A reading of Emily Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain.”
Jean-Luc Nancy writes:
The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer (by virtue of some unknown degree or necessity, for we bear witness also to the exhaustion of thinking through History), is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community. Communism, as Sartre said, is ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our time’, and it is so in many senses - political, ideological and strategic. But not least among these senses is the following consideration, quite foreign to Sartre’s intentions: the word ‘communism’ stands as an emblem of the desire to discover a place of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical dominion, and thereby beyond such wasting away of liberty, or speech or of simple happiness as comes about whenever these simply become subjugated to the exclusive order of privatization; and finally, more simply and even more decisively, a place from which to surmount the unravelling that occurs with the death of each one of us - that death that, when no longer anything more than the death of the individual, carries an unbearable burden and collapses into insignificance.
