Community/Common: Jean-Luc Nancy and Antonio Negri on Collective Potentialities

Abstract

Philosophical debates about “the common” have emerged as a prevalent thread of scholarship in communication. Little of this work, however, considers the relationship between the common and community. This essay takes up this relationship by putting the work of Antonio Negri into conversation with Jean‐Luc Nancy. I attend to the two scholars' differing conceptions of immanence and alterity, death and poverty, language and communication, work and production, love, and the people and multitude. I suggest juxtaposing Negri's and Nancy's ontologies of the common creates divergent possibilities for understanding how collective potentialities emerge and can be actualized. Ultimately, I argue for a refusal to choose between the two thinkers, suggesting the necessity of thinking the common kairologically.