Trying to find snippets here and there that maybe useful...
Side note on Agamben and “The Coming Community”
1) as summarized by Michael Hardt (who translated it) in an interview about Multitude:
"(the coming community) not being based on belonging. He was experimenting with the notion of a non-identity way of thinking and making social organization. That too is the project of multitude. In philosophical terms, like Agamben, we are trying to displace the contradictory couple identity/difference and instead work with the common, singularity, and multiplicity.
But our notion of "not-yet" is really very simple. In addition to aluding to Bloch's notion of utopia, we merely want to emphasize that multitude is a project, a political project, that must be brought into existence through collective struggle."
2)From a philosophy website overview of Agamben (cant remember which one maybe princeton's??)
The Coming Community
-he develops the notion of “whatever singularities.”
- In taking up the problem of community, Agamben enters into a broader engagement with this concept by others such as Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, and in the Anglo-American scene, Alphonso Lingis.
-broad aim of the engagement is to develop a conception of community that does not presuppose commonality or identity as a condition of belonging.
-Agamben’s conception of “whatever singularity” indicates a form of being that rejects any manifestation of identity or belonging and wholly appropriates being to itself, that is, in its own “being-in-language.” Whatever singularity allows for the formation of community without the affirmation of identity or “representable condition of belonging,” in nothing other than the “co-belonging” of singularities itself. Importantly though, this entails neither a mystical communion nor a nostalgic return to a Gemeinschaft that has been lost; instead, the coming community has never yet been. Interestingly, Agamben argues in this elliptical text that the community and politics of whatever singularity are heralded in the event of Tianenmen square, which he. He takes this event to indicate that the coming politics will not be a struggle between states, but, instead, a struggle between the state and humanity as such, insofar as it exists in itself without expropriation in identity.. Correlatively, the coming politics do not entail a sacralization of humanity, for the existence of whatever singularity is always irreparably abandoned to itself; as Agamben writes, ‘“The Irreparable is that things are just as they are, in this or that mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being. States of things are irreparable, whatever they may be: sad or happy, atrocious or blessed. How you are, how the world is—this is the irreparable....”(CC 90)
WHATEVER (singularity)
-amal
