The Disavowed Community

Jean-Luc Nancy, Philip Armstrong

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780823273867
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)—a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on "the inoperative community"—Nancy responds in turn with The Disavowed Community. Stemming from Jean-Christophe Bailly's initial proposal to think community in terms of "number" or the "numerous, " and unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot's text, Nancy's new book addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his proximity to and distance from Blanchot's thinking, from Bataille's "community of lovers" to the relation between community, communitarianism, and being-in-common; to Marguerite Duras, to the Eucharist. A key rethinking of politics and the political, this exchange opens up a new understanding of community played out as a question of avowal.

1

“COMMUNITY, NUMBER”

THE WORD “COMMUNISM”

This text is intended as a study of Maurice Blanchot’s work on community in The Unavowable Community.¹ Throughout the book’s history and the deciphering that it calls for—the impossibility, no doubt, of bringing its interpretation to a close—its subject takes shape in a way that far surpasses both the book itself and its author. It concerns our age’s preoccupation with the common character of our existence, in which we are not first and foremost distinct atoms but rather we exist in accordance with the relation, ensemble, and sharing [partage] in which discrete entities (individuals, persons) serve only as facets or punctuations. This very simple and very essential condition of being escapes us insofar as the evidence of what is given [sa donnée] is concealed with the stripping away [dérobement] of all the foundations and totems that could have been passed off as guarantees of a common being or rather, at the very least, as guarantees of our existence in common.

The common should be understood at once as the banal—that is, the element of a primordial equality irreducible to any effect of distinction—and, indistinguishably, as shared, in other words, that which only takes place in, through, and as relation. Consequently, the common is not resolved [se résout] in “being” or “unity,” or even in what can be posed as singular—“the relation”—without a simultaneous proliferation of its pluralities. To go back to an image from Freud, the “common” would be the fact of being fed from the same “maternal” milk, all the while being exposed one by one to the “paternal” absence of figural unity—the fact of being bound in this way inside an unbinding [déliaison], unbound along the very binding.

In our literal embodiment, how can we think this when it is no longer possible to appeal to the foundations and totems of lost worlds? By definition, this question exceeds all politics, ecclesiology, nationalism, or communitarianism, as well as all types of solidarity, mutual assistance, or collective care. This is the question that for more than two centuries the word communism has kept provoking, irritating, and tormenting, at the same time that it sustains an expectation and exigency.

Blanchot’s book, whose reading I initiate [entame] here, is a remarkable witness in the history of this question.

HAPAX

Blanchot published The Unavowable Community in the autumn of 1983. For thirty years, this book has been frequently recalled or evoked. It has also been frequently associated with The Inoperative Community that I published in 1986 and with Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community published in 1990.² However, if The Inoperative Community and, to a lesser extent, The Coming Community have become the subject of quite numerous commentaries and analyses (sometimes comparing, contrasting, or connecting them), The Unavowable Community has been little discussed, even if widely mentioned. Quotations from the text have been infrequent even though the book itself has been highlighted or invoked for its significance in opening up a reflection that, in many different ways, has extended to today.³

To characterize it with a formula, let us say that it is not by chance that this reflection was born out of the exhaustion of what was called “real communism” and that it brought into play a way of thinking that had been disfigured by this “real.” In fact, there is nothing fortuitous here, since the 1980s were the last years of the power that qualified itself as “Soviet,” in other words, organized on the basis of “councils.” It was not a question of renewing or developing a critique of the lies that had accumulated under terms that had long since mobilized the entire semantics of the common, the cum, the “with,” or the “ensemble” (thus, not just “communisms” and “socialisms” but “communions” or religious “communities”). In addition to the knowledge of lies and betrayals, there is for some the vague awareness that one does not really know what had been betrayed. (At most, one might think with more or less lucidity—Engels bears testimony to this—that the Christian truth of “community” had been lost, which simultaneously brought about the loss of the Christian message itself.)⁴ It did not suffice to take the measure of “real” communism by comparing its liberties, justice, and equality to those proposed by the democracy of states and “the rule of law” subjected, despite their claims to the contrary, to the mechanisms of a “production of wealth” foreign to any community of existence. It was a matter of interrogating the sense or content of a word such as “community,” which in essence suggests nothing other than “communism,” but without the political disrepute that communism has fallen into (including the difference—which is not negligible—to the doctrinal, even doctrinaire value of -ism as a suffix).

There was thus something original or inaugural in that moment during which the irreversible closure of historical communism demanded a new questioning on what “communism,” “community,” and “being-in common” could mean for categories of thought to which they referred (social? political? anthropological? ontological?) and for their symbolic or practical, imaginary, or affective implications.

This is why it is very surprising to observe how little Blanchot’s book has been analyzed, and specifically its second part, which is the most affirmative, but also the part that demands most clearly to be deciphered and interpreted, both in itself and in relation to the first part.⁵ Needless to say, if there have been commentaries, it does not seem (taking into account commentaries of which I remain unaware) that any of them has grasped the book’s overall construction or its specific economy.⁶ This fact is all the more remarkable given that the book is quite distinctive in the author’s body of work, which, in addition to fictional texts, is almost entirely composed of books made up of fragments and collections of essays or other texts that are fragmented formally. Books with a single focus are rare in his work and often very brief in length. In other respects, The Unavowable Community constitutes a hapax in Blanchot’s work if one takes into account its object, which is at once practical, political, and ontological, even if this means coming back to these qualifying terms later on.⁷ It is the only book in which literature does not appear thematically, even if it plays a role that could be called operational [opératoire]. In truth, this hapax is extended or played out again the following year with the publication in 1984 of “Intellectuals under Scrutiny,” a text that certainly should be considered as intimately tied to The Unavowable Community of 1983.⁸

GOING FURTHER

The preceding analysis enters into a double obligation. On the one hand, the content of Blanchot’s book must be examined more closely. On the other, one must understand why such an examination has been deferred for such a long time.

I am the first person obligated in this matter since The Unavowable Community found its pretext and theme in Blanchot’s desire to respond to my “The Inoperative Community” as it was published in its initial form in 1983, as an article in the journal Aléa.⁹ I made several allusions to this obligation without going any further than mere allusion. It happened that some were astonished by this, and I understand their astonishment. I acknowledge that, for thirty years, I have been at fault in this regard. My particular situation relates to a series of clear rationales—first of all, the feeling at the time of bewilderment [sidération] produced by the fact that Blanchot, in the space of just a few months, wrote a book in order to respond to a single essay, and that he published it in the same year (1983) as the article, writing as if responding to a sense of urgency.

My own astonishment stemmed from this promptness, but first from the fact that someone as prestigious as Blanchot would respond to an article written by someone who was only a young philosopher carrying little weight (thirty-three years younger than Blanchot, an age difference that includes all those years between 1920 and 1930—authority corresponds to experience). I know that initially I remained speechless, before even beginning more or less to understand that Blanchot had prohibited me—prohibited us—from remaining with the text I had published. In concluding the first part of his book, he in fact speaks of “the ‘unworking community’ Jean-Luc Nancy has asked us to reflect upon, though it is not permitted to us to stop there” (43/23).

I can imagine that this argument in its own way takes up the last sentence of the text I published in Aléa—“we can only go further”—in order to suggest that we have to extend what I had just cited from Bataille: “the feeling of community connecting me to Nietzsche.”¹⁰ These words had just concluded the text’s closing argument—neither communing [communielle], nor strictly political, the community of those and that which communicates itself in the suspension or interruption of transmissions, of continuities of exchange—what I designated with the word “writing” according to a meaning of the word derived from Blanchot himself and Derrida.¹¹

In extending the phrase and therefore the text that it concluded, it is clear that Blanchot, through a barely dissimulated twist in the argument, introduced a quite different value—it is not permitted to stop at what Nancy says; one has to go further. The second part of the book was applied to this going further. At the time, I perceived his intention only with much confusion and malaise.

Nevertheless, “going further” did not only imply detaching oneself from Nancy’s argument. It could mean extending it just as well as abandoning it. It could mean passing beyond it [dépasser] in all senses one could give to this word. And in fact, Blanchot undoubtedly opens up all these possibilities in his book, possibilities that are woven together and combined with several others relative to Bataille’s work. But their intrication is such that it cannot be completely disentangled. At the very least, I am incapable of doing it, and no doubt I am not alone. Perhaps this is the main reason for the often discomforting fascination exerted by this text, without ruling out the possibility that this discomfort might already be exerted on Blanchot himself. A perhaps insurmountable difficulty threatens the ambition to state the being of the sharing of being [l’être du partage de l’être], which cannot in any respect “be” other than by undoing [défaisant] being (substantive, subject) in its very act (verb, transitive).

THE NUMEROUS COMMON

Blanchot’s book was thus written from beginning to end as a response or rejoinder—in many ways, as a riposte—to the text I published in Aléa. If community is indeed the primary motif of Blanchot’s book, its motive is found in the reaction to something that he received as a call [rappel] (to phrase it a little crudely). One should not say “a call to order [un rappel à l’ordre]” but the call of an exigency to which he knew he ought to respond but perhaps without having sufficiently demonstrated it. His opening sentence reads: “In the wake of an important text by Jean-Luc Nancy, I would again take up a reflection, never in fact interrupted although surfacing only at long intervals, concerning the communist exigency” (9/1).¹²

One might be tempted to retrace the prior history of this motif in Blanchot’s work with some precision, in particular throughout his relations with Dionys Mascolo and Marguerite Duras. Those with more competence will address this. I limit myself to the situation in 1983. When one brings up the subject of Blanchot’s book, it is important to remember something that is easily overlooked. Not only did the book respond to my essay, but my essay responded to a question formulated by Jean-Christophe Bailly. For the fourth issue of Aléa, a journal he was editing and published by Christian Bourgois, he had proposed a theme that he announced as: “Community, Number [La communauté, le nombre].”¹³

With its beautiful lexical improvisation whose secret only he knows, Bailly had thus identified a question—an instance, an Idea, an expectation—that I was not expecting any more than Blanchot. However, I had just devoted a yearlong series of courses to the various motifs of community in Bataille. But I had done so, as it were, under the banner of a preoccupation dominated by the word “politics.”¹⁴ Besides, the article I had written clearly bears the mark...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the English-Language Edition
• Translator’s Introduction
• Half Title
• 1. “Community, Number”
• 2. Beyond the Political
• 3. The Heart or the Law
• 4. The Consumed Community
• 5. “Essentially That Which Escapes”
• Coda
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Series Page