The Question of Political Community

From discussions on democracy, to attempts to widen the scope of citizenship beyond the confines of the nation-state, Western thinking of the political community has continued to assume a unifying principle of sameness, reflected in history, space, language, or reason, as the condition of possibility of the community. The author assesses how, despite attempts to broaden the scope for inclusion and the meaning of political existence, contemporary political theory gives rise to new externalities through relying on a notion of the community as predicated on sameness. Proceeding normatively and hermeneutically, The Question of Political Community seeks to divert the thinking of political community from assumptions of calculability, unity, and boundedness by elaborating a notion of sameness that does not presuppose difference and a notion of difference that does not presuppose identity. Through close engagements with texts in contemporary political theory and continental philosophy, it is argued that in order to confront the problem of closure and exclusion, the question of political co-existence needs to be reformulated and relocated so as to grasp the meaning of an incalculable community.