In The Coming Community, published in Italian in 1990 and translated into English by longtime admirer Michael Hardt in 1993, Agamben describes the social and political manifestation of his philosophical thought. Employing diverse short essays he describes the nature of “whatever singularity” as that which has an “inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence”. It is important to note his understanding of “whatever” not as being indifference but based on the Latin translation of “being such that it always matters”.
Agamben starts off by describing “The Lovable”
Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is.
— [21]
In the same sense, Agamben talks about "ease" as the "place" of love, or "rather love as the experience of taking-place in a whatever singularity", which resonates his use of the concept "use" in the later works.
In this sense, ease names perfectly that "free use of the proper" that, according to an expression of Friedrich Hölderlin's, is "the most difficult task."
— [22]
Following the same trend, he employs, among others, the following to describe the “watershed of whatever”:
- Example – particular and universal
- Limbo – blessed and damned
- Homonym – concept and idea
- Halo – potentiality and actuality
- Face – common and proper, genus and individual
- Threshold – inside and outside
- Coming community – state and non-state (humanity)[23]
Other themes addressed in The Coming Community include the commodification of the body, evil, and the messianic.
Unlike other continental philosophers he does not reject the age-old dichotomies of subject/object and potentiality/actuality outright, but rather turns them inside-out, pointing out the zone where they become indistinguishable.
Matter that does not remain beneath form, but surrounds it with a halo
— [23]
The political task of humanity, he argues, is to expose the innate potential in this zone of indistinguishability. And although criticised as dreaming the impossible by certain authors,[24] he nonetheless shows a concrete example of whatever singularity acting politically:
Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear
