This dissertation rethinks the stakes, consequences, and possibilities of belonging—that is, of our attachments to community. I approach the desire to belong within the dynamic conditions of late-modernity in which the accelerated pace of life exceeds the local tempo of everyday living. In these conditions, belonging has often been marshaled as a reactionary defense against a too-fast time that is regarded as threatening the essence of community. As such, those who cultivate pluralism often view belonging as resistant to the engagement with difference. Against this, I affirm a desire to belong that is still very much alive in the mood, discourse, and demands of everyday life while resisting the essentializing tendencies that this desire can express. Beyond the slippery slide into chauvinistic modes of nationalism, xenophobic patriotism, and the violence and injustice that result from them, I believe that belonging is nonetheless vital to the demands of pluralism.

I explore belonging's pluralistic potential by examining an experience of time that exceeds the boundaries of our local attachments. Belonging does not necessarily foreclose engagements with pluralistic possibilities that exist beyond the scope of these attachments; in fact, an attachment to a particular community can simultaneously be a commitment to difference. Beginning with the Rousseauian model of community and contemporary versions posited by Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee, I trace the temporal implications underlining each account, arguing that the anxieties over our temporal existence prompts each thinker to posit an image of belonging that is circumscribed in its plurality. I then turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's account of time as multi-dimensional and Gilles Deleuze's ontology of becoming as a means to construct an alternative mode of belonging, what I term 'creative belonging'.