be six. And what is the point of this continual being together anyhow?
It is also pointless for the five of us, but here we are together and will remain
together; a new combination, however, we do not want, just because of our
experiences. But how is one to make all this clear to the sixth one? Long explanations would almost amount to accepting him in our circle, so we prefer not

12

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 34.

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to explain and not to accept him. No matter how he pouts his lips we push him
away with our elbows, but however much we push him away, back he comes.13

According to Kafkas literary admonition, elaborated in a sustained manner

in his celebrated novel The Castle, the cohesiveness of the village community is an effect of the administrative paternalism which produced a passive,
even submissive, mode of togetherness. The individual is subjected by way
of a heightened disciplinary violence of the bureaucratic machinery of the
state. The anonymous bureaucracy is governed by its own self-preserving
rationality and rules independently of all considerations for any singular being, any individual, and particularly if they are visitors, guests, immigrants,
refugees, in a word, foreigners: As a stranger you have no right to anything
here, perhaps here we are particularly strict or unjust toward strangers, I
dont know, but there it is, you have no right to anything, (Franz Kafka, The
Castle, 1969: 457). Hidden ethnic-ideological dynamics in the village (rural
ghetto) around the castle reliably document the empty form of community.
Traumatic experiences with the adaptation to the local community (K. was
well aware of the significance of his marrying Frieda, a local woman, as a
means of overcoming his outsider status and becoming an accepted member
of the community) fictionally confirm Kafkas radical insight that Togetherness is deeply rooted in the emancipation of human beings from each other.14
Kafkas fictional narrative on community as an empty frame reflects his
increased suspicion toward the inclusive rhetoric that had dominated the

13
14

Nahum H. Glazer, ed., Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories,

Vintage, London, 1983, p. 435.
Suzanne Keller, Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality
(Princeton: Princeton, University Press, 2003), p. 12. It is well known
that Kafka participated in the work of the Brentano Club. He participated
in alarming political debates on anti-Semitism and critique of assimilated
Jews who never received reciprocating love from the Germans. In the
closed sessions dedicated to the political community there participated
many of Kafkas friends and colleagues: Brentanos philosophical followers Oskar Kraus and Alfred Kastil, close literary friends Max Brod
and Felix Weltch, and sporadic visitors Sigmund Freud and Thomas
Masaryk. For detail see: Vivian Liska, When Kafka says We: Uncommon
Community in German-Jewish Literature (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 2009), and Mark E. Blum, Kafkas Social Discourse: An
Aesthetic Search for Community (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press,
2011).

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| 23

Western political tradition for so long. For example, his short story The
Great Wall of China (separately published as A Message from the Emperor:
Eine kaiserliche Botschaft, 1919) can alert us to Kafkas narrated distrust, his
deep suspicion toward very close neighbours, as well as most distant strangers. In the famous story about the Imperial Wall, narrated in the form of a
legend, Kafka turns back again, once more, and always more than once, to
the hidden mechanism of public life. The nominal reason for building the
Wall is to protect the Empire from exterior enemies, but in fact, to shield the
kingdom from within, to protect it from its own, disloyal citizens:
In the end, the Great Wall is built not to defend the empire against its enemies
there are no enemies, Kafka tells us, or if they do exist they can easily bypass
the Walls piecemeal structure. Instead, the Wall is built so as to defend the
empire against its own people, against their self-consciousness as archogenetic
agents, as autonomous beings. In order for this self-defense - or rather - defense against the self - to be effective, enemies from the North (or wherever)
must be invented. The Great Wall of China is really the constitutive object of
fantasy that holds a societys imaginary together.15

Kafkas gigantic work represents a pure satiric affirmation (Vladimir Nabokov), one of the most painful experiences in modern time: the dramatic collapse of the communal as well as of private life. He discovered pure emptiness, even banality, in the face of promised intimate life: (Temporary and
constantly changing human relationships, which never come from the heart
Metamorphosis, 1915). Kafka was more than conscious of the death of
community, a death that is coming, always already there, impossible to anticipate or predict. There is one specific moment of autoaffection in Kafkas
fictional discourse that can be the result of the sorrowful narrative of (self)
isolation and avoidance: Links with others are cut, I isolated myself from
the world, I withdraw into sadness and this unbinding that has cut me

15

Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1996), pp. 12-13. Stathis Gourgouris does not hesitate to promote Kafkas entire corpus as a supreme theoretical moment in twentieth-century
history. His radiant analysis of Kafkas great story The Burrow (1924)
can function as a paradigm for the analysis of the nationalised subjects
predicaments and the nations dream-work. It would be useful to read
additional readings of Kafkas work and his allegorical theorisation in
Stathis Gourgouris book, Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory
for an Antimythical Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

24 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #2

off from the world will end up cutting me off from myself.16 As Benjamin and Adorno once proposed, Kafkas allegoric discourses illuminate the
deep structure of the ruined world in non-arbitrary and non-illustrative ways.
Quite the opposite, in allegory the observer confronts a petrified, primordial
social and political reality. Kafkas allegory on separation the gesture
of one who has escaped from the family reveals history in the form of a
desert. Max Brod has commented: The world of those realities that were important for Kafka was invisible. What Kafka could see least was the gestus.
Each gesture is an event one might even say a drama in itself. (Walter
Benjamin, Illumination, 2007: 121).
On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari suggested that Kafkas hyperrealistic narrative reconnected isolated individuals and operative collectivities
into some machined assemblage: The highest desire, desires both to be
alone and to be connected to all the machines of desire. A machine that is
all the more social and collective insofar as it is solitary, a bachelor, and
that, tracing the line of escape, is equivalent in itself to a community whose
conditions havent yet been established. (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 1986: 71). If I understand this promising speculation correctly, Kafkas humoristic discourse (Kafkas Laughter)
operates as a detector for the comic structure of a prudent, self-isolated life.
I agree with this opinion that Kafkas literature is not a voyage through the
past but one traveling into an enigmatic future. At the same time, I am more
than sceptical about the political promotion of a minor literature as a new
modality of togetherness, inseparable from active solidarity: It is literature
that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the writer is
in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible
community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another
sensibility! (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 1986: 30). Does it mean that Kafkas main character K. functions as

16

Tina Chanter, Ewa Ziarek, ed., Revolt, Affect, Collectivity (New York:
SANU Press, 2005), p. 3. Critical comments on debates on the role of affected narrative in the formation of modern political community are present in the recent book: Patricia T. Clough, Autoaffection: Unconscious
Thought in the Age of Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012). On affective turn in Community studies see book: Patricia
Clough, Jean Halley, ed., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham Duke University Press Books, 2007).

Obrad Savi

| 25

a polyvalent assemblage of which the solitary individual is only a part and

the coming collective another? In the end, Deleuze and Guattari carefully
acknowledge: We cannot know in advance what this assemblage of the new
community will be: Fascist?, Revolutionary?, Socialist?, Capitalist? Or, even
all of these at the same time, connected in the most repugnant or diabolical
way!
This philosophical appropriation and expropriation of Kafkas work is very
inspired, but it is also deeply problematic and challenging as well, because
his novels and short stories always resist precisely such philosophic extrapolations. One of the reasons for that can be the undeniable fact that Kafka is
the prevalent thinker, not the philosopher, of the coming, post-human world.
This might be a reason why a new series of current lectures on Kafka (delivered at the European Graduate School, Leuk-Stadt, Switzerland, 2011) are
dedicated to post-philosophical, deconstructivist readings of Kafka: Judith
Butler, Kafka and the poetics of Arrival, Kafka on das Ziel destination,
Kafka on Leaving and Avital Ronell, Kafka and the Sublime, Deconstruction of Kafka: The Test, The Call, The Servant and Kafkas Letter to
His Father. Probably, these new forms of reading attempt to read something
that was never written: Study, for Benjamin no less than for Kafka, is inseparable from reading, even and perhaps especially where the text or script,
or key has been lost: To read what never was written. (Samuel Weber, Benjamins -abilities, 2008: 207).

Works cited
(This extensive bibliography of quoted books covered three different
chapters of text: additional two chapters will to be published successively
in the coming issues of the Journal).
1. Adrian Little, The Politics of Community, Edinburgh UP, Edinburgh,
2002.
2. Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994.
3. Andrew Mason, Community, Solidarity and Belonging: Levels of Community and Their Normative Significance, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2004.
4. Andrew Norris, Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, Duke UP, Durham,
2005.

26 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #2

5. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Rights, Polity Press, Cambridge

1994.
6. Arjun Appadurai, Fear of small Numbers, Duke University Press, Durham, 2006.
7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community, Verso press, London, 1991.
8. Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript, Verso Press, London, 2010.
9. Donald Moon, Constructing Community: Moral Pluralism and Tragic
Conflicts, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1993.
10. Etienne Balibar, We, the People of the Europe?, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 2004.
11. Frank Tannenbau, Crime and the Community, Columbia UP, New York,
1957.
12. Geoff Bennington, Interrupting Derrida, Routledge, London, 2000.
13. Geoff Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic, Edinburgh
UP, Edinburgh, 2011.
14. Georges Van Der Abbeele, Community at Loose Ends, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1991.
15. Gerard Deltany, Community, Routledge, London, 2003.
16. Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity, 2012.
17. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987.
18. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986.
19. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986.
20. Giorgio Agamben, Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1993.
21. Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001.
22. Helmut Plessner, The Limits of Community, Humanity Books, New
York, 1999.
23. Horsman, M. and A. Marshall, After the Nation-State: Citizens, Tribalism and the New World Disorder, Harper, London, 1994.
24. Jane Diddleston, Reinventing Community, Legend, London, 2005
25. Jacques Derrida, Points, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995.
26. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, Verso Press, London, 2005.
27. Jacques Derrida, Learning to live Finally, Melville House, New Jersey,
2007
28. Jean-Luc Nancy, Inoperative Community, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 1991.

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29. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Confronted Community, Postcolonial Studies,

No.1, 2003.
30. Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media
on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986.
31. Kairina Kordel, Dimitris Vardoulakis, ed., Kakfas Cages, Palgrave,
London, 2011.
32. Lingis Alphonso, The Community of those who have Nothing in Common, Indiana University Press, Indianapolis, 1994.
33. Mark E. Blum, Kafkas Social Discourse: An Aesthetic Search for Community, Lehigh University Press, Bethlehem, 2011.
34. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty
and Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2007.
35. Mathew Horsman, Andrew Marshall, After the Nation-state: Citizens,
Tribalism and the New World Disorder, Harper, New York, 1994.
36. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, Station Hill Press,
New York, 1988.
37. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of my Death, Stanford UP, Stanford,
2000.
38. Maurice R. Stein, The Eclipse of Community, Harper & Row, New York,
1965.
39. Miller J Hillis, The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2011.
40. Miranda Jospeh, Against the Romance of Community, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002.
41. Nahum H. Glazer, ed., Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories, Vintage, London, 1983.
42. Olivier Marchart, Post-foundational Political Thought, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2007.
43. Patrick OConnor, Derrida: Profanations, Continuum, New York, 2010.
44. Patricia Clough, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of
Technology, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2012.
45. Patricia Clough, Jean Halley, ed., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the
Social, Duke University Press Books, Durham, 2007.
46. Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, Columbia University Press, New York, 2010.
47. Philip Selznick, The Communitarian Persuasion, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington, D.C, 2002.
48. Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, Polity Press, Oxford, 2011.
49. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2010.

28 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #2

50. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008.
51. Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, Fordham University Press, New York, 2012.
52. Samuel Weber, Benjamins abilities, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2010. Scott Durham, Phantom Communities, Stanford UP, Stanford, 1998.
53. Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
1996.
54. Suzanne Keller, Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2003.
55. Tina Chanter, ed., Revolt, Affect, Collectivity, SANU Press, New York,
2005.
56. Vivian Liska, When Kafka says We, University of Indiana Press, Bloomington, 2009.
57. Walter Benjamin, Illumination, Shocked Books, New York, 2007.
58. William F. Whyte, Street Corner Society, University Of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1993.
59. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, Oxford UP, Oxford, 1989.
60. Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World,
Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001.
TO BE CONTINUED

Obrad Savi is Director of Center of Media and Communications, Faculty of Media and Communications, University Singidunum, Belgrade. He
worked as research fellow and lecturer at the School of Fine Art and Cultural
Studies, University of Leeds, UK, Visiting Lecturer at American University
in Kosovo (AUK), department of the Rochester Institute of Technology, NY,
USA. He has also been Editor-in-chief of a many journals: Theory, Philosophical Studies, Text, Belgrade Circle, and guest editor of Parallax, London,
UK. Published and edited many books/collections, and more than hundred
texts on various topics: Pornography of the Past: Construction of National
Memory (forthcoming); Community of Memory, 2006 (with Ana Miljanic);
Balkans as a Metaphor, 2005 (with Dusan Bjelic); Politics of Human Rights,
2002; Charles Taylor: Invoking Civil Society, 2000.

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