Sue-Im Lee’s A Body of Individuas: The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction (Ohio Uni Press, 2009) promises to be a work in literary studies using insights from, inter alia, Ernesto Laclau, to consider why different versions of the collective “we” are valued differently.
In the discourse of benevolent community, community is a tool towards achieving healing, productiveness, and connection. In the discourse of dissenting community, community that serves a function is simply another name for totalitarianism; instead, community must merely be a fact of coexistence.
The book engages with writers including Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Lydia Davis, Lynne Tillman, and David Markson, and with theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, François Lyotard, Ernesto Laclau, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
