In the name of “the community,” humanity - in particular in 20th century Europe - has
shown an unexpected capacity to destroy itself. This destruction has been quantitative -
mass extermination on such a scale that the very concept of quantity and of quantification
was perverted and inverted into a quality: the quality of the unquantifiable, numbers
becoming innumerable, becoming absolute, infinite figures. And at the same time
this autodestruction has been qualitative, for the idea and the value of “humanity” and
of “human nature” itself was destroyed, and its fragile texture being torn up; precisely
because of this, human singularities were reduced to numbers, quality being perverted
and inverted into quantity.
Nevertheless, the multiform history of the community, whether in its universal,
global, or in its particular, local shape, should not be seen as some evil, disastrous deviation
from the course of civilization; however stained it may have become, it is not an
aberrance from normality but rather humanity’s and humanism’s less innocent, less
ethereal side. One of the compelling questions of our time is whether the community is
a place, a topos, of self-destruction humanity cannot avoid or eliminate. At least this
presupposes that we must think the community as a “groundform” and not a side-effect
of human existence. As soon as people are exposed to one another in a plurality – and
what else could humanity be than precisely this reciprocal exposition of people and
peoples? – “there is community”. But this fundamental form of community is not simply
their product, nor their operation or “oeuvre”; it is not just the sum of individuals
having something in common. It is a place where they, inadvertently, are in common,
only to discover that this “in-common” cannot be controlled by them and so eludes
them. Consequently, anything can happen, can take place in this strange place of the
“inoperative community” (of “that” in a community which remains inoperative): peace
and violence, order and disorder, cohesion and destruction
