☛ The New Yorker: “Sometimes I think the collaborative process would work better without you” by Peter C. Vey, published in the May 18, 2009 issue, p. 65. © Condé Nast.

From his official website:

P.C. Vey was born, raised and currently lives in New York City with his wife, Tina. He sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1993 and has been a regular contributor since. His work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Barron’s, National Lampoon, Playboy, AARP Bulletin, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He has had three collections of cat cartoons published by Penguin/Plume and has contributed to many books of cartoons on a variety of subjects.

Vey’s characters are often easy to recognize: one of their eyes is always jumping out of their face.

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In his book Communitas Roberto Esposito explains how we got rid of the old way of being together –through the munus, this contractual obligation founded in debt– by moving to the (Hobbesian) social contract. Although this immunitary device protects us against the peril of the communitas, it comes with a high price tag. It left us, “individuals”, protected form the binding debt but we lost something in the process, something for which we have been longing ever since:

What is sacrificed is nothing other than the cum, the relation among men, and for that reason as well, in some way men themselves are sacrificed. They are paradoxically sacrificed to their own survival. They live in and of their refusal to live together.” (Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community, tr. Thimothy Campbell, Standford: Stanford University Press, ([1998] 2010), p. 14)

Previously: all entries tagged “communitas”.