This chapter argues that being amongst others is both fundamental to the being of the self and is experienced in each case uniquely by each self. The self that says ‘I’ encounters others as other selves, who disclose and conceal themselves from her in ways which mirror herself, but by that same token threaten to remain fundamentally opaque. The self stands in the midst of all of what binds and separates it from the other and from every other. What binds and separates is what is common with others. Sedimented pasts and dreamed of futures are instituted in myth and played out in rituals, structured into narratives of historical and political ‘selves’. The self which becomes a member of a collective whole, is called beyond any such identity, but is in the process called to sacrifice possibilities of itself. This sacrifice begins in fact before the self’s own agency; in being welcomed into a community sacrifices are made on its behalf. Constitutive of such sacrifice are promises made on behalf of and by the self, which makes possible its position within a community. Such work of community is at its core a work of exclusion as much as inclusion, and the chapter closes with a discussion of apape, manifest in the ’love of enemies’, as a fundamental critique of erotics of community. A phenomenology of the intersubjective constitution of the communal needs to maintain this tension of the agapeic and the erotic.