Capital, Individual and Development

Abstract

One of the demands that the technological understanding of Being makes on the human respondent is to “gather” the meaning of phenomena in terms of the logos of efficiency. Two manifest forms can be noticed by way of which the logos of efficiency is set to work: understanding all phenomena in terms of the calculative intelligibility of capital and understanding the human respondent in terms of the efficient agency of the atomistic individual. In this way, we can make sense of the liberal–capitalistic society in its global developmental form in line with the planetary impetus of the technological understanding of Being. Community or our primordial sociality may still be the only human form of restraint that can question, subvert and disrupt both the capitalistic measure of reality and the asocial and individual istic measure of the human being. However, the thought of community is commonly fraught with the same essentialist dangers as the militant, individualistic rule of capital, which is finding global acceptance in the name “development.” Hence, Jean-Luc Nancy’s Heideggerian notion of community without communion, a community that never can coagulate into a communal substance may be seen as a possible way of responding to the global reign of capital and individual.