Questioning community as a collective antidote to fear: Jean‐Luc Nancy's ‘singularity’ and ‘being singular plural’

Abstract

Community has long been a key academic concept and lay narrative, especially in commentaries of rural as opposed to urban life. Although community is proffered as an antidote for a plethora of emotional, social and policy challenges in contemporary Western societies, we argue that it is problematic. Previously, we suggested that community is a device mobilised in response to fears surrounding finitude. In this paper, we again draw on Nancy's theorising of singularity and being‐in‐common, but also engage with his yet more fundamental conceptualisation of ‘being singular plural’ to suggest directions for new geographies of singular and collective life.