ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the national community, perhaps the most important organizational form of modern societies. I analyze various notions of community, ranging from J.G. Herder and F. Nietzsche to J.-L. Nancy and G. Agamben. Subsequently, I go on to discuss community as envisaged in the works of two eminent Polish poets: Adam Mickiewicz, the greatest poet of Polish Romanticism, and Tadeusz Różewicz, a poet-survivor of wartime atrocities. I argue that their respective works embody two alternative visions of community. Mickiewicz conceptualizes a strong national community as the basic point of reference for individual experience, while Różewicz evokes a community of suffering in his poems.
