WHAT IS A COLLECTIVE? (2008)
(Excerpt)A collective, in my terms, is a community whose members are bound by nothing but the absence of an objective or absolute bond. The collective is perhaps nothing other than the community without community evoked by Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot (although in different ways). The bond that binds the subjects bound in the collective does not exist or, it is the factual non-existence of the bond. So how can a collective be imagined which is radically different from all communal structures based on objective criteria or norms, and also from the absolute communities which conjure up an ultimate transcendent ground? The Latin colligere, which refers to selecting and gathering together, already indicates the dynamics of gleaning, of collecting bit by bit. Colligere means to allow one’s gaze to roam in order to create a minimum of order in the disorder which reality is by starting to group its elements together. Now, it is correct to see in the act of grouping a force which is the force of simplification, of reduction. The collective which is a community beyond anything communal must bring in a resistance to the idea of grouping because the collective is obviously a group whose members are too different to bend to a unified principle or a common ideal. The collective I am thinking of is an infinitely fragile construction; a community indeed, but a community that has to make do without a shared ground and without a shared goal. It is the community of those without community in the sense that this community puts its trust in no bond other than the bond of a lack of bond. Therefore it must be said of this community that it does not exist.
[...]
translated by MICHAEL ELDRED