ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

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37 Here I am piggybacking on Bruce Robbins’s characterization of the public sphere as a phan-
tom in his introduction to Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), vii–xxvi. The benefits of such a concept have been outlined by
Rosalyn Deutsche in her essay “Agoraphobia” in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1996), 320–321. My reading of the discourse on community is indebted
especially to Deutsche’s work.
38 See Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” in Linda J.
Nicholson, ed., Feminism/ Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990), 300–323.
39 Ibid., 300.
40 Georges Van Den Abbeele describes two different types of communities based on two possible
etymological roots of the word: first, from “com + munis (that is, with the sense of being
bound, obligated, or indebted together),” and second, from “the more folk-etymological
combination of com + unus (or what is together as one.)” The former, which describes a
notion of community bound by a sense of mutual indebtedness, corresponds to the idea of
community as a kind of social contract (“popularized by Locke and the Enlightenment
philosophes”); the latter describes a notion of community as an organicist “body politic”
(“colloquially linked to the name of Hobbes”). See Van Den Abbeele’s introduction to Miami
Theory Collective, ed., Community at Loose Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), xi. Young’s notion of an ideal community coincides with Van Den Abbeele’s second
description: community as the absorption of singularities into oneness.
41 Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” 302.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 320.
44 Ibid., 302.
45 Rosalyn Deutsche comments on the effect of this seeming reversal in Young’s thesis: “Young’s
politics of difference glosses over [important questions facing the politics of pluralism], defining
difference as the ‘particularity of entities,’ although she says that particularity is socially
constructed. As a result, Young does not consider the productive role that can be played by
disruption, rather than consolidation, in the construction of identity, a disruption in which
groups encounter their own uncertainty.” (Deutsche, Evictions, 322; see pp. 309–310, 321–322
for a more extensive response to Young’s thesis.) Deutsche’s concern is primarily with the