reticulated community

is a division into a network or into small [spaces] with intersecting lines.

also called a retculated multiplicity, reticulation refers to 'a division into a network or into small [spaces] with intersecting lines (oxford dic). Existence is thus constituted, according to Nancy, by the criss-crossed borders (or surfaces of contact) at which relationally defined entities emerge. Put simple, Nancy's co-existential analytic views the world as a network of relationships a series of borders from which entities unfold not as the realisation of a particular substance. There is no such thing as a self-contained individual identity that exist prior to any relations, no such thing as a community that exist withotu relation to its others. The notions of community that, through figuration, attribute a substantial basis to being-in-common try to effect an understadning of politics in which the community (or the individuals who make up community) are conceived as having a self-contained substantial basis (i.e. the possibility of existing without relation to others.). And yet, Nancy notes that at a fundamental, ontological level, this is impossible. Figuration achieves the fiction of such being-with-out-relation only by disavowng difference. In reality, therefore, figuration can merely obscure the reticulated multiplicity, the relational being-with that is the co-existential condition.

reticulated community, n.All

reticulated community