In this study, the concept of essence, shaped around the concepts of singularity and community by focussing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, and Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community, and parallel to this, will be investigated what acting, which involves the act of creating another world, another time, another atmosphere, and another person by relating to that which is other than oneself in the construction of the role person, means and corresponds to in such an understanding of the self. All three aforementioned—Nancy, Blanchot, and Agamben—rejected the idea of an “absolute human” while proposing an alternative understanding wherein the notions of “individual” and “society” are superseded by the notions of “singularity” and “community” respectively.

Through the notion of Clinamen, Nancy criticises the individual as a whole, unchangeable, and fixed, and instead proposes the concept of singularity, which has the potential for change and transformation. Blanchot claims that the idea of equalising people, which emerged with communism, corresponds to “making humans immanent to humans”. This understanding, which subordinates one person to another, is a totalitarian mentality that ignores differences and makes them the same. According to Blanchot, “A being does not want to be recognised, it wants to be contested: in order to exist it goes towards the others (...)” Agamben cautions against seeking the criterion of difference in an “essence.” Just as singularities cannot be ordered according to their possession of a particular essence, they also cannot be sublated and homogenised according to other measures of discernment. All three of these scholars point to the concept of ecstasy, which means the state of being outside the limits or outside the limits of oneself. Singularities can be opened to the community through ecstasy. Arıcı imagines that the first actor of ancient Greece must have assumed the mask of a God, Dionysus, and must have manifested him: “Similar to the way that being becomes ex-ternal to itself, the actor, through an ecstatic act manifests the God in and through the mask.”

Many actors, directors, dramaturgs, and theatrical thinkers have proposed an “imagination of non-qualification” sought in the body, mind, and action as a path opening to the fictional world, into a creative space for the actor who settles in another voice, another body, constructs another space, another history. What does “featurelessness” mean for an actor? In this sense, the actor is the one who encounters and transforms themselves while transforming other(s). The actor is a traveller who is engaged in a process of creation in the real, present time with other creators. They are constructors of fiction, far from any generalisations. I intend to interlace a specific reading of essence that is formed around the notions of singularity and community with a reading of essence that mainly relates to the acting endeavour. Instead of an outlook where the act of possessing an essence is inverse and even incompatible with the idea of community, where individuality is closely linked with the possession of essence and where the arrangement of individuals leads to totalitarian outcomes and community structures, I will examine the viability of an outlook that centres around the ideas of non-belonging, dispossession, and non-qualification. My discussion around these subjects

demonstrates that actors who can collaboratively create a fictional world and singularities can be discussed on common theoretical grounds as a “cooperative” and “synergetic” couple.