The Dis-/Appearing Community: The Avant-Garde, Politics, and Literature

Abstract

The word community, as an empty signifier, acquires various meanings within different political agendas. One cannot ignore the fact that it often lends itself easily to banal political rhetoric, from the right as well as from the left. The question of its meaning has been addressed several times in the past few decades, for instance, by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and recently Irwin Goh. Even though they have offered different interpretations of its meaning, what all these thinkers have in common is the concept of a decentred community, community without the subject as its constitutive category, or community without identity. However, in my opinion, the question of community should be related to literature and examined within the context of the literary and artistic avant-garde, not only because it inclines toward collectivism and questions bourgeois institutions of art and the concept of individualism, but because the discussion has it source in the avant-garde experience of community.Therefore, in this chapter I intend to reconstruct different positions in the aforementioned discussion on community and explain why this topic is still important today. In order to provide a substantial introduction, I shall likewise address these questions: What is the relation of collectivism to the avant-garde? In what forms does the idea of community appear within various avant-garde programmes? How is it related to the critique of the bourgeois modernist subject? Why do communities appear and disappear? How does the avant-garde appear and disappear?