Abstract

One common way to conceive of political community and its relation to political judgment is to argue that my judgment reflects my community because I identify myself with it. This allows for a categorical distinction between the public (citizen) and the private (bourgeois) that in turn grounds civic virtue and common sense. Nancy, however, argues that this reifies community in ways that are continuous with totalitarianism, and that community is better understood in Heideggerian "ecstatic" terms. However, because Nancy does not give as helpful an account of judgment his contribution to political theory reveals itself as a utopian picture of a world in which political judgment-and, hence, politics itself-is written off as a misreading of our ontological condition