essay
by JEAN-LUC NANCY
Excerpt from The Confronted Community by Jean-Luc Nancy, translated from the French by Amanda Macdonald in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 23–36, 2003, published by Routledge on behalf of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Originally published as La Communauté affrontée, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 2001
The present state of the world is not a war of civilisations. It is a civil war: it is the internal war of an enclosed city, of a civility, of an “urbanity,” which are in the process of fanning out to the very limits of the world, and, because of this, spreading right to the extremity of their own concepts. At its limit, a concept breaks, a distended figure shatters, a yawning gap appears.
This war is not a war of religions either, or else all so-called wars of religion are wars internal to monotheism,…