Thinking in Common

If “every social community, reproduced by the functioning of institutions, is imaginary” (Balibar, Wallerstein 1997: 127), if it is the result of a largely fictional configuration, legitimised by the projection of individual existence on the image of a collective narrative – the one which, for example, gave birth and authority to the Nation-State, to the Empire-State –, what is the narrative underpinning the “World-State” that allows it to exist, to function and exercise its violence, both real and symbolic? Likewise, which other narratives could be possible? Which other narratives escape from the “striature” (Mezzadra 2008: 13), from the interstices of the global space?

It is on the basis of these statements and questions that a group of researchers from the Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires Multilingues from Université Paris Nanterre in collaboration with the Institut Français de Géopolitique has been working since 2018 on the “Tournant global” (Caillé, Dufoix 2013) to question discursive, normative and political instances starting from a cross-disciplinary approach that aims to be both an opportunity to diversify analytical tools and references and an exercise in decentralising scientific thought.

The group publication that these few lines attempt to introduce presents the initial results of research that questions globalisation in terms of its capacity to generate communities beyond political and geographical borders, around a common, that, after the “conflagration” (Blanchot 1984) of the meaning of community must be rethought beyond, or even upstream of, any hegemonic logic of unification, of any process of reducing differences to one (single) common. It must, in short, rewrite relations between individual and universal whose antinomy, wrote Agamben once and for all, “ha la sua origine nel linguaggio” (Agamben 2001: 18) and whose danger spans, marks and wounds our history.