Metonymic Community

Question 1

What constitutes a community?

Answer 1

• Something that its members have in common:
• a language, a set of values, shared interests, geographical location, passport, shared goal/purpose, a ‘destiny’ or destination, shared ancestry, shared history, shared genes (family)
• a certain durability in time; we probably would not consider the people sharing the bus on line 54 for three minutes as a “community”. But why not?
• also defined by and through those who are not members because they don’t share any of the criteria outlined above.
• every form of inclusion into a community by necessity requires a mechanism of exclusion as well.
• Any difference – by degree or absolute – then constitutes a certain problem. Community MEANS sameness.

Question 2

What is contingency?

Answer 2

• future event which is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty
• “A necessary truth is one that could not have been otherwise. It would have been true under all circumstances. A contingent truth is one that is true, but could have been false. A necessary truth is one that must be true; a contingent truth is one that is true as it happens, or as things are, but that did not have to be true…
• A permanent philosophical urge is to diagnose contingency as disguised necessity… although in the 20th century there have been equally powerful movements, especially associated with Quine, denying that there are necessary truths, instead regarding necessity as disguised contingency” (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 248).

Question 3

National myths and their purpose during the rise of nation states

Answer 3

• Turning metonymic space into metaphorical place
• to inscribe themselves into time, arguing that the national spirit actually arose in a past immemorial, and thus “has always been there.”
• synecdoche constitutes the third state of national community –> only once a metaphoric community has replaced a metonymic one, can we then assume that every citizen might be a part-of-the-whole that is now called the nation.

Question 4

The impossibility of metonymy

Answer 4

• Jakobson ascribes metonymy to realistic texts, while metaphor belongs to Romanticism and Modernism, the question arises whether realistic texts do defy interpretation more than do Romanticist and Modernist texts.
• Literature itself is metaphoric and non-literature is metonymic –> the text is the vehicle, the world is the tenor.

Question 5

The Metonymic Community and an Ethics of Hospitality

Answer 5

• For Agamben’s ‘whatever’ community to work, all strange creatures of this world have to be welcomed in the first place; they have to take place, we have to let them take (a) place before the discriminatory mechanisms set it that “identify” a guest to then decide about the metaphoric in- and exclusions.
  And, according to Jacques Derrida, this presumes a radical concept of hospitality indeed: “Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, an animal, or divine creature, a living or a dead thing, male or female” (77).

Question 6

Contingency

Answer 6

a future event or circumstance which is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty

Question 7

Contiguity

Answer 7

the state of bordering or being in contact with something

Question 8

Metonymy

Answer 8

the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant

Question 9

Metaphor

Answer 9

figure of speech that implicitly compares two unrelated things, typically by stating that one thing is another

Question 10

Synecdochal community

Answer 10

is a type of metonymy; it is a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something is used to refer to the whole (car is wheels)