In the preface to a slender volume entitled La communaute affrontee, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “The present state of the world is not a war of civilizations. It is a civil war: it is the internecine war of a city, of a civility, of a citizenry [citadinite] that are being deployed up until the limits of this world, and because of this, up until the extremity of their own concepts” (11). Globalization, or the limitless expansion of the West driven by totalizing notions such as “History, Science, Capital, Man and/or their Nothingness” reaches a point where such concepts must of necessity break apart, where “a distended figure bursts, [and] a chasm appears” (13, 1). This chasm signals a rent in the supposedly unified essence of a community, a tear within the fullness of an immanence completely present to itself. The gap is the sign of a community confronted with itself [“la communaute . . . affrontee a elle-meme” (17)], or rather, exposed to itself at its limit, facing the outside with which it is joined edge to edge. In an earlier essay entitled La communaute desoeuvree (first published in 1983 and translated as The Inoperative Community), Nancy notes that it is at this point of withdrawal or retreat from the infinite plenitude of communal fusion, from within the divide of this separation (le partage in French is both a division and a sharing) that a thinking of community, of a being-with or a being-in-common can take place. A being-in-common is a being-together of singularities that cannot be welded together into the unicity of a single being of togetherness. Nancy describes the experience of community as the “clear consciousness of the communal night – this consciousness at the extremity of consciousness” (19). Community takes place in an exposure to the outside of a self, in a consciousness of the difference of immanence from itself. Three years after the initial publication of La communaute desoeuvree, and the same year that Nancy’s essay appears alongside two other reflective pieces on community in book form, the Indian postcolonial critic Partha Chatterjee cautions against the boundless reach of Enlightenment Reason, which coopts the political legitimacy of anticolonial and postcolonial struggles in Asia and Africa by viewing them as dark, atavistic,