The Sense of Community Is the Community of Sense. On Discovering the “We” with Eugen Fink and Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract

The article discusses some striking correspondences between the respective accounts of sociality as developed by Eugen Fink in his Freiburg lecture on Existenz und Coexistenz (1952/53, repeated in 1968/69, first published in 1987) under the notion “community” (Gemeinschaft) and likewise by Jean-Luc Nancy in various books and articles since the 1980s, most notably in La communauté désœuvrée (1983) and Être singulier pluriel (1996). Their common ground is established by a chiasmatic logic Fink considers essential for community as such: if it has a sense (rather than “meaning”), it is this very sense that is a communal one. Thus, the sense of community is community, or, in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy who elaborates an analogous idea from a special reading of Kant’s first and third Critiques that is by no means alien to Fink’s own: “We are the sense.”

Keywords

• community
• chiasmatic logic
• "we"
• sense
• jean-luc nancy