"Sharing comes down to this: what community reveals to me, in presenting to me my birth and death, is my existence outside myself. Which does not mean existence reinvested in or by community, as if community were another subject that would sublate me, in a dialectical or communal mode. Community does not sublate the finitude it exposes. Community itself, in sum, is nothing but this exposition. It is the community of finite beings, and as such is itself a finite community. In other words, not a limited community as opposed to an infinite or absolute community but a community of finitude, because finitude “is” communitarian, and because finitude alone is communitarian."
— Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community
Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler
"A theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can serve a conception of ethics, and indeed, responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, not fully translucent and knowable to itself, it is not thereby licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its obligations to others. The contrary is surely true. The opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge…If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency."
— Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler
