The Disavowed Community

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.