The Clinamen of Community: Duns Scotus's Political Ontology

Abstract

ABSTRACT Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community claims that the conflagration of community stands as the “gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world.” He does not, however, nostalgically yearn for the lost intimacy of the premodern world. Instead, Nancy asks whether absolute immanence—which takes the political guise of totalitarianism, on the one hand, and liberalism, on the other—can be undone through community. Given this warning against nostalgic return to the premodern, introduction of the political ontology of John Duns Scotus might seem misguided. My turn to Scotus in this article, however, is not mere antiquarianism. Instead, one finds in Scotistic univocity, I argue, a powerful critique of immanentism. Given the inclination, or “clinamen,” of univocal being as always already being-as, Scotus allows us to think community as resisting its hypostatization but also its appropriation by individual subjects.