Ch. 5 – The Common
Utilising insights from Karl Marx, Jacques Rancière, Sartre and Paolo Virno, this chapter intends to express an idea of ‘the common’ as essential to atheist thought. If atheism expresses anything, it must articulate the common and generic conditions of humankind, those conditions in which our existence is enmeshed, and what the stakes of this might be for humanity as a whole. The aforementioned thinkers are decisive for discerning universal conditions that make human existence possible and liveable, and are valuable in that they offer an alternate narrative on the means by which humans can depersonalize themselves. This starkly diverges from conventional atheism which relies on questions of individual belief in evidential claims. Thus, these thinkers elevate atheism into wider and more meaningful questions of belonging, meaning, human potential, all of which are firmly grounded on shared life as founded on concepts of sensuous life, species-being, language and amenable life.
