Community Without Community

Abstract

This chapter investigates how postmodern difference, the difference that interests Jacques Derrida, is deeply multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and multi-racial. It represents what can be called a highly miscegenated “polymorphism.” Derrida does not dismiss the idea of unity and identity out of hand, for “pure” diversity would spell death no less surely than would a “pure” totalitarian unity. But he advocates highly heterogenous, porous, self-differentiating quasi-identities, unstable identities that are not identical with themselves, that do not close over and form a seamless web of the selfsame. What Derrida advocates, in a nutshell, is “democracy.” That is why he is troubled by the word “community.” What he does not like about the word “community” is its connotations of “fusion” and “identification.” The self-protective closure of “community” would be just about the opposite of what deconstruction is.