Registers of Community: Policy Discourse, Subjectivity, and Coming to Terms with our Conditions

Fostering community cohesion is a seemingly perennial concern. The sense of urgency around the need for community has been recast as Western democracies have moved further away from a welfare state model of government and the implicit sense of solidarity this entails. This chapter traces how the language of community in contemporary forms of governance has been repositioned and the form of individuality this requires. It then considers what governmental notions of community leave out of sight, drawing on notions of community in the work of Robert Esposito and Stanley Cavell that acknowledge partiality and indebtedness as existential elements of our living together. Following Latour's conception of political community, it moves towards a sense of community as always in the making, constituted in our gathering around what we care about.