Nation, community and work

Abstract

There exists a controversy between latinoamericanista discourse that tries to see in the literary works of the continent an essence or common denominator and the current thought on the community that ascertains the impossibility of “previous data” to the community. The idea of national community has different modulations in Fanon, Anderson and Nancy. This essay poses this controversy from the existent relationship between, first, the idea of community in its national modulation and, second, the national idea concerning it´s operative dimension; that is to say, from its production or presentation as a work, using the theses of Anderson in Imagined Communities and Nancy in The Inoperative Community, works that give account of this crash of theoretical positions concerning the community. Our attempt is to suggest the community (national) as a construct which could review its written basements towards a conception of it that exceeds its essentialist limits and consider its radical materiality and historicity.