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No theme has been more central to international philosophical debates ranging from American communitarianism, Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics to deconstruction than that of community. Communities indeed are one basic manifestation of an intentional affirmation of the Other, and thus, at the heart of (literary) ethics. This essay outlines how far literature in general and dramatic literature in particular feature functional affinities to what Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben have called the "inoperative' or "coming community'.By setting Nancy's and Agamben's concepts against a more traditional understanding of community (i.e. Benedict Anderson's in Imagined Communities, 1983), the author proposes that literature and, at the same time, the interpretation of literature not only aim at the production of consent and a unified, continuous, and enclosed collectivity. The "coming community' in literature, or literature understood as resembling a "coming community', also go beyond what Stanley Fish phrased as "interpretive communities" whose members are very much likely to arrive at the same meanings and interpretations of texts simply because their interpretations adhere to the very standards of values, purposes, goals, and intentions characteristic of their respective community. Without ignoring the potential for such cohesion, Nancy and Agamben have pointed out that silencing differences, contradictions, and the singularity of each member of a community amounts to foundational violence. In much the same vein, the author argues, literature and the interpretation of literature constitute a community away from the one invested in the notion of identity and belonging. Such a community in fact proposes a fluid interaction of authors, texts, readers, spectators, and their cultural environments. Furthermore, inasmuch as this "coming community' is understood as an active idea challenging the notion of a closed collectivity, (dramatic) literature and its reading (and performance) imply an active reader and spectator.Drawing on Jacques Rancière's posit of an "emancipated spectator' in the theatre, the author concludes that (reading) literature resembles a vital yet always incomplete confrontation with singularities instigating as well as necessitating an emancipated reader. The theatre and literature in general form a living community enacting its own principles, a performative body rather than an apparatus of forms and rules. Literature juxtaposes its reading, the spectacle of its performance, and community; it places side by side activity and passivity, externality and internality, mediation and simulacrum, collectivity and singularity (of experience), self-possession/identity formation and self-alienation. In an ontological rather than epistemological way the inconclusiveness and future-directedness inherent in these juxtapositions accentuate the temporal horizon of becoming. Literature, hence, is ethical, since it counteracts the complete loss of community and renegotiates, even if incommensurably, possibilities of solidarity and democracy.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-47428-5_18

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