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the stumbling block to thinking of community. A community presupposed as
having to be one of human beings presupposes that it effect, or that it must effect,
as such and integrally, its own essence, which is itself the accomplishment of the
essence of humanness. (,What can be fashioned by man? Everything. Nature,
human society, humanity', wrote Herder. We are stubbornly bound to this
regulative idea, even when we consider that this 'fashioning' is itself only a
'regulative idea'.) Consequently, economic ties, technological operations and
political fusion (into a body or under a leader) represent or rather present,
expose and realize this essence necessarily in themselves. Essence is set to work
in them: through them, it becomes its own work. This is what we have called
'totalitarianism', but it might be better named 'immanentism', as long as we do
not restrict the term to 'designating certain types of societies or regimes but
rather see in it the general horizon of our time, encompassing both democracies
and their fragile juridical parapets.
Is it really necessary to say something about the individual here? Some see in its
invention and in the culture, if not in the cult built around the individual,
Europe's incontrovertible merit of having shown the world the sole path to
emancipation from tyranny, and the norm by which to measure all our collective
or communitarian undertakings. But the individual is merely the residue of the
experience of the dissolution of community. By its nature - as its name
indicates, it is the atom, the indivisible - the individual reveals that it is the
abstract result of a decomposition. It is another, and symmetrical, figure of
immanence: the absolutely detached for-itself, taken as origin and as certainty.
But the experience through which this individual has passed, since Hegel at
least, (and through which he passes, it must be confessed, with staggering
opinionatedness) is simply the experience of this: that the individual can be the
origin and the certainty of nothing but its own death. And once immortality has
passed into its works, an operative immortality remains its own alienation and
renders its death still more strange than the irremediable strangeness that it
already 'is'.
Still, one cannot make a world with simple atoms. There has to be a clinamen.
There has to be an inclination or an inclining from one towards the other, of one
by the other, or from one to the other. Community is at least the clinamen of the
'individual'. Yet there is no theory, ethics, politics or metaphysics of the
individual that is capable 'of envisaging this clinamen, this declination or decline
of the individual within community. Neither 'Personalism' nor Sartre ever
managed to do anything more than coat the most classical individual-subject
with a moral or sociological paste: they never inclined it, outside itself, over that
edge that opens up its being-In-common.
56/ /THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS