The Inoperative Community
by Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991)
Key Passage
It is here, in this suspension, that the communion less communism of singular beings takes place. Here takes place the taking place (which is itself without a place. without a space reserved for or devoted to its presence) of community: not in a work that would bring it to completion even less in itself as work (family, people, church. nation, party, literature, philosophy). but in the unworking and as the unworking of all its works. There is the unworking of the works of individuals in the community ("writers," whatever their mode of writing might be), and there is the unworking of works that the community as such produces: its peoples, its towns, its treasures, its patrimonies, its traditions, its capital, and its collective property of knowledge and production. These are the same unworking: the work in the community and work of the community (each, moreover, belongs to the other, since either one can be reappropriated or unworked in the other) do not have their truth in the completion of their operation, nor in the substance and unity of their opus. What is exposed in the work, or through the works, begins and ends infinitely within and beyond the work-within and beyond the operative concentration of the work: there where what we have called up to now men, gods, and animals are themselves exposed to one another through an exposition that lies at the heart of the work and that gives us the work at the same time as it dissolves its concentration, and through which the work is offered up to the infinite communication of community. (p.72)
Keywords
Philosophy, Community, Mythology, Communism, Literature, Love, Divinity, Individuality, CommunicationThemes
The Inoperative Community, Nancy CitationsLinks to Reference
Translator
Connor, P.; Garbus, L.; Holland, M.; Sawhney, S.Citation
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