La Communauté désœuvrée

by Jean-Luc Nancy

Que nous reste-t-il de la communauté ? De ce qui a été pensé, voulu, désiré sous le mot de « communauté » ? Il semble qu'il ne nous en reste rien. Ses mythes sont suspendus, ses philosophies sont épuisées, ses politiques sont jugées. On pourrait dire aussi : « la communauté », c'était le mythe, c'était la philosophie, c'était la politique - et tout cela, qui est une seule et même chose, est fini.
Ce livre essaie de dire ceci : il y a, malgré tout, une résistance et une insistance de la communauté. Il y a, contre le mythe, une exigence philosophique et politique de l'être en commun. Non seulement elle n'est pas dépassée, mais elle vient au devant de nous, elle nous reste à découvrir. Ce n'est pas l'exigence d'une oeuvre communautaire (d'une communion ou d'une communication). C'est ce qui échappe aux oeuvres, nous laissant exposés les uns aux autres. C'est un communisme inscrit dans son propre désoeuvrement.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Theory, Sociology, Nonfiction, France

197 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Jean-Luc Nancy is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published English translations of a number of his works, including The Muses (1996), The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Birth to Presence (1993), Being Singular Plural (2000), The Speculative Remark (2001), and A Finite Thinking (2003).

Reviews

[mencey]

vaya mierda no he entendido nada... leido x obligación

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Community,” “myth,” “literature,” and “love”: four unfigurable figures that, for Jean-Luc Nancy, are articulated in their interruption, constituted by their dissolution, finding existence only in the suspension of essence. All four terms are interrogated in The Inoperative Community, parts of an attempt to push the limits of “communism,” which for Nancy “can no longer be the unsurpassable horizon of our time” (7). Nancy interrogates the totalitarian, totalizing “horizon” of communism via a “‘communitarian’ opposition” that challenges immanent, humanistic conceptions of “community” (2). Nancy’s re-conception of community is based neither on atomistic individuals nor absolute totality, but a relational “inclination” of one toward, by, or from the other (4): An “ecstasy ... [that] happens to the singular being” who is neither subject nor individual (7), challenging the nostalgic notion that a community of pure communion is something “lost” (11). Nancy claims that the “loss” of communion, like the “loss” of immanence in community members’ death, is “constitutive of ‘community’” (12, 14). The inability of the “I” to say it is dead is precisely why “I” is/am not “a subject” but rather an exposed singularity “radically implicated in its being-with” (14). Unworkable, death exceeds communal totalization, chiasmically making possible a community that inscribes the “impossibility of community” (15). Pushing Bataille’s realization that “the nostalgia for a communal being was ... the desire for a work of death” (17), Nancy seeks to expose singularities’ ecstasy as a suspended “self-consciousness” that “I only have ... in and through the community” (19). Unlike Bataille’s “lovers” (24), Nancy’s singular beings “compear” and are “constituted by sharing” (25), impassioned in encountering the limit of the other: the death that exposes without being recognizable (33). The other’s inappropriable limit cannot be sublated by the lovers’ kiss, which only reinscribes it. Instead, lovers touch community’s “extreme though not external limit” (38). Nancy calls for an “unworking” (of) “literature” that, like the lovers’ touch, inscribes community’s exposed limits (40). This “literary communism” shares “these limits” without passing them (41). This literature is not myth, which Nancy notes has itself been revealed as mythic. But, in the wake of the “Nazi myth,” knowing that “myth is mythic” is “not enough” (46). Instead, Nancy points to “the interruption of myth” (47). A totalizing myth, which implies both foundation’s fictionality and fiction’s foundationality, interrupts itself in these paradoxical realizations about its “origin” (55). Like community, then, Nancy’s “myth” is constituted by its own interruption (57). The “voice of [myth’s] interruption” is “the voice of community,” making heard “the mythless truth of endless being-in-common” (62). This is Nancy’s “literature”: a practice of “writing” inscribing the shared limit of “singularity/community” (72-73), articulating singularities constitutive of a “totality” that is nothing but “the play of the articulations” (76), not seeking mythic totalization or completion (66). Incompleting itself, it is an end only as the interminable thinking and sharing of singularities’ being-in-common (81). But here Nancy interrupts himself to think love. In fact, “thinking ... is love” (84). But Western philosophy has failed to think this existential love. Instead, from Plato to Hegel, “Love is at the heart of being” (88). For Nancy, however, this heart is not a heart. That is, it has no essence, beating only “under the regime of exposition” when dialectical power is “shattered” (89). Thinking thus always misses love, which never completes but “calls again for its repetition” (91). Love’s inevitable iterability causes a “break” in self-possession: “I is constituted broken” (96). This love “cuts across my identity,” but in doing so constitutes “my” being. Love shatters and is shatters, revealing that no “being” is not a “being-with” shared in and by community. This, Nancy writes, “is what Levinas, before anyone, understood” (105).

[Sinasham · Rating 2 out of 5]

AAAAAAHHHH! I learned that French philosophy is really hard to understand even when you've read lots of articles which use the dude's ideas and make them sound interesting. And then you're also left with the feeling of how can I even apply these ideas in any practical way? And why the hell am I spending days and days making notes on this shit???

[Devrim · Rating 2 out of 5]

çevirdim bitti

[Will Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some fascinating ideas - pushes the project of exorcising the vestiges of the philosophy of the subject farther than I've seen elsewhere. Difficult prose, but Nancy's main idea is repeated in each chapter, under a different guise, making the philosophy ultimately graspable for the persistent reader.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Inoperative Community" and "Literary Communism" are fantastic essays! "Shattered Love" was awful and I'm still considering "Of Divine Places." Nancy has great insights which make this book worth the read, but the criticisms of Nancy's larger project by Derrida and Critchley are on point (see "On Touching" by Derrida and the essay "With Being-With" by Critchley).

[tout · Rating 4 out of 5]

I need to reread this in a couple years from now when I might have read and understood Heidegger, have been immersed in Bataille and Nietzsche... Otherwise its meditations are provocative and beautifully strung. I just feel I lack the muscle necessary to squeeze enough out of it.

[jose coimbra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A proposta apresentada por Nancy neste livro deve ser vista em perspectiva com as proposições de Bataille, autor explicitamente apresentado como referência, bem como com as de Blachot. Mais especificamente, ainda que com diferenças, Nancy e Blanchot dialogam com Bataille quando escreveram 'The inoperative community' e 'La communauté inavouable'.
Em síntese poderíamos destacar uma pergunta-síntese dos ensaios que compõem o livro: como conceber uma comunidade composta de singularidades, cujo ponto de atração e reunião não fosse a identidade, mas, exatamente, a diferença?

The innoperative community
community; political participation; thory and history of literature

2008

175p

University of Minnesota Press - Minneapolis

Contents

foreword: experiences of finitude - Christopher Fynsk, vii
preface, xxxvi
1. the inoperative community, 1
2. myth interrupted, 43
3. 'literary communism', 71
4. of divine places, 110
notes, 151
index, 171

viii
Much of Nancy's work has thus taken the form of commentary, and continues to do so (as in the case of his essay on the Hegelian monarch). But over the past ten years, Nancy has also sought to depart from this mode and to pursue in a more independent fashion the notion of difference to which his work has pointed. He has attempted to abandon the comentator's position of relative safety and to elaborate a thought that would answer to the fact that maany of the concerns to which fundamental philosophy was addressed continue to speak to us today in the form of imperatives (freedom, justice, community), even though the conceptual systems from which these ideas have drawn their meaning are no longer viable.

singularity of Being - its singularity implying its multiplicity, and thus a differential structure that forms what Nancy calls the 'political space', and the site of community.

ix-x
From a political perspective, the gesture of forcing terms such as 'freedom' and 'community' - marking their philosophical limits and reworking them in relation to a thought of finitude - involves marking the gap and the ***bridge**** between his thought of community and any existent political philosophy or program, a gap and a bridge that also define the relation between what Nancy calls in the preface to this volume 'the political' (the site where what it means to be in common is open to definition) and 'politics' (the play of forces and interests engaged in a conflict over the representation and governance of social existence).

x
community names a relation tha cannot be thought as a subsistent ground or common measure for a 'being-in-common'....Nancy thus starts from the relation

limites da aplicação prática do conceito

xiii
he shows that the experience of freedom, and thus the experience of community, is the experience of the real, and while he deconstructs the notions of the individual and the subject's presence to itself, he points to the singularity of the self that knows itself as opening to alterity.

xv
In The Inoperative Community, Nancy follows Bataille (citing also Freud and the notion of a primal murder, as well Heideger) in arguing that the individual Dasein first knows community when it experiences the impossibility of communion or immanence before the dead other.

xvi
Death and community

xix
Whereas Nancy speaks of limits and their transgression, Blanchot tends to focus upon the indeterminacy of this same experience of passage.

Benjamin'a remark: truth is the death of intention.

xxii
There is a 'voice' of the community, Nancy argues, and this voice announces a law - there is a logos of the community.

xxiii
Heideger's concept of Auslegung is precisely what he is describing as 'communication' in La communauté désoeuvrée.

xxv *******
What Nancy defines as community lies at the limits of language - it is even the 'origin' of language, but is always of language. Otherwise, there would be no need to write and no way to write it.

There is a need to write it, because the communication that is community exceeds the horizon of signification.

xxvii
politics of community - a politics that would proceed from the imperative to which the work itself answers and that is inscribed there.

xxxvii
the political is the place where community as such is brought into play.

xxxviii
Being in common has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity that would no longer be exposed. Being in common means, to the contrary, no longer having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place, such a substancial identity, and sharing this 'lack of identity'. This is what philosophy calls 'finitude', and the following texts are entirely and uniquely devoted to an undertanding of it.

***Finitude, or the infinite lack of infinite identify, if we can risk such a formulation, is what makes community.

xxxix *****
how can the community without essence (the community that is neither 'people' nor 'nation', neither 'destiny' nor 'generic humanity' etc.) be presented as such? That is, what might a politics be that does not stem from the will to realize as essence?

how do we communicate?

1
The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer [...] is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.

3
But the individual is merely the **residue of the experience of the dissolution of community.

...the individual can be the origin and certainty of nothing but its own death.

3-4
Community is at leat the clinamen of the 'individual'.

4
The relation (the community) is, if it is, nothing other than what undoes, in its very principle - and at its closure or on its limit - the autarchy of absolute immanence.

6-7
Singularity never takes place at the level of atoms, those identifiable if not identical identities; rather it takes place at the level of the clinamen, which is unidentifiable.

7
blanchot: communism: that which excludes [and excludes itself from] every community already constituted.

9
***The lost, or broken,community can be exemplified in all kinds of ways, by all kinds of paradigms: the natural family, the Athenian city, the Roman Republic, the first Christian community, corporations, communes, or brotherhoods - always it is a matter of a lost age i which community was woven of tight, harmonious, and infragible bonds and in which above all it played back to itself, through its institutions,its rituals, and its symbols, the representation, indeed the living offering, of its own immanent unity, intimacy, and autonomy. Distinct from society (which is a simples association and division of forces and needs) and opposed to emprise (which dissolves community by submitting its people to its arms and to its glory), community is not only intimate communication between its members, but also its organic communion with its own essence. It is constituted not only by a fair distribution of tasks and goods, or by a happy equilibrium of forces and authorities: it is made up principally of the sharing, diffusion, or impregnation of an identity by a plurality wherein each member identifies himself only through the supplementary mediation of his identification with the living body of the community. In the motto of the Republic, fraternity designates community: the model of the family and of love.

11
Society was not built on the ruins of a community. It emerged from the disappearance or the conservation of something - tribes or empires - perhaps just as unrelated to what we call 'community' as to what we call 'society'. So that community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us - question, waiting, event imperative - i the wake of society.
Nothing, therefore, has been lost, and for this reason nothing is lost.

12
What this community has 'lost' - the immanence and the intimacy of a communion - is lost only in the sense that such a 'loss' is constitutive of 'community' itself.

It is not a loss: on the contrary, immanence, if it were to come about, would instantly suppress community, or communication, as such. Death is not only the example of this, it is its truth.

15
If community is revealed in the death of others it is because death itself is the true community of I's tha are egos.
Community therefore occupies a singular place: it assumes the impossibility of its own immanence, the impossibility of a communitarian being in the form of a communitarian being in the form of a subject. In a certain sense community acknowledges and inscribes - this is its peculiar gesture - the impossibility of community.

A community is the presentation to its members of their mortal beings...

18
bataille, inner experience, relação com o fora...comunidade

21
resumo

23
for bataille, as for us all, a thinking of the subject thwarts a thinking of a community.

24
Properly speaking, Bataille had no concept of the subject.

27
...the singular being, which is not the individual, is the finite being.

28
Community means, consequently, that there is no singular being without another singular being.

29
Communication consists before all else in this sharing and in this compearance (com-parution) of finitude: that is, in the dislocation and in the interpellation that reveal themselves to be constitutive of being-in-common ...

Finitude compears, that is to say it is exposed: such is the essence of community.

communication is not a bond

Communication is the constitutive fact of an exposition to the outside that defines singularity

31
Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called 'unworking' referring to that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do either with production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension. Community is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension that singular beings are.

[continua]

32
The unworking of community takes place around what bataille for a very long time called the sacred.

33
Singulariy is the passion of being.

There is no original or origin of identity

34
desubjectivization

35
Community is the sacred

In passing to its limit, finitude passes 'from' the one 'to' the other: this passage makes up the sharing.

incompletion

For a complete sharing implies the disappearance of what is shared.

**Only the fascist masses tend to annihilate community in the delirium of an incarnated communion.

Community is, in a sense, resistance itself...

Community is given to us - or we are given and abandoned to the community: a gift to be renewed and communicated, it is not a work to be done or produced.

36
For Bataille, community was first and finally the community of lovers.

37
communication is not communion.

41
the experience of community as communication: it implies writing.

45
Myth is of and from the orgin...
All myths are primal scenes...

47
To think our world in terms of this 'lack' might well be an indispensable task.
the absence of myth (bataille) => the interruption of myth (nancy)
narrative of origins

50
Myth communicates the common, the being-common of what it reveals or what it recites.

51
Myth is always the myth of community, that is to say, it is always the myth of a communion - the unique voice of the many - capable of inventing and sharing the myth.There is no myth that does not at least pressupose the myth of the communitarian (or popular) revelation of myths.

The myth of communion, like communism...

52**
The tradition is suspended at the very moment it fulfills itself. It is interrupted at that precise and familiar point where we know that it is all a myth.

...This is why our scene of myth, our discourse of myth, and all our mythological thinking make up a myth: to speak up of myth only ever been to speak of its absence. And the word 'myth' itself designates the absence of what it names.
This is what constitutes the interruption: 'myth' is cut off from its own meaning, on its own meaning, by its own meaning. If it even still has a proper meaning.

58***
Does the unavowable have a myth? By definition, it does not. The absence of avowal produces neither speech nor narrative. But if community is inseparable from myth, must there not be, according to a paradoxical law, a myth of the unavowable community? But this is impossible. Let me repeat: the unavowable community, the withdrawal of communionn or communitarian ecstasy, are revealed in the interruption of myth. And the interruption is not a myth: 'It is impossible to contest the absence of myth', wrote bataille.

59
passion = a movement that carries to the limit - to the limit of being.

passions carries to the limit of singularity: logically, this limit is the place of community.

61
Thus 'the myth of the absence of myth' which corresponds to the interrupted community - is neither another myth (nor the negative of a myth), but is a myth only inasmuch as it consists in the interruption of myth. It is not a myth: there is no myth of the interruption of myth. but the interruption of myth defines the possibility of a passion equal to mythic passion - and yet unleashed by the suspension of mythic passion: a 'conscious', 'lucid' passion, as Bataille calls it, a passion opened up by compearance and for it. It is not the passion for dissolution,but the passion to exposed, and to know that community itself does not limit community, that community is always beyond, that is, on the outside, offred outside of each singularity, and on this account always interrupted on the edge of the least one of these singularities.

The interruption of myth - and the interruption of myth s the passion of and for community - disjoins myth from itself, or withdraws it from itself. It is not enough to say, 'Myth is a myth', since the formula for irony, as I have already said, is fundamentally the same as the formula for the identity of myth (and for its mythic identity).

62
The voice is the voice of community or of the community's passion. If it must be affirmed that myth is essencial to community - but only in the essence that it completes it and gives it the closure and the destiny of an individual, of a completed totality - it is equally necessay to affirm that in the interruption the voice of the community, the voice of the incomplrte, exposed community speaking as myth without being in any respect mythic speech.

There is a voice of community articulated in the interruption, and even out of the interruption itself.

63
A name has been given to this voice of interruption: literature (or writing...)

67
But writing is the act that obeys the sole necessity of exposing the limit: not the limit of communication, but the limit upon which communication takes place.

71
Community without community is to come, in the sense that it is always coming, endlessly, at the heart of every collectivity (because it never stops coming, it ceaselessly resists collectivity itself as much as it resists the individual).

73
...only the limit is common, and the limit is not a place, but the sharing of places, their spacing.

74
Community means here the socially exposed particularity, in opposition to the socially imploded generality characteristic of capitalist community.

75
Capital negates community because it places above it the identity and the generality of production and products.

76
...the totality of community - by which I understand the totality of community resisting its own setting to work - is a whole of articulated singularities. Articulation does not mean organization.

This totality is the totality of a dialogue.

...the dialogue is no longer to be heard except as the communication of the incommunicable singularity/community.

77
...the community of articulation cannot be simply human...in the true movement of community, in the inflection (in the conjugation, in the diction) that articulates it, what is at stake is never humanity, but always the end of humanity.

78
Neither gods nor human beings nor animals are assured of their identity. It is in this respect that they share a common limit upon which they are always exposed to their end, as is witnessed, for example,in the end of the gods.

93
Thus love is at once the promise of completion, - but a promise always disappearing - and the threat of decompostion, always imminent.

99
Love offers finitude in its truth...

130 ****
parecer x aparecer
God imposes his presence outside of all presentation. He comes in the ruin of all appearing (le paraître). Art, on the contrary, infinitely incises the edges of appearance (l'apparaître), but keeps it intact.

144
That is what we have to learn, through a community without communion, and a face-to-face encounter with no divine coutenance.

147
Hybris is the belief that happiness could be anything other than a present from the gods (w. benjamin).
We all pray to some god, but what comes of it has no names (cesare pavese).

150
Divine places, without gods, with no god, are spread out everywhere around us, open and offered to our coming, to our going or to our presence, given up or promised to our visitation, to frequentation by those are not men either, but who are there, in these places: ourselves, alone, out to meet that which we are not, and which the gods for their part have never been. These places, spread out everywhere, yield up and orient new spaces: they are no longer temples, but rather the opening up and the spacing out of the temples themselves, a dis-location with no reserve henceforth, with no more sacred enclsures - other tracks, other ways, other places for all who are there.

[Anthony Galluzzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nancy's work should be better known, since he successfully combines a certain kind of deconstructive phenomenology that reaches back to Heidegger with an investment in Marxism, hence the question that unites the essays gathered in this book:... how can we rethink community or "being-together" without falling prey to the errors of the past? The essays on literary communism and love are particularly noteworthy.

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have no idea how to rate this book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially Nancy's assertion that a community is embodied by its (to put it too simplistically) opening out and openness to the world, instead of an attempt to remain insular and defined by something other than said openness.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be fair, I admit that I only read the title essay, but it was a good in'-- a little bit too much post-modern gobbly goo as P. Linebaugh would say.

[Joseph Volk · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is one of the most important works of social philosophy i've ever read. i've used this in like 5 different papers and it's poetic and brilliant and everything wonderful.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A somewhat frustrating collection of papers, marred by Nancy's left-Heideggerean quirks. The section on literary communism is the highlight of the book.

[Lena Chilari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Literatura e incizia (arată cum mitul poate fi).

[Timothy Lavenz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nancy has written on topics as diverse as poetry/aesthetics, history of (the closure) of metaphysics/philosophy, freedom, and what he has called "the deconstruction of Christianity," after first writing books on the Jena (romantic) group and one of Jacques Lacan's essays "The title of the letter." I see his writing as less labyrinthine than other French thinkers; in this book, perhaps, he helps us understand WHY it is a maze (why reading/thinking has to do with the deferral of meaning, the suspension of ____, rather than with "the communication of meaning"). The shortest essay in this collection, "Literary Communism," is a great example of this and is a great entry way into the rest of the book.

Nancy's thinking process approaches the straightforward. His "propositions" do not ask you to blankly accept them, but rather invite you to think with them, and the prose takes us through his movements. Often, he will turn a phrase in six or seven directions to get the reader focused on different implications, different avenues, to consider meaning alongside with nonmeaning and negation (see page 89 per the phrase: "Love is the extreme movement, beyond the self, of a being reaching completion"). And yet, Nancy is never for ambiguity and is never without proposition: when we stick with his ideas we see the reason for all these twists and turns. The ("argumentative") FOCUS of each chapter leads each to the next as much as they stand wholly on their own (though perhaps they cannot 'live' without each other-- Nancy's texts are always retracing themselves).

Nancy is reading a HUGE tradition and weaving them together in a way that gives us a window into a way of thinking through this tradition. I would characterize Nancy's whole work as a type of READING: he tries to let thinkers speak where they could not, to say what they were ("structurally") unable (including himself as time goes on, I think). He seems to let no thinking of the past go away, accepting all of it as there because it is to contribute. Derrida describes him quite adequately (and with all the philosophical implications for the tradition): PUNCTUAL. One gets the feeling that these essays were for the man Jean-Luc quite essential to his being-here with us-- But also that he has written, perhaps more than any other thinker, for US, that the whole past of philosophy (or at least of the more modern French writers) could not do without.

He will be the first to tell you in this book that "community" can only mean the continued articulation of a meaning that is constitutively deferred; again, this emphasizes the space of writing. This means: space for dialog and breathing. Nancy and Blanchot are exemplary as far as constituting this "conversation" in their texts (as when N writes: "Here, I must interrupt myself: it is up to you to allow to be said what no one, no subject, can say, and what exposes us in common.")

The philosophy presented in this book keys around a focal point in all of Nancy's thinking: that there is no longer a common-being (or communion), and that there is only being-in-common (the inoperative community). This is a discussion that leads him through Bataille's thinking on community, the impossibility of "communalism" (ch 1), the suspension of the communal myth and its relation to literature, etc (ch 2), and the type of (inoperative writing) community Nancy sees as the space of sharing this being-in-common (this sharing of the impossibility of a common-being, as my-self or as my-group): a "literary communism" (ch 3).

This lays the foundation for his reflection on the relationship between philosophy and love (ch 4) and question of "God" (ch 5), the two most astounding pieces, both from a philosophical and literary standpoint, I think. Coming long before his deconstruction of Christianity and (perhaps his most astonishing work) CORPUS, these last two especially seem to "tremble" with the question of love/God (i.e. the possibility, meaning of community-- this is a "political" philosophy). He has said himself this text is too mystical for his tastes, but that it was suppose to be an experiment in philosophy. Elsewhere he talks about ch 4 as an "ancient text" of his. I find all these even greater reasons to recommend this early work (along with The Literary Absolute) as a foundation for lots of other thinking, as I can attest it has been for me. Certainly, at least, they contribute immensely to his "tone"-- also an important concept in Nancy's thinking about the history/voicings of philosophical thinking.

I wanted to write this view to respond to the reviewer who said this book was "utter non-sense," not to challenge that claim or that experience of theirs, but rather to draw attention to it and emphasize that THAT IS the sense of it: to emphasize along with Nancy that SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED when it comes to signification and sense. (See his "The Forgetting of Philosophy" for this topic directly). I think his whole work is addressed to this break (I would suggest Holderlin's uniqueness for the modern world when it comes to this break). This is a book that teaches you how to read philosophy and will always help you read it. I am convinced that (following Bataille) Nancy writes for a readership ready to enter greater philosophical texts-- or those who aren't: he writes to be read, to give room for our own speech, and then to be read again.

He writes so that we might be exposed there to ourselves-- and there are no rules for how we follow after it. I hope that my terrible summary of the philosophy in "The Inoperative Community" has only encouraged you to check it out; if it hasn't, please give it a chance and let it speak (GROW) for itself.

[Nađa Pavlica]

"The heart is not broken, in the sense that it does not exist before the break. But it is the break itself that makes the heart. The heart is not an organ, and neither is it a faculty. It is: that I is broken and traversed by the other where its presence is most intimate and its life most open. The beating of the heart – rhythm of the partition of being, syncope of the sharing of singularity – cuts across presence, life, consciousness. That is why thinking – which is nothing other than the weighing or testing of the limits, the ends, of presence, of life, of consciousness – thinking itself is love."

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nancy grapples with the historical legacies of communism and fascism by interrogating the concept of community, through Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot, et al., leading to considerations of love, theology, etc., though his tropings of the world religions smack of Orientalism.

[CL Chu · Rating 3 out of 5]

All starts for shattered love.

[Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

the most turgid bloviating work of ‘left’ heideggerian mysticism i’ll ever probably have displeasure of reading.

[Göker Makaskıran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blanchot'nun "İtiraf Edilemeyen Cemaat" ve Agamben'in "Gelmekte Olan Ortaklık" kitaplarıyla bir üçlü oluşturuyor : Aynı konu (commun-community) üzerine yazılmış, birbirlerini etkilemiş kitaplar bunlar. Üçü bir arada okunmalı ama kronolojik açıdan bu kitaptan başlanmalı.

[Quentin Kemna · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fucking book. Nancy deconstructs the individual, community, love, and god in absolutely devastating fashion. be prepared to read sentences like "the proper of the proper into the impropriety of the proper" and other fun little traverses into the ridiculousness of language. But this book will change the way you look at the world, you will see the space between us as the Death of God and of the birth of god. of course Nancy would hate that, but it's true in a sense. Nancy offers us joy, as the god or goddesses offer us art, with no purpose but for affirming being-with, for the space where we may "unbecome". Nancy's vision is possibly the only way out of the simulacra of modernity, out of the reproduction of oppression that participating in such a society comes with. Affirm our unbecoming! become the death of the self, become the death of the individual being, "unbecome"- in order to birth a being-with.