Life and community in Fight club and The beach

Abstract

From the narratives Fight club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996) and The beach
(1996) by Alex Garland, this paper examines the community settings these
fictions present at the turn of the century. The two books are the starting
point for a dialectical analysis of the rupture and the foundation, the place and
the territory, but also between art and life, since the community narrative itself
is plagued by the passion for the real (Alain Badiou, The Century). It is within these
contradictions that the readings of Giorgio Agamben (The Coming Community),
Jean-Luc Nancy (The Inoperative Community) and Massimo Cacciari (Nomes de
lugar: confim) allow a discussion on the paradox of subject and community
relationship. Both narratives propose a displacement from the world in favour
of an alternative place. Established territories configured from identities (Flight
club), or geographical confinement (The beach), create and play out precisely the
contradictions that they intended to remedy in the first place. This failure,
which is no longer the universalist one, is what this paper attempts to explore.