Rethinking Community: Translation Space as a Departure from Political Community1

Abstract

In this paper, I explore one way of thinking about political community. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's idea of community, I suggest that community is not a full circle, but an open-ended line. Thinking community-as-a-line is to shift our focus from the completed pictures of community to the inception of community. In this way of thinking, community is a shared mode of being. I argue that at the heart of sharing lies translation-communication – or translation space – where one (singularity) is perpetually ingrained in others (plurality). The subject constantly “emerges” in relation to others in translation space. I argue that looking at community as a line is a way to avoid the statist boundary, the subject of which is situated either inside or outside. I further argue that the elusive subject in translation space engages in politics through escape.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.