Continental Perspectives on Community: Human Coexistence from Unity to Plurality

This volume explores the issues at the center of many historical and contemporary reflections on community and sociality in Continental philosophy. The essays reflect on the thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Arendt, Derrida, Badiou, Fanon, Baldwin, Nancy, Agamben and Laruelle.

Continental Perspectives on Community brings the different approaches of these thinkers into conversation with each other. It discusses the possibility of how the concept of community can extend beyond the one and beyond any sense of unity and totality. Additionally, the book shows how notion of community in plurality is at the heart of ethical and political reflections on alterity and race, of political philosophical reflections on the exception, and of ontological reflections on what it means for humans to be social. In this way, it offers an important contribution to the examination of how a community can be thought today.

This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on social, political, and cultural issues in Continental philosophy.

Chantal Bax is Senior Policy Officer for the Humanities at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Subjectivity After Wittgenstein: The Post-Cartesian Subject and the "Death of Man" (2011).

Gert-Jan van der Heiden is Professor of Metaphysics in the Center for Contemporary European Philosophy at Radboud University, The Netherlands. He is the author of The Truth (and Untruth) of Language: Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement (2010) and Ontology after Ontotheology: Plurality, Event and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy (2014), co-editor of Investigating Subjectivity: Classical and New Perspectives (2011) and Saint Paul and Philosophy: The Consonance of Ancient and Modern Thought (2017), and editor of Phenomenological Perspectives on Plurality (2015).